101–110 of 121 posts
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When a junior developer screws something up, I accept responsibility and apologize to the client. It's my fault. There is no authority without responsibility. If you don't like that, don't accept the job. [FWIW I didn't like Bush either]
Are you really conflating the challenge and compromises involved with being the leader of the free world to being a mid to senior level developer?
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Actually, in my haste to post I only listed the ones that I thought of right away. I was quite disappointed to hear the Apple too, has succomb. Now I really have a reason to install Debian Wheezy on MBPr. ;p This is no way to live. Something must be done.
This got me thinking. Linux distros has usually been seen as a safe harbor for people. We now have proof that MS and Apple has been in bed with the governments for a long time, and but even before it wouldn't have been too wrong to think MS/Apple has some kind of back door. Years ago, something called Ubuntu came up to spread linux to the masses. While it was hard to install and maintain a linux pc before, Ubuntu mad…
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How many times does some one have to say this? I'm sorry, but this sort of comment is getting pretty tiresome. Yes we all "knew". All of us "knew". Some of us have "known" for something like 15 years. (Which, BTW, is why I'm most sure why Obama is getting so much flack. Its a Clinton - Bush - Obama scandal.) But none of us, not one, actually did know anything at all. We suspected, or assumed. But we did not know. Not…
No. Don't downplay people concerned with privacy who noticed a series of obvious, blatant actions over a period of literally decades as cynics or conspiracy nuts. You are picking on people; we really did know, not "know." It was obvious, it remains obvious, and the fact is that its going to continue and get worse despite the revelations of this week, unless we do something. Painting rational people who notice and com…
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That is hyperbole. The number of terrorist incidents is massively low, and the few that the government claims to have stopped were such laughably unrealistic plots that one wonders the government even bothered. Meanwhile, we have a government surveillance program that literally surpasses the level of the Stasi, here in the United States, and simultaneously an administration that will not even reveal the criteria used…
Bullshit, 'the Stasi"? Go talk to somebody who lived in East Germany. And they catch people all the time trying to get bomb materials, how did you think they were doing it, luck? (In the case of the car bomb in Times Square you're right, it was dumb luck, the timer malfunctioned.) If the average person didn't freak out and start yelling retarded things like 'Stasi!' I'd say fine, maybe my fucking Facebook is worth pe…
I grew up as a kid in Romania, we didn't have the Stasi but we did have the Securitate (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securitate), which were as bad if not worse. I would like to confirm that from half a Globe away what I'm reading about the NSA gives me the chills.
Now. Exactly which data is exposed for each provider? I'm thinking mostly about Gmail. Because virtually everyone now is using it… The whole content of any communications? Just origin/dest? This is becoming scary.
I think YouTube too, saw a mention of it in one of the articles linked from HN. Which I guess makes sense from their point of view, there was this case about 3 months ago of two Russian spies caught in Germany who had "taken orders" by way of YouTube comments (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732453200457836...).
And then of course there's all the "jihadist" YT videos (Arabic Nasheeds and all that) with lots of comments that may hold "useful" data, like IP addresses of those commenting. Of course I've long time ago created a YT playlist with a couple of these nasheeds (even though I don't understand a word some of them do sound really nice), which I hope to counter-act in NSA's eyes by my loyal membership to /r/murica and limitless fanboyism for the works of Thomas Paine.
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IIRC, they're legally required to deny it. Plus, careful wording allows all sorts of out. Google says they don't provide a "back door", but this sort of thing could be defined as coming in the front door.
Gag orders don't require them to deny it, the require them not to confirm it.
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I think "as you type" means different things to an intelligence officer and a programmer. The intelligence officer probably means "real time" (no need for a judge/approval/etc). A Google Wave like interface is probably not in the backend, but if the FISA route took weeks and the new kit takes seconds I could see "literally as you type" being a description that fits.
Yes...maybe I reacted too strongly to the often misused "literally." But even real-time interception would not (seemingly) be that valuable to analysts. Assuming that suspects aren't dumb enough to use their own personal accounts and to talk of their plans explicitly, it seems analysts would want the historical aggregate of which alias accounts talked to which other alias accounts. Hell, Facebook can already figure o…
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Gag orders don't require them to deny it, the require them not to confirm it.
Which can be considered to require them to deny it. "We can't talk about that" confirms it.
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I've always wondered how a government agency would reliably set up cameras in everyone's home 1984 style. I find it hilarious that we may just go down to Best Buy and install in our own homes.
There was of course that one amusing Onion article about some US intelligence agency making its own social network so that everyone would just voluntarily give up all their information.
(note/edit: I've made an error of conflation between the recently reported massive phone record sweep-up and PRISM, which according to the WP, simply allows analysts to trace (essentially) the totality of someone's online interactions, though not everyone at once. So really, things don't seem that much different than last week when it was well known that the government has discretion to warrantlessly tap us. Still, $…
> this program only cost $20M a year? If that's the price of eternal security, I'd say we got a pretty goddamn good deal. This line of thought is similar to another comment on HN stating that "we should be grateful to Google". - Oh, they take only $20M? We should be grateful for that. Let them do whatever it takes to "protect our freedom". I'm very surprised to see this kind of reasoning on the hacker's forum.
I'm not. HN is typically more liberal than what some might consider a traditional hacker to be; I'd imagine the real hackers congregate somewhere else. Somewhere less "white hat-y", if you will.
The problem with getting through to people who are willing to surrender their freedoms for a false promise of security is that they don't see the government as a threat. If the government is not a threat then why not surrender your freedom to them? Are they not there to protect us?
This idea has been present throughout history and most notably in western literature. It's believed by some that in order to have an achievable utopian society we must enslave ourselves to the government only at the cost of our personal freedoms. By this definition we've long been enslaved, it's just that some are now noticing it.
Of course some level of opposition will always be present. However the size of such is so small that the power they have must be leveraged through some alternative means. Some say this is the internet. We now know that's not true.