They're not talking about Predator drones, they're talking about the much, much smaller ones that are basically like high-end R/C vehicles. Those don't go anywhere near 8000 feet or 100mph.
You're absolutely right that there's legitimate uses for this technology, however as Beadydog says above, the federal government has completely broken trust with the American people, so as far as I'm concerned, there's NO legitimate uses as long as they're the ones operating the drones. They simply can't be trusted.
It shouldn't be possible to intercept passwords by snooping on IP connections, as long as you're using encryption such as SSL, and not a shitty password-in-plaintext service like FTP.
However, if the destination is compromised (NSA), there's nothing you can do about that.
It seems to me this would be a good place for the alternative ROMs like CyanogenMod to offer non-Google versions of Android which they've certified (by making all the source code open and available, at least for the relevant parts) to work properly in this regard, allowing you to back up data on Google's hosts, but ensuring that it's all encrypted by a passphrase which Google has no access to.
And that stupid Google+ might be the last straw since everything is trying to foist it on me and I have no interest in it.
Google+ is exactly like Microsoft's Metro UI in Windows 8: it's a move to co-opt some big competitor (or someone they see as a competitor), by forcing a big change on their existing userbase in order to get them "used to" using this new service.
With Metro, MS saw that the mobile world was passing them by with iOS and Android (and that everyone hated their crappy WinCE offerings before these came around), so they decided they needed to force their way into the mobile device market. To do that, they decided that making a single, unified user interface was the way to do this, since 80+% of computer users use Windows; so, the bright idea was to make some "bold" (euphamism for "shitty") touch-oriented UI, different from everyone else's, and stick that on the desktop/laptop PCs so everyone would get used to it, and then want phones (and tablets) with that same UI, so they don't have to deal with radically-different devices in their lives. Problem is, not many people like Metro, especially on desktop/laptop PCs, since those devices don't lend themselves to a touch interface (google for "Gorilla arm").
Same goes for Google+: Google decided they needed to get in on the whole "social networking" thing, so they made up Google+, moved many of their existing services over to it which didn't really need it, and have used various ways to try to force users to use it, probably in the hope that they'll get tired of Facebook and just want to do everything on Google.
Not trusting any American companies with your data is of course prudent, in light of PRISM, however this doesn't mean your data is safe anywhere else either: if it's in France, Germany, or UK, they all have spying programs that are just as bad. And even if you keep your data in a relatively-safe country that probably has no spying at all, such as Switzerland or Iceland, that's no guarantee that the company hosting your data isn't just plain incompetent. If Google can make a mistake like this, anyone can.
Of course, since it's impossible to be 100% risk-free, it does make sense to try to mitigate that risk by avoiding obviously-bad choices, like using American companies.
Interestingly, it looks like some stuff has changed since I last looked at SMTP, according to the Wikipedia article. It does look like there's a SSL-secured SMTP, but it doesn't look like it's mandatory.
In-house email isn't safe either, unless your company is outside the US (and there, you're still going to be spied on if you're in the UK, Germany, France, etc. as those have all now been revealed to have programs just like PRISM or even worse). The reason for this is that email is fundamentally flawed from a security perspective: it travels completely unencrypted over what's basically a simple telnet session: you can telnet to port 25 of any mail server and send a bogus email quite easily using the appropriate SMTP commands ("HELO", "RCPT TO", etc.) (though it'll probably be rejected these days based on other techniques used to avoid spoofing). So if the government wants to spy on you, all they have to do is tap into your ISP connection and they'll see all your incoming and outgoing emails. Sure, you could use GPG to encrypt them, but then no one will be able to communicate with you since so few other people actually bother or even know what GPG is (and I sure wouldn't trust PGP since it's closed-source IIRC). Plus, even for the few people you do successfully communicate with using GPG, the NSA will know who you're talking to and at what frequency, though they may not be able to decipher the exact content of your messages so easily.
So to avoid that, the only way to be secure is to have a mail server based in some country that doesn't have a big spying program, such as Switzerland or Iceland. Then, you can access that mail server, even using a webmail interface, using typically-available encryption methods like SSL/https.
Same goes for FTP, but then again I don't know why anyone would ever use that these day. Only a moron would use FTP since it transmits your username and password in cleartext, so anyone listening in on your internet connection would not only see what files you're transferring but your login credentials as well (which may be the same credentials as used in many other places, since people tend to re-use passwords a lot). But at least here we have an ubiquitous and simple alternative: SFTP.
How is that going to help? The NSA and US government can get any data they want from any US-based email provider, Gmail, Outlook.com, or Yahoo. The only way you'll be really safe is to run your own mail server in a foreign country, but switching from one US-based provider to another US-based provider isn't going to make a bit of difference.
And this should not be only about MS. Any company should answer these questions. I really hope this shitstorm will kill stupid usage of "the cloud" but I doubt it. People are dumb, education budgets diminish every year so there is no changing that fact.
Education budgets in the US may diminish every year, but that probably isn't true in other industrialized countries. The real issue is that foreign governments and other customers may now decide that using Microsoft or any US-based vendor is a bad idea, thanks to NSA's spying, and they're right. There's nothing to stop the NSA from handing over important information to US companies or the US government; in effect, the NSA is an agent for espionag (industrial and otherwise). Any US-based software or cloud services vendor simply cannot be trusted, and this isn't going to be good for the US economy since IT products and services are one of the few big things continuing to prop it up.
IF they identify markers for violence, THEN we will need to concern ourselves with making sure society doesn't take that as a certainty. Society has decided that sex offenders usually having a high rate of recidivism means that every individual sex offender is going to commit another sex offense, so we should lock them up forever.
Except we don't do that at all. We'd rather keep nonviolent drug offenders in prison for ridiculously long terms.
With the convicted pedophiles, molestors, or just some poor kid that had sex with his slightly underage girlfriend, or some guy who was drunk and pissed in public, we go ahead and release them, but give them a "sex offender" label (which is the same, no matter whether you just pissed in public in view of a child or you molested one), which prevents them from living a certain distance from schools or day-care centers. What this translates to is they aren't allowed to live in any inhabited area, except under a bridge somewhere, because that's the only place they can find that isn't too close to a school or day-care center. They'd probably be a lot happier if we set up their own small city in the middle of North Dakota, free of any schools or children so they can live like normal people.
I thought Russia's industry was a state-owned company that was spun off into a private entity. That's not exactly the same as a private company building itself up from nothing. They're also having a lot of problems.
The USA developed the basics of the Internet backbone, but look at the current customer situation (which is all that matters, really), you can have 100mbps symmetrical in Japan, Slovakia, Estonia for 10-15$/month. In the USA you can have 10mbps with a 300GB cap for 40$/month. Again, your greed impedes innovation. A lot, most, of the optic fiber dropped in the oceans are operated by foreign countries.
This is all totally irrelevant: we're talking about technical innovation here, not business plans and operations. I could go start my own ISP, but that doesn't make me an innovator, it makes me someone who bought some off-the-shelf equipment and put it into use. It's great those other countries are providing internet service so cheaply, and I wish our ISP situation here wasn't so fucked up, but they're not innovators, just like your local car mechanic is not an innovator in the realm of automotive engineering. The innovators are the people/companies who designed and engineered the equipment those ISPs use, and while a lot of that has moved to Asia in recent years, much of the original design work (such as the Ethernet standards) was done by American companies. Dropping an optical cable into the ocean doesn't take innovation, it just requires buying an optical cable from someone and renting a boat. Laying transoceanic cables is a mature technology (they've been doing that for many decades now), and you're not an innovator of optical cables when all you do is buy it from someone else.
As far as HTC and Samsung, there's not all that much innovation going on there; they make Android (and Windows) phones, so they're getting their software from someone else, namely Google and MS, both American companies, and all the ICs they use are mostly designed by American companies.
I really don't want Chairmaster reading that rant: the last thing I want to see is Ballmer to get a clue and do something that would help that company. It's way too much fun watching him run it into the ground.
While it's true the US has been losing its edge in technological development, what other countries have really stepped up and filled that space? What country has developed usable electric cars, for instance? What country has developed private spaceflight? What country developed the internet? Smartphones?
The US is definitely going down in a lot of ways, but no one else seems to be shining in technological innovation either; everyone else either does only manufacturing or continues the use and development of a highly-mature technology. I just don't see any groundbreaking innovation coming from anywhere else. When the US collapses, things aren't going to progress very quickly in technology.
No, because by most accounts Apple hardware is actually very good, it's the other stuff that sucks (software that isn't flexible and requires you to do everything the "Apple way" with very little configurability or customizability; iTunes is a bloated pig; Apple styling is somewhat controversial (love it or hate it); arrogance towards customers ("the antenna is fine, you're holding the phone the wrong way"); patent trolling and excessive litigation; etc.).
Interesting that you point to Human Speaker's site; I happen to have a pair of Genesis speakers rebuilt with Human drivers (the guy who runs Human was one of the employees of Genesis when it folded, and continued making EPI and Genesis speakers and parts on his own).
Wrong. Engineering co-op jobs pay; I did this when I was in college back in '95-'96 and got paid $12/hour back then, which was enough to have my own apartment and save up a bunch to offset my college expenses.
From what I can tell, England is even worse than the US for engineering careers. It seems like all that's left in England is finance jobs.
Since England is part of the EU, you're eligible to work anywhere in the EU. Have you tried looking for jobs in Germany? Germany is still an engineering powerhouse, unlike the English-speaking countries that have all happily outsourced engineering wherever possible.
Someone with 10 years of experience is a better worker than someone fresh out of college, and will work faster and make fewer mistakes. Someone with 20 years of experience will do much better than someone with 20 years, similarly. Engineering is just like any other craft: the more you do it, and the longer you do it for, the better you get at it. Also, when you're senior, you're additionally valuable because you can mentor the younger engineers and bring them up to speed faster.
Red herring. You don't need a government "with a long history of lies, abuses, manipulation, and little or no accountability" in order to have roads, bridges, and military protection. Switzerland for example seems to do just fine with their government; you never hear about Orwellian surveillance programs from the Swiss government, and they have very nice roads and bridges there. There's dozens of other countries that do just fine with their governments too, such as Norway.
That has nothing to do with the honor system. UL is an organization that has a reputation to uphold, and other companies pay them to do tests on their products and certify their safety. Then, the customer gets to put the UL trademark symbol on their product (assuming it passes) and advertise it as "UL listed", in the hope that consumers will see this and be willing to pay more because of this independent certification.
If self-regulation worked, UL would have gone out of business long ago. Just because some manufacturer says their product is safe means nothing, but over the years UL has built enough of a reputation for testing that having that certification is valuable to customers.
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They're not talking about Predator drones, they're talking about the much, much smaller ones that are basically like high-end R/C vehicles. Those don't go anywhere near 8000 feet or 100mph.
Well the DHS has purchased over a billion rounds of ammunition, plus lots of tanks and coffins, so they're ready to brutally put down an uprising.
You're absolutely right that there's legitimate uses for this technology, however as Beadydog says above, the federal government has completely broken trust with the American people, so as far as I'm concerned, there's NO legitimate uses as long as they're the ones operating the drones. They simply can't be trusted.
Again, exactly like Microsoft and their Metro UI; it seems to be having the opposite effect as intended.
It shouldn't be possible to intercept passwords by snooping on IP connections, as long as you're using encryption such as SSL, and not a shitty password-in-plaintext service like FTP.
However, if the destination is compromised (NSA), there's nothing you can do about that.
It seems to me this would be a good place for the alternative ROMs like CyanogenMod to offer non-Google versions of Android which they've certified (by making all the source code open and available, at least for the relevant parts) to work properly in this regard, allowing you to back up data on Google's hosts, but ensuring that it's all encrypted by a passphrase which Google has no access to.
And that stupid Google+ might be the last straw since everything is trying to foist it on me and I have no interest in it.
Google+ is exactly like Microsoft's Metro UI in Windows 8: it's a move to co-opt some big competitor (or someone they see as a competitor), by forcing a big change on their existing userbase in order to get them "used to" using this new service.
With Metro, MS saw that the mobile world was passing them by with iOS and Android (and that everyone hated their crappy WinCE offerings before these came around), so they decided they needed to force their way into the mobile device market. To do that, they decided that making a single, unified user interface was the way to do this, since 80+% of computer users use Windows; so, the bright idea was to make some "bold" (euphamism for "shitty") touch-oriented UI, different from everyone else's, and stick that on the desktop/laptop PCs so everyone would get used to it, and then want phones (and tablets) with that same UI, so they don't have to deal with radically-different devices in their lives. Problem is, not many people like Metro, especially on desktop/laptop PCs, since those devices don't lend themselves to a touch interface (google for "Gorilla arm").
Same goes for Google+: Google decided they needed to get in on the whole "social networking" thing, so they made up Google+, moved many of their existing services over to it which didn't really need it, and have used various ways to try to force users to use it, probably in the hope that they'll get tired of Facebook and just want to do everything on Google.
Not trusting any American companies with your data is of course prudent, in light of PRISM, however this doesn't mean your data is safe anywhere else either: if it's in France, Germany, or UK, they all have spying programs that are just as bad. And even if you keep your data in a relatively-safe country that probably has no spying at all, such as Switzerland or Iceland, that's no guarantee that the company hosting your data isn't just plain incompetent. If Google can make a mistake like this, anyone can.
Of course, since it's impossible to be 100% risk-free, it does make sense to try to mitigate that risk by avoiding obviously-bad choices, like using American companies.
Interestingly, it looks like some stuff has changed since I last looked at SMTP, according to the Wikipedia article. It does look like there's a SSL-secured SMTP, but it doesn't look like it's mandatory.
In-house email isn't safe either, unless your company is outside the US (and there, you're still going to be spied on if you're in the UK, Germany, France, etc. as those have all now been revealed to have programs just like PRISM or even worse). The reason for this is that email is fundamentally flawed from a security perspective: it travels completely unencrypted over what's basically a simple telnet session: you can telnet to port 25 of any mail server and send a bogus email quite easily using the appropriate SMTP commands ("HELO", "RCPT TO", etc.) (though it'll probably be rejected these days based on other techniques used to avoid spoofing). So if the government wants to spy on you, all they have to do is tap into your ISP connection and they'll see all your incoming and outgoing emails. Sure, you could use GPG to encrypt them, but then no one will be able to communicate with you since so few other people actually bother or even know what GPG is (and I sure wouldn't trust PGP since it's closed-source IIRC). Plus, even for the few people you do successfully communicate with using GPG, the NSA will know who you're talking to and at what frequency, though they may not be able to decipher the exact content of your messages so easily.
So to avoid that, the only way to be secure is to have a mail server based in some country that doesn't have a big spying program, such as Switzerland or Iceland. Then, you can access that mail server, even using a webmail interface, using typically-available encryption methods like SSL/https.
Same goes for FTP, but then again I don't know why anyone would ever use that these day. Only a moron would use FTP since it transmits your username and password in cleartext, so anyone listening in on your internet connection would not only see what files you're transferring but your login credentials as well (which may be the same credentials as used in many other places, since people tend to re-use passwords a lot). But at least here we have an ubiquitous and simple alternative: SFTP.
How is that going to help? The NSA and US government can get any data they want from any US-based email provider, Gmail, Outlook.com, or Yahoo. The only way you'll be really safe is to run your own mail server in a foreign country, but switching from one US-based provider to another US-based provider isn't going to make a bit of difference.
And this should not be only about MS. Any company should answer these questions. I really hope this shitstorm will kill stupid usage of "the cloud" but I doubt it. People are dumb, education budgets diminish every year so there is no changing that fact.
Education budgets in the US may diminish every year, but that probably isn't true in other industrialized countries. The real issue is that foreign governments and other customers may now decide that using Microsoft or any US-based vendor is a bad idea, thanks to NSA's spying, and they're right. There's nothing to stop the NSA from handing over important information to US companies or the US government; in effect, the NSA is an agent for espionag (industrial and otherwise). Any US-based software or cloud services vendor simply cannot be trusted, and this isn't going to be good for the US economy since IT products and services are one of the few big things continuing to prop it up.
IF they identify markers for violence, THEN we will need to concern ourselves with making sure society doesn't take that as a certainty. Society has decided that sex offenders usually having a high rate of recidivism means that every individual sex offender is going to commit another sex offense, so we should lock them up forever.
Except we don't do that at all. We'd rather keep nonviolent drug offenders in prison for ridiculously long terms.
With the convicted pedophiles, molestors, or just some poor kid that had sex with his slightly underage girlfriend, or some guy who was drunk and pissed in public, we go ahead and release them, but give them a "sex offender" label (which is the same, no matter whether you just pissed in public in view of a child or you molested one), which prevents them from living a certain distance from schools or day-care centers. What this translates to is they aren't allowed to live in any inhabited area, except under a bridge somewhere, because that's the only place they can find that isn't too close to a school or day-care center. They'd probably be a lot happier if we set up their own small city in the middle of North Dakota, free of any schools or children so they can live like normal people.
Try looking for a way of getting to Staten Island and back off again without paying any tools.
Private spaceflight occurs mainly in Russia.
I thought Russia's industry was a state-owned company that was spun off into a private entity. That's not exactly the same as a private company building itself up from nothing. They're also having a lot of problems.
The USA developed the basics of the Internet backbone, but look at the current customer situation (which is all that matters, really), you can have 100mbps symmetrical in Japan, Slovakia, Estonia for 10-15$/month. In the USA you can have 10mbps with a 300GB cap for 40$/month. Again, your greed impedes innovation. A lot, most, of the optic fiber dropped in the oceans are operated by foreign countries.
This is all totally irrelevant: we're talking about technical innovation here, not business plans and operations. I could go start my own ISP, but that doesn't make me an innovator, it makes me someone who bought some off-the-shelf equipment and put it into use. It's great those other countries are providing internet service so cheaply, and I wish our ISP situation here wasn't so fucked up, but they're not innovators, just like your local car mechanic is not an innovator in the realm of automotive engineering. The innovators are the people/companies who designed and engineered the equipment those ISPs use, and while a lot of that has moved to Asia in recent years, much of the original design work (such as the Ethernet standards) was done by American companies. Dropping an optical cable into the ocean doesn't take innovation, it just requires buying an optical cable from someone and renting a boat. Laying transoceanic cables is a mature technology (they've been doing that for many decades now), and you're not an innovator of optical cables when all you do is buy it from someone else.
As far as HTC and Samsung, there's not all that much innovation going on there; they make Android (and Windows) phones, so they're getting their software from someone else, namely Google and MS, both American companies, and all the ICs they use are mostly designed by American companies.
I really don't want Chairmaster reading that rant: the last thing I want to see is Ballmer to get a clue and do something that would help that company. It's way too much fun watching him run it into the ground.
While it's true the US has been losing its edge in technological development, what other countries have really stepped up and filled that space? What country has developed usable electric cars, for instance? What country has developed private spaceflight? What country developed the internet? Smartphones?
The US is definitely going down in a lot of ways, but no one else seems to be shining in technological innovation either; everyone else either does only manufacturing or continues the use and development of a highly-mature technology. I just don't see any groundbreaking innovation coming from anywhere else. When the US collapses, things aren't going to progress very quickly in technology.
No, because by most accounts Apple hardware is actually very good, it's the other stuff that sucks (software that isn't flexible and requires you to do everything the "Apple way" with very little configurability or customizability; iTunes is a bloated pig; Apple styling is somewhat controversial (love it or hate it); arrogance towards customers ("the antenna is fine, you're holding the phone the wrong way"); patent trolling and excessive litigation; etc.).
Interesting that you point to Human Speaker's site; I happen to have a pair of Genesis speakers rebuilt with Human drivers (the guy who runs Human was one of the employees of Genesis when it folded, and continued making EPI and Genesis speakers and parts on his own).
Wrong. Engineering co-op jobs pay; I did this when I was in college back in '95-'96 and got paid $12/hour back then, which was enough to have my own apartment and save up a bunch to offset my college expenses.
From what I can tell, England is even worse than the US for engineering careers. It seems like all that's left in England is finance jobs.
Since England is part of the EU, you're eligible to work anywhere in the EU. Have you tried looking for jobs in Germany? Germany is still an engineering powerhouse, unlike the English-speaking countries that have all happily outsourced engineering wherever possible.
That's what I did; I got tired of just spending all my time bug-fixing, so I started my own small business.
Someone with 10 years of experience is a better worker than someone fresh out of college, and will work faster and make fewer mistakes. Someone with 20 years of experience will do much better than someone with 20 years, similarly. Engineering is just like any other craft: the more you do it, and the longer you do it for, the better you get at it. Also, when you're senior, you're additionally valuable because you can mentor the younger engineers and bring them up to speed faster.
Red herring. You don't need a government "with a long history of lies, abuses, manipulation, and little or no accountability" in order to have roads, bridges, and military protection. Switzerland for example seems to do just fine with their government; you never hear about Orwellian surveillance programs from the Swiss government, and they have very nice roads and bridges there. There's dozens of other countries that do just fine with their governments too, such as Norway.
That has nothing to do with the honor system. UL is an organization that has a reputation to uphold, and other companies pay them to do tests on their products and certify their safety. Then, the customer gets to put the UL trademark symbol on their product (assuming it passes) and advertise it as "UL listed", in the hope that consumers will see this and be willing to pay more because of this independent certification.
If self-regulation worked, UL would have gone out of business long ago. Just because some manufacturer says their product is safe means nothing, but over the years UL has built enough of a reputation for testing that having that certification is valuable to customers.