It's something of a chicken and egg problem. The presumption of Capitalism is that, as a company or business works to maximize it's profits, it will benefit society. -- The job of the government is to ensure that the rules are set such that, as a company's striving to maximize profit, it will necessarily benefit society. this was enforced by the principle of "one man, one vote".

The problem now, is that companies and their money are the primary contributor to election campaigns .. and this means that the politicians who control government are now beholden to the companies that they're supposed to be regulating. We've gone from one man one vote to one dollar one vote. This now puts the inmates in charge of the asylum of society.

yes.

If they're getting to you within minutes, then they're getting help from inside. It may be as simple as your router being configured for Dynamic DNS, or one or more of your machines is compromised... or -- as others said, they may be getting info from your game server.

Rather than paying gigabucks for a hardware router/firewall, take an ancient machine, add a second ethernet card to it and install OpenBSD onto it.OpenBSD will do you as well as anything hardware based, in terms of protecting your network -- even if it is bit more work to get properly configured. You can also then install stuff like Snort and wireshark to REALLY watch what your system is doing.

It won't take much in terms of hardware -- even a sub 1Gz machine will be more than sufficient for a 20 megabit feed.

Provide the option to disable the capability. Some distros will make it the default. Others won't... but it will ultimately allow users to decide -- which is the whole point of Open Source.

Just don't force people to hack the source juet to restore the capability.

The NSA stores all encrypted communications until they can decrypt them -- How do you determine that (parts of) a call or communication is encrypted without downloading and processing the actual content of the connection?

The NSA doesn't need direct access to Google's servers to read your mail. All that they need is access to google's data pipes and a copy of their private key. There's probably a FISA order telling Google to give them access to Google's private keys -- and the person who received the order isn't allowed to talk about it.

If you live in the US, then the NSA can legally intercept anything that you send out of the US. Encrypting it makes it harder for them to read, but they've still intercepted the encrypted message. If they've got, or can extract the decoding private key, then they've also intercepted your cleartext message (effectively).

They capture everything anyways. They say that they only keep encrypted data -- but to decide if the data is encrypted, they have to intercept and process it. If, after examining your data, they decide that it's not 'interesting', then the "don't intercept it" (whatever that may mean, at this point).

In my world, at that point, it's just a bunch of useless wordplay..

Shoulda made the cutoff a little bit more obiou

Remember: this is a slashdot idle article -- and a collapsed one at that. You shouldn't be taking it too seriously. It's meant to amuse you not inform you.

Rule 10: You take life too seriously.

Rule 6: Remember: You're not getting out of it alive.

It doesn't matter if Google uses https for searches, if the feds know what the top links are for those searches. If you end up going to presure-cookers.com and backpacks.com, then the NSA can get the http headers from your ISP's feed when you go to those sites (also your DNS queries).

They could also pay for (web-bug) ads for those search terms, if they wanted to be perfectly legal about it.

It would force them to get a search warrant. That would, among other things, document who was asking for the search and why. That last bit of information might be sealed in the short term, but you would eventually be allowed access to it.. (at least -- in theory).

Ethanol based fuel isn't much better off. it almost literally 'greenwashes' the carbon based fuel used to plant, fertilize reap and ferment it (i.e. about as much or up to twice as much hydrocarbons as just burning the gasoline it replaces)-- and that's not even taking into account that we're diverting sorely needed food sources.

MariaDB is plugin-compatible with MySQL, and remains GPL licensed.

It may be that this license change is just a build oops, or it may be that Oracle is breaking it's agreement with the EU to keep mysql stable, supported and free. In any case, this does strengthen the case for MariaDB for those organizations are still on the fence about switching over.

+1 funny, but it's still serious that MS has a big stranglehold on the desktop market and this can be seen as trying to subsidize it's way into a stranglehold on the tabletoid market by wedging it's way into schools. (or just screwing the schools over by selling them a product that they're about to orphan, which is probably slightly more legal, but less moral).