Simply put, you, the developer, are out of picture. MS, simply, don't, care, about, you, anymore. Period.
Actually, this may not be entirely inaccurate. It seems overall that Microsoft has lost touch with what their products are supposed to fucking DO in the first place.
Exhibit A: Windows Mobile ad that shows people changing from A to B and trying to associate it somehow with Windows being part of it all. From delivery driver to stunt driver? WTF? No, this is not how it works. Stunt jobs are not in the career path that contains delivery driver, idiots. And even it they were, WINDOWS HAS FUCKING NOTHING TO DO WITH IT.
Exhibit B: That Surface RT ad that takes place in a big conference room with a round table. Holy balls. Did that group of about two dozen people do more than a millisecond's work while they were circlejerking like that?
Now, compare and contrast this with Apple's latest ad campaign about the iPhone. Put aside any IOS/Android rivalry for a moment, and look upon it with clear eyes. It says...nothing, until the end when it just says "iPhone." But what it shows, for the entire commercial...is people listening to music with headphones on. A dancer in a studio listening to a piece, looking like she's either finding inspiration or learning the music...either way she's happy. A guy on the Staten Island ferry, probably going home at the end of the day, looking out over the water at the skyline as he chills out to music. And so on. You watch it, and at least half of the experiences you see you immediately identify with. Not a word is said...and not one needs to be said. You know exactly what they are doing, and how they feel. You've been it, you've seen it, and you want to feel it again. Brilliant.
A hell of a lot more brilliant than some faggot in a suit bouncing up and down in the middle of a conference table on one hand as an argument to use a product for business, I'll say that much.
RT is infamous for being virulently anti-American; it's a Russian news organization with an agenda that is fairly obvious at times. Now, that said, Der Spiegel is a totally valid news organization...so can someone provide something directly from that, instead of interpretation by people with their own agenda regarding this?
I would pay a lot of money to be able to drive distracted, asleep, or inebriated legally. Right now none of those are legal and one isn't even possible.
Meh. I'm in the other camp...I want everyone on a plane to be able to take turns playing "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" (because everyone knows what a great movie that was) and to be able to drive a train anywhere I want...not just on the train tracks. MORE FREEDOM!
...video linked supplied, there's no chaos, and despite the insinuation of more than one person, including children, having seizures - I saw one guy whose legs were trembling. I've seen shock victims trembling worse.
I'm not saying this didn't happen, I am just saying that the video basically shows nothing (and maybe there's something wrong with me, but I didn't think it was 'graphic' in the slightest.)
Maybe they linked the wrong video.
I'll go one step further...but first, let me give context to forestall anyone claiming I'm a fan of Assad and his pals. I most emphatically am not, and never have been. Nor do I support the purposes of Iran, which uses Syria as a fulcrum, most specifically in the Levant (Lebanon and surrounding area). This isn't about me supporting Syria, just about what I see when I look at this one video. In fact, I think that at this point both sides in this conflict have been thoroughly populated with people whose aims are not "good."
I saw a lot of people lying down. Not really indicative of one thing or another. No cyanosis or signs of skin irritation, nor signs of labored breathing or choking really. But hey, the absence of solid proof is not proof of absence and I don't think anyone said what kind of "poison gas" it was, so it's not particularly clear. But then I saw the "convulsing guy." He was twitching from the waist down...but his head was calmly, smoothly lolling from side to side? He was having a convulsion with his lower body, but not anywhere else? Hm. I don't believe that nerve agents turn people into MC Hammer. Nerve agents (cholerinterase inhibitors, specifically) make your whole body go apeshit...that's how you die. And it's not that one half of one person would be trembling and everyone else would look like they were taking a nap...anyone who was dead would look horrific and anyone who wasn't dead would not exactly look calm either. I call bullshit on this.
The rebels have made disproven claims in the past about chemical warfare attacks. They know that the Obama administration has stated that use of chemical weapons would result in direct US involvement, and they have a decided incentive to report on any that do happen, but also to fabricate evidence of one if they think they can pull it off. Furthermore, there's less of a penalty for a false claim than there is benefit from successfully pulling off a hoax. Hell, they even know how one person...one single source...lying about WMD got us to invade Iraq and demolish an entire nation.
And as stated above, UN chemical weapon inspectors had JUST shown up a few kilometers nearby. I find it incredibly difficult to believe that Assad would deploy such a weapon within easy reach of the very people who would be there to investigate.
And yes, the user name of the guy I'm quoting/responding to is "Assmasher," but that doesn't mean he's wrong. Let's stick to discussing this based the merits of what's said, guys:)
If these prisoners were serial killers, rapists, murderers and other assorted bad guys, then I fully support using their organs to save lives. I find it poetic justice and a very fitting end for the life of a person who (possibly) killed so many others.
If these prisoners are political prisoners sentenced to death because they were at Tiannamen Square or oppose communism, then I welcome the end of such barbaric policies.
You, sir, just hit the head on the nail with why this kind of thing is a problem. As soon as you say "well, everyone has rights, except for *those people*, you end up creating a line. When you create that line, you also create the need for someone to determine who ends up on which side of that line. And as soon as you do that, you give someone the power to take rights away from someone else. That always ends poorly; this is why the Constitution of the United States refers to rights as being "inalienable," or, in other words, irrevocable by man. Technically, "inalienable" means "Not subject to sale or transfer; inseparable."
Once people are given the ability to take basic rights away, invariably at some point, that power will be abused. It just works out that way, and has done so in history over and over and over again. The problem isn't about when it's some serial killer/rapist who is gladly donating a spare kidney because he's genuinely sorry for all the harm he's done and at least wants to do something decent; that's like having weather alerts for nice days. The problem is how the system can be abused. Even more to the point, the system WAS abused, widely and profoundly, in China, which is why this is a story to begin with, in exactly the way you describe on the last line of your post. That's exactly my point.
I can't believe people are actually taking Kim Dotcom's statement without oh, a pound of salt.
Let me translate: "As soon as I noticed that it could be something I could talk about to get my name on the news again, I noticed I was being spied on."
Snowden at least stands accused of treason. Assange faces rape-after-the-fact charges in one of the most misandrous countries on the planet. Where the fuck does a drone strike against the latter even become a topic open for discussion?
Make your case for Snowden, dude. I happen to consider him nothing short of a hero, but I can certainly appreciate the opposing POV. Assange ranks right up there with the Kardashians for his overall level of ego-vs-the-good-he-could-do.
Then again - Perhaps I have this backward. Yes, nuke Assange (and Rodman, and the Kardashians, etc) from orbit, so they stop trying to steal the spotlight from real discussions we need to have about security vs privacy vs basic human rights.
Sir (I assume you're male, please forgive me if I guessed wrong), your last line appealed to me so much that I entirely forgot everything you said before it...I think it was the idea of nuking the Kardashians that made me blue screen with glee, especially in the hopes of bringing more real discourse to the public stage again.
This situation kind of reminds me of the character played by Randy Quaid in "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation," where his wife explains that he's been out of work for close to a decade because "he's holding out for a position in upper management."
But on the other hand, why is it your job to tell him what to do with his career? It's his life, let him live it for better and for worse. Any mistake he's intent on making is his to learn from, and most great successes looked like suicide missions to other people at the outset.
* And more importantly, it doesn't just tell YOU about how appealing the concept is; it tells their potential OEM partners. That was probably the whole point of this. The good folks in management at Lenovo, Dell, Acer, etc. will be looking at those pre-orders a little enviously- do they think they could get the same interest and blind faith for their next "premium" Android handset?
I think the person above you hit it on the head when he pointed out that the real story is that they're only 1/3rd of the way to their goal. And I don't think that 10 million dollars would actually impress the potential OEM partners who 1, depend on the current status quo and their already-existing partnerships as a barrier to entry for other competitors, and 2, know that 10 million dollars is a rounding error when it comes to the development and launch of an entirely new mobile platform.
Your mistake is to think in absolutes. It is not because you have multiple non anonymous parts of your life that you should give up on protecting whatever you can of your privacy.
Yes, certainly you are not 100% safe, but an open source OS will be messed with by a large number of people and anyone who finds an irregularity will raise the flag. You cannot have a certainty of security, but you certainly have a lot more chance of detecting misdeeds than with closed source.
I think you're missing the point of surveillance and how it works. Surveillance is about interaction between multiple people...who speaks to whom, what is said, transactions between organizations, etc. What you run at home is of no real consequence whatsoever; what is monitored is not what stays inside your own computer. You can have totally secure code at your end, but if the key generation at the other end is in some way compromised, so is all crypto that is supposed to protect your communications with that endpoint. And in the scenario described here, that's exactly the situation.
I would hasten to point out that even now, the surveillance has absolutely no dependency whatsoever on closed source code; the providers are the source of the monitoring, not the software itself. There's no need to go through all the trouble of trying to get code inserted into all those different pieces of software; just go to about a dozen different companies, twist their arms, and at least 95% of the online population will interact with one of them. Add that to monitoring of cellular providers, traffic analysis of backbone providers, and you've got a really rich feed of information...all without a single line of code put into anyone's endpoint systems at home.
You don't honestly think I liked all that hand-editing and drudging through man files and so on that I had to do to run Linux when I switched twelve years ago, do you? I switched because I knew that the major vendors couldn't be trusted, and that I needed to learn systems that weren't shielded from users auditing them and securing them outside the scope of what was marketable.
Today, I no longer need to rely on major software and service venders for most things. That puts me ahead of the game. Of course, it's only as good as the services I provide for myself, and the security of the ones I use outside my own.
And yet, you're posting on Slashdot. Buying things from Amazon, probably, and banking online as well too. Did you build your cell phone from scratch, and validate all the systems of your cellular provider as well? If you run Ubuntu..or Debian...or Redhat, how will you be sure that the binaries you're getting from apt-get or RPM are the ones that match the source code you can read with your own eyes? (Keep in mind that last month there was a Slashdot article that pointed out the difficulty of getting the exact same binaries produced from the same source code, based on variances on the machines that do the compiling and the optimization flags...so forget about compiling your own binaries and just comparing the hash/filesize tuple.) For that matter, if you're using Gentoo will you read ALL of the source code all over again every time there's an update? What you say sounds great in theory, but in practice I don't believe you're as self-sufficient as you think you are.
Oh, and I remember doing all of that editing and reading of man files too...but I never would have spotted code that was meant to weaken crypto. Editing a config file or reading a man file does not equal a proper code audit.
What's really scary to me about the proposed scenario is this: not only does it plausibly describe a situation where the common man's privacy and security are jeopardized, in that scenario the truly bad guys...the ones who WOULD really be more self-sufficient...would run their own systems to some degree and be outside the scope of much of the tainted encryption. This is much as it was back when our government forbade export of strong crypto; the bad guys got it anyways, and the good guys were kept from using it in many situations.
So, it appears the article only talks about the time spent by the physician. I'm curious if the costs of the tools/technologies of these procedures have gone up, and how the doctors get paid for those (potentially) increased costs?
Well, that's another part of the problem, I would say. If one cost isn't getting addressed/monitored, and the way to try and offset it is to have another cost kept arbitrarily high in a way that does not reflect reality, then you're going to lose visibility into the real economics of it all and get undesired effects. Add in the fact that a trade association representing the vendors (in this case) is a major driver in the price determination process and the lack of transparency, and you increase the likelihood of undesired effects even further, and practically guarantee that anyone who looks upon the result will question it.
If so, it'd be the first time that anyone on Kickstarter found their life endangered based on being successful. Google "Gerald Bull," for an example of how far it can go.
I thought I'd make his life easier by getting rid of a lot of unneeded files on my system. There's a whole lot of stuff in C:\Windows that I never seem to use...let's start there!
Most power plants built the lake in the first place. And they don't discharge into the lake; they discharge at or downstream of the dam -- so they aren't pulling in their own hot water. Next to none (read: NONE) of the intake water is used in the turbine steam loops -- those are 100% closed loops, if you're losing water you have a problem. (a serious problem for nuke plants.) [note: steam loops use distilled water -- ZERO minerals, RO reduces the mineral/particle volume, but it's not zero.]
That said, there are still numerous plants that use evaporative cooling towers. And they do, indeed, require a significant volume of water that is "consumed" -- it goes up as vapor. While it isn't "drinking water", it's water that's not available to the filter plant that feeds your taps. In a drought, you have a choice... cool the power plant, or have water to drink.
Regardless of who built it, a lake is a closed body of water, period. And yes, they DO discharge into the lake, typically; if you take water out of a lake and release it into a river, you drain the lake. I'm not guessing at this; I work for the very large civil engineering company that is mentioned in the article; not only do we do a huge amount of work in the power gen world (we're building the second-largest power plant in the world in South Africa right now), but 30% of the world's drinking water comes from water purification or desalinization plants that we built. I've been doing NERC CIP compliance work since before the auditing deadlines for the first 18 requirements (NERC CIP was implemented in stages at first), so I've spent about 6 years in the power industry by now, at about two dozen utilities in total.
And you're right, next to no water is used in the steam loops, but some is...as I said. Enough is important that the demin plant is considered a critical asset if the plant itself is considered critical, and there's a large storage tank of demineralized water to give some cushion in case there's a problem with the RO filters. And you are right about the zero minerals, but every plant I've ever seen...CT or ST...used RO filters. They use a lot of them, in series.
But to get back on point...if you take water from a river and put it back in a river...or from a lake to a river downstream...you're still not using up that water. You're just moving it from one point to another. Again, neither is potable water, and it's not causing a net loss.
Evaporative cooling towers...also called passive cooling towers...are extremely rare outside of nuclear installations. They're very expensive to build in comparison. Even among energy engineers, they're something of a curiosity for the fossil generation world. So that won't add up to the 40% cited.
The number seems fishy to me...because every power plant I've ever seen that was cooled with fresh water sits on a lake. The water enters the plant from the lake, cools the steam coming off of the turbine(s), and goes back to the lake. Some of it first goes through an osmosis filter for demineralization; that water becomes the steam that directly turns the turbine. But yeah...it's not like any of the water is destroyed or even vented as steam to the air. And the water they use isn't directly potable; they aren't drawing the water from the water mains. (Water mains don't supply enough water for it to even be feasible.) There is one exception, which is combustion turbine plants. But these are smaller, and use a very small amount of water for cooling in the same way our car radiators do; the consumption from these is almost negligible. (Come to think of it, has anyone checked out how much fresh drinking water gets used by all of our cars, in our radiators?)
Now, what they do say about how in heat waves some plants have to shut down or reduce their output because the water gets too warm...that fits. I've been on a lake attached to a fairly standard-sized coal-powered plant, and you could definitely feel the difference between where the intake of the plant was and where the output back into the lake was. It was that big of a difference; these plants put a LOT of heat into the water.
Foreign Policy had a fascinating article last month on how metadata analysis is used in terms of relationships between suspected "evil" people and known "evil" people. (The word "evil" in quotes to signify that for purposes of this topic, the definition of "evil" is unimportant.) The article talks about the challenges of fewer vs. more degrees of separation in link analysis; the new revelation that they go to 3 degrees throws it into even more perspective.
Bruce Schneier saw this coming. And he's got a point...on one hand, we argue against the policies of countries like Egypt, Syria, Bahrain, China when it comes to free, uncensored and unmonitored use of the Internet (or lack thereof in the aforementioned countries). And then, oh...look what we're doing with all those network links that pass through our own country. You can argue that the motives are different, the means are more surgical (but only to a point since 1, they are classified programs and 2, intelligence agencies lie their assess off, by necessity, to foreign powers) but the argument still won't carry much weight.
Ad networks/common popular websites have been compromised repeatedly in the past and will be compromised repeatedly in the future. All sites could be considered "dirty sites".
This is totally true, but not even the whole story; a site need not be compromised to serve up malware. For a while, Foreign Policy's website was serving up malware once in a while through one of the advertising networks. Google released a comprehensive study of drive-by malware attacks that explicitly stated that the nature of content a person looked at was no longer germane to their safety from such attacks.
>.these guys used USB drives to move data between countries
Look, if anyone with any sense can bypass the snooping, they must know that. That only leaves *us* that they are snooping on.
I notice how you conveniently change what I said by omitting the second half of the sentence: "...and even that wasn't good enough to protect them." So no, that does not leave *us* that they are snooping on. And also, your premise assumes that no new targets come up, that there's no reason to snoop on other nations, and that no nations ever change sides from friendly to hostile (like happened with Venezuela, Belarus and the Ukraine and is happening with Argentina, for example).
Compare the value of a terrorist organization or hostile nation state to an average American, and you'll see that there's absolutely no comparison in terms of targeting. Even with their massive budget, the NSA still has finite resources and capability. They can't spy on everyone at once, even when they're grabbing all the data, any more than a librarian at the Library of Congress can read every book in the building.
Okay, there are options besides "consumer" and "enterprise." There are network devices for small offices and medium businesses. You don't need a Cisco 6900-series chassis to be more reliable than a dogshit consumer router. Cisco is a bit more filled-out in this range (I run some of this class of gear at home myself, and am happy). I have a Gig-E backbone and use a business-class WAP for wireless. It's not a wifi router mind you...no NAT, no switchports, no WPS. And I like it that way, because it allows me to have a flat network at home, gets rid of WPS and its security vulnerabilities, and it just plain works. My firewall is a Cisco ASA 5505 with a VPN license, and that, too, just plain works great.
I'm deliberately omitting hardware specifications and model numbers for the most part, for a good reason. What I have is for myself, and my requirements. What the OP needs is for them to decide. And that's where he/she should start...with requirements. I wanted Gig at the wire level, and 802.11n for wireless with fairly tight security. I wanted a solid VPN at my edge that would be able to leverage the VPN client on my work computer. I wanted a flat network for primary, trusted systems so that my Apple TV could see iTunes on my desktop, and printing from the MacBook would be simple. And my home network design reflects all of this. The OP might have different needs...so they need to figure out what those needs are, and then find the devices that fit them.
So, the majority of the population now realizes that their activity is in some way monitored, and they wish to evade that monitoring. They need to consider this: they are amateurs playing for nickel stakes in this game. The NSA doesn't care about them, and the people aren't used to playing this game either, for their part. This game exists, at the moment, primarily between the most sophisticated intelligence apparatus in human history and a very small population that is doing everything they can possibly do to hide. We think that using airgapping a network and using USB drives simply to move data across the room is a powerful security measure...these guys used USB drives to move data between countries, and even that wasn't good enough to protect them. The average citizen merely worries about some amorphous knowledge of their habits...the real target population faces death, or perhaps even worse internment in a black site somewhere for years first. And that population has been working on hiding for quite some time now; this is not a new game just because the rest of us know it's being played now.
So...with that context, why would anyone think that simply using a different search engine fucking matters?
The resolution to this is; hack everyone. If they were a fed, you'll be able to figure that out by the contents of their e-mail account and their My Documents folder.
If they even *have* a My Documents folder on a laptop at Defcon, you're most of the way to proving they're a fed...
Slashdot Mirror
Simply put, you, the developer, are out of picture. MS, simply, don't, care, about, you, anymore. Period.
Actually, this may not be entirely inaccurate. It seems overall that Microsoft has lost touch with what their products are supposed to fucking DO in the first place.
Exhibit A: Windows Mobile ad that shows people changing from A to B and trying to associate it somehow with Windows being part of it all. From delivery driver to stunt driver? WTF? No, this is not how it works. Stunt jobs are not in the career path that contains delivery driver, idiots. And even it they were, WINDOWS HAS FUCKING NOTHING TO DO WITH IT.
Exhibit B: That Surface RT ad that takes place in a big conference room with a round table. Holy balls. Did that group of about two dozen people do more than a millisecond's work while they were circlejerking like that?
Now, compare and contrast this with Apple's latest ad campaign about the iPhone. Put aside any IOS/Android rivalry for a moment, and look upon it with clear eyes. It says...nothing, until the end when it just says "iPhone." But what it shows, for the entire commercial...is people listening to music with headphones on. A dancer in a studio listening to a piece, looking like she's either finding inspiration or learning the music...either way she's happy. A guy on the Staten Island ferry, probably going home at the end of the day, looking out over the water at the skyline as he chills out to music. And so on. You watch it, and at least half of the experiences you see you immediately identify with. Not a word is said...and not one needs to be said. You know exactly what they are doing, and how they feel. You've been it, you've seen it, and you want to feel it again. Brilliant.
A hell of a lot more brilliant than some faggot in a suit bouncing up and down in the middle of a conference table on one hand as an argument to use a product for business, I'll say that much.
RT is infamous for being virulently anti-American; it's a Russian news organization with an agenda that is fairly obvious at times. Now, that said, Der Spiegel is a totally valid news organization...so can someone provide something directly from that, instead of interpretation by people with their own agenda regarding this?
Ah, never mind: here you go: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/25/us-usa-security-nsa-idUSBRE97O08120130825
I'm in.
I would pay a lot of money to be able to drive distracted, asleep, or inebriated legally. Right now none of those are legal and one isn't even possible.
Meh. I'm in the other camp...I want everyone on a plane to be able to take turns playing "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" (because everyone knows what a great movie that was) and to be able to drive a train anywhere I want...not just on the train tracks. MORE FREEDOM!
I read somewhere that it is shit.
is it true that the Hotel Quebec is shit?
Could it be that it's full of cockroaches, and that the waiters ejaculate into the food?
Has anyone said that the manager hurls racial abuse at his staff and non-white customers?
Did anyone find any reports about guests having their personal property stolen by the room cleaners?
I did know this one waiter there.
"Do not watch. I can't go if you watch."
Apart from seasoning the lobster bisque, he farted on the meringue, sneezed on braised endive, and as for the cream of mushroom soup, well...
(chuckling in the background)
"Go ahead. Say it."
You get the idea.
...video linked supplied, there's no chaos, and despite the insinuation of more than one person, including children, having seizures - I saw one guy whose legs were trembling. I've seen shock victims trembling worse.
I'm not saying this didn't happen, I am just saying that the video basically shows nothing (and maybe there's something wrong with me, but I didn't think it was 'graphic' in the slightest.)
Maybe they linked the wrong video.
I'll go one step further...but first, let me give context to forestall anyone claiming I'm a fan of Assad and his pals. I most emphatically am not, and never have been. Nor do I support the purposes of Iran, which uses Syria as a fulcrum, most specifically in the Levant (Lebanon and surrounding area). This isn't about me supporting Syria, just about what I see when I look at this one video. In fact, I think that at this point both sides in this conflict have been thoroughly populated with people whose aims are not "good."
I saw a lot of people lying down. Not really indicative of one thing or another. No cyanosis or signs of skin irritation, nor signs of labored breathing or choking really. But hey, the absence of solid proof is not proof of absence and I don't think anyone said what kind of "poison gas" it was, so it's not particularly clear. But then I saw the "convulsing guy." He was twitching from the waist down...but his head was calmly, smoothly lolling from side to side? He was having a convulsion with his lower body, but not anywhere else? Hm. I don't believe that nerve agents turn people into MC Hammer. Nerve agents (cholerinterase inhibitors, specifically) make your whole body go apeshit...that's how you die. And it's not that one half of one person would be trembling and everyone else would look like they were taking a nap...anyone who was dead would look horrific and anyone who wasn't dead would not exactly look calm either. I call bullshit on this.
The rebels have made disproven claims in the past about chemical warfare attacks. They know that the Obama administration has stated that use of chemical weapons would result in direct US involvement, and they have a decided incentive to report on any that do happen, but also to fabricate evidence of one if they think they can pull it off. Furthermore, there's less of a penalty for a false claim than there is benefit from successfully pulling off a hoax. Hell, they even know how one person...one single source...lying about WMD got us to invade Iraq and demolish an entire nation.
And as stated above, UN chemical weapon inspectors had JUST shown up a few kilometers nearby. I find it incredibly difficult to believe that Assad would deploy such a weapon within easy reach of the very people who would be there to investigate.
And yes, the user name of the guy I'm quoting/responding to is "Assmasher," but that doesn't mean he's wrong. Let's stick to discussing this based the merits of what's said, guys :)
If these prisoners were serial killers, rapists, murderers and other assorted bad guys, then I fully support using their organs to save lives. I find it poetic justice and a very fitting end for the life of a person who (possibly) killed so many others.
If these prisoners are political prisoners sentenced to death because they were at Tiannamen Square or oppose communism, then I welcome the end of such barbaric policies.
You, sir, just hit the head on the nail with why this kind of thing is a problem. As soon as you say "well, everyone has rights, except for *those people*, you end up creating a line. When you create that line, you also create the need for someone to determine who ends up on which side of that line. And as soon as you do that, you give someone the power to take rights away from someone else. That always ends poorly; this is why the Constitution of the United States refers to rights as being "inalienable," or, in other words, irrevocable by man. Technically, "inalienable" means "Not subject to sale or transfer; inseparable."
Once people are given the ability to take basic rights away, invariably at some point, that power will be abused. It just works out that way, and has done so in history over and over and over again. The problem isn't about when it's some serial killer/rapist who is gladly donating a spare kidney because he's genuinely sorry for all the harm he's done and at least wants to do something decent; that's like having weather alerts for nice days. The problem is how the system can be abused. Even more to the point, the system WAS abused, widely and profoundly, in China, which is why this is a story to begin with, in exactly the way you describe on the last line of your post. That's exactly my point.
I can't believe people are actually taking Kim Dotcom's statement without oh, a pound of salt.
Let me translate:
"As soon as I noticed that it could be something I could talk about to get my name on the news again, I noticed I was being spied on."
Wait, what?
Snowden at least stands accused of treason. Assange faces rape-after-the-fact charges in one of the most misandrous countries on the planet. Where the fuck does a drone strike against the latter even become a topic open for discussion?
Make your case for Snowden, dude. I happen to consider him nothing short of a hero, but I can certainly appreciate the opposing POV. Assange ranks right up there with the Kardashians for his overall level of ego-vs-the-good-he-could-do.
Then again - Perhaps I have this backward. Yes, nuke Assange (and Rodman, and the Kardashians, etc) from orbit, so they stop trying to steal the spotlight from real discussions we need to have about security vs privacy vs basic human rights.
Sir (I assume you're male, please forgive me if I guessed wrong), your last line appealed to me so much that I entirely forgot everything you said before it...I think it was the idea of nuking the Kardashians that made me blue screen with glee, especially in the hopes of bringing more real discourse to the public stage again.
This situation kind of reminds me of the character played by Randy Quaid in "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation," where his wife explains that he's been out of work for close to a decade because "he's holding out for a position in upper management."
But on the other hand, why is it your job to tell him what to do with his career? It's his life, let him live it for better and for worse. Any mistake he's intent on making is his to learn from, and most great successes looked like suicide missions to other people at the outset.
* And more importantly, it doesn't just tell YOU about how appealing the concept is; it tells their potential OEM partners. That was probably the whole point of this. The good folks in management at Lenovo, Dell, Acer, etc. will be looking at those pre-orders a little enviously- do they think they could get the same interest and blind faith for their next "premium" Android handset?
I think the person above you hit it on the head when he pointed out that the real story is that they're only 1/3rd of the way to their goal. And I don't think that 10 million dollars would actually impress the potential OEM partners who 1, depend on the current status quo and their already-existing partnerships as a barrier to entry for other competitors, and 2, know that 10 million dollars is a rounding error when it comes to the development and launch of an entirely new mobile platform.
Your mistake is to think in absolutes. It is not because you have multiple non anonymous parts of your life that you should give up on protecting whatever you can of your privacy.
Yes, certainly you are not 100% safe, but an open source OS will be messed with by a large number of people and anyone who finds an irregularity will raise the flag. You cannot have a certainty of security, but you certainly have a lot more chance of detecting misdeeds than with closed source.
I think you're missing the point of surveillance and how it works. Surveillance is about interaction between multiple people...who speaks to whom, what is said, transactions between organizations, etc. What you run at home is of no real consequence whatsoever; what is monitored is not what stays inside your own computer. You can have totally secure code at your end, but if the key generation at the other end is in some way compromised, so is all crypto that is supposed to protect your communications with that endpoint. And in the scenario described here, that's exactly the situation.
I would hasten to point out that even now, the surveillance has absolutely no dependency whatsoever on closed source code; the providers are the source of the monitoring, not the software itself. There's no need to go through all the trouble of trying to get code inserted into all those different pieces of software; just go to about a dozen different companies, twist their arms, and at least 95% of the online population will interact with one of them. Add that to monitoring of cellular providers, traffic analysis of backbone providers, and you've got a really rich feed of information...all without a single line of code put into anyone's endpoint systems at home.
You don't honestly think I liked all that hand-editing and drudging through man files and so on that I had to do to run Linux when I switched twelve years ago, do you? I switched because I knew that the major vendors couldn't be trusted, and that I needed to learn systems that weren't shielded from users auditing them and securing them outside the scope of what was marketable.
Today, I no longer need to rely on major software and service venders for most things. That puts me ahead of the game. Of course, it's only as good as the services I provide for myself, and the security of the ones I use outside my own.
And yet, you're posting on Slashdot. Buying things from Amazon, probably, and banking online as well too. Did you build your cell phone from scratch, and validate all the systems of your cellular provider as well? If you run Ubuntu..or Debian...or Redhat, how will you be sure that the binaries you're getting from apt-get or RPM are the ones that match the source code you can read with your own eyes? (Keep in mind that last month there was a Slashdot article that pointed out the difficulty of getting the exact same binaries produced from the same source code, based on variances on the machines that do the compiling and the optimization flags...so forget about compiling your own binaries and just comparing the hash/filesize tuple.) For that matter, if you're using Gentoo will you read ALL of the source code all over again every time there's an update? What you say sounds great in theory, but in practice I don't believe you're as self-sufficient as you think you are.
Oh, and I remember doing all of that editing and reading of man files too...but I never would have spotted code that was meant to weaken crypto. Editing a config file or reading a man file does not equal a proper code audit.
What's really scary to me about the proposed scenario is this: not only does it plausibly describe a situation where the common man's privacy and security are jeopardized, in that scenario the truly bad guys...the ones who WOULD really be more self-sufficient...would run their own systems to some degree and be outside the scope of much of the tainted encryption. This is much as it was back when our government forbade export of strong crypto; the bad guys got it anyways, and the good guys were kept from using it in many situations.
So, it appears the article only talks about the time spent by the physician. I'm curious if the costs of the tools/technologies of these procedures have gone up, and how the doctors get paid for those (potentially) increased costs?
Well, that's another part of the problem, I would say. If one cost isn't getting addressed/monitored, and the way to try and offset it is to have another cost kept arbitrarily high in a way that does not reflect reality, then you're going to lose visibility into the real economics of it all and get undesired effects. Add in the fact that a trade association representing the vendors (in this case) is a major driver in the price determination process and the lack of transparency, and you increase the likelihood of undesired effects even further, and practically guarantee that anyone who looks upon the result will question it.
If so, it'd be the first time that anyone on Kickstarter found their life endangered based on being successful. Google "Gerald Bull," for an example of how far it can go.
I thought I'd make his life easier by getting rid of a lot of unneeded files on my system. There's a whole lot of stuff in C:\Windows that I never seem to use...let's start there!
Most power plants built the lake in the first place. And they don't discharge into the lake; they discharge at or downstream of the dam -- so they aren't pulling in their own hot water. Next to none (read: NONE) of the intake water is used in the turbine steam loops -- those are 100% closed loops, if you're losing water you have a problem. (a serious problem for nuke plants.) [note: steam loops use distilled water -- ZERO minerals, RO reduces the mineral/particle volume, but it's not zero.]
That said, there are still numerous plants that use evaporative cooling towers. And they do, indeed, require a significant volume of water that is "consumed" -- it goes up as vapor. While it isn't "drinking water", it's water that's not available to the filter plant that feeds your taps. In a drought, you have a choice... cool the power plant, or have water to drink.
Regardless of who built it, a lake is a closed body of water, period. And yes, they DO discharge into the lake, typically; if you take water out of a lake and release it into a river, you drain the lake. I'm not guessing at this; I work for the very large civil engineering company that is mentioned in the article; not only do we do a huge amount of work in the power gen world (we're building the second-largest power plant in the world in South Africa right now), but 30% of the world's drinking water comes from water purification or desalinization plants that we built. I've been doing NERC CIP compliance work since before the auditing deadlines for the first 18 requirements (NERC CIP was implemented in stages at first), so I've spent about 6 years in the power industry by now, at about two dozen utilities in total.
And you're right, next to no water is used in the steam loops, but some is...as I said. Enough is important that the demin plant is considered a critical asset if the plant itself is considered critical, and there's a large storage tank of demineralized water to give some cushion in case there's a problem with the RO filters. And you are right about the zero minerals, but every plant I've ever seen...CT or ST...used RO filters. They use a lot of them, in series.
But to get back on point...if you take water from a river and put it back in a river...or from a lake to a river downstream...you're still not using up that water. You're just moving it from one point to another. Again, neither is potable water, and it's not causing a net loss.
Evaporative cooling towers...also called passive cooling towers...are extremely rare outside of nuclear installations. They're very expensive to build in comparison. Even among energy engineers, they're something of a curiosity for the fossil generation world. So that won't add up to the 40% cited.
The number seems fishy to me...because every power plant I've ever seen that was cooled with fresh water sits on a lake. The water enters the plant from the lake, cools the steam coming off of the turbine(s), and goes back to the lake. Some of it first goes through an osmosis filter for demineralization; that water becomes the steam that directly turns the turbine. But yeah...it's not like any of the water is destroyed or even vented as steam to the air. And the water they use isn't directly potable; they aren't drawing the water from the water mains. (Water mains don't supply enough water for it to even be feasible.) There is one exception, which is combustion turbine plants. But these are smaller, and use a very small amount of water for cooling in the same way our car radiators do; the consumption from these is almost negligible. (Come to think of it, has anyone checked out how much fresh drinking water gets used by all of our cars, in our radiators?)
Now, what they do say about how in heat waves some plants have to shut down or reduce their output because the water gets too warm...that fits. I've been on a lake attached to a fairly standard-sized coal-powered plant, and you could definitely feel the difference between where the intake of the plant was and where the output back into the lake was. It was that big of a difference; these plants put a LOT of heat into the water.
Foreign Policy had a fascinating article last month on how metadata analysis is used in terms of relationships between suspected "evil" people and known "evil" people. (The word "evil" in quotes to signify that for purposes of this topic, the definition of "evil" is unimportant.) The article talks about the challenges of fewer vs. more degrees of separation in link analysis; the new revelation that they go to 3 degrees throws it into even more perspective.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/06/17/evil_in_a_haystack_nsa_metadata
Bruce Schneier saw this coming. And he's got a point...on one hand, we argue against the policies of countries like Egypt, Syria, Bahrain, China when it comes to free, uncensored and unmonitored use of the Internet (or lack thereof in the aforementioned countries). And then, oh...look what we're doing with all those network links that pass through our own country. You can argue that the motives are different, the means are more surgical (but only to a point since 1, they are classified programs and 2, intelligence agencies lie their assess off, by necessity, to foreign powers) but the argument still won't carry much weight.
Ad networks/common popular websites have been compromised repeatedly in the past and will be compromised repeatedly in the future. All sites could be considered "dirty sites".
This is totally true, but not even the whole story; a site need not be compromised to serve up malware. For a while, Foreign Policy's website was serving up malware once in a while through one of the advertising networks. Google released a comprehensive study of drive-by malware attacks that explicitly stated that the nature of content a person looked at was no longer germane to their safety from such attacks.
> .these guys used USB drives to move data between countries
Look, if anyone with any sense can bypass the snooping, they must know that. That only leaves *us* that they are snooping on.
I notice how you conveniently change what I said by omitting the second half of the sentence: "...and even that wasn't good enough to protect them." So no, that does not leave *us* that they are snooping on. And also, your premise assumes that no new targets come up, that there's no reason to snoop on other nations, and that no nations ever change sides from friendly to hostile (like happened with Venezuela, Belarus and the Ukraine and is happening with Argentina, for example).
Compare the value of a terrorist organization or hostile nation state to an average American, and you'll see that there's absolutely no comparison in terms of targeting. Even with their massive budget, the NSA still has finite resources and capability. They can't spy on everyone at once, even when they're grabbing all the data, any more than a librarian at the Library of Congress can read every book in the building.
Okay, there are options besides "consumer" and "enterprise." There are network devices for small offices and medium businesses. You don't need a Cisco 6900-series chassis to be more reliable than a dogshit consumer router. Cisco is a bit more filled-out in this range (I run some of this class of gear at home myself, and am happy). I have a Gig-E backbone and use a business-class WAP for wireless. It's not a wifi router mind you...no NAT, no switchports, no WPS. And I like it that way, because it allows me to have a flat network at home, gets rid of WPS and its security vulnerabilities, and it just plain works. My firewall is a Cisco ASA 5505 with a VPN license, and that, too, just plain works great.
I'm deliberately omitting hardware specifications and model numbers for the most part, for a good reason. What I have is for myself, and my requirements. What the OP needs is for them to decide. And that's where he/she should start...with requirements. I wanted Gig at the wire level, and 802.11n for wireless with fairly tight security. I wanted a solid VPN at my edge that would be able to leverage the VPN client on my work computer. I wanted a flat network for primary, trusted systems so that my Apple TV could see iTunes on my desktop, and printing from the MacBook would be simple. And my home network design reflects all of this. The OP might have different needs...so they need to figure out what those needs are, and then find the devices that fit them.
So, the majority of the population now realizes that their activity is in some way monitored, and they wish to evade that monitoring. They need to consider this: they are amateurs playing for nickel stakes in this game. The NSA doesn't care about them, and the people aren't used to playing this game either, for their part. This game exists, at the moment, primarily between the most sophisticated intelligence apparatus in human history and a very small population that is doing everything they can possibly do to hide. We think that using airgapping a network and using USB drives simply to move data across the room is a powerful security measure...these guys used USB drives to move data between countries, and even that wasn't good enough to protect them. The average citizen merely worries about some amorphous knowledge of their habits...the real target population faces death, or perhaps even worse internment in a black site somewhere for years first. And that population has been working on hiding for quite some time now; this is not a new game just because the rest of us know it's being played now.
So...with that context, why would anyone think that simply using a different search engine fucking matters?
Or they're running a very quirky honeypot...
My Documents folder is filled with Badgers. Lots of Badgers. ;)
"Document Badger don't care. He don't give a shit!"
The resolution to this is; hack everyone. If they were a fed, you'll be able to figure that out by the contents of their e-mail account and their My Documents folder.
If they even *have* a My Documents folder on a laptop at Defcon, you're most of the way to proving they're a fed...