Unless google, et al are using compromised certs. They may not even know it if they are, maybe the NSA has co-opted the guy at each company who generates them. Cash, blackmail, misguided sense of patriotism, who knows but it is a seriously valuable point of vulnerability for all of them.
> Unless that 'revelation' was intentional misdirection.
Doubt it. This isn't cold war spy-vs-spy stuff with levels on levels and double and triple agents. The "enemy" is a bunch of random dudes with basically no espionage capability - the idea of al qaeda or even the muslim brotherhood infiltrating anything in the US is just patently absurd. There is no reason for internal NSA documents to contain misleading information because there is no one to mislead - they get to straight out lie in testimony to congress, that's more than enough misdirection to cover any plausible risk.
Then there is political party affiliation, where too often people are loyal to the point of treading on their opponents rights.
I want to comment on this point specifically because what you wrote is a common misunderstanding of such events. Their political opponents are just collateral damage - they are treading on the right of the citizenry to have a fair and representative government. Such actions are a crime against all of us regardless of party affiliation because they are essentially an attack on the democratic process itself.
What the press release totally left out was that the power savings of running IE on Linux is 100% compared to running firefox on linux. I don't understand why MS wouldn't mention that in their own press release - I mean, how often does MS beat anybody on linux systems?
But in response to your post, there is some logic behind the "Love it or Leave it" argument. For example, there are many in America who want to make America like Europe, and work hard to transform it to that. It makes sense to ask these people, "Why don't you just move to Europe?"
Here's why the logic doesn't work - those people are made of straw. You are working backwards with your argument - starting from the 'fact' that the changes they want resemble some of the policies in Europe to assuming they want to make the US into Europe. The goal is not to transform the US into Europe, the goal is to integrate what they consider to be the good parts of European policy and leave out the bad parts.
As the saying goes: My country, right or wrong... if right to be kept right, if wrong to be set right.
My own take is there is a enough personal data and information in meta data that use of it deprives us of our rights to be secure in our home and in our papers.. our communications with others, Etc.
I think the very fact that the NSA, et al, consider this "social graph" data to be worth all this effort proves that the data is far too invasive. They simply wouldn't be doing it unless it allowed them to see so much of our private lives.
I hear over and over in this discussion the salve "only the metadata has been recorded".
I'm guessing that's simply a function of limited technology,
I am sure that is part of it, but historically the US has had much less legal protection for "meta-data" than content. Before the use of the term meta-data, we called it a pen register. Indiviaul pen registers did not require warrants and that makes the whole pen-register for everybody easier for these people to rationalize.
This is a conspiracy theory that a good friend of mine passed along. I have no reason to believe it is true, but I think it can still illustrate the problem with that attitude.
First off, to recap, Anthony Weiner was a member of congress from New York City. He accidentally tweeted a "calvin klein underwear ad" of himself on his official twitter feed. Within minutes he deleted the tweet, but the damage was done. He ended up resigning and the seat he held, which had been held by democrats for something like 80 years, went to a republican.
It turned out Weiner had two twitter accounts, a personal one and the official one. He had been regularly using the private account to send suggestive photos to women across the country. Not illegal, but douchey. Although for all we the public know, his (brilliant and hot) wife was fine with it, maybe they had a look-but-don't-touch agreement. Whatever it was, it was their business alone.
Now, just imagine that somebody at the NSA who was "friendly" to the republicans decided to do a little checking into Weiner and discovered what he was doing on his "private" account. Then they logged into his official twitter account using some back-door or even just something sloppy like a cookie they sniffed off the wire from his own most recent login. Once logged in, they "accidentally" posted the picture and then deleted it a few minutes later.
Viola, career ruined and republicans get a chance to pick up a seat they would never have had a chance at if nobody had been snooping on Weiner.
Like I said at the start, I have zero reason to believe that is actually what happened. He probably just forgot what account he was logged into - all the blood had left his brain for other parts of his body. But, what matters here is just how plausible this theory is. The only thing standing in the way of this sort of corruption is the personal integrity of basically everyone with access to these programs at the NSA. Imagine just how easily this kind of ubiquitous surveillance apparatus can be turned to political corruption. We have way too much of that already, no need to make it any easier.
It's called "black humor". It's funny, but in a horrible way, and reminds us what horrible and inhumane places US prisons are.
I don't think so. There is practically no public discussion of just how fucked up the prison system is in the USA. It is just jokes like the OP. It took more than 20 years of me hearing FMIA jokes about prison before I ever considered what it all really meant for the people who have to suffer it and I like to think I am more attuned to thinking about this stuff than the average american citizen.
I get that all humor is rooted in suffering, but we need a lot more people shooting down the FMIA jokes with the sober details of what is essentially legalized torture. Until that happens FMIA jokes aren't a way of coping with the horror, they are a way to avoid acknowledging and fixing it.
It somehow reminds me of the Soviet Union, which was so out of touch and terrified of its populace that it used to jail poets and painters. Now the US government is so afraid of its populace that its mining people's fucking Facebook logs and mobile phone conversations.
I totally disagree. Artists represented an idealogical threat to the soviet union - artists are non-conformists and the USSR was all about conformity. The even CIA recognized it and heavily promoted the arts.
The reason the US government is spying on everyone is not because they feel threatened - at least not in the way the USSR did - but because it is super easy to do. They are willing to spend some minor portion of tax revenues on the threat of terrorism and it just so happens that the internet is such an enormous power multiplier that the same amount of money that would have spied on a couple of thousand russians in the 80s can now spy on nearly everybody. Since it is "cheap" they do it.
The CIA and the rest aren't interested in protecting american values, they are interested in stuff that is easily quantifiable - deaths due to terrorism, people killed by drones, money spent on budgets, etc. This sort of systemic weakness happens with organizations (government and private) all the time - look at the "No child left behind" program - focus on test scores because those are easy to quantify but neglect for the important but more ephemeral things like critical thinking, synergistic thinking and broader perspectives.
That these sorts of systems are easily abused is not an issue for the people implementing them because no one ever believes that they are a bad guy. Even guys like Hitler and Pol Pot had their own narratives which painted their actions as good and righteous.
Which, ultimately, is why the secrecy around these programs is toxic - without truly independent oversight from the public these programs will just grow as much as their budgets will allow.
It'd be nice if the public vitriol towards the current administration also helped Manning avoid further abuse, but I'm not holding my breath.
Yeah, my belief is that most of that vitriol is just "useful idiots" being steered by people with interests that favor a panopticon state at least as much as the current administration does. I expect to see "bi-partisan support" for excoriating Snowden and all the others.
Looks like he hasn't touched his other projects either.
(A) He tried it and wasn't as simple as all the big talk (B) no one else has picked it up.
And RDP supports rootless forwarding just like X11.
Bit-blasting just trades the latency problems with X11 forwarding for bandwidth problems.
But that's just one possible way of forwarding them. It's not like its impossibe.
"Not impossible" is a far cry from being designed, much less implemented. That's a tacit admission on your part that work is not being done on the issue.
Ah, yes because he said "we could probably do better" it's instantly terrible and doomed.
Hyperbole considered bad.
I read it as someone who was confident of their solution but unsure of the final form
"Probably" was not the only qualifier in the paragraph, pretty much everything he wrote was explicitly qualified. However you are welcome to support your beliefs with a citation to some documentation for even alpha level protocols for remoting wayland apps.
What I've seen is stuff like this GSoC participant who discovered that its not as simple as he thought. No one's touched his work since. Seems like the only work to come since then has been RDP based DESKTOP forwarding, not application remoting.
It isn't done yet, so let's wait and see. Everything I've seen looks very promising.
I don't know what you saw, but what I just read at the cited article is that the people designing wayland have barely given it a second thought. That attitude does not deserve the benefit of the doubt.
The only argument I've seen is the lack of network transparency, often poorly worded with no actual technical argument behind it.
Sounds like you aren't interested in hearing the arguments, but I'll try. Practically all X11 apps can run remotely - the ones that can't are likely to be inherently limited, like video players or 3d first person shooters that have bandwidth and latency requirements that are transport constrained. Outside of those types and pathological configurations, remote X11 just works for all apps.
V) "Wayland can't do remoting." Wrong. Wayland should be BETTER than X at remoting, partially do its asynchronous-by-design nature. Wayland remoting will probably look a like a higher-performance version of VNC, a prototype already exists. And this is without us even giving it serious thought about how to make it better. We could probably do better if we tried.
"We haven't given it serious thought" is a particularly bad approach to convince people to quit bitching. Show us a well thought out plan to support per window/application remoting, not vnc-style desktop remoting and that will shut up practically everyone. Act like you really don't give a shit and nobody will have any confidence that it ever will "better than X."
There may well be a good reason the Obama Administration has not shit-canned the whole thing. That is to say, the Obama Administration may realize that the Bush Administration had a reason to do all of this shit.
The proof is in the pudding. The number of serious terrorist attacks in the USA is minuscule. Until the boston bombers there had not been a single civilian death for ever a decade. Yet practically all of the people actually "caught" plotting "attacks" were numb-nuts who had no chance of success if the FBI hadn't been there to coax them along with informants. Unless the US is deliberately hiding the "real" plots and only using the idiots for PR, there is no significant threat.
My theory as to why Obama bought into it is the same as for why he bought into the too big to fail bullshit. He was inexperienced and allowed policy to be set by the people who talked like they knew what they were doing. There is so much invested in "anti-terrorism" literally trillions of dollars, that the contractors and agencies are surely very good at justifying their existence.
We are talking about Bloomberg here, the guy who blames large cups for obesity.
It is standard dieting advice to limit portion sizes. I know there was one study that suggested that maybe that's not always true, but that one study could easily have been poorly designed, it seems like so many are nowadays.
I think the problem people have with his proposal is he didn't sell it. He should have have said that any place which sells soda by the cup but won't sell them larger than 16oz or whatever his target size was, would have a half-rate tax on all their soda fountain sales.
Slashdot Mirror
> umm... https dude
Unless google, et al are using compromised certs. They may not even know it if they are, maybe the NSA has co-opted the guy at each company who generates them. Cash, blackmail, misguided sense of patriotism, who knows but it is a seriously valuable point of vulnerability for all of them.
> This story is not a story. It was a story two decades ago.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't take the opportunity to fix the problem. Who cares if the shit is fresh, its still shit that needs to be flushed out.
> Unless that 'revelation' was intentional misdirection.
Doubt it. This isn't cold war spy-vs-spy stuff with levels on levels and double and triple agents. The "enemy" is a bunch of random dudes with basically no espionage capability - the idea of al qaeda or even the muslim brotherhood infiltrating anything in the US is just patently absurd. There is no reason for internal NSA documents to contain misleading information because there is no one to mislead - they get to straight out lie in testimony to congress, that's more than enough misdirection to cover any plausible risk.
Then there is political party affiliation, where too often people are loyal to the point of treading on their opponents rights.
I want to comment on this point specifically because what you wrote is a common misunderstanding of such events. Their political opponents are just collateral damage - they are treading on the right of the citizenry to have a fair and representative government. Such actions are a crime against all of us regardless of party affiliation because they are essentially an attack on the democratic process itself.
> Power 6 was running at 5.0ghz 5-6 years ago.
And Power6 sacrificed out-of-order execution to do it. It was also only 2 cores instead of 8
> You then add these per watt if you want to show it off for a mobile device.
Or any data center.
What the press release totally left out was that the power savings of running IE on Linux is 100% compared to running firefox on linux. I don't understand why MS wouldn't mention that in their own press release - I mean, how often does MS beat anybody on linux systems?
But in response to your post, there is some logic behind the "Love it or Leave it" argument. For example, there are many in America who want to make America like Europe, and work hard to transform it to that. It makes sense to ask these people, "Why don't you just move to Europe?"
Here's why the logic doesn't work - those people are made of straw. You are working backwards with your argument - starting from the 'fact' that the changes they want resemble some of the policies in Europe to assuming they want to make the US into Europe. The goal is not to transform the US into Europe, the goal is to integrate what they consider to be the good parts of European policy and leave out the bad parts.
As the saying goes:
My country, right or wrong...
if right to be kept right,
if wrong to be set right.
My own take is there is a enough personal data and information in meta data that use of it deprives us of our rights to be secure in our home and in our papers.. our communications with others, Etc.
I think the very fact that the NSA, et al, consider this "social graph" data to be worth all this effort proves that the data is far too invasive. They simply wouldn't be doing it unless it allowed them to see so much of our private lives.
I hear over and over in this discussion the salve "only the metadata has been recorded".
I'm guessing that's simply a function of limited technology,
I am sure that is part of it, but historically the US has had much less legal protection for "meta-data" than content. Before the use of the term meta-data, we called it a pen register. Indiviaul pen registers did not require warrants and that makes the whole pen-register for everybody easier for these people to rationalize.
This is a conspiracy theory that a good friend of mine passed along. I have no reason to believe it is true, but I think it can still illustrate the problem with that attitude.
First off, to recap, Anthony Weiner was a member of congress from New York City. He accidentally tweeted a "calvin klein underwear ad" of himself on his official twitter feed. Within minutes he deleted the tweet, but the damage was done. He ended up resigning and the seat he held, which had been held by democrats for something like 80 years, went to a republican.
It turned out Weiner had two twitter accounts, a personal one and the official one. He had been regularly using the private account to send suggestive photos to women across the country. Not illegal, but douchey. Although for all we the public know, his (brilliant and hot) wife was fine with it, maybe they had a look-but-don't-touch agreement. Whatever it was, it was their business alone.
Now, just imagine that somebody at the NSA who was "friendly" to the republicans decided to do a little checking into Weiner and discovered what he was doing on his "private" account. Then they logged into his official twitter account using some back-door or even just something sloppy like a cookie they sniffed off the wire from his own most recent login. Once logged in, they "accidentally" posted the picture and then deleted it a few minutes later.
Viola, career ruined and republicans get a chance to pick up a seat they would never have had a chance at if nobody had been snooping on Weiner.
Like I said at the start, I have zero reason to believe that is actually what happened. He probably just forgot what account he was logged into - all the blood had left his brain for other parts of his body. But, what matters here is just how plausible this theory is. The only thing standing in the way of this sort of corruption is the personal integrity of basically everyone with access to these programs at the NSA. Imagine just how easily this kind of ubiquitous surveillance apparatus can be turned to political corruption. We have way too much of that already, no need to make it any easier.
It's called "black humor". It's funny, but in a horrible way, and reminds us what horrible and inhumane places US prisons are.
I don't think so. There is practically no public discussion of just how fucked up the prison system is in the USA. It is just jokes like the OP. It took more than 20 years of me hearing FMIA jokes about prison before I ever considered what it all really meant for the people who have to suffer it and I like to think I am more attuned to thinking about this stuff than the average american citizen.
I get that all humor is rooted in suffering, but we need a lot more people shooting down the FMIA jokes with the sober details of what is essentially legalized torture. Until that happens FMIA jokes aren't a way of coping with the horror, they are a way to avoid acknowledging and fixing it.
I mean he died on a modern cross to save us.
It somehow reminds me of the Soviet Union, which was so out of touch and terrified of its populace that it used to jail poets and painters. Now the US government is so afraid of its populace that its mining people's fucking Facebook logs and mobile phone conversations.
I totally disagree. Artists represented an idealogical threat to the soviet union - artists are non-conformists and the USSR was all about conformity. The even CIA recognized it and heavily promoted the arts.
The reason the US government is spying on everyone is not because they feel threatened - at least not in the way the USSR did - but because it is super easy to do. They are willing to spend some minor portion of tax revenues on the threat of terrorism and it just so happens that the internet is such an enormous power multiplier that the same amount of money that would have spied on a couple of thousand russians in the 80s can now spy on nearly everybody. Since it is "cheap" they do it.
The CIA and the rest aren't interested in protecting american values, they are interested in stuff that is easily quantifiable - deaths due to terrorism, people killed by drones, money spent on budgets, etc. This sort of systemic weakness happens with organizations (government and private) all the time - look at the "No child left behind" program - focus on test scores because those are easy to quantify but neglect for the important but more ephemeral things like critical thinking, synergistic thinking and broader perspectives.
That these sorts of systems are easily abused is not an issue for the people implementing them because no one ever believes that they are a bad guy. Even guys like Hitler and Pol Pot had their own narratives which painted their actions as good and righteous.
Which, ultimately, is why the secrecy around these programs is toxic - without truly independent oversight from the public these programs will just grow as much as their budgets will allow.
It'd be nice if the public vitriol towards the current administration also helped Manning avoid further abuse, but I'm not holding my breath.
Yeah, my belief is that most of that vitriol is just "useful idiots" being steered by people with interests that favor a panopticon state at least as much as the current administration does. I expect to see "bi-partisan support" for excoriating Snowden and all the others.
This man may well be our Jesus. The government is going to crucify him in their fury.
You know, I live in the deep South and I've never once in my 53 years heard that term used that way until just now.
Seems to go back at least to 1996 when it was used in the (excellent) Kiefer Sutherland movie "Freeway."
http://www.rsdb.org/slur/coal-burner
Looks like he hasn't touched his other projects either.
(A) He tried it and wasn't as simple as all the big talk
(B) no one else has picked it up.
And RDP supports rootless forwarding just like X11.
Bit-blasting just trades the latency problems with X11 forwarding for bandwidth problems.
But that's just one possible way of forwarding them. It's not like its impossibe.
"Not impossible" is a far cry from being designed, much less implemented.
That's a tacit admission on your part that work is not being done on the issue.
Ah, yes because he said "we could probably do better" it's instantly terrible and doomed.
Hyperbole considered bad.
I read it as someone who was confident of their solution but unsure of the final form
"Probably" was not the only qualifier in the paragraph, pretty much everything he wrote was explicitly qualified. However you are welcome to support your beliefs with a citation to some documentation for even alpha level protocols for remoting wayland apps.
What I've seen is stuff like this GSoC participant who discovered that its not as simple as he thought. No one's touched his work since. Seems like the only work to come since then has been RDP based DESKTOP forwarding, not application remoting.
Maybe because they know you won't even when they make an entirely point and put it in front of you? Read what he said:
I read that everything he said was qualified with the word PROBABLY. What did you read?
It isn't done yet, so let's wait and see. Everything I've seen looks very promising.
I don't know what you saw, but what I just read at the cited article is that the people designing wayland have barely given it a second thought. That attitude does not deserve the benefit of the doubt.
The only argument I've seen is the lack of network transparency, often poorly worded with no actual technical argument behind it.
Sounds like you aren't interested in hearing the arguments, but I'll try. Practically all X11 apps can run remotely - the ones that can't are likely to be inherently limited, like video players or 3d first person shooters that have bandwidth and latency requirements that are transport constrained. Outside of those types and pathological configurations, remote X11 just works for all apps.
V) "Wayland can't do remoting." Wrong. Wayland should be BETTER than X at remoting, partially do its asynchronous-by-design nature. Wayland remoting will probably look a like a higher-performance version of VNC, a prototype already exists. And this is without us even giving it serious thought about how to make it better. We could probably do better if we tried.
"We haven't given it serious thought" is a particularly bad approach to convince people to quit bitching. Show us a well thought out plan to support per window/application remoting, not vnc-style desktop remoting and that will shut up practically everyone. Act like you really don't give a shit and nobody will have any confidence that it ever will "better than X."
There may well be a good reason the Obama Administration has not shit-canned the whole thing. That is to say, the Obama Administration may realize that the Bush Administration had a reason to do all of this shit.
The proof is in the pudding. The number of serious terrorist attacks in the USA is minuscule. Until the boston bombers there had not been a single civilian death for ever a decade. Yet practically all of the people actually "caught" plotting "attacks" were numb-nuts who had no chance of success if the FBI hadn't been there to coax them along with informants. Unless the US is deliberately hiding the "real" plots and only using the idiots for PR, there is no significant threat.
My theory as to why Obama bought into it is the same as for why he bought into the too big to fail bullshit. He was inexperienced and allowed policy to be set by the people who talked like they knew what they were doing. There is so much invested in "anti-terrorism" literally trillions of dollars, that the contractors and agencies are surely very good at justifying their existence.
Is there really anybody out there who didn't know the government has been doing this?
We all knew it because it was the obvious simpleton path for the government to take in response to 9/11. But we didn't have proof. Now we have proof.
We are talking about Bloomberg here, the guy who blames large cups for obesity.
It is standard dieting advice to limit portion sizes. I know there was one study that suggested that maybe that's not always true, but that one study could easily have been poorly designed, it seems like so many are nowadays.
I think the problem people have with his proposal is he didn't sell it. He should have have said that any place which sells soda by the cup but won't sell them larger than 16oz or whatever his target size was, would have a half-rate tax on all their soda fountain sales.