That's just one of 1000's of items that were released that are not crimes, are not important for the American people to know
Not important for the American people... but what about everyone else? BTW CNN found that slightly less than half of all Brits think the rape thing is a holding charge whilst the US secretly indicts Assange....
The first Mass Effect was the business, story wise. Deeply thought out, self consistent world, interesting characters, a shadowy nemesis and a basically solid beginning, middle and end. Everything Hollywood needs to make a great movie.
But Mass Effect 2, though technically speaking a better game, definitely fared worse on the plot. The plot in ME2 suffered heavily from being wrapped around a fairly trivial design doc and didn't really have any beginning as such. Basically: hero dies, is rescued by an enigmatic terrorist leader with access to incredible resources, who tells him to recruit the most badass characters in the galaxy to fight an alien menace. 90% of the game involves this "recruitment". It's a race against the clock but nobody demonstrates any sense of urgency at all. There's never a "well, he'll do, let's get going!" to be heard. Once you have some arbitrary number of characters you jump through a wormhole, fight some baddies and blow up a space station. Fin.
There's some other stuff in there that advances the plot of the trilogy as a whole, but it's pretty weak.
Basically, if the author of TFA is hoping that Mass Effect will become a successful video game/movie crossover franchise, he'd better hope they only try and do it to the first game.
Bitcoins can be split up into much smaller pieces. A "coin" is a fairly arbitrary sized unit of value. So, the limited number of coins really isn't a big deal.
BitCoin is a little complicated to understand the internals of. See the discussion of it further up the thread for what it's doing and why it needs to burn so much CPU time. The thing to understand is that BitCoin eliminates the need for banks to mediate currency transactions on the internet (or at all), and it does so by forming a public, never ending story of money flows in the economy. That story (called the block chain) is extended by having public nodes perform large computations, the fact that coins are generated as a side effect of this process is basically a reward for donating CPU time to the system.
That's not quite correct. The proof of work must continue for as long as BitCoins is in use. There is another proof of work that's used for "mining" coins and eventually that will stop, but for transactions to take place securely there must be lots of CPU power being burned - enough combined power to prevent a big botnet herder taking over the network.
BitCoin is conceptually simple to use, not much different to what we do today. The headache inducing part is the implementation:-)
But if you want to spend some BitCoins it's actually not that hard. You just fire up the software, select who you want to send coins to (eg from the programs built in address book), how much you want to send and hit go. If the receivers P2P node is online at the time you can also include a message. If it's not, you can still send the money but without a message.
And that's it. That's all it takes. Receiving coins is likewise easy - you just fire up the software, let it synchronize with the network and now you have the coins that were sent to you.
There is one (big) catch. By the very definition of what BitCoin is, all transactions are public. It seems the latest versions attempt to obfuscate the size of the transactions, and there is a discussion in the linked page of how to go further - but nonetheless, the fact that an address you control transacted with somebody is a matter of public record. This is very different to today, where financial transactions are assumed to be secret unless otherwise published.
Ripple is much harder to understand and that's why I doubt it'll ever go anywhere. It's an excellent intellectual exercise but in a series of debates with Ryan I had back in 2008 (?) he admitted that a lot of the justifications for Ripple were post-hoc, and the fractional reserve did not have many of the flaws often cited.
You are thinking of a project called "Ripple" by Ryan Fugger. It is another P2P currency system, except not quite the same as BitCoin. I looked into some of these alternative currency systems some time back - they tend to be academically interesting but have weak justifications.
BitCoin is a variant of a system called HashCash. The basic insight behind hash based coins are that they are portable proofs of work, and thus easily checkable as being scarce. Any attempt to create electronic coins needs scarcity so that's a useful property.
Briefly, to create a hash coin you find some data that when run through SHA1 or whatever results in a hash with some easily checkable property. BitCoin uses "N leading digits are all zeros" where N varies over time. The nice thing about this is that the only way to find this data is brute force, so finding them represents real "work" in the sense of burned electricity and CPU time costs. It might seem arbitrary but it's really no less stupid than digging shiny metal out of the ground then putting it in a central bank.
Hash coins are not, by themselves, enough to create an electronic currency. They distribute and decentralize the minting process, but obviously to "spend" such a coin you need to transfer it in such a way that you lose it and the other person now has it. Some systems use a centralized registry to do this. I forget the name but one researcher was using a trusted computing/TPM style approach to that, so the registry could prove its trustworthyness to the participants remotely.
BitCoin attempts to decentralize the movement of coins as well via some clever cryptographic tricks. Essentially, to transfer a coin from A to B, the transaction is broadcast and incorporated into a constantly moving proof of work chain. The chain becomes a difficult to forge or tamper with public record of all transactions that have occurred.
So BitCoin can be seen as fundamentally the same idea as metal coins, but transferred into the digital realm and entirely decentralized - no banks required.
Ripple is a very different beast. Ripple networks are also P2P and decentralized but that's where the similarities end. In Ripple, if I do work for you, say I mow your lawn, the fact that you owe me a debt is marked in our Ripple accounts... and that's it. Now let's say I go to the grocery store and want to buy some food. My debt to the grocery store is recorded in our accounts. I can run up as much debt to the grocery store as they will allow. Finally, the owner of the grocery store goes to your shop and gets a haircut. The owner of the store now has a debt marked to you.
We now have a debt cycle.... you owe me, I owe the grocer and the grocer owes you. Ripple seeks out and destroys this circular debt, thus resetting the system to zero. In a Ripple network, the ideal state of an account is empty: you owe nothing and nobody owes you. The system attempts to trend towards that state.
If Ryan were to read this description he would undoubtably say it was inaccurate, as Ripples design is much more focussed on finding paths of debt.... for instance, if I don't know you why should I merely accept that you owe me $50 for mowing your lawn, when I might not ever get that back? So Ripple attempts to find social connections between people and locate a path of credit lines that can make the transaction possible, eg, maybe you know Bob and I also know Bob, Bob trusts you and I trust Bob thus Bob is willing to automatically back your debt.
As noted by the AC, that's not quite correct. Many Google services have their own cookies. Stealing one of them isn't necessarily enough to access the other services. For instance stealing a cookie that wasn't over HTTPS won't let you change your Google password, not will it let you access Gmail. So not quite as bad as it seems.
There's no evidence the women are being run by the CIA or whatever. However, there's also no evidence their allegations are true - if there was Assange would not have been told there was no case to answer and allowed to leave the country.
Given the absolute vacuum of evidence in this case, people tend to rely on rules of thumb, estimates of probability and "common sense" judgements to guide them. Common sense says that if you're raped you don't hang out with the guy the next day and throw parties. Probability says it's remarkable that after 39 years of not being a rapist, suddenly within weeks of becoming public enemy number one for political reasons he has not one but two women going after him. And rules of thumb.... if you want to take a guy down, what accusation do you choose? Rape has the advantage that many people presume guilty until.... well until never, really.
Conspiracy? Maybe so, maybe no. Of course it doesn't matter how weak the accusation is if the point is simply to haul him back to Sweden, so he can be extradited to the states - where he will surely be killed either by the state or through a "oops, we failed to stop a vigilate, our bad" type incident.
Unfortunately if there's one thing the leaked cables have shown, it's that European politicians are easily pressured by the US Government to lie to their own people and ignore their own laws. That is why Assange is fighting - in theory, Swedens extradition rules are actually stronger than the UKs. In practice governments will clearly do anything they can to screw him.
What makes you think they'll have a day in court? No prosecutor in their right mind would take this to trial because it boils down to her word against his. She says "he pinned me down", he denies it = no case.
That's why everyone is up in arms about this. The case is incredibly, unbelievably flimsy. It's so incredibly stupid that the weaknesses of the case are the strongest evidence it's not actually a political event. Even if you accept that the things he's accused of are crimes, the chances of proving them beyond reasonable doubt are zero. It's a waste of the courts time.
Well, bear in mind nothing at top secret or above has leaked. So it's hard to know if there's more going on, but it's very likely.
As to the rest, well, the USSR collapsed twenty years ago. What they thought is hardly relevant these days. I don't recall Putin constantly lecturing countries on how they should run themselves.
Not necessarily. I'm currently reading "The authorized history of MI5". It was written by a highly respected historian who was given full access to the files of the British internal intelligence services. It was vetted but the author claims to have been given virtually unrestricted access to the source data. Now it's possible he is lying, but I doubt it. His professional reputation is worth a lot more to him than book sales (it's way too huge and dry to be the next Harry Potter).
I have only got up to about the 1980s (it runs from 1900 up to the present day), but there have been no incidents where MI5 was caught doing anything like what the CIA have done. Lots of embarrassing stories, naturally the highly placed KGB moles were heavily covered, but nothing like kidnapping or torture at all. If such stories have been excised, they've been done in a way that there are no obvious gaps or inconsistencies in an extremely detailed history - so they can't have played a major part.
You can never really know for sure, but claims MI5 and MI6 were implicated in torture have been made, investigated and never stuck. If MI5 was routinely using these strategies, it'd have been very hard to hide it in such a gigantic history (over 1000 pages!). So I strongly suspect there is nothing being hidden.
Actually I have read many of the cables. But let's set the ad hominem attacks aside. You're mixing up people and governments, which is a fatal mistake for a few reasons.
Firstly, I don't work for the government. In theory at least, the government works for me. I pay their taxes and vote them in to do a job. That gives me a right to know what they are doing but nothing gives them (or you) the same right in return. If the government employed me, then of course they would know what I earned, what my job performance was and the contents of my (work) mailbox. Absolutely guaranteed if I was accused of doing something bad they would go take a look at that governmental mailbox - as the contents would arguably be theirs.
Secondly, things that are worth leaking tend to be things which show duplicity. If an organization flat out admits it's evil, there's not much point leaking evidence that it is. Some people have brought up the issue of why are there no Russian cable leaks? Well, when your intelligence agencies sign their assassinations with polonium, there isn't a whole lot of point risking your life to leak a document saying "Yes, Russian intelligence killed him". If nothing happened before nothing will happen now, and besides, anyone with access to that information knows full well what kind of organization they work for. There are no illusions to be broken.
Finally, your argument that I am unrealistic about leaks because I haven't published details of my finances is stupid. This information has no significance at all. I never heard of anyone deliberately leaking payroll of some random company and I'm pretty sure Wikileaks would ignore it if they did. To prove your point, here is the information you requested - I earn a six figure salary, my recent expenditures are dominated by a trip to the USA, my last job performance review was great - thanks for asking - but I was told I need to be a bit less confrontational;) And finally anything interesting in my Gmail account can be found in public mailing list archives, the rest is mostly autospam and mails from friends and relatives.
See? Nobody gives a crap. Now stop wasting time and go read some more cables.
Also its nice to see the USA is doing pretty much what it claims to be doing.
Hmm, I can't agree. The USA claims to be spreading democracy and freedom throughout the world. Its presidents and senior politicians promote this idea as often as regular people say hello.
But in practice it's doing all kinds of sleazy undemocratic shit. Pressuring governments to break their own laws and lie to their own people. Working to avoid the arrest of CIA agents guilty of deadly incompetence. Screwing with the IPCC for no better reason than "we don't like Iran, he is Iranian, therefore we don't like him".
The reason this is causing saturation coverage throughout the world is that every single day there is a new story of how the USA preaches one thing and does the exact opposite. Not news to people who follow politics and care about this, but the cables are very easy to read, very direct and very plentiful evidence of this. I've read some people wondering why Russian cables haven't leaked. Maybe it's because Russia doesn't claim to be some paragon of moral superiority to the world so its government employees don't have any illusions to be shattered.
It's not technically Assange that decides what leaks. It's people with access to the data who leak. Some people are painting this as an attack on diplomacy itself, but it's not and can never be. Assange doesn't have magical powers to shut down diplomatic dialogue as he is merely the messenger, not the message.
The story of the cables is very simple. A young, idealistic and (yes) rather naive young private who had been told his entire life that the USA was the light and the good in the world joined the military. There, he found he had access to everything. What he discovered is story after story of abuse of power shielded by secrecy, abuses that disgusted him. We know this because he said so himself. He decided to do something about it, and did.
If all there'd been in this archive was an occasional rude diplomat do you really think it would have leaked at all? Probably not. Manning didn't seem like an unhinged anarchist to me. He seemed like somebody angry about what he read, somebody who correctly thought others would agree.
The easiest way to protect yourself from Wikileaks is to ensure your organization doesn't do anything worth leaking. Simple as that.
Really? So why is "raw intelligence" being sent around the globe and made available en-masse to over 3 million people? No matter which way you slice it, the DoD ends up looking incompetent.
Yes this whole "people should govern themselves" business can be rather messy and complicated, can't it. Benign (?) dictatorship does tend to result in stability.... along with a lot of other less desirable things.
You realize that's what your "pax americana" argument boils down to, right?
You're assuming that the benevolent dictator model results in better security. But we have that in the desktop/laptop OS space in which Microsoft and Apple duke it out between them. Guess what - Apples track record of patching security flaws is absolutely atrocious. They have a reputation for leaving bugs unpatched for months. Microsoft do a lot better these days, but even then, there are so many exploits, and enough users who don't get the online updates, that the OS is a piece of Swiss cheese.
Today, HTC/Motorola/Samsung etc aren't that great about distributing updates quickly. But they're new to this game, much newer than Apple or Microsoft are. There's nothing to say that in future, HTC won't be the fastest gun in town when it comes to security..... if they begin to see it as a competitive advantage rather than a hidden cost.
Who knows? Maybe it was in fact reported as abusive. Or maybe Facebook are indeed trying to control the conversation and I'm wrong.
My point is people routinely report all kinds of things as spam. It's not uncommon for services to become identified as spammy even though the people running them don't think they're spammers. People hit "report spam" on anything they don't want, basically, especially if they can't figure out a way to get rid of it easily. For instance legit bulk mailers that have a poor unsubscribe implementation (eg requires you to sign in) sometimes develop bad reputations.
Anti-spam is complicated and I've ridden shotgun on more than one "zomg [big company] is marking [random thing] as spam it must be a conspiracy" type stories. Censorship is never the actual cause. Perhaps Facebook is the exception, but I doubt it.
The Xbox 360 encrypts the contents of RAM and hides the overhead behind the memory access latencies. I really doubt encrypting the Kinect data stream would have added much overhead. It might have added cost though, and why bother? As pointed out, there isn't a whole lot you can do except "build cool stuff" with this data. Given the completely crazy security system the core Xbox has, they clearly are telling the truth.
I really doubt this is to do with a "personal beef" against anything.
The first thing to realize is that anti-spam systems tend to look only at the domain name parts of links (there are a few exceptions). The reason is that URL paths are "free" whereas domain names are not.
If the pirate bay is being rejected as spammy, then the most likely explanation by far is not some Facebook corporate policy against piracy but that it's obtained a bad reputation, or possibly started showing up in an external urldomain blacklist like SURBL.
Why might Pirate Bay links appear in spam? I can think of a few reasons. One is that torrent sites are a great way to spread viruses. A lot of people who would never download and run a fake antivirus product or a free smilies package will happily download and run EXEs from torrent sites. There is an entire industry of people uploading viruses to these sites, in the past I've even read handy how-to guides that show you how to do this without any technical knowledge at all. They take you through obtaining a pay-per-install EXE from an affiliate operation, binding it to some warez, testing it against popular AV engines to ensure a miss, avoiding blocks by the torrent sites, etc. It's just a very effective way to infect people.
Of course once you have your virus onto a torrent site, how do you drive traffic? Well... spam! Make your virus steal a Facebook session and spam friends with a link to the latest hot video game or movie (which naturally needs a codec install before playing), and you just built a self propagating botnet.
This sort of thing is common and I've seen it before in other large anti-spam operations. The alternative explanations fail basic reality checks.... Facebook is not, as far as anyone is aware, launching or preparing to launch an iTunes competitor and it's questionable whether they'd accept link blocking as part of such a deal anyway.
Actually, I think they intended Facebook to become an IMAP server. You can already set up forwarding from Gmail to your @facebook.com address once it's up and running.
Hmm. Under 100msec you say? Are you sure you have 7GB of data? To meet the deadlines you seem to believe are normal, your hard disk would need to do a max of maybe 5 seeks (some of the remaining time is needed for rotational delays and transfer/cpu). That's pretty impressive. I don't think you could reliably achieve that unless your system was not doing anything else at all and its filesystem was not even slightly fragmented. In other words, I don't think that's at all representative of most peoples computers. Maybe if you have the whole thing on flash storage it could be believable, but again - not representative.
It's pretty sad you believe that. For one, if you'd like a phone that lets you reflash the OS you are welcome to buy a Nexus One direct from Google. The nature of open source code means that the phones made entirely by HTC may do things you disagree with. But that's openness for you. Sometimes people will do things you disagree with. It would be fairly pointless to have an open source OS if Google had veto power over every way in which it was used.
I don't know what the potshot at management is about. I've worked here for over four years and have also had plenty of opportunity to observe Google management up close. If they were really as cynical as you believe, they wouldn't have ensured Android was open source and the Nexus One was reflashable out of the box would they? This is something that, what, 0.01% of people purchasing phones probably base a purchasing decision on. If that. Yet here we are, with a phone of highly competitive quality that is also open to operating system developers. I haven't seen any other organization produce such a device, have you?
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Not important for the American people ... but what about everyone else? BTW CNN found that slightly less than half of all Brits think the rape thing is a holding charge whilst the US secretly indicts Assange ....
The first Mass Effect was the business, story wise. Deeply thought out, self consistent world, interesting characters, a shadowy nemesis and a basically solid beginning, middle and end. Everything Hollywood needs to make a great movie.
But Mass Effect 2, though technically speaking a better game, definitely fared worse on the plot. The plot in ME2 suffered heavily from being wrapped around a fairly trivial design doc and didn't really have any beginning as such. Basically: hero dies, is rescued by an enigmatic terrorist leader with access to incredible resources, who tells him to recruit the most badass characters in the galaxy to fight an alien menace. 90% of the game involves this "recruitment". It's a race against the clock but nobody demonstrates any sense of urgency at all. There's never a "well, he'll do, let's get going!" to be heard. Once you have some arbitrary number of characters you jump through a wormhole, fight some baddies and blow up a space station. Fin.
There's some other stuff in there that advances the plot of the trilogy as a whole, but it's pretty weak.
Basically, if the author of TFA is hoping that Mass Effect will become a successful video game/movie crossover franchise, he'd better hope they only try and do it to the first game.
Bitcoins can be split up into much smaller pieces. A "coin" is a fairly arbitrary sized unit of value. So, the limited number of coins really isn't a big deal.
BitCoin is a little complicated to understand the internals of. See the discussion of it further up the thread for what it's doing and why it needs to burn so much CPU time. The thing to understand is that BitCoin eliminates the need for banks to mediate currency transactions on the internet (or at all), and it does so by forming a public, never ending story of money flows in the economy. That story (called the block chain) is extended by having public nodes perform large computations, the fact that coins are generated as a side effect of this process is basically a reward for donating CPU time to the system.
That's not quite correct. The proof of work must continue for as long as BitCoins is in use. There is another proof of work that's used for "mining" coins and eventually that will stop, but for transactions to take place securely there must be lots of CPU power being burned - enough combined power to prevent a big botnet herder taking over the network.
BitCoin is conceptually simple to use, not much different to what we do today. The headache inducing part is the implementation :-)
But if you want to spend some BitCoins it's actually not that hard. You just fire up the software, select who you want to send coins to (eg from the programs built in address book), how much you want to send and hit go. If the receivers P2P node is online at the time you can also include a message. If it's not, you can still send the money but without a message.
And that's it. That's all it takes. Receiving coins is likewise easy - you just fire up the software, let it synchronize with the network and now you have the coins that were sent to you.
There is one (big) catch. By the very definition of what BitCoin is, all transactions are public. It seems the latest versions attempt to obfuscate the size of the transactions, and there is a discussion in the linked page of how to go further - but nonetheless, the fact that an address you control transacted with somebody is a matter of public record. This is very different to today, where financial transactions are assumed to be secret unless otherwise published.
Ripple is much harder to understand and that's why I doubt it'll ever go anywhere. It's an excellent intellectual exercise but in a series of debates with Ryan I had back in 2008 (?) he admitted that a lot of the justifications for Ripple were post-hoc, and the fractional reserve did not have many of the flaws often cited.
You are thinking of a project called "Ripple" by Ryan Fugger. It is another P2P currency system, except not quite the same as BitCoin. I looked into some of these alternative currency systems some time back - they tend to be academically interesting but have weak justifications.
BitCoin is a variant of a system called HashCash. The basic insight behind hash based coins are that they are portable proofs of work, and thus easily checkable as being scarce. Any attempt to create electronic coins needs scarcity so that's a useful property.
Briefly, to create a hash coin you find some data that when run through SHA1 or whatever results in a hash with some easily checkable property. BitCoin uses "N leading digits are all zeros" where N varies over time. The nice thing about this is that the only way to find this data is brute force, so finding them represents real "work" in the sense of burned electricity and CPU time costs. It might seem arbitrary but it's really no less stupid than digging shiny metal out of the ground then putting it in a central bank.
Hash coins are not, by themselves, enough to create an electronic currency. They distribute and decentralize the minting process, but obviously to "spend" such a coin you need to transfer it in such a way that you lose it and the other person now has it. Some systems use a centralized registry to do this. I forget the name but one researcher was using a trusted computing/TPM style approach to that, so the registry could prove its trustworthyness to the participants remotely.
BitCoin attempts to decentralize the movement of coins as well via some clever cryptographic tricks. Essentially, to transfer a coin from A to B, the transaction is broadcast and incorporated into a constantly moving proof of work chain. The chain becomes a difficult to forge or tamper with public record of all transactions that have occurred.
So BitCoin can be seen as fundamentally the same idea as metal coins, but transferred into the digital realm and entirely decentralized - no banks required.
Ripple is a very different beast. Ripple networks are also P2P and decentralized but that's where the similarities end. In Ripple, if I do work for you, say I mow your lawn, the fact that you owe me a debt is marked in our Ripple accounts ... and that's it. Now let's say I go to the grocery store and want to buy some food. My debt to the grocery store is recorded in our accounts. I can run up as much debt to the grocery store as they will allow. Finally, the owner of the grocery store goes to your shop and gets a haircut. The owner of the store now has a debt marked to you.
We now have a debt cycle .... you owe me, I owe the grocer and the grocer owes you. Ripple seeks out and destroys this circular debt, thus resetting the system to zero. In a Ripple network, the ideal state of an account is empty: you owe nothing and nobody owes you. The system attempts to trend towards that state.
If Ryan were to read this description he would undoubtably say it was inaccurate, as Ripples design is much more focussed on finding paths of debt.... for instance, if I don't know you why should I merely accept that you owe me $50 for mowing your lawn, when I might not ever get that back? So Ripple attempts to find social connections between people and locate a path of credit lines that can make the transaction possible, eg, maybe you know Bob and I also know Bob, Bob trusts you and I trust Bob thus Bob is willing to automatically back your debt.
As noted by the AC, that's not quite correct. Many Google services have their own cookies. Stealing one of them isn't necessarily enough to access the other services. For instance stealing a cookie that wasn't over HTTPS won't let you change your Google password, not will it let you access Gmail. So not quite as bad as it seems.
There's no evidence the women are being run by the CIA or whatever. However, there's also no evidence their allegations are true - if there was Assange would not have been told there was no case to answer and allowed to leave the country.
Given the absolute vacuum of evidence in this case, people tend to rely on rules of thumb, estimates of probability and "common sense" judgements to guide them. Common sense says that if you're raped you don't hang out with the guy the next day and throw parties. Probability says it's remarkable that after 39 years of not being a rapist, suddenly within weeks of becoming public enemy number one for political reasons he has not one but two women going after him. And rules of thumb .... if you want to take a guy down, what accusation do you choose? Rape has the advantage that many people presume guilty until .... well until never, really.
Conspiracy? Maybe so, maybe no. Of course it doesn't matter how weak the accusation is if the point is simply to haul him back to Sweden, so he can be extradited to the states - where he will surely be killed either by the state or through a "oops, we failed to stop a vigilate, our bad" type incident.
Unfortunately if there's one thing the leaked cables have shown, it's that European politicians are easily pressured by the US Government to lie to their own people and ignore their own laws. That is why Assange is fighting - in theory, Swedens extradition rules are actually stronger than the UKs. In practice governments will clearly do anything they can to screw him.
What makes you think they'll have a day in court? No prosecutor in their right mind would take this to trial because it boils down to her word against his. She says "he pinned me down", he denies it = no case.
That's why everyone is up in arms about this. The case is incredibly, unbelievably flimsy. It's so incredibly stupid that the weaknesses of the case are the strongest evidence it's not actually a political event. Even if you accept that the things he's accused of are crimes, the chances of proving them beyond reasonable doubt are zero. It's a waste of the courts time.
Well, bear in mind nothing at top secret or above has leaked. So it's hard to know if there's more going on, but it's very likely.
As to the rest, well, the USSR collapsed twenty years ago. What they thought is hardly relevant these days. I don't recall Putin constantly lecturing countries on how they should run themselves.
Not necessarily. I'm currently reading "The authorized history of MI5". It was written by a highly respected historian who was given full access to the files of the British internal intelligence services. It was vetted but the author claims to have been given virtually unrestricted access to the source data. Now it's possible he is lying, but I doubt it. His professional reputation is worth a lot more to him than book sales (it's way too huge and dry to be the next Harry Potter).
I have only got up to about the 1980s (it runs from 1900 up to the present day), but there have been no incidents where MI5 was caught doing anything like what the CIA have done. Lots of embarrassing stories, naturally the highly placed KGB moles were heavily covered, but nothing like kidnapping or torture at all. If such stories have been excised, they've been done in a way that there are no obvious gaps or inconsistencies in an extremely detailed history - so they can't have played a major part.
You can never really know for sure, but claims MI5 and MI6 were implicated in torture have been made, investigated and never stuck. If MI5 was routinely using these strategies, it'd have been very hard to hide it in such a gigantic history (over 1000 pages!). So I strongly suspect there is nothing being hidden.
Actually I have read many of the cables. But let's set the ad hominem attacks aside. You're mixing up people and governments, which is a fatal mistake for a few reasons.
Firstly, I don't work for the government. In theory at least, the government works for me. I pay their taxes and vote them in to do a job. That gives me a right to know what they are doing but nothing gives them (or you) the same right in return. If the government employed me, then of course they would know what I earned, what my job performance was and the contents of my (work) mailbox. Absolutely guaranteed if I was accused of doing something bad they would go take a look at that governmental mailbox - as the contents would arguably be theirs.
Secondly, things that are worth leaking tend to be things which show duplicity. If an organization flat out admits it's evil, there's not much point leaking evidence that it is. Some people have brought up the issue of why are there no Russian cable leaks? Well, when your intelligence agencies sign their assassinations with polonium, there isn't a whole lot of point risking your life to leak a document saying "Yes, Russian intelligence killed him". If nothing happened before nothing will happen now, and besides, anyone with access to that information knows full well what kind of organization they work for. There are no illusions to be broken.
Finally, your argument that I am unrealistic about leaks because I haven't published details of my finances is stupid. This information has no significance at all. I never heard of anyone deliberately leaking payroll of some random company and I'm pretty sure Wikileaks would ignore it if they did. To prove your point, here is the information you requested - I earn a six figure salary, my recent expenditures are dominated by a trip to the USA, my last job performance review was great - thanks for asking - but I was told I need to be a bit less confrontational ;) And finally anything interesting in my Gmail account can be found in public mailing list archives, the rest is mostly autospam and mails from friends and relatives.
See? Nobody gives a crap. Now stop wasting time and go read some more cables.
Hmm, I can't agree. The USA claims to be spreading democracy and freedom throughout the world. Its presidents and senior politicians promote this idea as often as regular people say hello.
But in practice it's doing all kinds of sleazy undemocratic shit. Pressuring governments to break their own laws and lie to their own people. Working to avoid the arrest of CIA agents guilty of deadly incompetence. Screwing with the IPCC for no better reason than "we don't like Iran, he is Iranian, therefore we don't like him".
The reason this is causing saturation coverage throughout the world is that every single day there is a new story of how the USA preaches one thing and does the exact opposite. Not news to people who follow politics and care about this, but the cables are very easy to read, very direct and very plentiful evidence of this. I've read some people wondering why Russian cables haven't leaked. Maybe it's because Russia doesn't claim to be some paragon of moral superiority to the world so its government employees don't have any illusions to be shattered.
It's not technically Assange that decides what leaks. It's people with access to the data who leak. Some people are painting this as an attack on diplomacy itself, but it's not and can never be. Assange doesn't have magical powers to shut down diplomatic dialogue as he is merely the messenger, not the message.
The story of the cables is very simple. A young, idealistic and (yes) rather naive young private who had been told his entire life that the USA was the light and the good in the world joined the military. There, he found he had access to everything. What he discovered is story after story of abuse of power shielded by secrecy, abuses that disgusted him. We know this because he said so himself. He decided to do something about it, and did.
If all there'd been in this archive was an occasional rude diplomat do you really think it would have leaked at all? Probably not. Manning didn't seem like an unhinged anarchist to me. He seemed like somebody angry about what he read, somebody who correctly thought others would agree.
The easiest way to protect yourself from Wikileaks is to ensure your organization doesn't do anything worth leaking. Simple as that.
Info about Gingerbread
Really? So why is "raw intelligence" being sent around the globe and made available en-masse to over 3 million people? No matter which way you slice it, the DoD ends up looking incompetent.
Yes this whole "people should govern themselves" business can be rather messy and complicated, can't it. Benign (?) dictatorship does tend to result in stability .... along with a lot of other less desirable things.
You realize that's what your "pax americana" argument boils down to, right?
You're assuming that the benevolent dictator model results in better security. But we have that in the desktop/laptop OS space in which Microsoft and Apple duke it out between them. Guess what - Apples track record of patching security flaws is absolutely atrocious. They have a reputation for leaving bugs unpatched for months. Microsoft do a lot better these days, but even then, there are so many exploits, and enough users who don't get the online updates, that the OS is a piece of Swiss cheese.
Today, HTC/Motorola/Samsung etc aren't that great about distributing updates quickly. But they're new to this game, much newer than Apple or Microsoft are. There's nothing to say that in future, HTC won't be the fastest gun in town when it comes to security ..... if they begin to see it as a competitive advantage rather than a hidden cost.
Who knows? Maybe it was in fact reported as abusive. Or maybe Facebook are indeed trying to control the conversation and I'm wrong.
My point is people routinely report all kinds of things as spam. It's not uncommon for services to become identified as spammy even though the people running them don't think they're spammers. People hit "report spam" on anything they don't want, basically, especially if they can't figure out a way to get rid of it easily. For instance legit bulk mailers that have a poor unsubscribe implementation (eg requires you to sign in) sometimes develop bad reputations.
Anti-spam is complicated and I've ridden shotgun on more than one "zomg [big company] is marking [random thing] as spam it must be a conspiracy" type stories. Censorship is never the actual cause. Perhaps Facebook is the exception, but I doubt it.
The Xbox 360 encrypts the contents of RAM and hides the overhead behind the memory access latencies. I really doubt encrypting the Kinect data stream would have added much overhead. It might have added cost though, and why bother? As pointed out, there isn't a whole lot you can do except "build cool stuff" with this data. Given the completely crazy security system the core Xbox has, they clearly are telling the truth.
I really doubt this is to do with a "personal beef" against anything.
The first thing to realize is that anti-spam systems tend to look only at the domain name parts of links (there are a few exceptions). The reason is that URL paths are "free" whereas domain names are not.
If the pirate bay is being rejected as spammy, then the most likely explanation by far is not some Facebook corporate policy against piracy but that it's obtained a bad reputation, or possibly started showing up in an external urldomain blacklist like SURBL.
Why might Pirate Bay links appear in spam? I can think of a few reasons. One is that torrent sites are a great way to spread viruses. A lot of people who would never download and run a fake antivirus product or a free smilies package will happily download and run EXEs from torrent sites. There is an entire industry of people uploading viruses to these sites, in the past I've even read handy how-to guides that show you how to do this without any technical knowledge at all. They take you through obtaining a pay-per-install EXE from an affiliate operation, binding it to some warez, testing it against popular AV engines to ensure a miss, avoiding blocks by the torrent sites, etc. It's just a very effective way to infect people.
Of course once you have your virus onto a torrent site, how do you drive traffic? Well ... spam! Make your virus steal a Facebook session and spam friends with a link to the latest hot video game or movie (which naturally needs a codec install before playing), and you just built a self propagating botnet.
This sort of thing is common and I've seen it before in other large anti-spam operations. The alternative explanations fail basic reality checks .... Facebook is not, as far as anyone is aware, launching or preparing to launch an iTunes competitor and it's questionable whether they'd accept link blocking as part of such a deal anyway.
Actually, I think they intended Facebook to become an IMAP server. You can already set up forwarding from Gmail to your @facebook.com address once it's up and running.
Hmm. Under 100msec you say? Are you sure you have 7GB of data? To meet the deadlines you seem to believe are normal, your hard disk would need to do a max of maybe 5 seeks (some of the remaining time is needed for rotational delays and transfer/cpu). That's pretty impressive. I don't think you could reliably achieve that unless your system was not doing anything else at all and its filesystem was not even slightly fragmented. In other words, I don't think that's at all representative of most peoples computers. Maybe if you have the whole thing on flash storage it could be believable, but again - not representative.
It's pretty sad you believe that. For one, if you'd like a phone that lets you reflash the OS you are welcome to buy a Nexus One direct from Google. The nature of open source code means that the phones made entirely by HTC may do things you disagree with. But that's openness for you. Sometimes people will do things you disagree with. It would be fairly pointless to have an open source OS if Google had veto power over every way in which it was used.
I don't know what the potshot at management is about. I've worked here for over four years and have also had plenty of opportunity to observe Google management up close. If they were really as cynical as you believe, they wouldn't have ensured Android was open source and the Nexus One was reflashable out of the box would they? This is something that, what, 0.01% of people purchasing phones probably base a purchasing decision on. If that. Yet here we are, with a phone of highly competitive quality that is also open to operating system developers. I haven't seen any other organization produce such a device, have you?