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It's why I've advocated for months now that any "humor" of a politicoreligious nature be relegated to the Basement.-kyrathaba (November 01, 2013, 06:38 PM)
Sorry, I was referring to the 'theory' about the high frequency networking side of it.-4wd (November 01, 2013, 05:57 PM)
On Thursday, Ars Technica ran a story about badBIOS, a nasty piece of malware allegedly discovered three years ago by security consultant Dragos Ruiu on an Apple laptop. The malware is so sophisticated that some wonder if the story is real or just a hoax.
I would like to seriously suggest that Edward Snowden, whether he wishes it or not, has a great future in American politics.
When it's all over - and he has been exonerated - it would behoove any of the 'third-party' political organizations opposed to unconstitutional practices, such as mass surveillance, or tapping the phones of foreign leaders, or waging undeclared foreign wars of aggression, to draft Edward Snowden to run for the US senate in 2016, and the presidency in 2020 when he will be over 35 and meet the constitutional age requirement to run.
Snowdens qualifications: Honesty, integrity, courage, putting 'doing the right thing' above personal advantage, and standing up for the basic democratic rights of the American people.
Three years ago, security consultant Dragos Ruiu was in his lab when he noticed something highly unusual: his MacBook Air, on which he had just installed a fresh copy of OS X, spontaneously updated the firmware that helps it boot. Stranger still, when Ruiu then tried to boot the machine off a CD ROM, it refused. He also found that the machine could delete data and undo configuration changes with no prompting. He didn't know it then, but that odd firmware update would become a high-stakes malware mystery that would consume most of his waking hours.
In the following months, Ruiu observed more odd phenomena that seemed straight out of a science-fiction thriller. A computer running the Open BSD operating system also began to modify its settings and delete its data without explanation or prompting. His network transmitted data specific to the Internet's next-generation IPv6 networking protocol, even from computers that were supposed to have IPv6 completely disabled. Strangest of all was the ability of infected machines to transmit small amounts of network data with other infected machines even when their power cords and Ethernet cables were unplugged and their Wi-Fi and Bluetooth cards were removed. Further investigation soon showed that the list of affected operating systems also included multiple variants of Windows and Linux.
"We were like, 'Okay, we're totally owned,'" Ruiu told Ars. "'We have to erase all our systems and start from scratch,' which we did. It was a very painful exercise. I've been suspicious of stuff around here ever since."
Man Jailed For Overdue Library Book
Head of Congressional Intelligence Committee: “You Can’t Have Your Privacy Violated If You Don’t KNOW Your Privacy Is Violated”
How’s that different from arguing that it’s okay for a thief to takes $100 from your bank account as long as you don’t notice that the money is missing? Or that it’s okay to rape a woman while she’s passed out so long as she doesn’t realize what happened?
That’s beyond ridiculous.
(see attachment in previous post)
Kristoffer Koch, Norwegian man, buys apartment with Bitcoin profit-Arizona Hot (October 30, 2013, 01:00 PM)
We don't need to cooperate with control freaks
It seems like a lot to risk for little gain.-wraith808 (October 30, 2013, 09:32 PM)
So is it merely that the NSA is now a reasonable target for such allegations for other reasons?-wraith808 (October 30, 2013, 09:32 PM)
US 'spied on future Pope Francis during Vatican conclave'
NSA spied on the future Pope Francis before and during the Vatican conclave at which he was chosen to succeed Benedict XVI
People need to get on the stick and reflexively raise hell anytime any organization starts asking for information they really don't need.-Stoic Joker (October 30, 2013, 12:00 PM)
LAW & DISORDER / CIVILIZATION & DISCONTENTS
Man sues DHS, NSA for the right to parody them on mugs, T-shirts
"Forbidding citizens from criticizing them is beyond the pale,” lawyer says.
David Cameron threatened on Monday to act to stop newspapers publishing what he called damaging leaks from former U.S. intelligence operative Edward Snowden.
"If they don't demonstrate some social responsibility it will be very difficult for government to stand back and not to act," Cameron told parliament.
More on this story over at Techdirt.
I'm wondering how many more heavy handed attempts will be made at derailing the revelations before somebody with access to the documents decides to do a preemptive mass data dump of the entire remaining collection?
-40hz (October 29, 2013, 02:01 PM)
There's that "social responsibility" phrase again. I don't think it means quite what Cameron seems to think it means. Social responsibility is not being stenographers for the government's point of view. Quite the opposite. You'd think that someone in Cameron's position would understand that.
However, and though I could be wrong, of course, an argument over the rightness/wrongness of the belief would seem to have two-fifths of ¼ of sod all to do with the thread Knight to queen's bishop 3 - Snowden charged with espionage.-IainB (October 29, 2013, 05:50 PM)
The question then is how comfortable people are with lying. Politicians are obviously extremely comfortable with it.-Renegade (October 29, 2013, 04:06 AM)
One problem with this position is that it does not acknowledge that the daily work of a politician consists of negotiating conflicting demands from opposing interests, while the world is constantly changing around them. Something will always look like a lie from someone's particular position, and opponents will be more than happy to point those out to exploit them for their own particular political interests.-dr_andus (October 29, 2013, 02:10 PM)
This doesn't mean that barefaced lies are always OK. But asking politicians to always only tell the truth and only the truth is a highly unrealistic demand that no one is actually capable of doing in their own lives either.-dr_andus (October 29, 2013, 02:10 PM)
Perpetuating such unrealistic expectations by saying that "all politicians are liars" undermines the democratic process because it breeds cynicism and simply turns people off politics and they stop voting and they get even more disenfranchised.-dr_andus (October 29, 2013, 02:10 PM)
There will never be such a thing as a politician that 100% always tells the truth as it is. That is only possible in an alternate Platonic world or maybe in Heaven.-dr_andus (October 29, 2013, 02:10 PM)
Fury at Facebook as login requests “Government ID” from users
Thousands of Facebook users have vented their fury at the social media site on Twitter after they were locked out of the site, and were requested to provide “Government ID” to log back in.
Similar mass lockouts have occurred on Facebook in the past, most recently in January this year. At that time, the ID request was in response to claims that users’ accounts had been hacked.
“This is just a general practice for both Facebook and Instagram to request photo IDs for verification purposes depending on what type of violation may have occurred,” Facebook said at the time.
This is the first mass lockout and ID request to have taken place since the NSA government data trawling revelations, and it seems to have outraged users to a greater extent.
At the time of publication, Facebook have not issued any public comment or confirmation.
True, there does have to be a certain level of trust. But lying by omission is still lying- but not necessarily bad faith. So having a budget of $500 on a purchase, and not telling the other person your true budget or telling a different budget and driving a hard bargain based on that, prepared to if it comes to the wall to increase that amount... is that lying? Or good bargaining tactics?-wraith808 (October 28, 2013, 10:26 PM)
It's not as black and white as it may appear, IMO.-wraith808 (October 28, 2013, 10:26 PM)