Seriously... paper is the superior alternative here. It doesn't interrupt your and your coworkers' train of thought, it has backup, it is the fastest way to collaboratively design and modify designs... and it has the added advantage of being unspyable by the NSA, GCHQ, the Chinese, or other industrial espionage outfits who rely on ElInt. Prepare your designs on paper. There'll be enough time to translate your final design on a computer and CC the NSA and competition later.
Why not? The only thing that Google really does better than anyone else is search (and maybe free machine translation). For everything else, there's a better or at least equivalent option.
Gmail is actually doing quite a good job as well. What other mail provider does probably BCC every mail you receive and send to the NSA cloud for safekeeping and backup?
Google suspending Orkut is but a tiny example of why you better communicate with people by using e-mail directly. Or, if you must, go the old fashioned way (*cough* Usenet *cough*). But rely on a specific social network run by a single company, and you're sure that it will be shut down sometimes down the road. Even Facebook, not to mention Google+ will someday go the way of Geocities.
Selling bitcoin - or ANYTHING ELSE - at an auction in exchange for US dollars does not set ANY kind of precedent establishing that bitcoin - or ANYTHING ELSE - is now legal tender. In fact, it establishes the opposite.
You're right. It would make bitcoin legal tender only if you could pay for the auctioned bitcoins with... bitcoins. But then again, that would be pretty pointless, wouldn't it?
I very seldom agree with your islamophobic comments, but on this point, you're absolutely right. Autocratic rule is much better for minorities, but also for moderate muslims, than a theocracy imposed by muslim brothers or similar sects like ISIS. This, Obama's administration doesn't understand (yet), and keeps pushing islamism on muslim-majority countries that would better be left alone, as they know better how to deal with their demons.
How can anybody be so naive as to think that NSA isn't already crawling with Russian spies? Everything NSA knows, its Russian counterpart knows nearly at the same time. It doesn't take a Snowden to achieve that. Remember: Russians have a long tradition of building up sleeper and secret agents in foreign targets, and they are renowned for their patience and the time they take in placing those agents in high positions.
It's been a quarter century since I chased down those hackers.
I saw a translation of The KGB, the Computer, and Me that aired back then on German TV, and it was fascinating! Great to see you here on Slashdot Cliff!
Basically, we're making it WAY too easy for the NSA to spy on us. But, even if we all switched to encrypted mail, that's not enough: with their metadata collection, they can still infer a lot of things from our communications patterns. So technically, we need I2P, Freenet or similar anonymizing technology to hide in the crowd. However, to REALLY fix the problem once and for all, we need to take it to the political arena, and fight for majorities to get Congress to reign in NSA in earnest, no matter what "Yes We Scan" Obama wants. If we don't, Orwell's 1984 will remain in effect, no matter how much we use OSS, encryption and so on.
Some European countries' citizens are especially militant, when it comes to privacy. In Germany, Google Earth was forced to blur houses of everyone who wanted this. The result for Germany was twofold: one of the worst Google Earth experiences worldwide, because some many houses are blurred, and Google Earth abandoning Germany altogether (they didn't resume scanning smaller cities, so the coverage is much less than that of other countries).
That's exactly what could happen to Google Search as well. The amount of people wanting to be erased from the index will grow exponentially, and that index will be mutilated beyond recognition up to a point where it won't be useful anymore. In the long run, I see Google dropping Europe as an interesting area altogether.
Changing laws after the fact is always possible. Applying them retroactively is unconstitutional in most civilized countries. And even if Sweden is playing lapdog to Uncle Sam, I still don't believe they've sunk so low as to retroactively apply some laws there. At least, I hope they won't.
I wouldn't place my hopes on the Bundestag. They are being controlled by a grand coalition of CDU and SPD, both parties being traditionally more pro-surveillance than pro-civil rights.
I hope they don't shut the project down... abruptly and without warning...
You mean with warning... not to use OpenSSL, but rely on Microsoft's NSA-infested crypto-libraries like TrueCrypt did with its BitLocker recommendation?
24 hours is quite a long time actually. In Germany, we use paper voting too, and the (final) results are usually available within 2-3 hours, 4 hours at most.
Right! Cisco's gear likely has value-added NSA backdoors inside. That makes it a lot more desirable to buy than Huawei's likely built-in chinese backdoors. We should definitely buy more of our surveillance gear than their's.
Yes, they give access to source code, but no instructions on how to build a binary that's 1:1 identical to the released version. This source code, for what it's worth, isn't proof that the release version is spyware-free.
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Seriously... paper is the superior alternative here. It doesn't interrupt your and your coworkers' train of thought, it has backup, it is the fastest way to collaboratively design and modify designs... and it has the added advantage of being unspyable by the NSA, GCHQ, the Chinese, or other industrial espionage outfits who rely on ElInt. Prepare your designs on paper. There'll be enough time to translate your final design on a computer and CC the NSA and competition later.
Gmail is actually doing quite a good job as well. What other mail provider does probably BCC every mail you receive and send to the NSA cloud for safekeeping and backup?
Google suspending Orkut is but a tiny example of why you better communicate with people by using e-mail directly. Or, if you must, go the old fashioned way (*cough* Usenet *cough*). But rely on a specific social network run by a single company, and you're sure that it will be shut down sometimes down the road. Even Facebook, not to mention Google+ will someday go the way of Geocities.
You're right. It would make bitcoin legal tender only if you could pay for the auctioned bitcoins with... bitcoins. But then again, that would be pretty pointless, wouldn't it?
Well, for Egypt, the question is rather to choose between an autocratic military regime on one side, and an autocratic theocracy on the other side.
I very seldom agree with your islamophobic comments, but on this point, you're absolutely right. Autocratic rule is much better for minorities, but also for moderate muslims, than a theocracy imposed by muslim brothers or similar sects like ISIS. This, Obama's administration doesn't understand (yet), and keeps pushing islamism on muslim-majority countries that would better be left alone, as they know better how to deal with their demons.
How can anybody be so naive as to think that NSA isn't already crawling with Russian spies? Everything NSA knows, its Russian counterpart knows nearly at the same time. It doesn't take a Snowden to achieve that. Remember: Russians have a long tradition of building up sleeper and secret agents in foreign targets, and they are renowned for their patience and the time they take in placing those agents in high positions.
s/XOR/OR/.
Because they are (semi-)automated reply-templates anyway?
I saw a translation of The KGB, the Computer, and Me that aired back then on German TV, and it was fascinating! Great to see you here on Slashdot Cliff!
FreeBSD just issued a security advisory w.r.t. OpenSSL. You better update to -STABLE asap.
Basically, we're making it WAY too easy for the NSA to spy on us. But, even if we all switched to encrypted mail, that's not enough: with their metadata collection, they can still infer a lot of things from our communications patterns. So technically, we need I2P, Freenet or similar anonymizing technology to hide in the crowd. However, to REALLY fix the problem once and for all, we need to take it to the political arena, and fight for majorities to get Congress to reign in NSA in earnest, no matter what "Yes We Scan" Obama wants. If we don't, Orwell's 1984 will remain in effect, no matter how much we use OSS, encryption and so on.
That's exactly what could happen to Google Search as well. The amount of people wanting to be erased from the index will grow exponentially, and that index will be mutilated beyond recognition up to a point where it won't be useful anymore. In the long run, I see Google dropping Europe as an interesting area altogether.
Considering that he spawned the Pirate Parties in many countries in the world, including Sweden, he can be considered a political prisoner (too).
Changing laws after the fact is always possible. Applying them retroactively is unconstitutional in most civilized countries. And even if Sweden is playing lapdog to Uncle Sam, I still don't believe they've sunk so low as to retroactively apply some laws there. At least, I hope they won't.
Who says he won't be extradited to the US later?
I wouldn't place my hopes on the Bundestag. They are being controlled by a grand coalition of CDU and SPD, both parties being traditionally more pro-surveillance than pro-civil rights.
You mean with warning... not to use OpenSSL, but rely on Microsoft's NSA-infested crypto-libraries like TrueCrypt did with its BitLocker recommendation?
Instead of Truecrypt, I'm considering using GELI on a wide scale. I'm wondering about its quality, cryptography-wise.
So that the NSA gets to see the results before the Canadians themselves?
24 hours is quite a long time actually. In Germany, we use paper voting too, and the (final) results are usually available within 2-3 hours, 4 hours at most.
If you consider your biggest debtor an enemy, yes.
Right! Cisco's gear likely has value-added NSA backdoors inside. That makes it a lot more desirable to buy than Huawei's likely built-in chinese backdoors. We should definitely buy more of our surveillance gear than their's.
Yes, they give access to source code, but no instructions on how to build a binary that's 1:1 identical to the released version. This source code, for what it's worth, isn't proof that the release version is spyware-free.