Recent events have shown that while Google may not be worse than other companies in the industry, they're certainly not better.
Agreed. But if anyone really cares about the data that Google collects on them, there are quite a few steps that can be taken to limit or eliminate them.
Or, of course, there is the option to simply not use any of Google's services.
Wow, I wonder if Google has ALREADY given their Buddies over at the NSA a BACKDOOR so we get spied on even more?
Even more than what?
I had assumed that by now everybody was aware that all of the major search engines or other online services had backdoors for the NSA or other so-called "security" agencies. Similarly, everybody should now be aware that there is fuck-all you can do about it (other than complain, of course).
The only things you can protect yourself against (to a large extent) are commercial interests that (for now, at least) don't have access to the pipes available to governments.
From this point of view, it doesn't really matter much what browser you choose, whether it be chrome/chromium/iron or firefox or whatever. With judicious use of adblock and hosts blocking, you can disable the worst of the commercial intrusions, but you can never escape (without really good end-to-end encryption) surveillance from the people who monitor the wires or fibres.
The best we can do is escape their notice, either by being boring (pet cats/dogs etc) or by having EVERYBODY flood every single message with keywords like Jihad, Bomb, US Satan, Kill Infidel...
Excuse me for a moment, I seem to have some gentlemen with curly wires hanging from their ears banging on my front do
And, even it's use may be legal, part of a criminal investigation, and destruction of it may be obstruction of justice.
Legal, schmegal.
OK, I'm not a US citizen, and I have never fired a gun. But if I discovered a drone hovering over my property, I would feel completely entitled to knock it down by whatever means available, legal or not. The use of a drone might be legal, but that doesn't make it right. Just try asking a Pakistani.
And when did GitHub become a work of the US Government? Git was originally one of Linus Torvalds' projects (when he got fed up with Bitkeeper), and GitHub offers both free and private repositories.
...when you attempt to join a community you either abide by the rules and customs of that community or else you leave and go elsewhere.
Exactly. Sure, Linus may have a useful vocabulary of Anglo-Saxon terminology, but given how much communication he actually has to do in his line of work, it is probably more surprising how little he uses it.
On the comparatively few occasions when someone has done something outrageously wrong or stupid, he is quite forceful in his expression, but his arguments are invariably detailed in their reasoning. It's hardly his fault that the media latch on to these dialogues and blow them out of proportion.
Of course, Saddam Hussein didn't do himself any favors...
Let us not forget that the US helped prop up Hussein at a time when it was convenient.
Ditto, in fact, Osama bin Laden. It might be convenient for politicians to [persuade us to] forget the last 30 years of history, but there are a (vanishingly) few of us who aren't so ignorant.
These wars are nothing to do with religion, or terror, drugs or anything else.
These wars are waged (not fought, or even usually declared) because there is a mentality that says the US always has to be fighting "the last war", because they're "the good guys", and for some reason the "end of days" is in their hands. The US is incapable of functioning in the absence of a state of war.
Well, I have news: Lots of Muslims are good guys too. And Vietnamese. And Cambodians. And Russians. Even Americans (excluding American politicians generally).
And the other world powers that have multicultural prime ministers and presidents are... ? I feel like Obama's Peace Prize was more about transcending race and color finally among the world's super powers. France is super liberal but you'll never seen someone of Algerian descent as their prime minister.
I don't think Obama's peace prize had much to do with race or colour of skin; it was more a(n over-)reaction to the antics of his predecessor, who was arguably as anti-peace as is possible to be.
But given the way Obama on one hand claiming he's not that interested in pursuing a 29-year-old hacker, while on the other hand doing all he can to nail Snowden's hide to a fence, I'd say he should be handing that peace prize back.
Even when I'm specifically searching for Wikipedia articles, I usually find a Google search including "wiki" much quicker than Wikipedia's search. I guess it's a simple matter of how much money can be spent on great servers.
...his answer is "such a request would be unconstitutional". Yes, it would. It was unconstitutional for all the other search engines too. So what? That obviously doesn't matter.
I guess his point is that rather than tamely rolling over and saying "tickle me just there, please", he's saying that a request (let's be honest and call it a demand) that is *OBVIOUSLY* unconstitutional should be comparatively straightforward to contest if the NSA ever had the courage to bring an action to court, which would be a matter of public record.
Now, obviously if the spooks are serious about it, they could get an actual court order, which (while interesting from any number of perspectives) would change the state of play totally.
The last disk I decommissioned took 24 hours to shred
You're doing it wrong. I used to be a professional blacksmith in an earlier life, and I still have all my tools, which include a 1500lb pneumatic power-hammer. That mother can deliver 1.5 blows per second at full power, and if I stick any hard drive under that, it'll be thinner than a bee's dick in a couple of seconds.
However, I do like to take out those cool lanthanide magnets first...:-)
So you have no test and just let the virus spread?
You extend the analogy too far. In fact, the analogy in TFA, while interesting, has limited relevance. Yes, the danger and destructive effects of false positives are important in both medicine and national security, but where TFA mentions (almost in passing) that "The balance between privacy and security is always difficult", it sidesteps the simple fact that this surveillance is about neither. It is about control.
Let us not fool ourselves that the US (or any other) government is actually likely to prevent all (or any) acts of terrorism with these efforts. We have recent proof otherwise. Our various governments have simply seized on this supposed threat as a means to exert control - for no other reason than because they can.
Even today, Apple's motto is still "Think Different"
What they don't say is "Think different, just so long as you think the same as we do". If anything, Mac boxes are even less configurable to individual tastes than Windows machines.
Quite apart from the screen real-estate issues, it seems to me that using a touchscreen would be fairly strenuous for any serious amount of input. It's probably OK for something like Twitter, but for real input, you need a real keyboard.
Android is now reinventing Desktop environments, they are all the way up to Tiling window managers!
Next comes overlapping windows and then full compositing.
And I might find myself welcoming the day. In the meantime, my cheapie Asus laptop running Slackware/KDE4.10.5 works pretty well for most of what I do. However it pans out, I don't want to be stuck with a touchscreen keypad for my main interface. That's fine for a dinky thing like a phone, but for "real" work I want a proper keyboard.
IN some cases it almost looks like they tried to make it impossible to read the code.
Why "almost"? Inside every COBOL programmer, there's a frustrated Fortran programmer struggling to get out. (I have been both, for more years than I care to remember.)
COBOL obfuscation can be as much fun as similar work in C, ALGOL or ADA. You lose points for inefficient code, though. And, of course, one big drawback of COBOL is that it is usually impossible to generate self-modifying code.
Sure, COBOL has a GOTO. But if you're old enough to have programmed in COBOL (i.e. when you didn't get the projects involving Fortran and assembler), you should be old enough to know that Real Programmers aren't afraid to use GOTO.
Now excuse me a moment while I just go shoot this velociraptor...;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Recent events have shown that while Google may not be worse than other companies in the industry, they're certainly not better.
Agreed. But if anyone really cares about the data that Google collects on them, there are quite a few steps that can be taken to limit or eliminate them.
Or, of course, there is the option to simply not use any of Google's services.
Wow, I wonder if Google has ALREADY given their Buddies over at the NSA a BACKDOOR so we get spied on even more?
Even more than what?
I had assumed that by now everybody was aware that all of the major search engines or other online services had backdoors for the NSA or other so-called "security" agencies. Similarly, everybody should now be aware that there is fuck-all you can do about it (other than complain, of course).
The only things you can protect yourself against (to a large extent) are commercial interests that (for now, at least) don't have access to the pipes available to governments.
From this point of view, it doesn't really matter much what browser you choose, whether it be chrome/chromium/iron or firefox or whatever. With judicious use of adblock and hosts blocking, you can disable the worst of the commercial intrusions, but you can never escape (without really good end-to-end encryption) surveillance from the people who monitor the wires or fibres.
The best we can do is escape their notice, either by being boring (pet cats/dogs etc) or by having EVERYBODY flood every single message with keywords like Jihad, Bomb, US Satan, Kill Infidel...
Excuse me for a moment, I seem to have some gentlemen with curly wires hanging from their ears banging on my front do
NO CARRIER
Well, even a blind pig must find the occasional acorn... :-)
And, even it's use may be legal, part of a criminal investigation, and destruction of it may be obstruction of justice.
Legal, schmegal.
OK, I'm not a US citizen, and I have never fired a gun. But if I discovered a drone hovering over my property, I would feel completely entitled to knock it down by whatever means available, legal or not. The use of a drone might be legal, but that doesn't make it right. Just try asking a Pakistani.
If so, what affect would having our debt be at 0 for a day be?
I can tell you exactly what it would be like. We would see a massive spike in the US military budget, and half a dozen new wars started.
I don't know what you guys are talking about. If the Blackberry is good enough for your President, it should be good enough for you.
But I guess thanks to that nice Mr Snowden, he doesn't have as much to hide any more.
Try the .au Project Gutenberg site instead. Not under copyright here.
HTH
And when did GitHub become a work of the US Government? Git was originally one of Linus Torvalds' projects (when he got fed up with Bitkeeper), and GitHub offers both free and private repositories.
...when you attempt to join a community you either abide by the rules and customs of that community or else you leave and go elsewhere.
Exactly. Sure, Linus may have a useful vocabulary of Anglo-Saxon terminology, but given how much communication he actually has to do in his line of work, it is probably more surprising how little he uses it.
On the comparatively few occasions when someone has done something outrageously wrong or stupid, he is quite forceful in his expression, but his arguments are invariably detailed in their reasoning. It's hardly his fault that the media latch on to these dialogues and blow them out of proportion.
such as Hilary Clinton, because she was the First Lady (she is a lady, right?)
No, she's Bill Clinton's wife. :)
Of course, Saddam Hussein didn't do himself any favors...
Let us not forget that the US helped prop up Hussein at a time when it was convenient.
Ditto, in fact, Osama bin Laden. It might be convenient for politicians to [persuade us to] forget the last 30 years of history, but there are a (vanishingly) few of us who aren't so ignorant.
Well, the above probably stands to reason given that Alfred Nobel was an arms manufacturer and the inventor of dynamite.
These wars are nothing to do with religion, or terror, drugs or anything else.
These wars are waged (not fought, or even usually declared) because there is a mentality that says the US always has to be fighting "the last war", because they're "the good guys", and for some reason the "end of days" is in their hands. The US is incapable of functioning in the absence of a state of war.
Well, I have news: Lots of Muslims are good guys too. And Vietnamese. And Cambodians. And Russians. Even Americans (excluding American politicians generally).
And the other world powers that have multicultural prime ministers and presidents are ... ? I feel like Obama's Peace Prize was more about transcending race and color finally among the world's super powers. France is super liberal but you'll never seen someone of Algerian descent as their prime minister.
I don't think Obama's peace prize had much to do with race or colour of skin; it was more a(n over-)reaction to the antics of his predecessor, who was arguably as anti-peace as is possible to be.
But given the way Obama on one hand claiming he's not that interested in pursuing a 29-year-old hacker, while on the other hand doing all he can to nail Snowden's hide to a fence, I'd say he should be handing that peace prize back.
what do you expect? it's bing.
On what do you base that statement? (I have only played with DDG briefly, and found it OK, but bing is total crap).
Even when I'm specifically searching for Wikipedia articles, I usually find a Google search including "wiki" much quicker than Wikipedia's search. I guess it's a simple matter of how much money can be spent on great servers.
...his answer is "such a request would be unconstitutional". Yes, it would. It was unconstitutional for all the other search engines too. So what? That obviously doesn't matter.
I guess his point is that rather than tamely rolling over and saying "tickle me just there, please", he's saying that a request (let's be honest and call it a demand) that is *OBVIOUSLY* unconstitutional should be comparatively straightforward to contest if the NSA ever had the courage to bring an action to court, which would be a matter of public record.
Now, obviously if the spooks are serious about it, they could get an actual court order, which (while interesting from any number of perspectives) would change the state of play totally.
How come you guys can spell "spook" but nobody seems to be able to manage "lose"?
The last disk I decommissioned took 24 hours to shred
You're doing it wrong. I used to be a professional blacksmith in an earlier life, and I still have all my tools, which include a 1500lb pneumatic power-hammer. That mother can deliver 1.5 blows per second at full power, and if I stick any hard drive under that, it'll be thinner than a bee's dick in a couple of seconds.
:-)
However, I do like to take out those cool lanthanide magnets first...
So you have no test and just let the virus spread?
You extend the analogy too far. In fact, the analogy in TFA, while interesting, has limited relevance. Yes, the danger and destructive effects of false positives are important in both medicine and national security, but where TFA mentions (almost in passing) that "The balance between privacy and security is always difficult", it sidesteps the simple fact that this surveillance is about neither. It is about control.
Let us not fool ourselves that the US (or any other) government is actually likely to prevent all (or any) acts of terrorism with these efforts. We have recent proof otherwise. Our various governments have simply seized on this supposed threat as a means to exert control - for no other reason than because they can.
Even today, Apple's motto is still "Think Different"
What they don't say is "Think different, just so long as you think the same as we do". If anything, Mac boxes are even less configurable to individual tastes than Windows machines.
Quite apart from the screen real-estate issues, it seems to me that using a touchscreen would be fairly strenuous for any serious amount of input. It's probably OK for something like Twitter, but for real input, you need a real keyboard.
Android is now reinventing Desktop environments, they are all the way up to Tiling window managers! Next comes overlapping windows and then full compositing.
And I might find myself welcoming the day. In the meantime, my cheapie Asus laptop running Slackware/KDE4.10.5 works pretty well for most of what I do. However it pans out, I don't want to be stuck with a touchscreen keypad for my main interface. That's fine for a dinky thing like a phone, but for "real" work I want a proper keyboard.
IN some cases it almost looks like they tried to make it impossible to read the code.
Why "almost"? Inside every COBOL programmer, there's a frustrated Fortran programmer struggling to get out. (I have been both, for more years than I care to remember.)
COBOL obfuscation can be as much fun as similar work in C, ALGOL or ADA. You lose points for inefficient code, though. And, of course, one big drawback of COBOL is that it is usually impossible to generate self-modifying code.
Sure, COBOL has a GOTO. But if you're old enough to have programmed in COBOL (i.e. when you didn't get the projects involving Fortran and assembler), you should be old enough to know that Real Programmers aren't afraid to use GOTO.
;-)
Now excuse me a moment while I just go shoot this velociraptor...