It's not just chat software either. The Internet in China is very different than the Internet in the rest of the world. For me, it's virtually worthless without a VPN. When I was last in China, the two largest VPN services that advertise service in China (ExpressVPN and NordVPN) didn't work for an entire week because it was a politically sensitive period. Thankfully, an OpenVPN server I hosted worked fine. Almost all of the most popular sites in the US are blocked including all of Google/Alphabet's sites, Facebook, Wikipedia etc. Here's a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

That's likely because you aren't in mainland China. Many of the commonly used chat applications in the US are banned in mainland China. For example, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Telegram are banned. Signal is not banned but it has very little usage among the population in mainland China, which is likely why it hasn't been banned. iMessage can be used but Apple controls the key management, which means the government can likely compel them to hand over keys for Chinese devices. Moreover, iPhones are much more prevalent in the US than in China. WeChat has a billion users - virtually everyone in China uses it - it's a chat, payment, and social media platform, and can even be used to pay your subway or cab fare in Shanghai. Moreover, for individuals with limited or no English proficiency, the options may be even further limited. The point is that chat software is only useful if the people you want to speak to are also using it. For communicating with people in China, there's no more prevalent app than WeChat. That doesn't mean it's not used for surveillance or propaganda. It's the only app I know of where your messages are censored in real time. Send a message about a controversial topic and it may never be delivered. You also may be interrogated the next time you enter China. It's a horrible app. Nonetheless, for many Chinese-Americans, it's essential for communicating with their family in Mainland China. Thankfully, a US-purchased device can use the US app store in China. US-purchased device + VPN to Tokyo = access to any software you wish to use.

According to the summary, the GPU enhanced version uses ECB:

"A demo in its current source repository is a modified eCryptfs, which is an encrypted filesystem used by Ubuntu and other distributions . . . .However, both the GPU cipher-based eCryptfs and the CPU cipher-based one are changed to use ECB cipher mode for parallelism. "

I hope this is just a proof-of-concept design because ECB mode should not be used for this purpose. Wikipedia provides a pretty obvious example of the weakness of ECB mode:

"The disadvantage of this method is that identical plaintext blocks are encrypted into identical ciphertext blocks; thus, it does not hide data patterns well. In some senses, it doesn't provide serious message confidentiality, and it is not recommended for use in cryptographic protocols at all. A striking example of the degree to which ECB can leave plaintext data patterns in the ciphertext is shown below; a pixel-map version of the image on the left was encrypted with ECB mode to create the center image, versus a non-ECB mode for the right image."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cipher_modes_of_operation#Initialization_vector_.28IV.29

No, 1 of 794 people identified were ultimately arrested of SOME crime, but not necessarily convicted. The article states that 40% of the arrests were immigration related, and a great deal more were drug related. Thus, the real number of false positives is actually much higher if you are only including legitimate threats to security.

Just to be clear, the paragraphs starting with "Members of Congress" and "Experts agree" are direct quotations from CNN. The remainder of the post contains my opinion. Sorry for any confusion.

According to CNN, the TSA is actually more ineffective than I initially thought:

False Positives-

Members of Congress also expressed concern about the number of "false positives" -- people flagged for additional screening that resulted in nothing being found. For every person correctly identified as a "high risk" traveler by (the behavior detection officers), 86 were misidentified, Willis said. At random screening, for every person correctly identified, 794 were misidentified.

Effectiveness at detecting terrorists-

Experts agree that the fact that there is an extremely small number of terrorists makes it hard to evaluate the effectiveness of behavioral observation programs. The Accountability Office said it looked at 23 occasions in which 16 individuals -- people later charged with terrorism-related activities -- passed through high-threat airports. None is known to have been identified. But it is not known if the behavior detection officers were working at the time, the agency said.

So, in the best case scenario, for every person ultimately charged with a crime (not necessarily convicted) 86 are misidentified. And that is using "trained" behavioral analysts. Most TSA searches are random, which results in one charge for every 794 false positives. Note also that nearly 40% of the charges are immigration related. Most of the rest are probably drug related.

The TSA can't point to a single incident where its random searches or behavioral analysis actually has prevented a terrorist attack. Despite their utter failure, the TSA plans to spend another $1.2 billion over the course of five years on behavior analysis techniques.

Source: http://www.cnn.com/2011/TRAVEL/04/15/tsa.screeners.complain/index.html?hpt=C1

I can only get 40 Mbit (5 MB/sec) on my 802.11n wireless router. However, I routinely get my rated speed of 50 Mbit/sec (6.2 MB/sec) down from my DOCSIS 3.0 connection, which peaks of 8 MB/sec. Of course, such connections are a rarity. Nonetheless, Gigabit ethernet is cheap and is far more reliable than wireless. Wireless connections just can't maintain multiple, high-throughput connections while wired ethernet can.

Also, I can easily get local transfers over my gigabit LAN that surpass 100 MB/sec. Unlike 802.11n, Gigabit doesn't have 50%+ overhead. I don't see wireless competing with wired ethernet anytime soon. Anyway, by the time Gigabit wireless is available, 10 Gbit Ethernet will be mainstream.

I'm currently signed up for Comcast's new 50/10 Docsis 3.0 connection. I get a constant 50 Mbit on Bittorrent with bursts up to 70 Mbit. Upload bursts to 20 Mbit and provides reliable 10 Mbit speeds. Not bad for cable. I am told that there are no data caps in my area but I won't know for sure for a few months :P.

However, FiOS still has better upload speeds and no download caps. Verizon offers 35/35 (around 43/35 in practice) in most of its service areas for $100/mo. or $115 with its ultimate HD package.

Was it a Plasma or LCD based screen? I was able to demo two 3D televisions at Best Buy. One was horrid (the LCD) while the Plasma had a very pleasing 3D effect without the traditional ghosting and blurring that you normally see at the theatre. I guess it depends on the implementation.

And if it was incorrectly calibrated by the Fry staff, what chance is their that Joe Consumer will figure it out. There are still people that think they're watching HD programming because the logo on their 4:3 27" 480i TV says "HDTV".

Odd, it scrolls fine for me in Chrome 5.0.375. There is a slight delay while the page fully loads, but after that it scrolls smoothly. Firefox is smooth immediately, but the delay is at most 1/10th of a second.

What build of Chrome and OS are you using?

I'm on Windows 7 and am using Chrome 5.0.375. I compared against Firefox 3.6.3.

I'm using Adblock, FlashBlock, and Session Manager in Chrome. While Adblock isn't as good as Adblock plus, it works fairly well. I certainly wouldn't say Chrome lacks a base of plugins.

BTW, I use Firefox 3.6.3 and Chrome 5. I've used Firefox since it was Phoenix, and Mozilla before that. I love Firefox for the amazing extensions, Awesomebar, recently closed tabs etc. but I also like testing out new browsers, and I have to say I'm very impressed with Chrome. I really like that each tab is sandboxed in its own tab. It makes everything more responsive, and the rendering speed is ridiculous. There really is nothing better than having a browser load before you have the opportunity to remove your finger from the left mouse button. :P

I wonder if there is some issue on your system causing performance problems with Chrome. For example, I know there is an incompatibility between Nod32 4.0 and Chrome 5 that causes insanely high ping. I was getting 10 ping in speedtests on Firefox 3.6.3 and 550 ping in Chrome 5. After upgrading to Nod32 4.2 the issue was fixed. Chrome went from sluggish to blazing.

I find Chrome to be as fast, or faster than Firefox in all circumstances. It is usually faster. The browser loads instantly on a Core i7 system with an Intel X-25M G2 SSD vs. 1.5 seconds cold start for Firefox (around 0.8 sec without Adblock Plus), but that's running off a fast SSD. It took significantly longer on cold start off a WD Caviar Black drive, which is similar to what most people are using.

Page rendering is amazingly fast. The Adblock extension isn't as good as Firefox, but it's ok.

I really do like Chrome's multi-threading and sandboxing. In Firefox, every time a download finished, the browser would freeze momentarily while NOD32 scanned the file (disabled checking in about::config, but still happened), and often loading Adobe Acrobat files would hang the browser momentarily. Because Chrome is multi-threaded, issues in one tab never affect another tab.

In addition, while Chrome uses more RAM than Firefox because of its design, you actually get the RAM back when you close a tab. With Firefox, RAM usage balloons unless you close the browser. I've seen Firefox use 1.5 GB of RAM after 2-3 days of usage. Close all the tabs in Chrome and you're back to 70 MB or so of usage. And Chrome also loads instantly, even with many tabs.

In conclusion, Chrome's performance isn't just marketing - it is the fastest browser available at the moment. If it's slow for you, something else is wrong.

Not really since you can't use Flash on either the iPad or iPhone, so the only way to view streaming video is through HTML5, and presumably H.264. In either case, HTML5 fins.

Macs can run any browser of your choosing including Firefox and Chrome, which do support VP8. VP8 just seems like a better choice than H.264 for streaming video. Perhaps when all the other major browsers support VP8, Apple will add support.