Still, half of the reason to use Duck Duck Go or some other privacy oriented search engine is not just HTTPS but the fact they don't feed everything you search for into an enormous data mining effort.
Anyway, doesn't the alleged NSA backdoor into Google as part of the PRISM program make any supposed "anti-NSA" stance a completely empty gesture?
The intense backtracking that the PRISM providers have done since the revelations seems very disingenuous.
It's interesting to see just how the battle to make mined data more valuable is hotting up.
Up until now, all we're really witnessed is accumulation, how companies can extract as much reliable information from you as possible. Tracking cookies, keywords etc. give a crude overview of you, but none of it is really analysed or put in context.
The next stage I suppose is making accurate assumptions on the additional data extracted, and there is an avalanche of it posted everyday. It strikes me that analysis like that is a problem that really isn't going to be feasible to solve anytime soon.
I suppose when your customers are advertisers, you're obviously going to make lots of wonderful announcements about how you are working to make advertising so much more lucrative.
Big Brother exists, but he only wants to sell you shit.
By 2005, according a Department of Energy report (.pdf), the U.S. government owned 87 pounds, of which roughly two-thirds was designated for national security projects, likely to power deep-sea espionage hardware.
What on earth do they need deep sea espionage for? Are they trying to spy on Cthulhu or something?
I wonder occasionally if advertising is the next overinflated bubble fit to burst.
Companies or investors are buying into these vast userbases (which is essentially what is being sold) on the broad assumption that somehow advertising revenue will return the investment. Yet in almost every case this has proved spurious as the trends are so volatile.
Tumblr has never made a profit and yet is worth over $1 billion simply because people believe that advertising is worth that much. It seems to be an act of faith in much the same way as people believed that housing was an investment that always grew, or you couldn't lose buying technology stock in the late 90's.
The foundations of this advertising collossus seem no more secure than those of the financial one, and we all know how well that ended up.
At what point will we start seeing legislation forbidding the automation of certain industries?
Never.
If governments had any interest whatsoever in protecting jobs there have been ample opportunities to stem the tide of automation over the last forty years, and they have done absolutely nothing. The ruins of Detroit and the death of unskilled on reasonable wages should demonstrate that point.
I say this all the time, but we have to start thinking about providing a reasonable standard of living to people who are automated out of a job. The situation as it stands is unacceptable, so what good is legislating against further automation going to do?
Better to deal with the root problem of providing people with income directly than a ridiculous sticking plaster solution where say, a further 10% of the workforce are chucked on the scrapheap (making unemployment 20%+ in a lot of places) instead of 20%. We've seen the sort of devastation and deprivation that 20%+ unemployment causes, are we really going to throw one in four or five people on the scrapheap in sacrifice of our outdated industrial age ideas?
The terrorists won around the time that the Patriot Act was passed. What we've been witnessing the last twelve years is occupation; constant fear and the ever ballooning corpulence of the security state.
bombing the shit out of the country isn't going to make a decent democracy emerge.
Quite, and certainly not in Syria.
What is most perplexing is why the US is so bent on arming the Syrian rebels. In the past the US has been absolutely terrified of political Islam.
It now seems willing to embrace and fund it, even if one or more of the parties of rebels are linked to terrorist groups. Deposed dictators like Mubarak, Saddam Hussein, the Shah of Iran and so on have been used in the past to stop the forming of an Islamic government.
Perhaps it's because they'll get a better deal out of the new rulers than the old. Perhaps it's to weaken a Russian ally. Is there much oil in Syria? Perhaps they want oil again.
In Iraq where one of the first laws passed after the invasion was the implementation of US style copyright laws. Perhaps this has been set up by the RIAA? After all, the US helped overthrow a government for United Fruit once.
I imagine whenever the US decides to go to war, the president just spins a little wheel in the White House marked "justification" and runs with whatever it lands on.
1: Buy the rights and announce a multiplayer version of a dearly loved series of games, suggest some great ideas, receive lots of money and goodwill.
2: Drag your feet, procrastinate, dumb the game down, fail to implement features and watch it finally drift endlessly as yet another average, money grubbing F2P.
Self driving cars will cost jobs, as will eventual moves towards automation, telecommuting &c.
The increasing role of technology in every sphere of life will eventually rule out all but very skilled, specialised jobs in small numbers. This is a trend that started in the industrial age, and no amount of legislation will stop the fact that we simply don't need to employ as many people as we used to.
I've advocated on here before the role of a guaranteed minimum income, and this could be an opportunity to create the first real leisure society. Consumerism as we more or less know it would fund economic development still, as it does now, except the source of our income wouldn't be our increasingly obsolete labour but a guaranteed disposable income, rising gradually ahead of living costs over time.
The amount of creative works, open source projects, general hackery &c. that'll spring from having a majority of people free from having to be employed will be mind boggling.
The biggest stumbling block to this in my mind is the dismantling of "trickle up" neoliberalism and the replacement of a brain dead political class.
Technology companies have produced remarkably brilliant new opportunities and efficiencies, but they have also raised the specter of lives bled of purpose, of the inhumanity of the new social structures that are emerging. What do we do to keep everyone gainfully occupied when globalization and technological change render the bottom two thirds of society redundant?
This is a point that I always feel gratified reading, and it really cannot be stated often enough. We are reaching a stage where we simply don't need as many people employed as we used to. Instagram was worth $1 billion when it was bought by Facebook, and it had only 13 employees. Could you imagine thirty years ago any business at all being worth that sort of money with a dozen employees?
It isn't just web services though, it's the manufacturing and retail / service sectors too. Even down to those obnoxious self checkout machines in supermarkets, which are costing several people a job while at the same time making the customer do more of the work.
We're already in a position where job creation is lagging population growth. How much worse will it need to get before people actually start discussing this?
(My pet solution is a guaranteed minimum income, enough to allow people to live comfortably with a decent amount of disposable income.)
Then on the other side, even my supposed thoughtful reporting NPR station put out anotehr fluff piece, this time about the NSA LOVEINT activities. The two reporters made it seem like a joke, a trivial action taken by so "oh so naughty" analysts instead of what it was, a sever breach of privacy
One element of propaganda is always humanising on side while demonising the other.
The LOVEINT angle struck me as a very awkward and ill thought out way of trying to do that. A couple of the reports I read had a sort of "oh look, they're jealous insecure paranoids too!" ring about it, which was probably not the intention. I imagine a lot of people saw that for the flagrant abuse of power that it really was.
It'll be fun playing "guess the planted story" over this, as they try and dress up the erosion of representative democracy as something good.
MS had some great ideas, but absolutely screwed it up in terms of execution. I occasionally still use a PocketPC from the turn of the millenium and it is genuinely well designed. One example is the design spec for the PPC put a scroll wheel on one side, which means you can hold it in one hand, clicking through pages on Microsoft Reader with the wheel.
If the PocketPC PDAs had used a finger touch screen while at the same time been marketed as a gaming and media player, rather than as purely a business tool I imagine they would have sold like crazy. Instead, it had a calander application and Office.
In its current form, Microsoft often feels like it's struggling in the wake of Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook
Microsoft still has 90% of the desktop operating system market share in one form or another. It can afford to make a lot more mistakes yet, desktop machines aren't going anywhere.
A comparison with Detroit in the 60's struck me as I was reading it. Certainly it was a different era, but the same hubris and ignorance seems to afflict the large firms in the tech industry as it did the Big Three. I suppose one benefit of the isolation of the tech industry is that it won't destroy the lives of so many people when it inevitably crumbles into dust.
Also, quoth the article:
San Francisco is becoming a city without a middle class.
This seems to be becoming true everywhere, not just SF. The middle class is getting absorbed into an enormous economic demographic of people who struggle with various degrees of severity to make ends meet.
Techology won't save us from that fate, it'll make it worse. There actually needs to be a social and political solution through income redistribution before we start witnessing real segregation - massive percentages of a community in poverty with awful basic services while the fortunate are shuttled to work from their gated communities and provided private company paid services, completely isolated from the city they work in. All while the company milks constant local tax breaks and leeches off the crumbling infrastructure.
If you're using the service more, you should expect to pay more.
Assuming you ran a mail and web server within the agreed bandwidth limits, how would you be abusing or over utilising the service?
It strikes me as one of those arbitrary decisions that are made purely for the bottom line, like how some telecom companies charge extra for tethering despite it costing them absolutely nothing extra.
I'm a Lavabit user, and this is the absolute first I've heard of this. We had no warning and since yesterday the mail servers have been down. I assume we'll never get them back either.
I appreciate the sentiment and all, but you could have done it with a bit more professionalism than just disappearing one day, leaving those of us with Lavabit accounts completely in the lurch.
It goes without saying that if the US government is so paranoid and afraid that it'll tap your god damn Facebook profile, then it is going to be hell bent on trying to get at Darknets, anonymising services and Tor.
Slashdot Mirror
Brainfuck. Look it up, I can't even give a code example as it pisses off /.'s filter.
Still, half of the reason to use Duck Duck Go or some other privacy oriented search engine is not just HTTPS but the fact they don't feed everything you search for into an enormous data mining effort.
Anyway, doesn't the alleged NSA backdoor into Google as part of the PRISM program make any supposed "anti-NSA" stance a completely empty gesture?
The intense backtracking that the PRISM providers have done since the revelations seems very disingenuous.
It's interesting to see just how the battle to make mined data more valuable is hotting up.
Up until now, all we're really witnessed is accumulation, how companies can extract as much reliable information from you as possible. Tracking cookies, keywords etc. give a crude overview of you, but none of it is really analysed or put in context.
The next stage I suppose is making accurate assumptions on the additional data extracted, and there is an avalanche of it posted everyday. It strikes me that analysis like that is a problem that really isn't going to be feasible to solve anytime soon.
I suppose when your customers are advertisers, you're obviously going to make lots of wonderful announcements about how you are working to make advertising so much more lucrative.
Big Brother exists, but he only wants to sell you shit.
People have a tendency to think in dichotomies, rightly or wrongly
Ahh, I see what you did there.
By 2005, according a Department of Energy report (.pdf), the U.S. government owned 87 pounds, of which roughly two-thirds was designated for national security projects, likely to power deep-sea espionage hardware.
What on earth do they need deep sea espionage for? Are they trying to spy on Cthulhu or something?
I wonder occasionally if advertising is the next overinflated bubble fit to burst.
Companies or investors are buying into these vast userbases (which is essentially what is being sold) on the broad assumption that somehow advertising revenue will return the investment. Yet in almost every case this has proved spurious as the trends are so volatile.
Tumblr has never made a profit and yet is worth over $1 billion simply because people believe that advertising is worth that much. It seems to be an act of faith in much the same way as people believed that housing was an investment that always grew, or you couldn't lose buying technology stock in the late 90's.
The foundations of this advertising collossus seem no more secure than those of the financial one, and we all know how well that ended up.
At what point will we start seeing legislation forbidding the automation of certain industries?
Never.
If governments had any interest whatsoever in protecting jobs there have been ample opportunities to stem the tide of automation over the last forty years, and they have done absolutely nothing. The ruins of Detroit and the death of unskilled on reasonable wages should demonstrate that point.
I say this all the time, but we have to start thinking about providing a reasonable standard of living to people who are automated out of a job. The situation as it stands is unacceptable, so what good is legislating against further automation going to do?
Better to deal with the root problem of providing people with income directly than a ridiculous sticking plaster solution where say, a further 10% of the workforce are chucked on the scrapheap (making unemployment 20%+ in a lot of places) instead of 20%. We've seen the sort of devastation and deprivation that 20%+ unemployment causes, are we really going to throw one in four or five people on the scrapheap in sacrifice of our outdated industrial age ideas?
Our contraptions have 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and sometimes higher.
In fact, man is so superior, we even have contraptions with infinite gears!
Christ, I havn't even replaced the CRT yet.
The terrorists won around the time that the Patriot Act was passed. What we've been witnessing the last twelve years is occupation; constant fear and the ever ballooning corpulence of the security state.
bombing the shit out of the country isn't going to make a decent democracy emerge.
Quite, and certainly not in Syria.
What is most perplexing is why the US is so bent on arming the Syrian rebels. In the past the US has been absolutely terrified of political Islam.
It now seems willing to embrace and fund it, even if one or more of the parties of rebels are linked to terrorist groups. Deposed dictators like Mubarak, Saddam Hussein, the Shah of Iran and so on have been used in the past to stop the forming of an Islamic government.
Perhaps it's because they'll get a better deal out of the new rulers than the old. Perhaps it's to weaken a Russian ally. Is there much oil in Syria? Perhaps they want oil again.
In Iraq where one of the first laws passed after the invasion was the implementation of US style copyright laws. Perhaps this has been set up by the RIAA? After all, the US helped overthrow a government for United Fruit once.
I imagine whenever the US decides to go to war, the president just spins a little wheel in the White House marked "justification" and runs with whatever it lands on.
I am selling platinum-tipped, lead-shielded, kevlar-reinforced Ultra Mega HDMI 2.0 cables for the low, low price of $200/ft.
Fool! I am selling $1 store HDMI cables painted bright green with gold painted connectors for $200/ft.
The green stabalises electrons so my cables have 25% more clarity. Electrons moving is what makes the picture fuzzy.
1: Buy the rights and announce a multiplayer version of a dearly loved series of games, suggest some great ideas, receive lots of money and goodwill.
2: Drag your feet, procrastinate, dumb the game down, fail to implement features and watch it finally drift endlessly as yet another average, money grubbing F2P.
3: ???
4: Profit!
CAPTCHA : pitiable
Self driving cars will cost jobs, as will eventual moves towards automation, telecommuting &c.
The increasing role of technology in every sphere of life will eventually rule out all but very skilled, specialised jobs in small numbers. This is a trend that started in the industrial age, and no amount of legislation will stop the fact that we simply don't need to employ as many people as we used to.
I've advocated on here before the role of a guaranteed minimum income, and this could be an opportunity to create the first real leisure society. Consumerism as we more or less know it would fund economic development still, as it does now, except the source of our income wouldn't be our increasingly obsolete labour but a guaranteed disposable income, rising gradually ahead of living costs over time.
The amount of creative works, open source projects, general hackery &c. that'll spring from having a majority of people free from having to be employed will be mind boggling.
The biggest stumbling block to this in my mind is the dismantling of "trickle up" neoliberalism and the replacement of a brain dead political class.
Could you imagine thirty years ago any business at all being worth that sort of money with a dozen employees?
Actually, since I thought of a couple of examples, make that fifty years!
Technology companies have produced remarkably brilliant new opportunities and efficiencies, but they have also raised the specter of lives bled of purpose, of the inhumanity of the new social structures that are emerging. What do we do to keep everyone gainfully occupied when globalization and technological change render the bottom two thirds of society redundant?
This is a point that I always feel gratified reading, and it really cannot be stated often enough. We are reaching a stage where we simply don't need as many people employed as we used to. Instagram was worth $1 billion when it was bought by Facebook, and it had only 13 employees. Could you imagine thirty years ago any business at all being worth that sort of money with a dozen employees?
It isn't just web services though, it's the manufacturing and retail / service sectors too. Even down to those obnoxious self checkout machines in supermarkets, which are costing several people a job while at the same time making the customer do more of the work.
We're already in a position where job creation is lagging population growth. How much worse will it need to get before people actually start discussing this?
(My pet solution is a guaranteed minimum income, enough to allow people to live comfortably with a decent amount of disposable income.)
Then on the other side, even my supposed thoughtful reporting NPR station put out anotehr fluff piece, this time about the NSA LOVEINT activities. The two reporters made it seem like a joke, a trivial action taken by so "oh so naughty" analysts instead of what it was, a sever breach of privacy
One element of propaganda is always humanising on side while demonising the other.
The LOVEINT angle struck me as a very awkward and ill thought out way of trying to do that. A couple of the reports I read had a sort of "oh look, they're jealous insecure paranoids too!" ring about it, which was probably not the intention. I imagine a lot of people saw that for the flagrant abuse of power that it really was.
It'll be fun playing "guess the planted story" over this, as they try and dress up the erosion of representative democracy as something good.
MS had some great ideas, but absolutely screwed it up in terms of execution. I occasionally still use a PocketPC from the turn of the millenium and it is genuinely well designed. One example is the design spec for the PPC put a scroll wheel on one side, which means you can hold it in one hand, clicking through pages on Microsoft Reader with the wheel.
If the PocketPC PDAs had used a finger touch screen while at the same time been marketed as a gaming and media player, rather than as purely a business tool I imagine they would have sold like crazy. Instead, it had a calander application and Office.
In its current form, Microsoft often feels like it's struggling in the wake of Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook
Microsoft still has 90% of the desktop operating system market share in one form or another. It can afford to make a lot more mistakes yet, desktop machines aren't going anywhere.
A comparison with Detroit in the 60's struck me as I was reading it. Certainly it was a different era, but the same hubris and ignorance seems to afflict the large firms in the tech industry as it did the Big Three. I suppose one benefit of the isolation of the tech industry is that it won't destroy the lives of so many people when it inevitably crumbles into dust.
Also, quoth the article:
San Francisco is becoming a city without a middle class.
This seems to be becoming true everywhere, not just SF. The middle class is getting absorbed into an enormous economic demographic of people who struggle with various degrees of severity to make ends meet.
Techology won't save us from that fate, it'll make it worse. There actually needs to be a social and political solution through income redistribution before we start witnessing real segregation - massive percentages of a community in poverty with awful basic services while the fortunate are shuttled to work from their gated communities and provided private company paid services, completely isolated from the city they work in. All while the company milks constant local tax breaks and leeches off the crumbling infrastructure.
If you're using the service more, you should expect to pay more.
Assuming you ran a mail and web server within the agreed bandwidth limits, how would you be abusing or over utilising the service?
It strikes me as one of those arbitrary decisions that are made purely for the bottom line, like how some telecom companies charge extra for tethering despite it costing them absolutely nothing extra.
I'm a Lavabit user, and this is the absolute first I've heard of this. We had no warning and since yesterday the mail servers have been down. I assume we'll never get them back either.
I appreciate the sentiment and all, but you could have done it with a bit more professionalism than just disappearing one day, leaving those of us with Lavabit accounts completely in the lurch.
The Washington Post article itself says that it's simply a recommendation by a report published by the Department of Commerce.
With any luck, it won't be acted upon. The time to worry is when it starts being pushed as a change to the law, not now.
It goes without saying that if the US government is so paranoid and afraid that it'll tap your god damn Facebook profile, then it is going to be hell bent on trying to get at Darknets, anonymising services and Tor.
Abuse of power comes as no surprise.
I think the largest known spreads across some 2,200 acres
That's the NSA super fungus processing centre, created for intercepting spores.