301–310 of 641 posts
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> How can they feel good about what they are doing? You'd be amazed. https://twitter.com/_nothingtohide
Seems to me that people aren't too concerned of nameless, faceless people looking through their stuff so long as people they know (parents, spouse, friends..) don't see it.
This bit both somewhat limits the impact and makes Greenwald et. al.'s claims that most everything is being Hoovered up a lot more credible: " The XKeyscore system is continuously collecting so much internet data that it can be stored only for short periods of time. Content remains on the system for only three to five days, while metadata is stored for 30 days. One document explains: "At some sites, the amount of dat…
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You're both right. If you read the PATRIOT Act, it's easy to look backwards and see that the things we're becoming aware of now are logical extensions of what was being asked for way back then. It is, however, VERY easy not to have been able to have that foresight, and I think that the insights people were expecting the government to have been constrained by the fact that all the information of value is collected by…
If Richard Stallman is quietly berating us somewhere, he can go fuck himself. Part of educating the masses is being a person who people want to listen to. If he failed at that, he's no better than anyone else, and perhaps far worse, because of all the lost potential.
Aside from that, I didn't mean to seriously suggest that he's out there passing judgement on us so much as I was attempting to acknowledge how hypocritical we are for having disregarded his message because of his eccentricities. I think your statement, that he should actively try to be more popular for us to care, is further proof of how wrong we are to be that way.
In an ideal world, your response would have made a perfect satire of how Americans are likely to react in the face of the responsible elder telling us to eat our proverbial vegetables. That is isn't saddens me.
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>This is overwhelming. Even when you always hear the claims about we knew this was going on, somehow it is still shocking when you see it all laid out infront of you with screenshots and the capabilities described. It has become a bit of a pet peeve of mine recently to see self-aggrandizing comments from users around the net about how "we should have known" and "none of this is new." I'm a practically addicted news j…
First of all: keep the staggering to a minimum. Second: realizing that "we should have known" and "none of this is new" isn't so much about reading news articles and being "plugged in", but rather having an understanding of how the Internet works. To oversimplify greatly, you're essentially playing a very precise game of telephone between around 10-20 different people, and usually about 1-3 different publicly-owned c…
This is overwhelming. Even when you always hear the claims about we knew this was going on, somehow it is still shocking when you see it all laid out infront of you with screenshots and the capabilities described. I can see how they get HTTP information, since they would intercept at transit hubs - but how are they getting all Facebook private messages and Gmail? I was also looking for another unique ID that users ar…
> how are they getting all Facebook private messages and Gmail? Perhaps you missed the news about PRISM? :)
Surely the question on everyone's mind is: how good is incognito mode???
It's not. It's only just a way to visit sites without a record being stored on your computer. Read the warning. For example, Firefox's private browsing mode states: > While this computer won't have a record of your browsing history, your internet service provider or employer can still track the pages you visit. They should include government spooks in that warning!
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300 "terrorists" caught for a few billion people's privacy completely destroyed at a price tag of 100 Billion (pulled out of my ass obviously). Absurdity at its finest.
How many of these "terrorists" were just young men suffering typical teenage angst, and happened to be of the wrong religion?
[1]http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-secret-nsa-survei...
Slide 13 just got slightly redacted. http://imgur.com/a/SVerP#0
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Why would Google (or anyone) link to them directly? with fiber no less! this stuff is alarming enough no need for FUD. This XKS business seems about intercepting non-encrypted traffic as the references to HTTP payload quoted in the article would suggest.
> Why would Google (or anyone) link to them directly? with fiber no less! "They have no direct access to our servers" I wonder what a beam splitter consists of. Oh. A PRISM.
When one refers to a beamsplitter, it's usually a partially silvered mirror.
http://www.thorlabs.us/newgrouppage9.cfm?objectgroup_id=914
If it's fancy, it might use an evanescent wave to do the coupling, as in some cube beamsplitters.
Beamsplitters for optical fiber are more generally referred to as 'couplers' and involve bringing two fiber cores close enough for a long enough distance that the probability of coupling light from one to the other is the desired amount.
http://www.thorlabs.us/newgrouppage9.cfm?objectgroup_id=374
It is possible to split beams with a birefringent prism, but it is much less common.
http://www.thorlabs.us/newgrouppage9.cfm?objectgroup_id=745 http://www.thorlabs.us/newgrouppage9.cfm?objectgroup_id=917
Disclaimer for the following: I only work with optical fiber couplers occasionally, and not for telecom. Someone who works on telecom fibers daily will be more informed.
In summary, if someone wanted me to tap an optical fiber, I'd call up ThorLabs, get a matching coupler shipped overnight, cut the relevant fiber, slap APC ends on the fiber ends, and jack in. Splitting the beam in free space (outside of a fiber) with a prism is far more errorprone, unstable, and no more efficient. A fiber coupler has no moving parts, can't break, and won't take down a telecom's trunk line if someone breathes on it funny.
If they're actually using a prism, it's because of some sort of impedance/reflection minimization scheme; I can't conjure one that would work better than using simpler techniques though.