I think the problem is that MS isn't being completely clear as to what it is they're collecting or why they're collecting it. Take those seven or eight updates to Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 that added forced telemetry collection. No one really knows what it is those things are collecting - MS's own update really doesn't say much other than "It's information needed to ease the transition between Windows 7 or 8.1 and Windows 10" and "It's for customer experience improvements". On top of this, all of the telemetry updates were marked as "Important" in Windows Update, meaning that they'll be automatically installed on most update configurations.
If MS really had some reason to do this, they should have said exactly what it is they were collecting and why from the get-go, and also had a clear opt-out provision. Failing to do this is what's sparking a lot of paranoia - I've heard everything from "MS's telemetry service is logging everything you type and sending it to MS to improve autocorrect functionality" to "MS is actively recording input from attached webcams and microphones and sending it to MS servers".
I think if MS were to put out a well-thought out announcement telling people why it is they're doing this, a lot of the paranoia would go away.
It's funny because most of those things are also in the Bible, and yet no one (to the best of my knowledge) has ever made a serious campaign to ban the Bible.
Dawn is such a typical Federal employee. From the article: "Dawn reached Ceres on March 6th, 2015". Doesn't it know that we taxpayers pay its salary, and that we're not paying for it to take five months to get within 1,470 km of the planet, and then another two to get within 375 km? I think we should fire Dawn and replace it with someone more competent. Maybe one of those Mars rovers is available for work.
Of course Wifi only exists near hotspots, which is why I plan to sell the parents behind this lawsuit my own unique brand of Wifi that won't trigger their son's sensitivity. As everyone knows, only Wifi routers put out harmful radiation that can trigger such totally real disorders as electromagnetic hypersensitivity syndrome. Microwaves, on the other hand, contain all their radiation entirely within the steel box using the powers of science.
By putting their Wifi router in the microwave, along with any devices they wish to receive wifi, and turning the microwave on for 12 hours, young G's parents can bake the Wifi right into their devices without any risk of electromagnetic radiation triggering their son's disorder. I like to call it Mi-Fi.
In June, MS shipped a bunch of now-infamous "Telemetry Services" updates to Windows 7 and Windows 8/8.1. I forget what the exact Knowledge Base numbers are, but you can find them pretty easily. These updates were marked as "Important" in Windows Update, and actually have the same general description of "This update fixes some bugs and improves security" that they use for all updates if viewed in the Add/Remove Programs window.
The "Telemetry Update" has been proven to send information to MS, and cannot be controlled short of uninstalling the update and force-stopping the associated services. I was told that the "update" collects all of your keyboard input and ships it to MS for use in "improving" their Auto-Correct and Word Suggestion features, and I have no reason to believe otherwise.
I had to turn off Windows Update entirely on both of my machines in order to stop MS trying to ship this update after I uninstalled it, because it kept trying to push the update even when I specifically said not to install it.
In recent months, it seems as if Nerval's Lobster has evolved into a submitter that lionizes single-source stories based on Dice advertisements. Despite all the press about Nerval's Lobster only posting Dice stories, is there still a significant market for older submitters, especially those who post actual news stories? The answer is "yes," of course, and sites like the comments section of Slashdot suggest that Nerval's Lobster should take steps such as posting something that isn't a single-source story from Dice and spending a lot of time on submitting actual quality stories if they want to not be mocked by commenters. But do they really need to go through all of that? If you have twenty, thirty, or even forty years of Dice link submissions, is it worth jumping through all sorts of new hoops? Or is there a better way to keep working — provided you don't already have a way to bypass the editorial system, that is, or move up to management, or just keep posting Dice links?
The Joshua Duggar scenario is certainly one where it is possible to prove he did it, but consider this (hypothetical) scenario:
The person who used my burner email to sign up pays for his Ashley Madison subscription with a pre-paid Visa or Mastercard, the kind you can buy at any Wal-Mart for cash. My (nonexistent) SO knows about my burner email. She Googles and finds any one of the number of sites that allow you to put an email in and see if it's in the leaked database (without showing supporting info such as the payment info or addresses). Of course, mine turns up, but I'm assuming my theoretical SO is smart enough to realize that email alone is not enough to prove anything.
The SO then looks at the full database, and sees that the account was paid for with a pre-paid card with no billing address. At this point, I have no way to prove that I didn't buy that pre-paid card short of opening up my financials and accounting for every single dollar to prove that there's no way I could've bought that pre-paid card. The possibility that I cheated now exists, and the possibility alone can be enough to cause a breakup or divorce for something that I never did in the first place.
Sure, the scenario is a little far-fetched, but it's not outright impossible.
I hope none. The database can't be trusted, and I can verify this because my email address is in their database despite the fact that I had never heard of Ashley Madison or Avid Life Media until the hack happened. You do not need an email verification to make an account there - again, I know this because whoever signed up my address was able to do so without access to my email account. The mix-up is likely due to the fact that my email address is a shortened version of a common first name and a common Hispanic last name (though I didn't realize this when I made the account, oddly enough). I would post my email address here so people could verify, but I'd rather not so that I don't inadvertently attract people to whoever the poor bastard was that made the account using my email.. and also to avoid spam.
Merely having an email address listed in the leaked database is not proof of anything, and I would hope that any spouses who see their partner's email on that database get independent verification first before accusing them of anything. I know I would hate to have a significant other see that and assume I was trying to cheat on them, even though I'd never attempted anything of the sort.
On top of this, there's the problem of computer-assisted reporters (most of whom are preparing numbers-based stories about things like how many people in the Canadian government had emails in the database) using this database for stories that may not reflect the reality of what's going on.
I have written a paper that conclusively proves that there is absolutely no fraud within the field of academic publishing within the biomedical field. It was peer reviewed by no fewer than sixty of my peers (who definitely aren't me making up names) and is absolutely concrete in its findings... provided you don't look too hard at my evidence. Clearly, anyone who says there is fraud within the biomed field is in fact fraudulent themselves.
Also, I take checks, Visa, and Mastercard, but no Amex.
From the article, Stokes actually voted twice to kill the ISS, and only switched after political prodding from the Clinton administration. The way the headline is written makes it seem like he was a champion for the ISS the entire time.
Some companies simply can't migrate away from old software because of the nature of their business. I worked for a place that used a copy of JD Edwards (a godawful inventory management system from the 90s that was nearly sued into oblivion because of how buggy it was) that had last been patched in 1998, simply because they would have had to get authorization from the government to upgrade and that would have cost the company a bunch of money.
One thing I don't understand about this, and that the articles never cover, is how much of a problem it is that the current block size is limited to 1MB in "core" Bitcoin. Is the situation that the Bitcoin network is coming dangerously close to having enough transactions to exceed that 1MB limit? Is it that Bitcoin has a problem like IPv4, where it has a set date at which it will likely exceed that 1MB limit and start having issues?
I would think that there must be some sort of issue, but then again it seems like the people behind Bitcoin XT stand to make a lot of money if the big Bitcoin exchanges switch over to their version of the currency, so I'm not so sure.
There's an exhibit called Bodies Revealed that showcases preserved human bodies - all of them from China - to show what our insides look like and just how big some of our organs are (they had one display that was just nerves, which was absolutely astounding). One of the exhibits shows off the lungs. I don't know if there are any pictures, but there are MASSIVE black spots on the lungs, the kind you'd expect to see in someone who smoked a lot. I remember the tour guide saying when someone asked that the black spots weren't from smoking, but from breathing in polluted air day after day. They weren't quite as bad as smoker's lungs, which get damaged over time from the heat of the cigarette smoke, but apart from that were identical in every way.
I doubt there's much they couldn't get into if they wanted to.
In the United States, there is literally NOTHING they cannot get into. As long as the owner of whatever service or software they want to get into lives within or visits the physical jurisdiction of the United States, there is absolutely nothing stopping them from serving a National Security Letter that gives that person the opportunity to cooperate or be thrown in jail until they cooperate. The only way to have a service that's even semi- "NSA proof" is to have it reside entirely outside of the United States.. though all that will do is stop the NSA until they decide they want whatever you have badly enough to use the resources to get it.
The question I'd have is why anyone who really wants to DoS a target would bother doing it this way. It would be far easier to upload a popular torrent with malware attached (hide it in a cracked.exe or something else that people would expect to show up as a false positive on a virus scanner as many cracked.exes tend to) and then use the resulting botnet to DoS a target. By the time someone finds out that the torrent contains malware, you've probably already got a sizeable botnet and have your goal accomplished.
The article states that the London Taxi Drivers Association and a couple of other groups are against the bike lanes because they believe the bike lanes will increase congestion - yet the article also states that the bike lanes are entirely or almost entirely segregated from normal car traffic. I just don't see how those two things meet up. The real reason is obvious: that more people riding bikes means fewer people taking taxis and other forms of paid transportation, but they could have at least come up with a better argument.
"Examples of operating systems are Unix and Linux.
I'd like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux is in fact GNU/Linux or GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities, and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX... etc etc.
I'm at work so I can't check, but there was a person going by the handle "Tomato" who was the driving force behind the fan localization of Mother 3. I know he mentioned at one point that he worked as a localizer for Nintendo of America - but I don't know if anyone found out what his actual name is. Tomato did an amazing job translating Mother 3, and if this is the same person NoA are idiots for firing him, especially when he singlehandedly proved that Mother 3 had an audience in the United States and would have made Nintendo money hand over fist if it had been ported to the DS and localized.
I used to get the New York Times almost every day, usually through school or my gym. Every day, I'd see advertisements from the big Swiss watchmakers, usually full-page and usually showing off detailed shots of the insides of the watches. That right there signifies what their market is - older people with lots of money. There's no way I could've afforded one back then, and though I probably could afford one if I saved long enough now, I have no reason to do so. Wearing a high-end watch is one more thing I have to worry about losing or having stolen or getting damaged.
Really, the answer to their problems is right in front of them. These people know how to make a watch, and there is no shortage of stylistic complaints about existing smartwatches. All they'd need to do is team up with an existing smartphone company that doesn't have a smartwatch of their own and start offering "Swiss-style" smartwatches at a reasonable price. They'd be rolling in money, assuming they can fix the style issues.
But see, the question then becomes why you wouldn't do something like set up a "drone raceway" and give users the ability to control a drone there or send in their own (perhaps have two different categories, one for stock drones and one for user-submitted ones) to race. Pay $x as an entry fee and you can race a drone from the comfort of your own home computer. Given all the VR tech that's coming out at some point "soon", you could even add that as part of the experience (put on an Oculus Rift or similar headset and control your drone from its perspective).
Heck, if you were willing to go that far you could even do drone tours of scenic areas (with controls to stop them going too far off) in the same manner.
I see ad blocking as part of a larger service problem with the content industry on the web. Many website operators have gone to war with Adblock Plus, and lose every time because Adblock Plus can adapt around whatever new safeguards they've put in against it. If people are blocking your ads, it's because you have a service problem. Allow me to give an example:
I play a game called Pathfinder fairly regularly with a group of friends online. Pathfinder is basically a clone of Dungeons and Dragons 3.5th edition, very rules-heavy and with lots of little things to look up that most people don't bother memorizing. To that end, there are two major sites that carry all of the open game content (which in Pathfinder is pretty much 100% of the content) in a searchable form which is a lot easier than figuring out which book you need and then looking through a corresponding PDF or the book itself.
One of these sites is d20pfsrd.com, which is run by a guy who ran tons of ads for a long time and then ultimately resorted to a Patreon account.. in addition to ads. Now, I understand that he needs money to keep buying the books to put the stuff on his website, but it becomes more than a little annoying when I'm trying to look something up in the middle of a game and have a third of my phone's screen taken up by the incessant pop-ups advertising sales of third-party books (from which the site owner gets a cut) that no one ever uses or linking people to his Patreon to donate money. I don't know how successful his Patreon campaign is, but I'm imagining it's not very much if he keeps begging for money.
Meanwhile, there's a second site called Archives of Nethys that is in general better organized, doesn't run intrusive ads, and has the same exact content that d20pfsrd does. I don't block ads on Archives of Nethys because like the d20pfsrd owner, I understand that they need money for books - but at the same time, they're not running intrusive ads or begging me for Patreon dollars in an overlay that blocks me from reading the actual content of their website. If I was going to donate money to one of these sites, I'd pick Archives of Nethys hands down because they have better service to their readers.
You could say that from a business perspective, d20pfsrd has a service problem: their ads are more annoying than their competitor's, and thus more likely to be blocked. The same principle can be applied to any website.
These glasses seem kind of pointless in that from what the article says, they pretty much have to be that big in order to actually work - the earlier model by the same company was even bigger. With something like this, the goal should be to make them as surreptitious as possible so that the person wearing them doesn't stand out in a crowd and thus draw attention from whatever security organization is likely monitoring the cameras. $250 (at current exchange rates anyway) is also far too high of a price tag for a pair of what are basically glorified sunglasses.
Now, if they looked like normal sunglasses (or better yet could be built into prescription glasses) and were under $100, I could see myself getting a pair of these if I planned to be in an area with heavy CCTV usage.
From experience, silicone rubber tends to pick up a lot of gunk really quickly - body hair, dead skin cells, dust, that kind of thing. This seems like something the manufacturer intends for people to use on a daily basis the way you might use a pair of earbuds, taking them off and putting them on several times a day. I'd be interested to see how they intend to combat the gunk buildup, as well as how they expect it to stick in the middle of summer or at the gym when sweat becomes an issue.
It should've been obvious to everyone involved that shutting down all the nuclear reactors in Japan as a reaction to the Fukushima meltdown with absolutely no replacement strategy wasn't a sustainable option.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the problem is that MS isn't being completely clear as to what it is they're collecting or why they're collecting it. Take those seven or eight updates to Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 that added forced telemetry collection. No one really knows what it is those things are collecting - MS's own update really doesn't say much other than "It's information needed to ease the transition between Windows 7 or 8.1 and Windows 10" and "It's for customer experience improvements". On top of this, all of the telemetry updates were marked as "Important" in Windows Update, meaning that they'll be automatically installed on most update configurations.
If MS really had some reason to do this, they should have said exactly what it is they were collecting and why from the get-go, and also had a clear opt-out provision. Failing to do this is what's sparking a lot of paranoia - I've heard everything from "MS's telemetry service is logging everything you type and sending it to MS to improve autocorrect functionality" to "MS is actively recording input from attached webcams and microphones and sending it to MS servers".
I think if MS were to put out a well-thought out announcement telling people why it is they're doing this, a lot of the paranoia would go away.
It's funny because most of those things are also in the Bible, and yet no one (to the best of my knowledge) has ever made a serious campaign to ban the Bible.
Dawn is such a typical Federal employee. From the article: "Dawn reached Ceres on March 6th, 2015". Doesn't it know that we taxpayers pay its salary, and that we're not paying for it to take five months to get within 1,470 km of the planet, and then another two to get within 375 km? I think we should fire Dawn and replace it with someone more competent. Maybe one of those Mars rovers is available for work.
Of course Wifi only exists near hotspots, which is why I plan to sell the parents behind this lawsuit my own unique brand of Wifi that won't trigger their son's sensitivity. As everyone knows, only Wifi routers put out harmful radiation that can trigger such totally real disorders as electromagnetic hypersensitivity syndrome. Microwaves, on the other hand, contain all their radiation entirely within the steel box using the powers of science.
By putting their Wifi router in the microwave, along with any devices they wish to receive wifi, and turning the microwave on for 12 hours, young G's parents can bake the Wifi right into their devices without any risk of electromagnetic radiation triggering their son's disorder. I like to call it Mi-Fi.
In June, MS shipped a bunch of now-infamous "Telemetry Services" updates to Windows 7 and Windows 8/8.1. I forget what the exact Knowledge Base numbers are, but you can find them pretty easily. These updates were marked as "Important" in Windows Update, and actually have the same general description of "This update fixes some bugs and improves security" that they use for all updates if viewed in the Add/Remove Programs window.
The "Telemetry Update" has been proven to send information to MS, and cannot be controlled short of uninstalling the update and force-stopping the associated services. I was told that the "update" collects all of your keyboard input and ships it to MS for use in "improving" their Auto-Correct and Word Suggestion features, and I have no reason to believe otherwise.
I had to turn off Windows Update entirely on both of my machines in order to stop MS trying to ship this update after I uninstalled it, because it kept trying to push the update even when I specifically said not to install it.
In recent months, it seems as if Nerval's Lobster has evolved into a submitter that lionizes single-source stories based on Dice advertisements. Despite all the press about Nerval's Lobster only posting Dice stories, is there still a significant market for older submitters, especially those who post actual news stories? The answer is "yes," of course, and sites like the comments section of Slashdot suggest that Nerval's Lobster should take steps such as posting something that isn't a single-source story from Dice and spending a lot of time on submitting actual quality stories if they want to not be mocked by commenters. But do they really need to go through all of that? If you have twenty, thirty, or even forty years of Dice link submissions, is it worth jumping through all sorts of new hoops? Or is there a better way to keep working — provided you don't already have a way to bypass the editorial system, that is, or move up to management, or just keep posting Dice links?
The Joshua Duggar scenario is certainly one where it is possible to prove he did it, but consider this (hypothetical) scenario:
The person who used my burner email to sign up pays for his Ashley Madison subscription with a pre-paid Visa or Mastercard, the kind you can buy at any Wal-Mart for cash. My (nonexistent) SO knows about my burner email. She Googles and finds any one of the number of sites that allow you to put an email in and see if it's in the leaked database (without showing supporting info such as the payment info or addresses). Of course, mine turns up, but I'm assuming my theoretical SO is smart enough to realize that email alone is not enough to prove anything.
The SO then looks at the full database, and sees that the account was paid for with a pre-paid card with no billing address. At this point, I have no way to prove that I didn't buy that pre-paid card short of opening up my financials and accounting for every single dollar to prove that there's no way I could've bought that pre-paid card. The possibility that I cheated now exists, and the possibility alone can be enough to cause a breakup or divorce for something that I never did in the first place.
Sure, the scenario is a little far-fetched, but it's not outright impossible.
I hope none. The database can't be trusted, and I can verify this because my email address is in their database despite the fact that I had never heard of Ashley Madison or Avid Life Media until the hack happened. You do not need an email verification to make an account there - again, I know this because whoever signed up my address was able to do so without access to my email account. The mix-up is likely due to the fact that my email address is a shortened version of a common first name and a common Hispanic last name (though I didn't realize this when I made the account, oddly enough). I would post my email address here so people could verify, but I'd rather not so that I don't inadvertently attract people to whoever the poor bastard was that made the account using my email.. and also to avoid spam.
Merely having an email address listed in the leaked database is not proof of anything, and I would hope that any spouses who see their partner's email on that database get independent verification first before accusing them of anything. I know I would hate to have a significant other see that and assume I was trying to cheat on them, even though I'd never attempted anything of the sort.
On top of this, there's the problem of computer-assisted reporters (most of whom are preparing numbers-based stories about things like how many people in the Canadian government had emails in the database) using this database for stories that may not reflect the reality of what's going on.
I have written a paper that conclusively proves that there is absolutely no fraud within the field of academic publishing within the biomedical field. It was peer reviewed by no fewer than sixty of my peers (who definitely aren't me making up names) and is absolutely concrete in its findings... provided you don't look too hard at my evidence. Clearly, anyone who says there is fraud within the biomed field is in fact fraudulent themselves.
Also, I take checks, Visa, and Mastercard, but no Amex.
From the article, Stokes actually voted twice to kill the ISS, and only switched after political prodding from the Clinton administration. The way the headline is written makes it seem like he was a champion for the ISS the entire time.
Some companies simply can't migrate away from old software because of the nature of their business. I worked for a place that used a copy of JD Edwards (a godawful inventory management system from the 90s that was nearly sued into oblivion because of how buggy it was) that had last been patched in 1998, simply because they would have had to get authorization from the government to upgrade and that would have cost the company a bunch of money.
One thing I don't understand about this, and that the articles never cover, is how much of a problem it is that the current block size is limited to 1MB in "core" Bitcoin. Is the situation that the Bitcoin network is coming dangerously close to having enough transactions to exceed that 1MB limit? Is it that Bitcoin has a problem like IPv4, where it has a set date at which it will likely exceed that 1MB limit and start having issues?
I would think that there must be some sort of issue, but then again it seems like the people behind Bitcoin XT stand to make a lot of money if the big Bitcoin exchanges switch over to their version of the currency, so I'm not so sure.
I think what you just described is the origin story for the Space Marines in Warhammer 40,000.
There's an exhibit called Bodies Revealed that showcases preserved human bodies - all of them from China - to show what our insides look like and just how big some of our organs are (they had one display that was just nerves, which was absolutely astounding). One of the exhibits shows off the lungs. I don't know if there are any pictures, but there are MASSIVE black spots on the lungs, the kind you'd expect to see in someone who smoked a lot. I remember the tour guide saying when someone asked that the black spots weren't from smoking, but from breathing in polluted air day after day. They weren't quite as bad as smoker's lungs, which get damaged over time from the heat of the cigarette smoke, but apart from that were identical in every way.
I doubt there's much they couldn't get into if they wanted to.
In the United States, there is literally NOTHING they cannot get into. As long as the owner of whatever service or software they want to get into lives within or visits the physical jurisdiction of the United States, there is absolutely nothing stopping them from serving a National Security Letter that gives that person the opportunity to cooperate or be thrown in jail until they cooperate. The only way to have a service that's even semi- "NSA proof" is to have it reside entirely outside of the United States.. though all that will do is stop the NSA until they decide they want whatever you have badly enough to use the resources to get it.
The question I'd have is why anyone who really wants to DoS a target would bother doing it this way. It would be far easier to upload a popular torrent with malware attached (hide it in a cracked .exe or something else that people would expect to show up as a false positive on a virus scanner as many cracked .exes tend to) and then use the resulting botnet to DoS a target. By the time someone finds out that the torrent contains malware, you've probably already got a sizeable botnet and have your goal accomplished.
The article states that the London Taxi Drivers Association and a couple of other groups are against the bike lanes because they believe the bike lanes will increase congestion - yet the article also states that the bike lanes are entirely or almost entirely segregated from normal car traffic. I just don't see how those two things meet up. The real reason is obvious: that more people riding bikes means fewer people taking taxis and other forms of paid transportation, but they could have at least come up with a better argument.
"Examples of operating systems are Unix and Linux.
I'd like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux is in fact GNU/Linux or GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities, and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX... etc etc.
I'm at work so I can't check, but there was a person going by the handle "Tomato" who was the driving force behind the fan localization of Mother 3. I know he mentioned at one point that he worked as a localizer for Nintendo of America - but I don't know if anyone found out what his actual name is. Tomato did an amazing job translating Mother 3, and if this is the same person NoA are idiots for firing him, especially when he singlehandedly proved that Mother 3 had an audience in the United States and would have made Nintendo money hand over fist if it had been ported to the DS and localized.
Can anyone confirm if this is the same guy?
I used to get the New York Times almost every day, usually through school or my gym. Every day, I'd see advertisements from the big Swiss watchmakers, usually full-page and usually showing off detailed shots of the insides of the watches. That right there signifies what their market is - older people with lots of money. There's no way I could've afforded one back then, and though I probably could afford one if I saved long enough now, I have no reason to do so. Wearing a high-end watch is one more thing I have to worry about losing or having stolen or getting damaged.
Really, the answer to their problems is right in front of them. These people know how to make a watch, and there is no shortage of stylistic complaints about existing smartwatches. All they'd need to do is team up with an existing smartphone company that doesn't have a smartwatch of their own and start offering "Swiss-style" smartwatches at a reasonable price. They'd be rolling in money, assuming they can fix the style issues.
But see, the question then becomes why you wouldn't do something like set up a "drone raceway" and give users the ability to control a drone there or send in their own (perhaps have two different categories, one for stock drones and one for user-submitted ones) to race. Pay $x as an entry fee and you can race a drone from the comfort of your own home computer. Given all the VR tech that's coming out at some point "soon", you could even add that as part of the experience (put on an Oculus Rift or similar headset and control your drone from its perspective).
Heck, if you were willing to go that far you could even do drone tours of scenic areas (with controls to stop them going too far off) in the same manner.
I see ad blocking as part of a larger service problem with the content industry on the web. Many website operators have gone to war with Adblock Plus, and lose every time because Adblock Plus can adapt around whatever new safeguards they've put in against it. If people are blocking your ads, it's because you have a service problem. Allow me to give an example:
I play a game called Pathfinder fairly regularly with a group of friends online. Pathfinder is basically a clone of Dungeons and Dragons 3.5th edition, very rules-heavy and with lots of little things to look up that most people don't bother memorizing. To that end, there are two major sites that carry all of the open game content (which in Pathfinder is pretty much 100% of the content) in a searchable form which is a lot easier than figuring out which book you need and then looking through a corresponding PDF or the book itself.
One of these sites is d20pfsrd.com, which is run by a guy who ran tons of ads for a long time and then ultimately resorted to a Patreon account.. in addition to ads. Now, I understand that he needs money to keep buying the books to put the stuff on his website, but it becomes more than a little annoying when I'm trying to look something up in the middle of a game and have a third of my phone's screen taken up by the incessant pop-ups advertising sales of third-party books (from which the site owner gets a cut) that no one ever uses or linking people to his Patreon to donate money. I don't know how successful his Patreon campaign is, but I'm imagining it's not very much if he keeps begging for money.
Meanwhile, there's a second site called Archives of Nethys that is in general better organized, doesn't run intrusive ads, and has the same exact content that d20pfsrd does. I don't block ads on Archives of Nethys because like the d20pfsrd owner, I understand that they need money for books - but at the same time, they're not running intrusive ads or begging me for Patreon dollars in an overlay that blocks me from reading the actual content of their website. If I was going to donate money to one of these sites, I'd pick Archives of Nethys hands down because they have better service to their readers.
You could say that from a business perspective, d20pfsrd has a service problem: their ads are more annoying than their competitor's, and thus more likely to be blocked. The same principle can be applied to any website.
These glasses seem kind of pointless in that from what the article says, they pretty much have to be that big in order to actually work - the earlier model by the same company was even bigger. With something like this, the goal should be to make them as surreptitious as possible so that the person wearing them doesn't stand out in a crowd and thus draw attention from whatever security organization is likely monitoring the cameras. $250 (at current exchange rates anyway) is also far too high of a price tag for a pair of what are basically glorified sunglasses.
Now, if they looked like normal sunglasses (or better yet could be built into prescription glasses) and were under $100, I could see myself getting a pair of these if I planned to be in an area with heavy CCTV usage.
From experience, silicone rubber tends to pick up a lot of gunk really quickly - body hair, dead skin cells, dust, that kind of thing. This seems like something the manufacturer intends for people to use on a daily basis the way you might use a pair of earbuds, taking them off and putting them on several times a day. I'd be interested to see how they intend to combat the gunk buildup, as well as how they expect it to stick in the middle of summer or at the gym when sweat becomes an issue.
It should've been obvious to everyone involved that shutting down all the nuclear reactors in Japan as a reaction to the Fukushima meltdown with absolutely no replacement strategy wasn't a sustainable option.