What he said in his books was that he was essentially since late childhood, but he was pretty scared of admitting it in public. Atheists have made amazing progress in social acceptability since 1980, and a lot of people who hate on "new atheists" don't understand that people feared for their lives and careers, and couldn't talk in public at all.
I am a 38 year old christian that was an atheist till about 10 years ago. I would just like to emphasize the above comments. Ironically, popular tolerance of things like non-white-male PoTUS, masturbation, homosexuality, cannabis, and atheism these days (versus the 70s and 80s of my childhood) factor greatly into my worship of God.
Eye-tracking is a big honking window into the subject's subconscious mind. I will be extremely reticent about releasing that data into an information system.
It's creepy enough seeing the amount Google knows about me already just from searches and cookies. I sure as hell don't want advertisers to get fine-grained feedback about which ads attract my attention...
And the NSA wonders why I wear sunglasses indoors at night while using my computer these days...:)
If anyone is interested in the common carrier argument, I urge them to read the following as it relates to being able to treat your residential ISP as a 'common carrier' (so that for instance one could host their own server running an open source or commercial solution that provides an alternate to facebook messaging).
the point is that your choice of wording makes it sound like you prefer the outcome of Snowden being punished for violations of the law. That and you are just plain wrong (at least in my jurisdiction) about "beating the shit out of someone trying to rape someone". As long as there is a "someone trying to rape someone" in your vicinity, it is 100% legal to beat the shit out of that someone. It is not against the law. There are times when violence, and even deadly force are 100% legal to use.
Facebook is in the business of selling your information. If you don't like that, you should use a different communication mechanism.
The practical problem with that is that the 'field of dreams' of the internet, which was supposed to foster a competitive environment for the most valuable and innovative services, has been militarized by the NSA. When the NSA has Google/gmail and Facebook onboard it's PRISM program, and through years of disinformation, those services have weaseled their way into ubiquity, the opportunity for alternatives to flourish is suppressed. Look at the way ISPs filter smtp or ban servers against residential connections. You say- "just go run your own mail server and use pgp if you want 'real' 'private messages'". I say, I can't do that without paying a 5X premium in price to my ISP for a 'business grade' service that allows me to host my own mail server, cutting out the Facebook and Google middlemen. And when there is a 5X, or even 200% premium in price, the market for commercial developers to provide a solution to the masses is effectively cut off. The NSA very much likes things as they are with all the sheeple forced to funnel their traffic through the swiss cheese of the Google and Facebook corporations. (the NSA infiltrating Google and Facebook is a weak link in security that will never go away. open source and the ability to independently host servers at home is the only way to cut those spooky fucking middle-weasels out of the picture. Let them chew on my gpg encrypted smtp traffic).
ironically moments after that post, I see a user AHuxley reply to an earlier comment on another article. Another great example of 'hidden meaning' versus 'interesting coincidence' versus I'm too lazy and uninterested to see if AHuxley replied seconds after the LSD comment.
In any event, I'd also like to further add to the above sentiment, that I think in some cases the 'hearing voices' may be related to the same effect. I.e. the case of hearing something that sounds like a voice, then your by-evolutinary-advantage paranoid mind doing a pattern match against any theoretical threat. In this case, the threat of some voice saying something menacing. I do have a close relative that did go off the paranoia deep-end, and part of it involved believing they heard nefarious talk about them from the hallway beyond a closed door where they work. That fits my model of a commen scenario- you hear muffled far away voices, and your brain, in its attempt to gleam meaning from insufficient pixel or audio sample resolution, tries to 'guess' the likelyest actual conversation, but guesses wrong. I actually think my history of hallucinogenic drug use has made my mind more skeptical of such guesses. Does that make me a "high functioning schizophrenic"? Dunno... But I think the effect must be common enough. Same thing going on in the childrens "telephone game". (i.e. a ring of players, a message whispered from one ear to the next, by the time it makes it around the circle, it is entirely unrelated to the original actual message due to such misinterpretations of audio input- compounded by feedback loop. And similar feedback loops exist in paranoid thought, that perhaps increase adrenoline/anxiety and make the effect worse (but still for evolutionarily advantageous reason- over all). And worse yet when you have political enemies trying to amplify the feedback).
I know people with this illness, hearing voices seeing "hidden meanings" etc.
Note, hearing voices, and seeing "hidden meanings" are two entirely different things. I experience the latter, not the former. Note also the "hidden meanings" thing is also basically what is going on with a large percentage of religious people. Like really, lots of people. It's also something that was induced by the East German secret police (the Stasi) in order to silence political dissenters. (or tactics similar to that). And then lets not even bring up the fun of how that melts into "targeted advertising". I.e. having your personal thoughts sent by email used to select the most psychologically influencing image to present to your eyes in exchange for a 'free' email service. And note also that I imagine the _effect_ is not so much disease that is on or off in people, but I think an artifact of our pattern-seaking minds. Our brains live and thrive on making connections of signifigance. It has been my experience that drugs such as cannabis and LSD tweak/stimulate this natural phenomena. I.e. making your brain more likely to see meaningful connection ("hidden meaning") in otherwise not obvious seperate events. A good example is what happens if you are camping, and you hear leaves rustling. It is simply a survival trait that your brain has a tendency to over-react ('be paranoid') and err-on-the-side of assuming that noise was a predator about to devour you. The upside of preventing a successful predator attack against yourself is more evolutionarily valuable than the downside of being wrong some percentage of the time. So I see the mental illness as properly diagnosed when this sort of thing falls so far out of whack that people cannot cope and live decent lives. Unfortunately this very natural and common affliction has also been widely used by social predators to politically silence opponents. I urge you not to dismiss any aspect of that. People need to realize that both are important when considering the topic of schizophrenia. And note, I'm no trained psych, and have never been diagnosed with any mental illness such as schizophrenia. But I have done a lot of mind altering drugs, and I'll let others consider what I've just said and decide if it rings true.
If you have a system inside your LAN able to construct whatever network communications it wants to any internal device it might as well be running metasploit at that point and don't think a dinky old consumer grade WiFi router will be protecting you then.
When your sketchy friend/coworker/apartment-maintenance-guy[1] is visiting the home, the computers you are most worried about may not be powered on or present (your primary laptop). The infiltrator running metasploit would then not be able to get very far unless metasploit owned the wifi router (or other device). But one would hope that if many 'dinky old consumer grade wifi routers' were vulnerable to metasploit, we'd be hearing more about it in the news. Presuming the consumer grade routers are at least able to protect themselves against metasploit, then it still matters having an unprotected admin port on your router exposed to the internal network.
[1] about 10 years ago I was able to use motion.sf.net to catch my refrigerator repairman snooping through my bedroom office. Local police told me that since the bedroom door was open, *no law had been violated*!!! Closed but unlocked, and I could have filed trespassing charges. Open an inch, no law broken. Whatever...
I haven't been following it too closely but my understanding was that everything that Snowden was complaining about were data collection activities that the courts had allowed...
Snowden absolutely should be pardoned for leaking information about the NSA's domestic spying activities, and/or covered under whistleblower policies. This was an act of a patriot.
IMHO the whisteblower policies with jurisdiction should allow Snowden to walk free, never charged with a crime. Any existing charges should be withdrawn, and any pardon worded as a "just in case" kind of thing, making clear no implication of an offense the pardoner believes requires being pardoned.
But I don't think he'd get a pass for all the subsequent leaks which were only done to undermine the NSA's foreign spying (that's what they're for!). It's not benefiting US citizens or it's gov't. Now it seems like he's just trying to do as much damage to the US as he can.
The fact that the authorities failed to provide him a path that involved him feeling ordinarily secure as a citizen, as well as feeling his loved ones enjoyed the same protection under law, I see all his delicate subsequent actions as justifiable self-defense. When Keith Alexander has accused you of being as guilty as a hostage taker who murdered 10 of 50 hostages, I don't think that _ethically_ we could fault the man for revealing any level of national security destroying information to enemies of our state that might do us harm. Put a gun to mans head, and he is not ethically responsible for what words come out of his mouth, or what actions his body takes while that gun is against his head.
The moment the US government starts harming families is the moment I declare war and cap some asses.
“The females that we had, were the spouses or sister or cousin of high value detainees, that were being used as - ‘well O.K., we have your sister, we have your wife, you know you need to turn yourself in’. The same thing with the little children. I mean we had like nine year olds in there. I’m like why do I have a nine year old in a prison – that’s crazy - but yeah that’s what was there.”
- Javal Davis, 372nd Military Police Company, Abu Ghraib 2003-2004, “Ghosts of Abu Ghraib – HBO Documentary”
Or a good artist with a decent memory creating a realistic rendition with oil on canvas, pencil on paper, or perhaps even a grid of castles in the sand. I'm beginning to think Snapchat is a Psy-Op by the CIA to convince people like me that the rest of the population really is so stupid they deserve to be treated as pets of the state. It's like that first episode of the first (or fifth?) season of 'The Wire' where they convince the low level criminal that a xerox machine is a lie detector to provoke a confession. Snapchat is the cop's new xerox machine.
Is there a good PC version of any of these? It seems odd that they're phone-only, messaging on the computer is still very much a thing.
People who are advanced enough to use a keyboard interface to a computing device are smart enough to know the entire premise for the product is a fraud.
I agree strongly with your comment in general, but Snowden didn't show "exactly how far it went". He provided some proof of some amount of wrongdoing. But I imagine there is still plenty of wrongdoing that Snowden didn't become aware of, or acquire evidence of. But still, those wrongdoers are probably feeling a lot less secure in their deeds these days. And that is a win too.
"The Media". It is a double edge sword. But never forget that "freedom of the press"'s more literal interpretation equates to "freedom of the media". Unless you give others the freedom to spin things their way, the better angels won't get a voice.
Granted, the last time I checked linux makes the memory space of every process for any uid available to any other process running under the same uid (unless you're using SELinux). It is just that big unixy trust-everything-local attitude.
I am a bit of bearded unix burnout but... For goodness sakes. It has nothing to do with "unixy trust-everything-local attitude". It has everything to do with _the uid security model_. The security model is not "trust everything local", it is "each user(by id) can run a bunch of programs, and those programs are all _by design_ able to communicate (or interfere) with any other program run by the same user". Yes, in practice, we find many unix systems where there is effectively only a single user, and the biggest security threat vector against that user is *not other users on the system* but *programs the user decided to run that were not sufficiently vetted to be free of (remotely) explotable bugs and backdoors*. The method android uses, assigning a unix uid to each program to provide the kind of inter-program sandboxing/isolation (that selinux also enables), is a *complete kludge* in the context of the unix uid security model. In practice, I admit that there is a spirited educational morsel you were trying to get across. But I don't think the way you phrased it will lead to readers of your comment becoming properly educated about what is really going on, and how we got here.
They should say there is no backdoor, not that they did not help making one.
They should say that it is company policy to in all instances, secure the products and services from any possible backdoor. They should say that all of their employees are required to spend 30 minutes each year watching a refresher video on how to most effectively whistleblow should they be asked to do anything unethical or deceptive by any government agency, no matter the legal arguments that government agency uses to defend its 'orders'. Same goes for methods to deal safely with outright criminal elements that attempt the same through common means of coercion/extortion/blackmail/etc.
Don't believe you. It's now proven most American companies can't be trusted.
I for one, either believe them, or think it doesn't matter. It doesn't take infiltrating every member of the company to accomplish what the NSA has. A very very small number of high ranking employees can be compromised, and effectively compromise the main products and services of the corporation. While open source and open development is still vulnerable to this same threat vector, I think its decreased threat surface will make it a formidable contender in the post-snowden tech era.
"You want to call him the most influential person in politics, fine... but tech? I think we can do better."
Are you KIDDING me? He may not personally design the devices and write the code that we are using for the next 10 years, but *you can sure bet* that he seriously impacted those designs and that code by revealing the proof and scope, if not the existence of the insecurities that were rampant in the prior devices and code.
We will be buying fundamentally more secure devices with fundamentally more secure programming in the coming years, due *primarily* to Snowden's revelations. Dinging him for being more like the tech-CEO who merely gets to decide the direction of development instead of writing the actual code seems just plain silly. Compared to the influence all the other tech-CEOs had in 2013 on the future of computing technology, I'd say Snowden wins hands down. No question. It's a different tech _landscape_ today because of him. What other tech person had a greater change on the nature of the technology we will use in the coming decade?
Yes, it is getting ridiculous. All of this info has been suspected, and the paranoids were already taking steps to protect themselves. Most average people don't care and have much bigger issues to deal with that really will affect their lives.
Thing is, "most average people" aren't the ones who shape human society for the next generation. Edward Snowden did that.
It isn't like he invented something cool, advanced society through developing new technologies, or accomplished anything. He went in with an agenda and was able to hack the system from the inside, now he has some power and fame.
I like to also think his Agenda was to "invent" a cool new world, where instead of NSA spook-community running completely rampant and rough-shod toward a dystopian neo-Stasi future, we now get to know and mitigate the threat to the 4th ammendment that they represent. That's is a freaking cool invention if you ask me. I'll take it over the crap that "most average people" like yourself churn out.
agreed. coreboot, flash write protect jumper, secure boot, linux, and a physical RO or WORM media to recover/reload all firmware and bootloader... Ah, I long for the days when I imagined I had computational security...
Slashdot Mirror
What he said in his books was that he was essentially since late childhood, but he was pretty scared of admitting it in public. Atheists have made amazing progress in social acceptability since 1980, and a lot of people who hate on "new atheists" don't understand that people feared for their lives and careers, and couldn't talk in public at all.
I am a 38 year old christian that was an atheist till about 10 years ago. I would just like to emphasize the above comments. Ironically, popular tolerance of things like non-white-male PoTUS, masturbation, homosexuality, cannabis, and atheism these days (versus the 70s and 80s of my childhood) factor greatly into my worship of God.
You could increase polygon tessellation at an area of focus and remove detail from the peripheral. It would be very useful for triple 120Hz 4K 3D. ;)
I've long imagined that was the performance trick God uses on it's VR system.
Eye-tracking is a big honking window into the subject's subconscious mind. I will be extremely reticent about releasing that data into an information system.
It's creepy enough seeing the amount Google knows about me already just from searches and cookies. I sure as hell don't want advertisers to get fine-grained feedback about which ads attract my attention...
And the NSA wonders why I wear sunglasses indoors at night while using my computer these days... :)
If anyone is interested in the common carrier argument, I urge them to read the following as it relates to being able to treat your residential ISP as a 'common carrier' (so that for instance one could host their own server running an open source or commercial solution that provides an alternate to facebook messaging).
http://cloudsession.com/dawg/downloads/misc/kag-draft-2k121024.pdf
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/07/google-we-can-ban-servers-on-fiber-without-violating-net-neutrality/
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/google-fiber-continues-awful-isp-tradition-banning-servers
http://crossies.com/pissed.html
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/10/google-fiber-now-explicitly-permits-home-servers/
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/08/01/198327/googles-call-for-open-internet.html
the point is that your choice of wording makes it sound like you prefer the outcome of Snowden being punished for violations of the law. That and you are just plain wrong (at least in my jurisdiction) about "beating the shit out of someone trying to rape someone". As long as there is a "someone trying to rape someone" in your vicinity, it is 100% legal to beat the shit out of that someone. It is not against the law. There are times when violence, and even deadly force are 100% legal to use.
Facebook is in the business of selling your information. If you don't like that, you should use a different communication mechanism.
The practical problem with that is that the 'field of dreams' of the internet, which was supposed to foster a competitive environment for the most valuable and innovative services, has been militarized by the NSA. When the NSA has Google/gmail and Facebook onboard it's PRISM program, and through years of disinformation, those services have weaseled their way into ubiquity, the opportunity for alternatives to flourish is suppressed. Look at the way ISPs filter smtp or ban servers against residential connections. You say- "just go run your own mail server and use pgp if you want 'real' 'private messages'". I say, I can't do that without paying a 5X premium in price to my ISP for a 'business grade' service that allows me to host my own mail server, cutting out the Facebook and Google middlemen. And when there is a 5X, or even 200% premium in price, the market for commercial developers to provide a solution to the masses is effectively cut off. The NSA very much likes things as they are with all the sheeple forced to funnel their traffic through the swiss cheese of the Google and Facebook corporations. (the NSA infiltrating Google and Facebook is a weak link in security that will never go away. open source and the ability to independently host servers at home is the only way to cut those spooky fucking middle-weasels out of the picture. Let them chew on my gpg encrypted smtp traffic).
ironically moments after that post, I see a user AHuxley reply to an earlier comment on another article. Another great example of 'hidden meaning' versus 'interesting coincidence' versus I'm too lazy and uninterested to see if AHuxley replied seconds after the LSD comment.
In any event, I'd also like to further add to the above sentiment, that I think in some cases the 'hearing voices' may be related to the same effect. I.e. the case of hearing something that sounds like a voice, then your by-evolutinary-advantage paranoid mind doing a pattern match against any theoretical threat. In this case, the threat of some voice saying something menacing. I do have a close relative that did go off the paranoia deep-end, and part of it involved believing they heard nefarious talk about them from the hallway beyond a closed door where they work. That fits my model of a commen scenario- you hear muffled far away voices, and your brain, in its attempt to gleam meaning from insufficient pixel or audio sample resolution, tries to 'guess' the likelyest actual conversation, but guesses wrong. I actually think my history of hallucinogenic drug use has made my mind more skeptical of such guesses. Does that make me a "high functioning schizophrenic"? Dunno... But I think the effect must be common enough. Same thing going on in the childrens "telephone game". (i.e. a ring of players, a message whispered from one ear to the next, by the time it makes it around the circle, it is entirely unrelated to the original actual message due to such misinterpretations of audio input- compounded by feedback loop. And similar feedback loops exist in paranoid thought, that perhaps increase adrenoline/anxiety and make the effect worse (but still for evolutionarily advantageous reason- over all). And worse yet when you have political enemies trying to amplify the feedback).
I know people with this illness, hearing voices seeing "hidden meanings" etc.
Note, hearing voices, and seeing "hidden meanings" are two entirely different things. I experience the latter, not the former. Note also the "hidden meanings" thing is also basically what is going on with a large percentage of religious people. Like really, lots of people. It's also something that was induced by the East German secret police (the Stasi) in order to silence political dissenters. (or tactics similar to that). And then lets not even bring up the fun of how that melts into "targeted advertising". I.e. having your personal thoughts sent by email used to select the most psychologically influencing image to present to your eyes in exchange for a 'free' email service. And note also that I imagine the _effect_ is not so much disease that is on or off in people, but I think an artifact of our pattern-seaking minds. Our brains live and thrive on making connections of signifigance. It has been my experience that drugs such as cannabis and LSD tweak/stimulate this natural phenomena. I.e. making your brain more likely to see meaningful connection ("hidden meaning") in otherwise not obvious seperate events. A good example is what happens if you are camping, and you hear leaves rustling. It is simply a survival trait that your brain has a tendency to over-react ('be paranoid') and err-on-the-side of assuming that noise was a predator about to devour you. The upside of preventing a successful predator attack against yourself is more evolutionarily valuable than the downside of being wrong some percentage of the time. So I see the mental illness as properly diagnosed when this sort of thing falls so far out of whack that people cannot cope and live decent lives. Unfortunately this very natural and common affliction has also been widely used by social predators to politically silence opponents. I urge you not to dismiss any aspect of that. People need to realize that both are important when considering the topic of schizophrenia. And note, I'm no trained psych, and have never been diagnosed with any mental illness such as schizophrenia. But I have done a lot of mind altering drugs, and I'll let others consider what I've just said and decide if it rings true.
If you have a system inside your LAN able to construct whatever network communications it wants to any internal device it might as well be running metasploit at that point and don't think a dinky old consumer grade WiFi router will be protecting you then.
When your sketchy friend/coworker/apartment-maintenance-guy[1] is visiting the home, the computers you are most worried about may not be powered on or present (your primary laptop). The infiltrator running metasploit would then not be able to get very far unless metasploit owned the wifi router (or other device). But one would hope that if many 'dinky old consumer grade wifi routers' were vulnerable to metasploit, we'd be hearing more about it in the news. Presuming the consumer grade routers are at least able to protect themselves against metasploit, then it still matters having an unprotected admin port on your router exposed to the internal network.
[1] about 10 years ago I was able to use motion.sf.net to catch my refrigerator repairman snooping through my bedroom office. Local police told me that since the bedroom door was open, *no law had been violated*!!! Closed but unlocked, and I could have filed trespassing charges. Open an inch, no law broken. Whatever...
I haven't been following it too closely but my understanding was that everything that Snowden was complaining about were data collection activities that the courts had allowed...
The courts used to allow slavery.
Snowden absolutely should be pardoned for leaking information about the NSA's domestic spying activities, and/or covered under whistleblower policies. This was an act of a patriot.
IMHO the whisteblower policies with jurisdiction should allow Snowden to walk free, never charged with a crime. Any existing charges should be withdrawn, and any pardon worded as a "just in case" kind of thing, making clear no implication of an offense the pardoner believes requires being pardoned.
But I don't think he'd get a pass for all the subsequent leaks which were only done to undermine the NSA's foreign spying (that's what they're for!). It's not benefiting US citizens or it's gov't. Now it seems like he's just trying to do as much damage to the US as he can.
The fact that the authorities failed to provide him a path that involved him feeling ordinarily secure as a citizen, as well as feeling his loved ones enjoyed the same protection under law, I see all his delicate subsequent actions as justifiable self-defense. When Keith Alexander has accused you of being as guilty as a hostage taker who murdered 10 of 50 hostages, I don't think that _ethically_ we could fault the man for revealing any level of national security destroying information to enemies of our state that might do us harm. Put a gun to mans head, and he is not ethically responsible for what words come out of his mouth, or what actions his body takes while that gun is against his head.
If the NSA pays folks to play video games, they will most certainly also pay folks to troll Slashdot.
You don't say? :)
The moment the US government starts harming families is the moment I declare war and cap some asses.
“The females that we had, were the spouses or sister or cousin of high value detainees, that were being used as - ‘well O.K., we have your sister, we have your wife, you know you need to turn yourself in’. The same thing with the little children. I mean we had like nine year olds in there. I’m like why do I have a nine year old in a prison – that’s crazy - but yeah that’s what was there.”
- Javal Davis,
372nd Military Police Company,
Abu Ghraib 2003-2004,
“Ghosts of Abu Ghraib – HBO Documentary”
Or a good artist with a decent memory creating a realistic rendition with oil on canvas, pencil on paper, or perhaps even a grid of castles in the sand. I'm beginning to think Snapchat is a Psy-Op by the CIA to convince people like me that the rest of the population really is so stupid they deserve to be treated as pets of the state. It's like that first episode of the first (or fifth?) season of 'The Wire' where they convince the low level criminal that a xerox machine is a lie detector to provoke a confession. Snapchat is the cop's new xerox machine.
Is there a good PC version of any of these? It seems odd that they're phone-only, messaging on the computer is still very much a thing.
People who are advanced enough to use a keyboard interface to a computing device are smart enough to know the entire premise for the product is a fraud.
I agree strongly with your comment in general, but Snowden didn't show "exactly how far it went". He provided some proof of some amount of wrongdoing. But I imagine there is still plenty of wrongdoing that Snowden didn't become aware of, or acquire evidence of. But still, those wrongdoers are probably feeling a lot less secure in their deeds these days. And that is a win too.
"The Media". It is a double edge sword. But never forget that "freedom of the press"'s more literal interpretation equates to "freedom of the media". Unless you give others the freedom to spin things their way, the better angels won't get a voice.
Granted, the last time I checked linux makes the memory space of every process for any uid available to any other process running under the same uid (unless you're using SELinux). It is just that big unixy trust-everything-local attitude.
I am a bit of bearded unix burnout but... For goodness sakes. It has nothing to do with "unixy trust-everything-local attitude". It has everything to do with _the uid security model_. The security model is not "trust everything local", it is "each user(by id) can run a bunch of programs, and those programs are all _by design_ able to communicate (or interfere) with any other program run by the same user". Yes, in practice, we find many unix systems where there is effectively only a single user, and the biggest security threat vector against that user is *not other users on the system* but *programs the user decided to run that were not sufficiently vetted to be free of (remotely) explotable bugs and backdoors*. The method android uses, assigning a unix uid to each program to provide the kind of inter-program sandboxing/isolation (that selinux also enables), is a *complete kludge* in the context of the unix uid security model. In practice, I admit that there is a spirited educational morsel you were trying to get across. But I don't think the way you phrased it will lead to readers of your comment becoming properly educated about what is really going on, and how we got here.
They should say there is no backdoor, not that they did not help making one.
They should say that it is company policy to in all instances, secure the products and services from any possible backdoor. They should say that all of their employees are required to spend 30 minutes each year watching a refresher video on how to most effectively whistleblow should they be asked to do anything unethical or deceptive by any government agency, no matter the legal arguments that government agency uses to defend its 'orders'. Same goes for methods to deal safely with outright criminal elements that attempt the same through common means of coercion/extortion/blackmail/etc.
Don't believe you.
It's now proven most American companies can't be trusted.
I for one, either believe them, or think it doesn't matter. It doesn't take infiltrating every member of the company to accomplish what the NSA has. A very very small number of high ranking employees can be compromised, and effectively compromise the main products and services of the corporation. While open source and open development is still vulnerable to this same threat vector, I think its decreased threat surface will make it a formidable contender in the post-snowden tech era.
I know I shouldn't feed trolls, but...
"You want to call him the most influential person in politics, fine... but tech? I think we can do better."
Are you KIDDING me? He may not personally design the devices and write the code that we are using for the next 10 years, but *you can sure bet* that he seriously impacted those designs and that code by revealing the proof and scope, if not the existence of the insecurities that were rampant in the prior devices and code.
We will be buying fundamentally more secure devices with fundamentally more secure programming in the coming years, due *primarily* to Snowden's revelations. Dinging him for being more like the tech-CEO who merely gets to decide the direction of development instead of writing the actual code seems just plain silly. Compared to the influence all the other tech-CEOs had in 2013 on the future of computing technology, I'd say Snowden wins hands down. No question. It's a different tech _landscape_ today because of him. What other tech person had a greater change on the nature of the technology we will use in the coming decade?
mod parent up
...that the federal government has. And it's not the muslim jihadists they're worried about. It's us.
Indeed, and since it seems so apropos to link to and quote slashdot today-
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4606965&cid=45806859
"
The insecurity is on the side of the NSA.
They wouldn't go through such hoops if we didn't have the most powerful freedom tool ever, namely the Internet.
Use it properly and they shall vanish.
"
Yes, it is getting ridiculous. All of this info has been suspected, and the paranoids were already taking steps to protect themselves. Most average people don't care and have much bigger issues to deal with that really will affect their lives.
Thing is, "most average people" aren't the ones who shape human society for the next generation. Edward Snowden did that.
It isn't like he invented something cool, advanced society through developing new technologies, or accomplished anything. He went in with an agenda and was able to hack the system from the inside, now he has some power and fame.
I like to also think his Agenda was to "invent" a cool new world, where instead of NSA spook-community running completely rampant and rough-shod toward a dystopian neo-Stasi future, we now get to know and mitigate the threat to the 4th ammendment that they represent. That's is a freaking cool invention if you ask me. I'll take it over the crap that "most average people" like yourself churn out.
agreed. coreboot, flash write protect jumper, secure boot, linux, and a physical RO or WORM media to recover/reload all firmware and bootloader... Ah, I long for the days when I imagined I had computational security...