This is a Federal prosecution of Federal laws against online gambling. The Feds can't force Minnesota not to make it illegal for Minnesotans to gamble with each other, but some Federal politicians, particularly Jon Kyl, Right-Wing Senator from Arizona, have been pushing for years to get the Feds to make online gambling illegal for all Americans, even if their states don't ban it, and he's been pretty successful at stopping attempts to undo the laws he got passed.
This isn't a "look the other way" issue, and while the Obama Administration initially promised not to prosecute medical marijuana under Federal law in states that ended their local laws against it, they've gone back on their promise and continue to raid dispensaries and occasionally patients.
The Sucker Rule says that when you sit down at the poker table, you should look around for the sucker. If you can't figure out who it is, then it's probably you. In online gambling, you can't see the other guys at the table, so by default it's always you. There's been a lot of research into cryptographic protocols for playing games like poker online while preventing cheating, but since poker is fundamentally about manipulating people, not about manipulating cards, the math can only go so far.
Some years ago New York State's Off-Track Betting system went broke. Imagine what it must take to lose money having a monopoly on horse-race betting in New York, where it's parimutuel betting so the winners only get paid from the loser's losses and the house always gets a cut.
Senator Kyl, a right-winger from Arizona, was one of the big pushers of Federal laws against online gambling. He didn't want it left to the states, and didn't want Americans to be able to gamble at non-US gambling houses. It's always nice to know how strongly Republicans believe in small government that stays out of people's personal lives and leaves decisions to the states when they don't need to be Federal.
Governments actually like that kind of business. First the sucker earns some money doing real work, and pays income tax on it. Then the sucker loses some of that money to the gambling house (which pays business taxes) and some more money to the other players (who may also be suckers or may be sharks.) The winners pay income tax on their net winnings, if any, and the suckers don't get to deduct gambling losses (except to offset any winnings), so the government gets to take more money off the top.
When I was a kid, gambling was illegal because it was immoral and stupid, unless it was bingo sponsored by a religious or civic charity such as a volunteer fire company, or involved horses with driven by jockeys riding behind them in carts, not (gasp!) actually sitting on top of the horse. Eventually the state I grew up in started a state lottery, so gambling was now illegal because it was competing with the state's efforts to scam the stupid and immoral. When I lived in New Jersey, the state lottery system was required to put up posters explaining where the lottery money went (X% to the ticket sellers, Y% to the winners, Z% to the lottery bureaucracy, etc.) About 30-35% went to the state prison system, and some of it went to the school system (but obviously not to teaching math.)
If you're designing an ASIC, one traditional method is to do your design, flash it to FPGA, test it, debug, repeat, and when you're done, send it out to the fab to get it burned into ASIC. So yes, it's hardware upgrades through programmable circuitry, and you might be doing multiple upgrades per day.
If you're doing small production runs of chips, for instance for custom hardware, you may want something that's fast but you're not going to make 10,000 of them so you don't want to pay the price of burning ASICs. (ASIC prices have gotten a lot cheaper in the last decade, and production cycles have gotten faster, but it still takes time and money.) So don't - just do the chip in FPGA. And just like providing firmware in EPROM, the fact that the chip's reprogrammable doesn't mean you'll necessarily be doing that in the field.
These guys are basically doing a smaller cheaper FPGA design, as far as I can tell from the article and the comments. Those sound like good things.
A large part of the power demand in southern California is for air conditioning, so a power system that produces its power in the daytime works just fine for most of the demand. (Also, the local climate tends to be hot days but much cooler at night, unlike say the humid Southeast where it stays hot at night.)
Of course - but the serious anarchists I knew planned on not getting caught by not engaging in illegal activities (well, other than a bit of pot smoking and music piracy), because violence isn't a way to change society for the better. And most of the "highly subversive organizations" I've known that the FBI likes to investigate are just engaging in legitimate First-Amendment-protected free speech and assembly and politics, but that's never stopped the police from harassing peace groups in the past.
The "not for identification" on the Social Security Card didn't mean "You may not use the Social Security Number for Identification" - it wasn't a pro-privacy imperative.
It was simply a disclaimer that the Social Security Administration was making no promises that the card they'd handed out was of any use for identifying the person now holding it. It was a card providing information, not identification.
When I was taking chemistry in college, calculators were banned from exams. That was partly because they were new enough back then that not everybody had them (pocket calculators had gone from nonexistent to $400 to $150 to $100 over about four years), while everybody could afford a plastic slide-rule, and partly because in chemistry you were expected to know what the calculations you were doing actually meant, and partly because you seldom had measurements that needed more accuracy than a slide rule anyway.
When I was in grad school in the late 70s, my time-series professor didn't believe in wasting valuable computer time graphing numbers. We should be doing that by hand on graph paper and only use the computer for Real Computing. Of course, I'd usually crunch the numbers on the IBM 5150 and have it graph them on its crude thermal printer, and then copy the graph by hand. Things have changed a lot.
Apparently the main impact of the London surveillance system on crime is that street criminals learn where the cameras are and only mug people or steal cars where they're not likely to be watched, and wear hats or hoodies to hide their faces. ("Criminal was an average-height man wearing jeans and a dark hoodie - probably white.")
Maybe you're younger than I am, but I remember back in the 60s when people were worried about computers and privacy, and the mainframe computers at the time cost a few million dollars, got their data from punchcards, and required large teams of programmers doing months of work to build databases that could do new large queries. By the mid-90s, I was ranting about how that level of work was something that a random government employee could to by typing in a casual query on his desktop PC at lunchtime (like "where's my ex-girlfriend been buying lunch recently" or "are there any registered Democrats in the department"?) Now that it's the 2010s, I've got a $50 wristwatch that's got a 16-bit 20 MHz CPU, and the low-end smartphone in my pocket has as much horsepower as a supercomputer did at some time in the 70s and an Internet connection that's faster than the whole building I worked in had in the mid-90s.
It used to be that if the police wanted to investigate a highly subversive organization like your college anti-war discussion group or Quaker meeting, the Red Squad had to get a young scruffy-looking cop to pass for a student to infiltrate you (failed) or at least park a large American car full of guys in suits outside the school you were holding the anarchist convention at (I offered them coffee, but they said they'd brought their own.) Now they can force your ISP and phone company to hand over your email and text messages and not tell you, as well as friending you on Facebook or whatever.
The numbers they were providing for how many stolen cars they recovered weren't expressed in the same units for with and without cameras, but it looks like they probably recovered at most a couple percent more of the stolen cars this year than before they got the system, not correcting for all the other things they've done differently or OnStar/Lojack. (Here in San Francisco, the real trick is to make sure the parking ticket system gets correlated to the stolen-car database, since amateur car thieves who are actually using their car don't bother to pay tickets; professionals seldom get caught.) It's significantly more effective at tracking cars that have expired registrations on them (which I don't count as "puts actual criminals in prison"), but that's a local taxation function that shouldn't be paid for by skimming Federal "terrorism" funds (which I'd consider to be a crime against the taxpayer.)
John Perry Barlow once said about privacy that living in a small town means that you don't need to use your turn signal because everybody already knows where you're going anyway.
This is basically doing the same thing for New York City. You gotta problem wid' dat?
The Feds are always complaining that when we get better telephony technology it's hard for them to wiretap us, and that's so unfair that we need to be forced to build better wiretap technology into everything, whether it's simple digital telephony or mobile phones or VOIP, even though the legal justification for wiretapping was always highly dubious. But this is is the opposite effect - putting a license plate on your car used to just make it easy to tell if a given car had paid its car taxes for the year, and now it provides them a really sophisticated set of tools for conveniently tracking where everybody goes, even the people who haven't paid extra for a Fastrack toll-payer or a cellphone. And somehow they don't have a problem with that at all.
Browsers have cached DNS for years, in addition to the caching that ISPs do. It's been a problem for load-balancers and disaster recovery web servers, because they can't trivially move what machine you're getting web pages from just by changing the DNS response.
I noticed Chrome offering to pre-fetch DNS. It's a mostly good idea, though we're going to see things like web bugs that use unique DNS entries to get around browser privacy features that block them from loading images or running Javascript things.
Wow! In my early 20s, I used to read PLATO Notesfiles, and later Netnews, and if I wanted to read news it came on chopped-up dead trees. (For a year or two that was also how I read netnews, once it had gotten big enough that printing it all 4-up on the new laser printer was easier than reading it article-by-article at 1200 baud.)
Kid, I've been using web browsers since before Mosaic came out. A "Flash problem" that chokes Firefox is a Firefox problem. If Firefox can't safely send stuff to Flash without choking the whole Firefox session when Flash does something stupid, then Firefox isn't protecting itself adequately. Sure, it wouldn't surprise me if Flash or Javascript is acting stupid as well, but it's Firefox's problem to keep Firefox running.
I used to run far larger instances than you do - typically about 200-300 tabs in 8-10 windows, but I've moved a lot of my tabs over to Chrome and today my sessions's down to the size of yours, but it still hung up this morning, going from ~800MB to 1.4GB. The newer versions behave a bit better, in that they'll now often leak memory and hang but not burn the whole CPU core while they're doing so, but it's still unreliable and annoying.
And it's not like Google Chrome doesn't have trouble either - if it gets overwhelmed, typically all the tabs in a given window will turn into the "Oh, Snap!" page. A typical way to trigger that is to go to a news aggregator site like Fark.com, open all the stories in tabs, and see if it lives. Sometimes Firefox does ok, usually it burns a bunch of CPU for a while and then recovers, sometimes it tanks. Google usually tanks.
I've moved more than half of my standard browser windows over to Chrome (mostly stuff I don't care if Google snoops on, but not reading news online because Chrome still chokes on that.) Gmail is one of the things I run on Chrome.
Most SMTP servers will use encryption for mail transfer these days, not just for mail submission and mail reading. klapaucjusz's reply to your article has more details on how.
The governments most likely to be interested in you are your own government and any you might be trying to overthrow. So don't go there. And use your own mail server to store your mail on, not your mailbox provider's.
Pick some country other than your own, not the US, not a notorious spam or cybercrime haven. (The latter's obvious, just because you don't want your mail discarded automatically by your recipients.) The countries that have good privacy laws mostly have police agencies trying to pass data retention laws, so it's not much of a win. Preferably pick somewhere that your language isn't the primary local language.
But this really was a Hello-world-tutorial, and presented as such. The application itself was slightly lamer than printing "hello world", but that wasn't really the point.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a Federal prosecution of Federal laws against online gambling. The Feds can't force Minnesota not to make it illegal for Minnesotans to gamble with each other, but some Federal politicians, particularly Jon Kyl, Right-Wing Senator from Arizona, have been pushing for years to get the Feds to make online gambling illegal for all Americans, even if their states don't ban it, and he's been pretty successful at stopping attempts to undo the laws he got passed.
This isn't a "look the other way" issue, and while the Obama Administration initially promised not to prosecute medical marijuana under Federal law in states that ended their local laws against it, they've gone back on their promise and continue to raid dispensaries and occasionally patients.
The Sucker Rule says that when you sit down at the poker table, you should look around for the sucker. If you can't figure out who it is, then it's probably you. In online gambling, you can't see the other guys at the table, so by default it's always you. There's been a lot of research into cryptographic protocols for playing games like poker online while preventing cheating, but since poker is fundamentally about manipulating people, not about manipulating cards, the math can only go so far.
Some years ago New York State's Off-Track Betting system went broke. Imagine what it must take to lose money having a monopoly on horse-race betting in New York, where it's parimutuel betting so the winners only get paid from the loser's losses and the house always gets a cut.
Senator Kyl, a right-winger from Arizona, was one of the big pushers of Federal laws against online gambling. He didn't want it left to the states, and didn't want Americans to be able to gamble at non-US gambling houses. It's always nice to know how strongly Republicans believe in small government that stays out of people's personal lives and leaves decisions to the states when they don't need to be Federal.
Governments actually like that kind of business. First the sucker earns some money doing real work, and pays income tax on it. Then the sucker loses some of that money to the gambling house (which pays business taxes) and some more money to the other players (who may also be suckers or may be sharks.) The winners pay income tax on their net winnings, if any, and the suckers don't get to deduct gambling losses (except to offset any winnings), so the government gets to take more money off the top.
When I was a kid, gambling was illegal because it was immoral and stupid, unless it was bingo sponsored by a religious or civic charity such as a volunteer fire company, or involved horses with driven by jockeys riding behind them in carts, not (gasp!) actually sitting on top of the horse. Eventually the state I grew up in started a state lottery, so gambling was now illegal because it was competing with the state's efforts to scam the stupid and immoral. When I lived in New Jersey, the state lottery system was required to put up posters explaining where the lottery money went (X% to the ticket sellers, Y% to the winners, Z% to the lottery bureaucracy, etc.) About 30-35% went to the state prison system, and some of it went to the school system (but obviously not to teaching math.)
If you're designing an ASIC, one traditional method is to do your design, flash it to FPGA, test it, debug, repeat, and when you're done, send it out to the fab to get it burned into ASIC. So yes, it's hardware upgrades through programmable circuitry, and you might be doing multiple upgrades per day.
If you're doing small production runs of chips, for instance for custom hardware, you may want something that's fast but you're not going to make 10,000 of them so you don't want to pay the price of burning ASICs. (ASIC prices have gotten a lot cheaper in the last decade, and production cycles have gotten faster, but it still takes time and money.) So don't - just do the chip in FPGA. And just like providing firmware in EPROM, the fact that the chip's reprogrammable doesn't mean you'll necessarily be doing that in the field.
These guys are basically doing a smaller cheaper FPGA design, as far as I can tell from the article and the comments. Those sound like good things.
Today's episode opens with Larry Page and his white cat pondering the applications for a solar death ray...
> The pains that people will take to bash Google have really risen to remarkable heights.
450 feet isn't all that remarkable.
A large part of the power demand in southern California is for air conditioning, so a power system that produces its power in the daytime works just fine for most of the demand. (Also, the local climate tends to be hot days but much cooler at night, unlike say the humid Southeast where it stays hot at night.)
Of course - but the serious anarchists I knew planned on not getting caught by not engaging in illegal activities (well, other than a bit of pot smoking and music piracy), because violence isn't a way to change society for the better. And most of the "highly subversive organizations" I've known that the FBI likes to investigate are just engaging in legitimate First-Amendment-protected free speech and assembly and politics, but that's never stopped the police from harassing peace groups in the past.
They probably don't have an office much closer than Boise, so they're not right on top, but they've always been a bit over the edge.
The "not for identification" on the Social Security Card didn't mean "You may not use the Social Security Number for Identification" - it wasn't a pro-privacy imperative.
It was simply a disclaimer that the Social Security Administration was making no promises that the card they'd handed out was of any use for identifying the person now holding it. It was a card providing information, not identification.
Inquiring minds want to know....
When I was taking chemistry in college, calculators were banned from exams. That was partly because they were new enough back then that not everybody had them (pocket calculators had gone from nonexistent to $400 to $150 to $100 over about four years), while everybody could afford a plastic slide-rule, and partly because in chemistry you were expected to know what the calculations you were doing actually meant, and partly because you seldom had measurements that needed more accuracy than a slide rule anyway.
When I was in grad school in the late 70s, my time-series professor didn't believe in wasting valuable computer time graphing numbers. We should be doing that by hand on graph paper and only use the computer for Real Computing. Of course, I'd usually crunch the numbers on the IBM 5150 and have it graph them on its crude thermal printer, and then copy the graph by hand. Things have changed a lot.
Apparently the main impact of the London surveillance system on crime is that street criminals learn where the cameras are and only mug people or steal cars where they're not likely to be watched, and wear hats or hoodies to hide their faces. ("Criminal was an average-height man wearing jeans and a dark hoodie - probably white.")
Maybe you're younger than I am, but I remember back in the 60s when people were worried about computers and privacy, and the mainframe computers at the time cost a few million dollars, got their data from punchcards, and required large teams of programmers doing months of work to build databases that could do new large queries. By the mid-90s, I was ranting about how that level of work was something that a random government employee could to by typing in a casual query on his desktop PC at lunchtime (like "where's my ex-girlfriend been buying lunch recently" or "are there any registered Democrats in the department"?) Now that it's the 2010s, I've got a $50 wristwatch that's got a 16-bit 20 MHz CPU, and the low-end smartphone in my pocket has as much horsepower as a supercomputer did at some time in the 70s and an Internet connection that's faster than the whole building I worked in had in the mid-90s.
It used to be that if the police wanted to investigate a highly subversive organization like your college anti-war discussion group or Quaker meeting, the Red Squad had to get a young scruffy-looking cop to pass for a student to infiltrate you (failed) or at least park a large American car full of guys in suits outside the school you were holding the anarchist convention at (I offered them coffee, but they said they'd brought their own.) Now they can force your ISP and phone company to hand over your email and text messages and not tell you, as well as friending you on Facebook or whatever.
The numbers they were providing for how many stolen cars they recovered weren't expressed in the same units for with and without cameras, but it looks like they probably recovered at most a couple percent more of the stolen cars this year than before they got the system, not correcting for all the other things they've done differently or OnStar/Lojack. (Here in San Francisco, the real trick is to make sure the parking ticket system gets correlated to the stolen-car database, since amateur car thieves who are actually using their car don't bother to pay tickets; professionals seldom get caught.) It's significantly more effective at tracking cars that have expired registrations on them (which I don't count as "puts actual criminals in prison"), but that's a local taxation function that shouldn't be paid for by skimming Federal "terrorism" funds (which I'd consider to be a crime against the taxpayer.)
John Perry Barlow once said about privacy that living in a small town means that you don't need to use your turn signal because everybody already knows where you're going anyway.
This is basically doing the same thing for New York City. You gotta problem wid' dat?
The Feds are always complaining that when we get better telephony technology it's hard for them to wiretap us, and that's so unfair that we need to be forced to build better wiretap technology into everything, whether it's simple digital telephony or mobile phones or VOIP, even though the legal justification for wiretapping was always highly dubious. But this is is the opposite effect - putting a license plate on your car used to just make it easy to tell if a given car had paid its car taxes for the year, and now it provides them a really sophisticated set of tools for conveniently tracking where everybody goes, even the people who haven't paid extra for a Fastrack toll-payer or a cellphone. And somehow they don't have a problem with that at all.
I've been surprised how much stuff Ghostery finds to block, in addition to the things NoScript and AdBlock Plus block.
Browsers have cached DNS for years, in addition to the caching that ISPs do. It's been a problem for load-balancers and disaster recovery web servers, because they can't trivially move what machine you're getting web pages from just by changing the DNS response.
I noticed Chrome offering to pre-fetch DNS. It's a mostly good idea, though we're going to see things like web bugs that use unique DNS entries to get around browser privacy features that block them from loading images or running Javascript things.
You mean those things that Ghostery and NoScript block?
Wow! In my early 20s, I used to read PLATO Notesfiles, and later Netnews, and if I wanted to read news it came on chopped-up dead trees. (For a year or two that was also how I read netnews, once it had gotten big enough that printing it all 4-up on the new laser printer was easier than reading it article-by-article at 1200 baud.)
You're absolutely correct about protocol openness being the important issue.
Kid, I've been using web browsers since before Mosaic came out. A "Flash problem" that chokes Firefox is a Firefox problem. If Firefox can't safely send stuff to Flash without choking the whole Firefox session when Flash does something stupid, then Firefox isn't protecting itself adequately. Sure, it wouldn't surprise me if Flash or Javascript is acting stupid as well, but it's Firefox's problem to keep Firefox running.
I used to run far larger instances than you do - typically about 200-300 tabs in 8-10 windows, but I've moved a lot of my tabs over to Chrome and today my sessions's down to the size of yours, but it still hung up this morning, going from ~800MB to 1.4GB. The newer versions behave a bit better, in that they'll now often leak memory and hang but not burn the whole CPU core while they're doing so, but it's still unreliable and annoying.
And it's not like Google Chrome doesn't have trouble either - if it gets overwhelmed, typically all the tabs in a given window will turn into the "Oh, Snap!" page. A typical way to trigger that is to go to a news aggregator site like Fark.com, open all the stories in tabs, and see if it lives. Sometimes Firefox does ok, usually it burns a bunch of CPU for a while and then recovers, sometimes it tanks. Google usually tanks.
I've moved more than half of my standard browser windows over to Chrome (mostly stuff I don't care if Google snoops on, but not reading news online because Chrome still chokes on that.) Gmail is one of the things I run on Chrome.
Most SMTP servers will use encryption for mail transfer these days, not just for mail submission and mail reading. klapaucjusz's reply to your article has more details on how.
The governments most likely to be interested in you are your own government and any you might be trying to overthrow. So don't go there. And use your own mail server to store your mail on, not your mailbox provider's.
Pick some country other than your own, not the US, not a notorious spam or cybercrime haven. (The latter's obvious, just because you don't want your mail discarded automatically by your recipients.) The countries that have good privacy laws mostly have police agencies trying to pass data retention laws, so it's not much of a win. Preferably pick somewhere that your language isn't the primary local language.
But this really was a Hello-world-tutorial, and presented as such. The application itself was slightly lamer than printing "hello world", but that wasn't really the point.