From what I understand, they have not yet released the new proposed regulations. They're only going to do so once the public comment period passes, and there will still be multiple commentary periods after this one before anything is actually put into force.
Personally, I don't think they're going to try to continue with the "fast lane". Tom Wheeler may be a former lobbyist, but I think even he has realized that no one wants a "fast lane", as evidenced by 600,000+ comments from the public and members of his own commission speaking out against it as a terrible idea. Tom Wheeler also doesn't want to be known as the FCC chairman who wasted millions of taxpayer dollars defending the lawsuits from Google, Netflix, the EFF, etc if he tries to pass a fast lane.
One thing I can think of is running wires through tight spaces. Put a small, snake-like "robot" made of this stuff with a camera on one end on a wire and use it to guide the wire through a small hole in the wall or ceiling. Make it deformable to go around corners, and rigid to go up walls. If it's cheap enough, there's plenty of electricians and cable installers who would probably buy one.
What I don't get here is what target audience MakerBot hopes is going to buy these at a Home Depot. 3D printers are really only viable for purchase by businesses in most cases, because individual buyers generally don't have enough use for them to justify a four-digit purchase price. Most individuals who want to use a 3D printer are going to use one of the numerous places online where you can send them a design and have them print and ship it at a fraction of the cost of buying a printer, and most businesses are going to use something more reliable (injection molding and the like) rather than buy one of these.
It seems like it would be more profitable to set up a "makerspace" kind of thing at the stores - charge people for materials and to use the printer to print out designs, rather than trying to sell them the printers themselves.
You'll have to forgive me on that, I remember reading about this study at least a year ago and my memory of the exact details is a little fuzzy, but I think their logic went like this, using a real-world example:
It's early March, 2014. I have an entertainment budget of $50 for the week (which is part of a very finite entertainment budget per year), and a whole lot of choices as to how to spend that money. For sake of argument, let's narrow it down to three. I could:
- Buy a copy of Dark Souls 2, which would at the time have come out later in the week. - Buy a copy of some new release film (whatever that might be) - Buy a copy of KC Green's newest Gunshow book and get it signed and everything.
The logic is that if all of those things cost $50 (in reality KC's book was like $30 signed and everything and Dark Souls was $40 with a bunch of pre-order discounts) each, whichever one I pick wins the competition for my money. At that point, I no longer have the money to spend, and thus can't buy either of the other things. Even if I pirate KC's book and the film, they still haven't lost a sale because I wouldn't have been able to buy it anyway. That was more or less how I remember the study's logic going.
(Note for KC in case he somehow reads this, I actually did buy your book a few weeks later when I had the cash.)
I know that the NSA could easily be tapping iPhones and have backdoors into them (and probably do) but this seems like a colossal over-reaction by the Chinese media. CCTV is claiming that the "Frequent Locations" feature could somehow be used to leak state secrets, but that doesn't make sense for any number of reasons:
1. According to the ZDNet article, the feature in question is entirely opt-in and disabled by default. They don't seem to have proof that the switch is merely for show (as in, it's transmitting the data regardless of whether or not you've opted in) which means there's a very easy fix for this - don't turn it on, or turn it off if it's on.
2. Also from the ZDNet article, the feature apparently causes the phone to keep a local copy of location data in regards to frequently-visited areas for use in other applications. It's not clear whether this data is actually transmitted anywhere - Apple said the device only keeps a local copy, but with the NSA around it's entirely possible it transmits it somewhere. If what Apple is saying is true, obtaining a copy of the data requires physical access to the device. If you've had your phone stolen and didn't lock it, chances are that you have much bigger privacy concerns than someone obtaining your location data, especially if you're in the Chinese government.
3. CCTV claims that the device can somehow be used to leak state secrets, but this seems like FUD. The only way I could see this happening (and being useful) is if someone who works on a submarine or other restricted area (nuclear sites, missile silos, etc) happened to have their phone stolen or was intentionally giving their phone to someone, but I'm fairly certain their military doesn't allow outside devices into restricted areas (the US military sure doesn't) and if someone's intentionally giving away the data that's another problem altogether.
Couple this with the fact that China has smartphone manufacturers located in-country that only sell within China, and you have what looks like FUD designed to get people to stop switching to the iPhone and instead buy a phone made by a state-friendly manufacturer.
This is actually how a bunch of anime (and games) winds up getting translated and released stateside, but at the same time there's a bunch of companies that refuse to translate no matter what. People who want to watch/play them do fan translations, which are in a legal grey area at best (the shows/games aren't licensed in the United States, and normally there aren't too many legal challenges from Japan) and later on the companies hopefully do an official release.
Best example I can think of in recent memory is Dangan Ronpa, a visual novel on the PSP about a bunch of high schoolers trapped in a high school and murdering each other. Dangan Ronpa and its sequel were both fan-translated on the PSP, became insanely popular as a result, and were eventually released (with a butchered translation) stateside on the Vita by NIS. As much as I dislike NIS for their love of pointless censorship that would make Ted Woolsey blush, they at least got Dangan Ronpa somewhat correct, though most people agree that the fan translation was better. At least they gave it a chance, unlike Nintendo with Mother 3 (later fan-translated and half-reprogrammed by Tomato and his team) and Capcom with Gyakuten Kenji 2 (later fan-translated as Ace Attorney Investigations 2: Prosecutor's Path).
There was a study a few years ago out of one of the Scandinavian countries - I think it was Sweden, but it might well have been Finland or Denmark - which stated that piracy had no impact on overall entertainment industry profits. What they found, as I recall, was that there was no impact because people spend roughly the same amount on entertainment regardless of how much they pirate, it was simply that they were spending it in different areas. Someone who was pirating films, for instance, would still spend their entertainment budget but might do so on books or music or video games instead of films.
I also agree with his second point about pre-releases being good for films. When Deus Ex: Human Revolution came out some years ago, there was a leak of a "beta" build that consisted of about 50-60% of the full game about a month before the game's street date. Up until that point, a lot of people believed that HR would be complete crap.. but then the leak happened and changed a lot of people's minds (myself included) about it. I don't think I would've bought it, even on deep discount, if I hadn't played that leak first.
I applaud the effort to make a bot like this, but from what I understand, most of the Wikipedia edits that are shilling for someone (or something) are done by outside "reputation management" firms. It would probably be interesting to track anonymous and reverted edits to pages for major politicians and see if they can catch some of these firms at work.
He didn't die in the car itself, but he died of injuries sustained from the car crash. The summary makes this distinction by saying "in a Tesla automobile crash", but the article itself does not.
The real question is how much they want for the phone numbers and call recordings of every single, moderately-attractive woman in the world, and then how much they want to get my name on the list of every single, moderately-attractive man in the world... hey, the NSA could open up a pretty profitable side business like this.
The article from Brian Krebs seems to indicate that this new variant of Gameover can interface with the old one somehow, and be used to recover all of the infected computers that were part of the original Gameover botnet. Is this true, or is this an attempt to re-build the Gameover Zeus botnet from scratch?
If I had to guess, it's because Amazon doesn't want to have Canada pass a law or regulation banning commercial drone use the same way the FAA did. If they were to go to Canada, the media there would likely report that they're doing it to skirt US regulations, and that could cause all kinds of bad PR for Amazon. The attention would also likely cause lawmakers in Canada to consider a similar ban, pointing at the FAA ban as precedent.
But wait, wouldn't that make me MORE vulnerable to the mind-control radio waves being sent out by the Lizard People? I don't know if protecting my equipment from voltages is worth the risk.
It's clear that Pennsylvania was taking a cue from Heroes of Might and Magic 3 and attempting to build an unstoppable army of 14,000 skeletons. I wonder what the Pennsylvania governor's necromancy score is?
Actually, the only question I have is why the US didn't just say that Maldives law enforcement was responsible for the arrest in the first place. It could've been spun as good PR for both countries - "Cooperation Between US, Maldives Law Enforcement Leads to Arrest of Card Hacker" or somesuch. That would've quelled any questions about who was responsible for the arrest in the first place as well.
What I don't get is how ANY of those groups pose a threat to anyone outside of their local areas. ISIS doesn't care about the West, their entire reason for existing is that the al-Maliki government in Iraq essentially locked out the Sunnis from representation in the country's government and they had a handy bunch of Islamic fighters in the country next door who were willing to divert their rebellion against Bashar al-Assad for a little while to try and take down al-Maliki. If anything, they'd have more reason to go after the United States (who installed al-Maliki) than they would to try something against the UK.
al-Shabab is a localized terror group based out of Somalia. Yes, they attacked a mall in Africa, but defense analysts in the United States have said multiple times that al-Shabab does not have the resources or the manpower to mount an attack on the United States or any of its interests. I would assume that the UK, being a long-time ally of the United States, would count as a "United States interest".
Last I checked, the UK also has existing laws on the books for dealing with pedophiles and organized crime - they were certainly able to handle the IRA before the days of mass-surveillance programs. Neither of these seem to pose any real "national security" threat that I can see, though I don't live in the UK.
Cameron was lying through his teeth and he knows it.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution came out a few years ago, with a "Mission Pack" that involved rescuing a character who appears in the original Deus Ex during the latter third of the game. That content was exclusive to GameStop pre-orders for a few years, but then Square-Enix decided to sell it as DLC on Steam. A lot of people condemned this practice, and there were some pretty hilarious reactions (look up "Deus Ex Unreal Revolution" on YouTube, I'm at work so I can't link it).
Publishers won't allow this to happen because they want to make the most money off pre-orders they can, and that means making content available on all platforms and ensuring everyone can pay extra for whatever content they've decided to lock away. I know that I won't buy any games that do this.
Back in the 50s and 60s, when the Civil Rights Movement was starting to pick up, the FBI had files on most of the major civil rights leaders, even those that advocated purely peaceful resistance. I recall reading an interview with a high-ranking FBI official at the time who said that J. Edgar Hoover was particularly proud of the file he had on Martin Luther King. They tracked relationships between civil rights groups, and tried to watch them all. I'm fairly certain that there were also secret wiretaps done on some of the people they were tracking, though I don't remember if that was the case with MLK or not.
If you look on the list, the agency responsible for maintaining the surveillance against the Muslim-Americans targeted in this case is the FBI. They haven't changed much since 1960, and it shows.
From what the article shows, it seems like a lot of this information is public knowledge - where substations and water plants are and how they operate. Pretty much everyone in my town knows where the local substations are, and it doesn't take a genius to know that an attack that disables or destroys a substation would have a massive impact on the people living there. None of these documents appear to be classified, which means they don't contain anything that DHS was afraid of the general public knowing.
It would be a different story if these were classified documents containing things like the floor plans for nuclear plants and gaps in security at said plants that could actually be useful in an attack, but this seems like a non-story other than that DHS's FOIA officer got lazy and just CTRL+F'd for "Aurora" and blindly copied anything with that word in the name.
The real injustice is that I'll never be able to fill that spot on my bucket list under "Perform open heart surgery in front of a judge while vigorously arguing a case on behalf of the guy who is having his heart operated on."
From what I can tell from the article, it seems like the reason they haven't put the stuff online is because it's a huge number of documents and they apparently had a very strict agreement with Mitrokhin about how they could store and publicize it. The documents are also all in Russian, which means they'd be of limited use to anyone who doesn't speak the language. Scanning all of the stuff would probably take years, so I can imagine why they haven't undergone the effort.
I had actually been referring to the Lewinsky case - Whitewater is a different beast altogether. Whitewater wasn't so much people believing Ken Starr as it was people believing the testimony of two witnesses who had clear ulterior motives (in David Hale's case trying to cooperate to reduce additional charges against him, and in Jim McDougal's case trying to save his own skin from the bad loans he'd provably made) for coming forward and a judge who was too blind to see that something was off about the whole case. To me, it seems like Starr only went along with that because he thought it'd give him a shot at going after Clinton and he was willing to do anything to get that opportunity.
It is definitely regrettable that Susan McDougal got hurt, but that was the fault of the judge and the bad witnesses. Starr was just doing what he's always done - clown around for publicity.
Sure, he did all kinds of dirt-gathering in order to try and impeach Clinton, but no one took him seriously. He lost a Supreme Court appointment, his case against Clinton was essentially turned into a laughingstock and ultimately thrown out. The only people who actually cared about the Monica Lewinsky affair were the people trying to use the case to score political points against Clinton and Starr himself - sort of like Benghazi today, except replace Ken Starr with John Boehner. I'm 90% sure the only reason Starr was even appointed as a special prosecutor was because he was the only person who would take a case like that.
Ken Starr was, and continues to be, a clown. Am I afraid of Ken Starr? No.
A better example would've been the NSA or FBI, who I'm sure could obtain and use data like this to incriminate people for actual crimes that could land them long prison sentences. The worst Ken Starr could ever do is accuse me of having sex.
I'd argue Chris Sawyer, the programmer behind the original Rollercoaster Tycoon. The entire game was written in Assembly, and works on pretty much anything to this day without needing an emulator or any real fixes. Second place goes to Toady, the programmer of Dwarf Fortress, for singlehandedly making a game that goes into more detail than it should ever have reason to and still works most of the time.
Carmack, as far as I'm aware, was behind the horrible "update" of Doom 3 that released on Steam a few years ago, which wouldn't run on fully half the machines of the people who bought it. He was also behind Rage, which was a notorious crashfest.
They actually already do "postal zone dumps" in the United States, in that the front of every single piece of mail sent through the Post Office is imaged and put in a database for law enforcement. They've been doing it for some time.
Slashdot Mirror
From what I understand, they have not yet released the new proposed regulations. They're only going to do so once the public comment period passes, and there will still be multiple commentary periods after this one before anything is actually put into force.
Personally, I don't think they're going to try to continue with the "fast lane". Tom Wheeler may be a former lobbyist, but I think even he has realized that no one wants a "fast lane", as evidenced by 600,000+ comments from the public and members of his own commission speaking out against it as a terrible idea. Tom Wheeler also doesn't want to be known as the FCC chairman who wasted millions of taxpayer dollars defending the lawsuits from Google, Netflix, the EFF, etc if he tries to pass a fast lane.
One thing I can think of is running wires through tight spaces. Put a small, snake-like "robot" made of this stuff with a camera on one end on a wire and use it to guide the wire through a small hole in the wall or ceiling. Make it deformable to go around corners, and rigid to go up walls. If it's cheap enough, there's plenty of electricians and cable installers who would probably buy one.
What I don't get here is what target audience MakerBot hopes is going to buy these at a Home Depot. 3D printers are really only viable for purchase by businesses in most cases, because individual buyers generally don't have enough use for them to justify a four-digit purchase price. Most individuals who want to use a 3D printer are going to use one of the numerous places online where you can send them a design and have them print and ship it at a fraction of the cost of buying a printer, and most businesses are going to use something more reliable (injection molding and the like) rather than buy one of these.
It seems like it would be more profitable to set up a "makerspace" kind of thing at the stores - charge people for materials and to use the printer to print out designs, rather than trying to sell them the printers themselves.
You'll have to forgive me on that, I remember reading about this study at least a year ago and my memory of the exact details is a little fuzzy, but I think their logic went like this, using a real-world example:
It's early March, 2014. I have an entertainment budget of $50 for the week (which is part of a very finite entertainment budget per year), and a whole lot of choices as to how to spend that money. For sake of argument, let's narrow it down to three. I could:
- Buy a copy of Dark Souls 2, which would at the time have come out later in the week.
- Buy a copy of some new release film (whatever that might be)
- Buy a copy of KC Green's newest Gunshow book and get it signed and everything.
The logic is that if all of those things cost $50 (in reality KC's book was like $30 signed and everything and Dark Souls was $40 with a bunch of pre-order discounts) each, whichever one I pick wins the competition for my money. At that point, I no longer have the money to spend, and thus can't buy either of the other things. Even if I pirate KC's book and the film, they still haven't lost a sale because I wouldn't have been able to buy it anyway. That was more or less how I remember the study's logic going.
(Note for KC in case he somehow reads this, I actually did buy your book a few weeks later when I had the cash.)
I know that the NSA could easily be tapping iPhones and have backdoors into them (and probably do) but this seems like a colossal over-reaction by the Chinese media. CCTV is claiming that the "Frequent Locations" feature could somehow be used to leak state secrets, but that doesn't make sense for any number of reasons:
1. According to the ZDNet article, the feature in question is entirely opt-in and disabled by default. They don't seem to have proof that the switch is merely for show (as in, it's transmitting the data regardless of whether or not you've opted in) which means there's a very easy fix for this - don't turn it on, or turn it off if it's on.
2. Also from the ZDNet article, the feature apparently causes the phone to keep a local copy of location data in regards to frequently-visited areas for use in other applications. It's not clear whether this data is actually transmitted anywhere - Apple said the device only keeps a local copy, but with the NSA around it's entirely possible it transmits it somewhere. If what Apple is saying is true, obtaining a copy of the data requires physical access to the device. If you've had your phone stolen and didn't lock it, chances are that you have much bigger privacy concerns than someone obtaining your location data, especially if you're in the Chinese government.
3. CCTV claims that the device can somehow be used to leak state secrets, but this seems like FUD. The only way I could see this happening (and being useful) is if someone who works on a submarine or other restricted area (nuclear sites, missile silos, etc) happened to have their phone stolen or was intentionally giving their phone to someone, but I'm fairly certain their military doesn't allow outside devices into restricted areas (the US military sure doesn't) and if someone's intentionally giving away the data that's another problem altogether.
Couple this with the fact that China has smartphone manufacturers located in-country that only sell within China, and you have what looks like FUD designed to get people to stop switching to the iPhone and instead buy a phone made by a state-friendly manufacturer.
This is actually how a bunch of anime (and games) winds up getting translated and released stateside, but at the same time there's a bunch of companies that refuse to translate no matter what. People who want to watch/play them do fan translations, which are in a legal grey area at best (the shows/games aren't licensed in the United States, and normally there aren't too many legal challenges from Japan) and later on the companies hopefully do an official release.
Best example I can think of in recent memory is Dangan Ronpa, a visual novel on the PSP about a bunch of high schoolers trapped in a high school and murdering each other. Dangan Ronpa and its sequel were both fan-translated on the PSP, became insanely popular as a result, and were eventually released (with a butchered translation) stateside on the Vita by NIS. As much as I dislike NIS for their love of pointless censorship that would make Ted Woolsey blush, they at least got Dangan Ronpa somewhat correct, though most people agree that the fan translation was better. At least they gave it a chance, unlike Nintendo with Mother 3 (later fan-translated and half-reprogrammed by Tomato and his team) and Capcom with Gyakuten Kenji 2 (later fan-translated as Ace Attorney Investigations 2: Prosecutor's Path).
There was a study a few years ago out of one of the Scandinavian countries - I think it was Sweden, but it might well have been Finland or Denmark - which stated that piracy had no impact on overall entertainment industry profits. What they found, as I recall, was that there was no impact because people spend roughly the same amount on entertainment regardless of how much they pirate, it was simply that they were spending it in different areas. Someone who was pirating films, for instance, would still spend their entertainment budget but might do so on books or music or video games instead of films.
I also agree with his second point about pre-releases being good for films. When Deus Ex: Human Revolution came out some years ago, there was a leak of a "beta" build that consisted of about 50-60% of the full game about a month before the game's street date. Up until that point, a lot of people believed that HR would be complete crap.. but then the leak happened and changed a lot of people's minds (myself included) about it. I don't think I would've bought it, even on deep discount, if I hadn't played that leak first.
I applaud the effort to make a bot like this, but from what I understand, most of the Wikipedia edits that are shilling for someone (or something) are done by outside "reputation management" firms. It would probably be interesting to track anonymous and reverted edits to pages for major politicians and see if they can catch some of these firms at work.
He didn't die in the car itself, but he died of injuries sustained from the car crash. The summary makes this distinction by saying "in a Tesla automobile crash", but the article itself does not.
The real question is how much they want for the phone numbers and call recordings of every single, moderately-attractive woman in the world, and then how much they want to get my name on the list of every single, moderately-attractive man in the world... hey, the NSA could open up a pretty profitable side business like this.
The article from Brian Krebs seems to indicate that this new variant of Gameover can interface with the old one somehow, and be used to recover all of the infected computers that were part of the original Gameover botnet. Is this true, or is this an attempt to re-build the Gameover Zeus botnet from scratch?
If I had to guess, it's because Amazon doesn't want to have Canada pass a law or regulation banning commercial drone use the same way the FAA did. If they were to go to Canada, the media there would likely report that they're doing it to skirt US regulations, and that could cause all kinds of bad PR for Amazon. The attention would also likely cause lawmakers in Canada to consider a similar ban, pointing at the FAA ban as precedent.
But wait, wouldn't that make me MORE vulnerable to the mind-control radio waves being sent out by the Lizard People? I don't know if protecting my equipment from voltages is worth the risk.
It's clear that Pennsylvania was taking a cue from Heroes of Might and Magic 3 and attempting to build an unstoppable army of 14,000 skeletons. I wonder what the Pennsylvania governor's necromancy score is?
Actually, the only question I have is why the US didn't just say that Maldives law enforcement was responsible for the arrest in the first place. It could've been spun as good PR for both countries - "Cooperation Between US, Maldives Law Enforcement Leads to Arrest of Card Hacker" or somesuch. That would've quelled any questions about who was responsible for the arrest in the first place as well.
What I don't get is how ANY of those groups pose a threat to anyone outside of their local areas. ISIS doesn't care about the West, their entire reason for existing is that the al-Maliki government in Iraq essentially locked out the Sunnis from representation in the country's government and they had a handy bunch of Islamic fighters in the country next door who were willing to divert their rebellion against Bashar al-Assad for a little while to try and take down al-Maliki. If anything, they'd have more reason to go after the United States (who installed al-Maliki) than they would to try something against the UK.
al-Shabab is a localized terror group based out of Somalia. Yes, they attacked a mall in Africa, but defense analysts in the United States have said multiple times that al-Shabab does not have the resources or the manpower to mount an attack on the United States or any of its interests. I would assume that the UK, being a long-time ally of the United States, would count as a "United States interest".
Last I checked, the UK also has existing laws on the books for dealing with pedophiles and organized crime - they were certainly able to handle the IRA before the days of mass-surveillance programs. Neither of these seem to pose any real "national security" threat that I can see, though I don't live in the UK.
Cameron was lying through his teeth and he knows it.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution came out a few years ago, with a "Mission Pack" that involved rescuing a character who appears in the original Deus Ex during the latter third of the game. That content was exclusive to GameStop pre-orders for a few years, but then Square-Enix decided to sell it as DLC on Steam. A lot of people condemned this practice, and there were some pretty hilarious reactions (look up "Deus Ex Unreal Revolution" on YouTube, I'm at work so I can't link it).
Publishers won't allow this to happen because they want to make the most money off pre-orders they can, and that means making content available on all platforms and ensuring everyone can pay extra for whatever content they've decided to lock away. I know that I won't buy any games that do this.
Back in the 50s and 60s, when the Civil Rights Movement was starting to pick up, the FBI had files on most of the major civil rights leaders, even those that advocated purely peaceful resistance. I recall reading an interview with a high-ranking FBI official at the time who said that J. Edgar Hoover was particularly proud of the file he had on Martin Luther King. They tracked relationships between civil rights groups, and tried to watch them all. I'm fairly certain that there were also secret wiretaps done on some of the people they were tracking, though I don't remember if that was the case with MLK or not.
If you look on the list, the agency responsible for maintaining the surveillance against the Muslim-Americans targeted in this case is the FBI. They haven't changed much since 1960, and it shows.
From what the article shows, it seems like a lot of this information is public knowledge - where substations and water plants are and how they operate. Pretty much everyone in my town knows where the local substations are, and it doesn't take a genius to know that an attack that disables or destroys a substation would have a massive impact on the people living there. None of these documents appear to be classified, which means they don't contain anything that DHS was afraid of the general public knowing.
It would be a different story if these were classified documents containing things like the floor plans for nuclear plants and gaps in security at said plants that could actually be useful in an attack, but this seems like a non-story other than that DHS's FOIA officer got lazy and just CTRL+F'd for "Aurora" and blindly copied anything with that word in the name.
The real injustice is that I'll never be able to fill that spot on my bucket list under "Perform open heart surgery in front of a judge while vigorously arguing a case on behalf of the guy who is having his heart operated on."
From what I can tell from the article, it seems like the reason they haven't put the stuff online is because it's a huge number of documents and they apparently had a very strict agreement with Mitrokhin about how they could store and publicize it. The documents are also all in Russian, which means they'd be of limited use to anyone who doesn't speak the language. Scanning all of the stuff would probably take years, so I can imagine why they haven't undergone the effort.
I had actually been referring to the Lewinsky case - Whitewater is a different beast altogether. Whitewater wasn't so much people believing Ken Starr as it was people believing the testimony of two witnesses who had clear ulterior motives (in David Hale's case trying to cooperate to reduce additional charges against him, and in Jim McDougal's case trying to save his own skin from the bad loans he'd provably made) for coming forward and a judge who was too blind to see that something was off about the whole case. To me, it seems like Starr only went along with that because he thought it'd give him a shot at going after Clinton and he was willing to do anything to get that opportunity.
It is definitely regrettable that Susan McDougal got hurt, but that was the fault of the judge and the bad witnesses. Starr was just doing what he's always done - clown around for publicity.
Sure, he did all kinds of dirt-gathering in order to try and impeach Clinton, but no one took him seriously. He lost a Supreme Court appointment, his case against Clinton was essentially turned into a laughingstock and ultimately thrown out. The only people who actually cared about the Monica Lewinsky affair were the people trying to use the case to score political points against Clinton and Starr himself - sort of like Benghazi today, except replace Ken Starr with John Boehner. I'm 90% sure the only reason Starr was even appointed as a special prosecutor was because he was the only person who would take a case like that.
Ken Starr was, and continues to be, a clown. Am I afraid of Ken Starr? No.
A better example would've been the NSA or FBI, who I'm sure could obtain and use data like this to incriminate people for actual crimes that could land them long prison sentences. The worst Ken Starr could ever do is accuse me of having sex.
I'd argue Chris Sawyer, the programmer behind the original Rollercoaster Tycoon. The entire game was written in Assembly, and works on pretty much anything to this day without needing an emulator or any real fixes. Second place goes to Toady, the programmer of Dwarf Fortress, for singlehandedly making a game that goes into more detail than it should ever have reason to and still works most of the time.
Carmack, as far as I'm aware, was behind the horrible "update" of Doom 3 that released on Steam a few years ago, which wouldn't run on fully half the machines of the people who bought it. He was also behind Rage, which was a notorious crashfest.
They actually already do "postal zone dumps" in the United States, in that the front of every single piece of mail sent through the Post Office is imaged and put in a database for law enforcement. They've been doing it for some time.