I can see where these would be a valuable option for the "unbanked." I agree that obtaining a free checking account is simply not possible for many people; if they've bounced checks in the past, many banks will refuse to open a checking account for you, no matter the cost. However, this should never be mandatory, or even a default. Instead, many employers are making it the default choice (and in many cases the ONLY choice.) The default should, of course, be Direct Deposit, which has the lowest total cost and hassle for everybody. These payroll cards foist all the payroll costs on the employee.
For those that don't have a poor ChexSystems record, locating a bank that will provide free checking if you have Direct Deposit is not difficult.
Alternatively, physical checks should be able to be cashed, free of charge, at the bank of issue, and should only be issued from a bank with reasonable local branches.
McDonald's is NOT being sued. McDonalds has nothing to do with employee payroll processing in individual restaurants. The franchisee pulling this stunt is the business getting sued.
How can adopting a particular curriculum lock in students for "generations"? School districts / states can, and do, make curriculum changes All. The. Time.
Gee, the FBI thinks it's valuable to have an informant inside an organization that actively solicits classified intelligence and data of all kinds and seeks to distribute it? I'd be shocked (and disappointed) if the FBI (or other agency) didn't have an informant, or try to obtain one.
This is kind of what we pay an intelligence apparatus to do.
I put this in the same category as the shocking revelations that we try and hack Chinese computer systems.
If they ever got the distance extended, I could see this being handy for long-haul links (although is it really better than a CWDM or DWDM?) But over intra-rack links, it'd have to have a pretty small premium over current technologies to be able to justify using it over just laying another strand of fiber.
In all but HPC applications bandwidth is rarely an issue anyway. You might occasionally use those for trunk lines, but again, why not just lay another strand?
I want a "real" copy in my own e-mail account, and I expect most other people do too. I don't want to have to go through all the hassle to obtain and save my own copy. What happens if your Amazon account is suspended? You'd never see those receipts again if you hadn't already saved a copy.
So, what exactly is Amazon supposed to do? Most people LIKE getting their transaction details sent to them; it's called a "receipt", and it serves as proof you bought whatever it is you think you bought, should this ever be up for dispute. Most people expect to receive a receipt for every electronic transaction, even if it isn't strictly necessary.
And the same thing could be said about any commercial e-mail service... nothing stops Mom-n-Pop ISP from mining your e-mail for data (or selling mining access to somebody who can.)
In any case, Amazon doesn't seem to be too bothered by the prospect...
If you don't trust GMail e-mail scanning, get your address elsewhere.
On a tour of the Joint Intelligence facilities in the Pentagon many (15) years ago, we got to walk past the room with the actual hotline (it's not in the White House, or even some buried secret Pentagon sub-basement.) It's a closet with a door with a bored-looking officer in there, along with a teletype. It has a phone, but it was connected to the DoD phone system, not Russia.
You are absolutely correct that this won't make child porn disappear. But from Google's standpoint, it will help keep their top-notch search engine (and other search engines) from being used to find it. In addition, it's more than making it "not searchable"; RTFA. This will also have "hooks" into law enforcement and ISPs.
This is certainly, unarguably, a useful tool that can be used in order to accomplish a worthy societal goal; I don't think our criteria for such things should be: "Well, it could be used for bad things, so we should stick our heads in the sand instead." No cars because they might be driven by bank robbers! No knives because they might be used to cut people instead of carrots! etc.
In any case, content recognition algorithms already exist and are already used for nefarious purposes. Why not use those tools towards a worthy end?
" just three companies — Google, Apple, and Facebook — have generated most of the new ideas and most of the business momentum in the world of computing."
Those three companies are responsible for most of the ideas and business momentum in CONSUMER computing. Enterprise IT has been innovating at a brisk clip without contributions from those three companies, thank you very much.
Apple cares far more (as they should) for the people that buy their stuff new (and produce revenue for Apple) than they care for the economic well-being of secondary-market resellers. Which makes total business sense.
Since buyers can purchase from internet-based businesses with no fear via the mighty eBay/PayPal or Credit Card chargeback, the only resellers that will be hurt will be those that were moving stolen equipment and will have their product source dry up. (Or sketchy cash-only sellers on Craigslist... lets just say they weren't that trustworthy of a source to begin with.)
There are already ships far larger than Panamax in operation and docking at ports, they just have to take a different route if they want to get from the Pacific to the Atlantic (or vice-versa.)
If the canal wasn't there, the water would simply flow into the ocean naturally. Panama doesn't exactly need that water for irrigation (it's rains enough already), and bulk water transport is impractical, the only other use vs. letting it flow naturally would be a hydroelectric dam. But the canal is far more valuable to Panama than using that same water to generate electricity.
Saying the water is "wasted" is like saying that we should suck all the water out of the Mississippi and send it to dry parts of the US instead of letting it flow into the Gulf. (As a side-note, this is essentially what we do with the Colorado; while it's slightly better now, 20 or so years ago the mighty Colorado withered down to a muddy drainage ditch by the time us and Mexico were done with it.)
Vasectomy reversal is difficult, expensive, and only works about half the time. I think it's pretty clear that the summary was referring to something with reversibility as a design point, not a workaround...
Nearly any accident in a motorcycle involves you being thrown from it. A convertible is a car; the only accident where this would be an issue is a rollover, and due to their lower center of gravity, this is less likely than in a regular car. Convertibles also have roll bars and stiffer A-pillars to provide some protection.
The NSA is a DoD agency; ergo any programs it undertakes are "defense" programs, and any classified information it produces is "national defense information".
In this case, legality of the program (for now) is whatever the DoJ/DoD say it is. The FISA court, and the Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committees, which ostensibly exist to provide checks on this kind of behavior, have all signed off on this program.
That doesn't mean it's right, or is, in fact, constitutional, just that at the current time, it's certainly going to be treated as if it is legal.
So as you pretty much concede, if at least part of Congress knew about, and the NSA Inspector General, other major parts of the government, and apparently the FISA court, it was apparently both legal and constitutional as things stand. That would seem to imply that they were doing things in a responsible manner, wouldn't it?
Given how little regard the DoJ, Congress, the NSA, and the FISA court have shown for our civil liberties, I would say it implies no such thing. It only implies that if the program is ever ruled unconstitutional, which I doubt, nobody will go to prison (or even get fired) over it. Remember, this is the same government that decided torture was A-OK, and that the indefinite detention of people we don't like without charge or trial is a good idea, as long as we don't detain them here.
What difference does it make going to the Guardian? The Guardian is ideologically unfriendly to the United States. It can be expected to show little restraint in publishing material that is damaging but sheds little light. I think the more important question is, why didn't he do to one of the major American papers like the New York times? They have been part of other major leaks. It would seem his choice of publishers provides insight into his motives.
Again, what does it matter what country the paper was based in? (or it's ideological leanings?) If, as you say, the NYT would have published the material without hesitation, why does it make any difference who did the publishing? The end result is the documents are public, full-stop. Or, perhaps, he didn't have any confidence in the "the Iraq war is a good idea" NYT or "dependent on insiders for every story" WashPo to not crush the story. And the recent revelations on the record pulls from the AP make a foreign (but still respectable) newspaper a pretty decent choice.
You're joking, right? Shame him? They will praise him to the heavens. After all, they wouldn't want to discourage any similarly "civic minded" people from fleeing into the arms of Chinese intelligence while carrying laptops full of Top Secret data now, would they?
The PRC praising him to the heavens would shame him. The "average American", who is naturally suspicious of the Chinese are instantly going to doubt every word somebody the Chinese are promoting.
As a side-note, here's the tactic I suspect they'll use to publicly disgrace him and distract the public from the documents: They'll argue that he was not, in fact, motivated out of a noble desire to advance our civil liberties, but rather tried, and failed, to sell secrets to the PRC. (No sense in claiming the PRC actually bought them... that'd pointlessly shame them for something they didn't actually do. (for once.)) They'll claim he has a lot more secrets in his possession than the ones he's revealed, and that those other secrets contained stuff that should have stayed secret. (Of course you can't know what those are, because it's too dangerous to tell you...)
This will be effective, because they don't actually have to reveal their evidence (or lack thereof) for such a tale during trial. His confession is already more than enough to convict him under the Espionage Act.
(All this said, the PRC was an odd choice... I'm not sure he had any good choices, as the program he revealed would have been legal in most of the countries he otherwise could have fled to, but he's going to be called on to elaborate a little further beyond waxing poetic about the peace-and-freedom loving people of Hong Kong. Personally, I would have picked Sweden or Finland; they're neither an enemies of the US nor members of NATO or reliant on the US for anything in particular. They are, however, harder to hide in.)
First, the US govt. almost certainly knew it was him already. He's an employee with access to all those documents that suddenly abandoned his job. It would have taken a couple hours, tops, to call Homeland Security and ask for a quick search of airplane passenger manifests. Given that all citizens with security clearance are supposed to clear all international travel in advance, an unannounced trip to the PRC is going to be kind of a gigantic red flag. Even the most addle-brained FBI Counter-Intelligence agent could have figured out it was him.
In any case, please note that he's not making it about him at all. He's not just another citizen complaining. He's a whistleblower, and with the cat out of the bag, there's little point in making him simply disappear.
1) The Inspector General would have done nothing. This was not a tiny program by some rogue field office. This was a widespread program that was approved by the (toothless) Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court. It had the backing of pretty much the entire DoD, and I'm sure all the appropriate BS memos were on file at the DoJ.
2) Congress knew about it already, and did nothing.
3) Why does it matter which country the media organization was based in? Why was calling up the Guardian and having them publish it somehow different than the New York Times doing so?
4) If he's a spy, he's really shitty at it. He's a whistleblower in every sense of the word.
5) He didn't have a huge number of choices in places to flee to. Most of the countries that would ordinarily protect someone making such a disclosure are US allies with bigger diplomatic fish to fry than protecting him, making an asylum application problematic. (Of note is that the program he disclosed would not have been illegal in most "free" countries.) He could have fled to some 3rd-world $hithole, but in those countries it'd be easier to simply snatch him off the street. Hong Kong is not the worst choice out of a whole pile of bad options.
That said, if the PRC government gets a hold of him, they will indeed pump him for all he's worth and then publicly shame him as a defector. Here's to hoping going public before that happens insulates him somewhat from that.
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I can see where these would be a valuable option for the "unbanked." I agree that obtaining a free checking account is simply not possible for many people; if they've bounced checks in the past, many banks will refuse to open a checking account for you, no matter the cost. However, this should never be mandatory, or even a default. Instead, many employers are making it the default choice (and in many cases the ONLY choice.) The default should, of course, be Direct Deposit, which has the lowest total cost and hassle for everybody. These payroll cards foist all the payroll costs on the employee.
For those that don't have a poor ChexSystems record, locating a bank that will provide free checking if you have Direct Deposit is not difficult.
Alternatively, physical checks should be able to be cashed, free of charge, at the bank of issue, and should only be issued from a bank with reasonable local branches.
McDonald's is NOT being sued. McDonalds has nothing to do with employee payroll processing in individual restaurants. The franchisee pulling this stunt is the business getting sued.
How can adopting a particular curriculum lock in students for "generations"? School districts / states can, and do, make curriculum changes All. The. Time.
Gee, the FBI thinks it's valuable to have an informant inside an organization that actively solicits classified intelligence and data of all kinds and seeks to distribute it? I'd be shocked (and disappointed) if the FBI (or other agency) didn't have an informant, or try to obtain one.
This is kind of what we pay an intelligence apparatus to do.
I put this in the same category as the shocking revelations that we try and hack Chinese computer systems.
If they ever got the distance extended, I could see this being handy for long-haul links (although is it really better than a CWDM or DWDM?) But over intra-rack links, it'd have to have a pretty small premium over current technologies to be able to justify using it over just laying another strand of fiber.
In all but HPC applications bandwidth is rarely an issue anyway. You might occasionally use those for trunk lines, but again, why not just lay another strand?
I want a "real" copy in my own e-mail account, and I expect most other people do too. I don't want to have to go through all the hassle to obtain and save my own copy. What happens if your Amazon account is suspended? You'd never see those receipts again if you hadn't already saved a copy.
So, what exactly is Amazon supposed to do? Most people LIKE getting their transaction details sent to them; it's called a "receipt", and it serves as proof you bought whatever it is you think you bought, should this ever be up for dispute. Most people expect to receive a receipt for every electronic transaction, even if it isn't strictly necessary.
And the same thing could be said about any commercial e-mail service... nothing stops Mom-n-Pop ISP from mining your e-mail for data (or selling mining access to somebody who can.)
In any case, Amazon doesn't seem to be too bothered by the prospect...
If you don't trust GMail e-mail scanning, get your address elsewhere.
Those clowns at InPhase ("Holographic Discs") were like the Duke Nukem Forever of storage; well over a decade, and no shipping product.
For now, I put this in the same pile as the Windows Database File System and Laptop Fuel Cells.
On a tour of the Joint Intelligence facilities in the Pentagon many (15) years ago, we got to walk past the room with the actual hotline (it's not in the White House, or even some buried secret Pentagon sub-basement.) It's a closet with a door with a bored-looking officer in there, along with a teletype. It has a phone, but it was connected to the DoD phone system, not Russia.
You are absolutely correct that this won't make child porn disappear. But from Google's standpoint, it will help keep their top-notch search engine (and other search engines) from being used to find it. In addition, it's more than making it "not searchable"; RTFA. This will also have "hooks" into law enforcement and ISPs.
This is certainly, unarguably, a useful tool that can be used in order to accomplish a worthy societal goal; I don't think our criteria for such things should be: "Well, it could be used for bad things, so we should stick our heads in the sand instead." No cars because they might be driven by bank robbers! No knives because they might be used to cut people instead of carrots! etc.
In any case, content recognition algorithms already exist and are already used for nefarious purposes. Why not use those tools towards a worthy end?
" just three companies — Google, Apple, and Facebook — have generated most of the new ideas and most of the business momentum in the world of computing."
Those three companies are responsible for most of the ideas and business momentum in CONSUMER computing. Enterprise IT has been innovating at a brisk clip without contributions from those three companies, thank you very much.
Apple cares far more (as they should) for the people that buy their stuff new (and produce revenue for Apple) than they care for the economic well-being of secondary-market resellers. Which makes total business sense.
Since buyers can purchase from internet-based businesses with no fear via the mighty eBay/PayPal or Credit Card chargeback, the only resellers that will be hurt will be those that were moving stolen equipment and will have their product source dry up. (Or sketchy cash-only sellers on Craigslist... lets just say they weren't that trustworthy of a source to begin with.)
There are already ships far larger than Panamax in operation and docking at ports, they just have to take a different route if they want to get from the Pacific to the Atlantic (or vice-versa.)
If the canal wasn't there, the water would simply flow into the ocean naturally. Panama doesn't exactly need that water for irrigation (it's rains enough already), and bulk water transport is impractical, the only other use vs. letting it flow naturally would be a hydroelectric dam. But the canal is far more valuable to Panama than using that same water to generate electricity.
Saying the water is "wasted" is like saying that we should suck all the water out of the Mississippi and send it to dry parts of the US instead of letting it flow into the Gulf. (As a side-note, this is essentially what we do with the Colorado; while it's slightly better now, 20 or so years ago the mighty Colorado withered down to a muddy drainage ditch by the time us and Mexico were done with it.)
This is what I've been looking for! I was trying Feedly, but their interface isn't nearly as responsive or well-organized.
Vasectomy reversal is difficult, expensive, and only works about half the time. I think it's pretty clear that the summary was referring to something with reversibility as a design point, not a workaround...
Nearly any accident in a motorcycle involves you being thrown from it. A convertible is a car; the only accident where this would be an issue is a rollover, and due to their lower center of gravity, this is less likely than in a regular car. Convertibles also have roll bars and stiffer A-pillars to provide some protection.
Why did you take this job if you can't answer this question yourself? Sounds to me like you oversold your skills.
The NSA is a DoD agency; ergo any programs it undertakes are "defense" programs, and any classified information it produces is "national defense information".
In this case, legality of the program (for now) is whatever the DoJ/DoD say it is. The FISA court, and the Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committees, which ostensibly exist to provide checks on this kind of behavior, have all signed off on this program.
That doesn't mean it's right, or is, in fact, constitutional, just that at the current time, it's certainly going to be treated as if it is legal.
So as you pretty much concede, if at least part of Congress knew about, and the NSA Inspector General, other major parts of the government, and apparently the FISA court, it was apparently both legal and constitutional as things stand. That would seem to imply that they were doing things in a responsible manner, wouldn't it?
Given how little regard the DoJ, Congress, the NSA, and the FISA court have shown for our civil liberties, I would say it implies no such thing. It only implies that if the program is ever ruled unconstitutional, which I doubt, nobody will go to prison (or even get fired) over it. Remember, this is the same government that decided torture was A-OK, and that the indefinite detention of people we don't like without charge or trial is a good idea, as long as we don't detain them here.
What difference does it make going to the Guardian? The Guardian is ideologically unfriendly to the United States. It can be expected to show little restraint in publishing material that is damaging but sheds little light. I think the more important question is, why didn't he do to one of the major American papers like the New York times? They have been part of other major leaks. It would seem his choice of publishers provides insight into his motives.
Again, what does it matter what country the paper was based in? (or it's ideological leanings?) If, as you say, the NYT would have published the material without hesitation, why does it make any difference who did the publishing? The end result is the documents are public, full-stop. Or, perhaps, he didn't have any confidence in the "the Iraq war is a good idea" NYT or "dependent on insiders for every story" WashPo to not crush the story. And the recent revelations on the record pulls from the AP make a foreign (but still respectable) newspaper a pretty decent choice.
You're joking, right? Shame him? They will praise him to the heavens. After all, they wouldn't want to discourage any similarly "civic minded" people from fleeing into the arms of Chinese intelligence while carrying laptops full of Top Secret data now, would they?
The PRC praising him to the heavens would shame him. The "average American", who is naturally suspicious of the Chinese are instantly going to doubt every word somebody the Chinese are promoting.
As a side-note, here's the tactic I suspect they'll use to publicly disgrace him and distract the public from the documents: They'll argue that he was not, in fact, motivated out of a noble desire to advance our civil liberties, but rather tried, and failed, to sell secrets to the PRC. (No sense in claiming the PRC actually bought them... that'd pointlessly shame them for something they didn't actually do. (for once.)) They'll claim he has a lot more secrets in his possession than the ones he's revealed, and that those other secrets contained stuff that should have stayed secret. (Of course you can't know what those are, because it's too dangerous to tell you...)
This will be effective, because they don't actually have to reveal their evidence (or lack thereof) for such a tale during trial. His confession is already more than enough to convict him under the Espionage Act.
(All this said, the PRC was an odd choice... I'm not sure he had any good choices, as the program he revealed would have been legal in most of the countries he otherwise could have fled to, but he's going to be called on to elaborate a little further beyond waxing poetic about the peace-and-freedom loving people of Hong Kong. Personally, I would have picked Sweden or Finland; they're neither an enemies of the US nor members of NATO or reliant on the US for anything in particular. They are, however, harder to hide in.)
First, the US govt. almost certainly knew it was him already. He's an employee with access to all those documents that suddenly abandoned his job. It would have taken a couple hours, tops, to call Homeland Security and ask for a quick search of airplane passenger manifests. Given that all citizens with security clearance are supposed to clear all international travel in advance, an unannounced trip to the PRC is going to be kind of a gigantic red flag. Even the most addle-brained FBI Counter-Intelligence agent could have figured out it was him.
In any case, please note that he's not making it about him at all. He's not just another citizen complaining. He's a whistleblower, and with the cat out of the bag, there's little point in making him simply disappear.
1) The Inspector General would have done nothing. This was not a tiny program by some rogue field office. This was a widespread program that was approved by the (toothless) Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court. It had the backing of pretty much the entire DoD, and I'm sure all the appropriate BS memos were on file at the DoJ.
2) Congress knew about it already, and did nothing.
3) Why does it matter which country the media organization was based in? Why was calling up the Guardian and having them publish it somehow different than the New York Times doing so?
4) If he's a spy, he's really shitty at it. He's a whistleblower in every sense of the word.
5) He didn't have a huge number of choices in places to flee to. Most of the countries that would ordinarily protect someone making such a disclosure are US allies with bigger diplomatic fish to fry than protecting him, making an asylum application problematic. (Of note is that the program he disclosed would not have been illegal in most "free" countries.) He could have fled to some 3rd-world $hithole, but in those countries it'd be easier to simply snatch him off the street. Hong Kong is not the worst choice out of a whole pile of bad options.
That said, if the PRC government gets a hold of him, they will indeed pump him for all he's worth and then publicly shame him as a defector. Here's to hoping going public before that happens insulates him somewhat from that.