For the record, I am very capable of both reading the intent and being a jackass grammar Nazi. I'm usually forgiving but if you are going to follow up superfluous with mind-numbing, when you mean the exact opposite, then you open the door to a "WTF?" response.
Maybe, however, you have a point. So in the spirit of mending my jackass ways I'm not even going to bring up what a mess this "sentence" is: "That sure as hell isn't "dull, boring, or tedious" except trying to respond to a troll... which certainly is."
I'm pretty sure mind-numbing is universally accepted to be dull,boring, or tedious. If you can cite a reference showing it being used otherwise I'd love to see it.
True, however trying to correct the terminology at this point will just confuse the issue even more for the vast majority of people. It's better in this case to use their term for it and show how intrusive this "metadata" they are collecting is than trying to argue that their idea of metadata is wrong.
I would add France, Taiwan, and Australia to that list as well but you pretty much nailed it. They all do it, usually to gain advantage during trade and treaty negotiations. The official "outrage" is mostly posturing. In the long run this is going to be a bit of a windfall for the EU countries since this is going to give them a good bit of leverage for a while.
International diplomacy is a sport all it's own, and it's a very rough sport.
It'd be much more difficult for the NSA to monitor all ham communications, especially once non-hams start using our frequencies!
Uh, you may want to look into the origin of the NSA. Signals intelligence is their bread and butter and they cut their teeth on intercepting radio communications. I would be surprised if they were not already monitoring all ham communications.
You do realize we would start with everyone outside our borders first, right? Can't leave a possible terrorist alive somewhere in the world. Think Wool.
Easy fix: next time you are in China get arrested and thrown into a Chinese jail. Forced emersion and I bet no one will be bugging you to practice their English.
"Presidential Alert" is just the renamed national activation. It's the core of the original purpose of the system (going back to the cold war). Since you bring it up, 9/11 did not trigger an EBS (at the time) alert because media coverage was immediate and widespread. Those alerts are really for something imminent and massive (think incoming nuclear missiles, alien invasion, or asteroid). Most likely you will live your entire life and never see one. It is NOT a vehicle for the president to send out political propaganda or campaign messages.
You realize that the "Presidential Alerts" are for things like imminent nuclear attack and other such "kiss your ass goodbye" national moments? There has never been a national activation of the alert system in the history of the system (going back to the EBS and before that the CONELRAD system. Ever. Not even during 9/11, the most significant event on US soil since Pearl Harbor.
So if you RTFA it might clear a bit of the confusion up. The issue has to do with carrier branded WiFi networks. If you buy a phone from, say, Vodaphone (mentioned in the article) there is a feature the carrier can enable on their iPhones that allows the phones to connect automatically to the carrier owned WiFi hotspots. I believe AT&T does the same thing. The phones have built in authentication, so the user never sees it. Most are using HTTPS STS but I guess Apple hasn't pushed that out yet. Vodaphone brings up a good point though: for their network, they use EAP-SIM auth, which is a two-way authentication protocol so it would not fall for a simple spoofing of the SSID.
True, but (assuming they are not storing the calls but just the metadata) they could use the metadata as part of a case to get a warrant that would allow them to intercept and open your snail mail, reseal it then send it back on it's way. It essentially puts you in the same process flow as intercepting calls or data traffic.
As for scanning the contents of the documents in an envelope as they pass through: let's hope not, but honestly would it be that far fetched?
Maybe we need to bring carrier pigeons back into the mainstream.
I think the problem, and I find this truly astonishing, is most people here don't seem to care! The only reason to keep the items recently leaked secret is to prevent public outcry over them. Same with classifying the numbers for these programs. Any terrorist smarter than a bag of rocks would have already assumed that we have the capabilities that we found out about last week. They are not that big of a stretch to imagine.
My fear is now that it's out and the majority of people either don't care or outright support it, we have reset their expectation of what people will go along with and, thus, what they can get away with in secret.
Honestly, do we really think it's safe to assume the NSA couldn't break SSL even if they don't have access to the private key from the CA? I mean we know, from various cases, about where the limits of domestic law enforcement capabilities are, but I think it's a pretty safe bet the NSA is way out in front of them, and probably doesn't share with them since they a) don't care about domestic law enforcement (for now) and b) don't want anyone else to figure out where their limits are. These guys live cryptography and cryptoanalysis. We have no way of knowing just how far out ahead they actually are. Personally, I'd just assume that as far as the NSA is concerned SSL is just as bad as plain text.
"I think that the regular postal mail is still protected from the NSA. "
Why would you think that? The contents of the mail might be, but there is no reason the metadata (to/from addresses, date, post office locations, size, weight, etc) could not be harvested right now. The post office already has the ability to do this with their sorting equipment. Diverting a copy of all that data off the the NSA would not be difficult at all.
The early days it didn't need to be hacked, so many companies left the default SYSTEM and/or FIELD account passwords in place you didn't need to waste time trying to hack in.
Slashdot Mirror
For the record, I am very capable of both reading the intent and being a jackass grammar Nazi. I'm usually forgiving but if you are going to follow up superfluous with mind-numbing, when you mean the exact opposite, then you open the door to a "WTF?" response.
Maybe, however, you have a point. So in the spirit of mending my jackass ways I'm not even going to bring up what a mess this "sentence" is: "That sure as hell isn't "dull, boring, or tedious" except trying to respond to a troll... which certainly is."
I'm pretty sure mind-numbing is universally accepted to be dull,boring, or tedious. If you can cite a reference showing it being used otherwise I'd love to see it.
For more immediate visual gratification appreciated by a wider audience, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter provides wonderfully detailed images of Phobos.
That was the instrument that caught this mind-numbing image of the Phoenix lander as it was descending on its parachute. Words are really quite superfluous.
That's a great image, I wouldn't consider it mind-numbing at all.
True, however trying to correct the terminology at this point will just confuse the issue even more for the vast majority of people. It's better in this case to use their term for it and show how intrusive this "metadata" they are collecting is than trying to argue that their idea of metadata is wrong.
Visual Studio Express is the same great product that the full version of Visual Studio is, but is great for beginners.
This sounds great until you read the license agreement where it says that it is illegal to use Visual Studio Express for commercial purposes..
This is not true. There is no restriction for using VS Express editions for commercial development.
I would add France, Taiwan, and Australia to that list as well but you pretty much nailed it. They all do it, usually to gain advantage during trade and treaty negotiations. The official "outrage" is mostly posturing. In the long run this is going to be a bit of a windfall for the EU countries since this is going to give them a good bit of leverage for a while.
International diplomacy is a sport all it's own, and it's a very rough sport.
Why has “get off my lawn” become code for cranky senior citizen?
About the moment you clicked submit on that post.
Would you like a free application for membership to AARP?
I'm confused, is Google it's own race now?
That would be a great idea if these jackholes didn't use caller ID spoofing to rotate the numbers they call from.
It'd be much more difficult for the NSA to monitor all ham communications, especially once non-hams start using our frequencies!
Uh, you may want to look into the origin of the NSA. Signals intelligence is their bread and butter and they cut their teeth on intercepting radio communications. I would be surprised if they were not already monitoring all ham communications.
You do realize we would start with everyone outside our borders first, right? Can't leave a possible terrorist alive somewhere in the world. Think Wool.
Perhaps they might be buggering you to practice their Greek, though...
FTFY.
FTFYB
Easy fix: next time you are in China get arrested and thrown into a Chinese jail. Forced emersion and I bet no one will be bugging you to practice their English.
"Presidential Alert" is just the renamed national activation. It's the core of the original purpose of the system (going back to the cold war). Since you bring it up, 9/11 did not trigger an EBS (at the time) alert because media coverage was immediate and widespread. Those alerts are really for something imminent and massive (think incoming nuclear missiles, alien invasion, or asteroid). Most likely you will live your entire life and never see one. It is NOT a vehicle for the president to send out political propaganda or campaign messages.
You realize that the "Presidential Alerts" are for things like imminent nuclear attack and other such "kiss your ass goodbye" national moments? There has never been a national activation of the alert system in the history of the system (going back to the EBS and before that the CONELRAD system. Ever. Not even during 9/11, the most significant event on US soil since Pearl Harbor.
You mean the presidential alerts that have never been used in the 50 plus year history if the eas/ebs?
So they can start collecting brain metadata?
Well, I'll do my part and die sometime between now and then, so put me down for -1.
So if you RTFA it might clear a bit of the confusion up. The issue has to do with carrier branded WiFi networks. If you buy a phone from, say, Vodaphone (mentioned in the article) there is a feature the carrier can enable on their iPhones that allows the phones to connect automatically to the carrier owned WiFi hotspots. I believe AT&T does the same thing. The phones have built in authentication, so the user never sees it. Most are using HTTPS STS but I guess Apple hasn't pushed that out yet. Vodaphone brings up a good point though: for their network, they use EAP-SIM auth, which is a two-way authentication protocol so it would not fall for a simple spoofing of the SSID.
True, but (assuming they are not storing the calls but just the metadata) they could use the metadata as part of a case to get a warrant that would allow them to intercept and open your snail mail, reseal it then send it back on it's way. It essentially puts you in the same process flow as intercepting calls or data traffic.
As for scanning the contents of the documents in an envelope as they pass through: let's hope not, but honestly would it be that far fetched?
Maybe we need to bring carrier pigeons back into the mainstream.
I think the problem, and I find this truly astonishing, is most people here don't seem to care! The only reason to keep the items recently leaked secret is to prevent public outcry over them. Same with classifying the numbers for these programs. Any terrorist smarter than a bag of rocks would have already assumed that we have the capabilities that we found out about last week. They are not that big of a stretch to imagine.
My fear is now that it's out and the majority of people either don't care or outright support it, we have reset their expectation of what people will go along with and, thus, what they can get away with in secret.
Honestly, do we really think it's safe to assume the NSA couldn't break SSL even if they don't have access to the private key from the CA? I mean we know, from various cases, about where the limits of domestic law enforcement capabilities are, but I think it's a pretty safe bet the NSA is way out in front of them, and probably doesn't share with them since they a) don't care about domestic law enforcement (for now) and b) don't want anyone else to figure out where their limits are. These guys live cryptography and cryptoanalysis. We have no way of knowing just how far out ahead they actually are. Personally, I'd just assume that as far as the NSA is concerned SSL is just as bad as plain text.
"I think that the regular postal mail is still protected from the NSA. "
Why would you think that? The contents of the mail might be, but there is no reason the metadata (to/from addresses, date, post office locations, size, weight, etc) could not be harvested right now. The post office already has the ability to do this with their sorting equipment. Diverting a copy of all that data off the the NSA would not be difficult at all.
The early days it didn't need to be hacked, so many companies left the default SYSTEM and/or FIELD account passwords in place you didn't need to waste time trying to hack in.
Now my inner voice when reading slashdot posts is Sheldon.