In addition, the internet has given a way for independent media to work outside of the corporate owned media.
IMHO, the Internet (as in: independent news) is overrated. Most of the MSM are just parroting, sometimes even verbatim, what the Pravda^WReuters-AP-AFP-... are writing, and the rest, well, they don't have an audience big enough to matter. And even if... people would selectively blend out news that don't agree with their worldview. Or, said another way, you don't need an info monopoly to manipulate people; they do that instinctively themselves.
Let's see: on one side, there's a government in Syria that is involved in a life-and-death struggle with militant Islamists affiliated with Al Qaeda, that the West calls "the rebels" -- militants who won't hesitate to commit genocide on Syria's minorities (Alewites, Christians, and moderate Sunnis as well!) On the other side, there are governments in the West that harbor numerous old grudges against Syria and would do everything in their power to destroy that country. Now, chemical weapons have been used, and before the UN even completes its inspection tour, Syria's enemies (who call themselves "Friends of Syria" in the best of Orwell's Newspeak tradition) have already made up their minds about who used those weapons. This is disgusting politics at its worst, folks. Iraq v 2.0 is looming on the horizon.
Does it matter at *all* whether the government agents destroyed the drives themselves, or coerced the owners of the drives to do it?
Not to be cynical, but Government could still say that the Guardian destroyed the drives, and it was all a big misunderstanding. It's like in the bad movies where the corrupt police officer orders you at point blank to injure yourself and later claims that it was you who did it to yourself and he couldn't prevent it.
The "security apparatus" isn't the real problem here. They're just the symptom, the manifestation of a deep fear that permeates societies... and may I add, irrational fears at that. Why irrational? Because the number of casualties from traffic accidents is of many orders of magnitude higher than those of terror attacks. But nobody seriously intends to forbid cars and people from driving. Yet when it comes to "terrism", regular people just kind of shut off their rational thinking and go into total obedience mode (to the almighty State). This tells more about human nature than we ever wanted to know, doesn't it?
Au contraire, my dear Watson. Providing raw material is exactly the service news providers should be doing in the first place. Let other reporters and bloggers sift through this publicly available raw data to point out interesting stuff. There's no reason reporters should be entitled to exclusive access to raw material, and the rest of the world would have to accept what reporters say without a way of controlling that.
That was exactly the problem with Wikileak's initial redacted release of Cablegate. It was only after they've released the whole data unredacted that real reporting could begin (and can still take place).
So my guess (...) is that yahoo would not ever be sued.
Whether David sues Goliath is pretty much irrelevant. It's whether Yahoo! suffers a (IMHO well deserved) PR disaster that counts. It's news like these that people keep in mind when they think of companies. Next time I think about using Yahoo, I'll remember: "Oh, that was that bunch of jerks that kicked a dead customer out who pre-paid for 5 years? Okay, better look elsewhere."
Whatever they have in their TOS, and whatever their strange morals may be, ignoring the will of a dead person to leave something behind is considered not only petty behavior, it also above all pretty rude in almost all cultures around the world. Perhaps it's different in savage Yahoo!-Land, but we, the civilized world, are shocked by their lack of sensitivity.
The NSA is still depriving US citizens of their rights on a frighteningly large scale.
If they keep spying on citizens of friendly countries on a frighteningly large scale, I wouldn't wonder that they got used to it and started spying on their own citizens as well. It's the whole mindset (spying on individuals) that has to be reviewed. In the past, governments used to spy on other governments, not on unsuspecting citizens. Now, they spy on everything they can get a tap on.
The NSA didn't break the Holy Copyright laws. Therefore, they're safe from prosecution. It's not like they stole quadrillions of US dollars from the public by recording their private phone calls ("stealing" their conversations) without prior consent and license. Or did they? It would be interesting if people starting suing the NSA for copyright violations instead of "mere" violation of their privacy. Now that would hurt the NSA, if they got convicted.
They don't have to be semi-friendly or semi-hostile. Blackmail works like a charm among friendly governments as well, when it comes to "persuading" them. And how do you blackmail politicians of your friendly government if not by snooping into their personal communications? All this spying is perhaps the oldest (or second-oldest) business in the world. It won't go away anytime soon. And yes, everybody's doing it.
Theoretically, laws are written by the legislative branch, i.e. by Congress.. and not by the executive branch, i.e. Government. Of course, in practice, laws are written by corporations. But this isn't news, is it?
Redundancy has to be made intelligently, not just a 1 to 1 copy, which nearly useless. Think dvdisaster, for example. Makes for a pretty good optical archive, if you try to keep a 30% to 40% ECC ratio on the disks, and 2 copies of each ECC-enhanced disk. Of course, it's not perfect either, but what is?
I agree w.r.t. HDCP being broken, but AACS, unfortunately, is still very (too) strong. Some brave folks are capable of using a cracked version software BluRay players to extract the keys of some popular discs, and that's about it. As long as this procedure can't be automated, we won't see a BluRay/AACS-encoded mplayer/vlc on Linux (or some other OS) anytime soon.
As long as AACS isn't totally broken, steer clear of BluRay discs at any costs. Use at your own risk. Unplayable at the whim of Big Content.
The process of decrypting blu-ray is thus possible for those with a little skill, but cannot be easily automated and put into VLC.
So basically, AACS is NOT broken (yet). What's broken is its currently poorly handled key management. As long as the process of breaking that system can't be automated, keep away from it. You don't know how long those few skilled people hanging around in doom9 are willing to help with YOUR favorite bluray movie.
Not in the HUGE parts of the world where bandwidth is limited, and download caps are in effect. And this includes big parts of *ahem* the US as well. So it may be the future, but certainly not mainstream for at least a decade or two down the road.
Yet Microsoft still keeps charging a ~$100 tax on every machine.
In many countries in the world, you can get a refund by non accepting the Windows EULA, and installing something else on that machine. People are just too lazy to jump through the administrative hoops to get that refund. OTOH, some stores in Europe sell PCs without operating system, and offer strictly optional cheap OEM licenses.
I know more and more people AND corps who would rather opt for real servers that can host 18 to 24 SATA disks at once, rather than for PCs with their limited set of 4 or so SATA ports. Add to this that it is easier to upgrade RAMs in server-grade machines than on classic PCs, and you've got a shift in demand. I fully expect classic PCs to be phased out in favor of server-grade PCs (a la supermicro or so) on one side, and by tablets and other small portable gadgets on the other side.
Since you can't boot your own operating system on them. Technically, tablets are computers, but they are not the kind of open computer that we use(d) to call PCs.
Plenty of high-tech firms in case you ever need a job again (...)
Do you seriously think that a sysadmin who ratted out his employer (notwithstanding his motives who may or may not have been good-natured) would ever get a similar job anywhere else in the industry? Sysadmin position is one of trust, and this is precisely what Snowden betrayed. Sorry to sound so conservative, but as a many decades long sysadmin myself, I take the ethics of this profession very seriously and quite a dim view on what Snowden has done.
There is no justifiable excuse for this or prism etc.. etc.. but we are clearly powerless to do anything and I think my mind needs a defence mechanism.
How about a little bit of subversive thinking and acting?
Let's turn this whole surveillance mania against them, won't we? Say, the US government won't give a rat's ass of what you want or what you think: write to them as much as you want, they won't even acknowledge you exist. However, try to keep something private, and they'll go out of their way to spy on you, to intrude your privacy etc.. And why? Just so they can hear what you wanted to say them altogether openly from the beginning. You've got their (big NSA) ears and their attention now: use 'em to deliver your message.
Or, said otherwise: forget about writing your elected representatives, write what you want your government to know to your own friends, and Government will eventually get to read it too.
This won't do you any good, if they took a snapshot of the drive, created MD5 digests for all sectors, and matched those digests with a list provided by the Copyright Cartel.
Encrypt your drives. It's your own personal data, nobody has the right or need to view the contents of your hard drives. People need to be reminded it's not the right of the government to be 'big brother', despite what the NSA is doing lately.
That may be true for US persons, but if you're a foreigner, beware: you don't enjoy the same rights.
Slashdot Mirror
IMHO, the Internet (as in: independent news) is overrated. Most of the MSM are just parroting, sometimes even verbatim, what the Pravda^WReuters-AP-AFP-... are writing, and the rest, well, they don't have an audience big enough to matter. And even if... people would selectively blend out news that don't agree with their worldview. Or, said another way, you don't need an info monopoly to manipulate people; they do that instinctively themselves.
Let's see: on one side, there's a government in Syria that is involved in a life-and-death struggle with militant Islamists affiliated with Al Qaeda, that the West calls "the rebels" -- militants who won't hesitate to commit genocide on Syria's minorities (Alewites, Christians, and moderate Sunnis as well!) On the other side, there are governments in the West that harbor numerous old grudges against Syria and would do everything in their power to destroy that country. Now, chemical weapons have been used, and before the UN even completes its inspection tour, Syria's enemies (who call themselves "Friends of Syria" in the best of Orwell's Newspeak tradition) have already made up their minds about who used those weapons. This is disgusting politics at its worst, folks. Iraq v 2.0 is looming on the horizon.
Let Syria deal with it. Not Europe's problem.
Not to be cynical, but Government could still say that the Guardian destroyed the drives, and it was all a big misunderstanding. It's like in the bad movies where the corrupt police officer orders you at point blank to injure yourself and later claims that it was you who did it to yourself and he couldn't prevent it.
The "security apparatus" isn't the real problem here. They're just the symptom, the manifestation of a deep fear that permeates societies... and may I add, irrational fears at that. Why irrational? Because the number of casualties from traffic accidents is of many orders of magnitude higher than those of terror attacks. But nobody seriously intends to forbid cars and people from driving. Yet when it comes to "terrism", regular people just kind of shut off their rational thinking and go into total obedience mode (to the almighty State). This tells more about human nature than we ever wanted to know, doesn't it?
Au contraire, my dear Watson. Providing raw material is exactly the service news providers should be doing in the first place. Let other reporters and bloggers sift through this publicly available raw data to point out interesting stuff. There's no reason reporters should be entitled to exclusive access to raw material, and the rest of the world would have to accept what reporters say without a way of controlling that.
That was exactly the problem with Wikileak's initial redacted release of Cablegate. It was only after they've released the whole data unredacted that real reporting could begin (and can still take place).
Whether David sues Goliath is pretty much irrelevant. It's whether Yahoo! suffers a (IMHO well deserved) PR disaster that counts. It's news like these that people keep in mind when they think of companies. Next time I think about using Yahoo, I'll remember: "Oh, that was that bunch of jerks that kicked a dead customer out who pre-paid for 5 years? Okay, better look elsewhere."
Whatever they have in their TOS, and whatever their strange morals may be, ignoring the will of a dead person to leave something behind is considered not only petty behavior, it also above all pretty rude in almost all cultures around the world. Perhaps it's different in savage Yahoo!-Land, but we, the civilized world, are shocked by their lack of sensitivity.
If they keep spying on citizens of friendly countries on a frighteningly large scale, I wouldn't wonder that they got used to it and started spying on their own citizens as well. It's the whole mindset (spying on individuals) that has to be reviewed. In the past, governments used to spy on other governments, not on unsuspecting citizens. Now, they spy on everything they can get a tap on.
The NSA didn't break the Holy Copyright laws. Therefore, they're safe from prosecution. It's not like they stole quadrillions of US dollars from the public by recording their private phone calls ("stealing" their conversations) without prior consent and license. Or did they? It would be interesting if people starting suing the NSA for copyright violations instead of "mere" violation of their privacy. Now that would hurt the NSA, if they got convicted.
They don't have to be semi-friendly or semi-hostile. Blackmail works like a charm among friendly governments as well, when it comes to "persuading" them. And how do you blackmail politicians of your friendly government if not by snooping into their personal communications? All this spying is perhaps the oldest (or second-oldest) business in the world. It won't go away anytime soon. And yes, everybody's doing it.
Theoretically, laws are written by the legislative branch, i.e. by Congress.. and not by the executive branch, i.e. Government. Of course, in practice, laws are written by corporations. But this isn't news, is it?
Yep, when you live in a dystopian world, dystopian movies appear like utopias.
Redundancy has to be made intelligently, not just a 1 to 1 copy, which nearly useless. Think dvdisaster, for example. Makes for a pretty good optical archive, if you try to keep a 30% to 40% ECC ratio on the disks, and 2 copies of each ECC-enhanced disk. Of course, it's not perfect either, but what is?
[citation needed]
I agree w.r.t. HDCP being broken, but AACS, unfortunately, is still very (too) strong. Some brave folks are capable of using a cracked version software BluRay players to extract the keys of some popular discs, and that's about it. As long as this procedure can't be automated, we won't see a BluRay/AACS-encoded mplayer/vlc on Linux (or some other OS) anytime soon.
As long as AACS isn't totally broken, steer clear of BluRay discs at any costs. Use at your own risk. Unplayable at the whim of Big Content.
So basically, AACS is NOT broken (yet). What's broken is its currently poorly handled key management. As long as the process of breaking that system can't be automated, keep away from it. You don't know how long those few skilled people hanging around in doom9 are willing to help with YOUR favorite bluray movie.
Not in the HUGE parts of the world where bandwidth is limited, and download caps are in effect. And this includes big parts of *ahem* the US as well. So it may be the future, but certainly not mainstream for at least a decade or two down the road.
If it's made by Microsoft who helped NSA, I won't buy it EVEN if it ran Linux or Android. Don't know what's hiding in those chips.
In many countries in the world, you can get a refund by non accepting the Windows EULA, and installing something else on that machine. People are just too lazy to jump through the administrative hoops to get that refund. OTOH, some stores in Europe sell PCs without operating system, and offer strictly optional cheap OEM licenses.
I know more and more people AND corps who would rather opt for real servers that can host 18 to 24 SATA disks at once, rather than for PCs with their limited set of 4 or so SATA ports. Add to this that it is easier to upgrade RAMs in server-grade machines than on classic PCs, and you've got a shift in demand. I fully expect classic PCs to be phased out in favor of server-grade PCs (a la supermicro or so) on one side, and by tablets and other small portable gadgets on the other side.
Since you can't boot your own operating system on them. Technically, tablets are computers, but they are not the kind of open computer that we use(d) to call PCs.
Do you seriously think that a sysadmin who ratted out his employer (notwithstanding his motives who may or may not have been good-natured) would ever get a similar job anywhere else in the industry? Sysadmin position is one of trust, and this is precisely what Snowden betrayed. Sorry to sound so conservative, but as a many decades long sysadmin myself, I take the ethics of this profession very seriously and quite a dim view on what Snowden has done.
How about a little bit of subversive thinking and acting?
Let's turn this whole surveillance mania against them, won't we? Say, the US government won't give a rat's ass of what you want or what you think: write to them as much as you want, they won't even acknowledge you exist. However, try to keep something private, and they'll go out of their way to spy on you, to intrude your privacy etc.. And why? Just so they can hear what you wanted to say them altogether openly from the beginning. You've got their (big NSA) ears and their attention now: use 'em to deliver your message.
Or, said otherwise: forget about writing your elected representatives, write what you want your government to know to your own friends, and Government will eventually get to read it too.
This won't do you any good, if they took a snapshot of the drive, created MD5 digests for all sectors, and matched those digests with a list provided by the Copyright Cartel.
That may be true for US persons, but if you're a foreigner, beware: you don't enjoy the same rights.