>> so please watch the video(s)

Um...the summary makes it sound like some guy's going to read you some Wikipedia pages.

Quick - can someone find an editor (maybe borrow one from TheRegister) that can make this sound at all interesting? To anyone? (e.g., "Rare Earth Expert Says (Shit You Would Not Believe)" or "Which 3 Rare Earths Will Be Exhausted in 10 Years" or "Is It True that Garbage Dump Mining Is a Good Way to Get Rare Earth" or...)

>> How would you tell?

Highest FTW* ratio. * = Finger to window.

Let's see...for $50K...I could probably write up a quick mobile app ($1K) that feeds microphone input into a streaming acceptance service on a server ($3K), that chops it up into wav files for Mechanical Turk processing. Fund that long enough to pass the POC stage ($2K), ride some odds (25%) and cash the check before the tech collapses = $6K for possible $12.5K win = $6.5K possible profit? Er...still no.

>> "encrypts its communications with the C&C servers, making the traffic indistinguishable from legitimate SSL, SSH or VPN traffic"

Um...if you think simple transport encryption stops a determined analyst (who can hone in on source/destination IPs, initial traffic patterns, traffic volume, local signals or can use an attack proxy for some MITM action)...think again.

>> they will provide a sense for the first time which Netflix shows are the most popular

Umm...wouldn't Netflix already have this information at its fingertips in its own logs?

>> ducted fans driven by a four cylinder gasoline engine

Yeah...the guy who blows the leaves off the parking lot has one of these too.

Must be a slow news day. Didn't anyone ask BH what he thinks of the number "39"?

When I read the headline I thought, "IoT Devices...could alter your career...by leaking all kinds of stuff about you to accidentally connected Facebook, Google+ and other social accounts."

I don't even think people know what they're getting into out there - here's a guy who's at least trying to get his head around what people are thinking about on
IoT consumer privacy.

>> I'm not hearing Republicans saying this should stop.

Meet Rand Paul (R): http://lmgtfy.com/?q=rand+paul...

Also, here's a 2013 poll demonstrating most of the support for wiretapping is now in the Democratic party:
http://blogs.marketwatch.com/c...

Long story short, if you're not hearing people say it should stop, it's time to open your ears.

>> Yes, Obama has failed to stop it. But he didn't initiate it.

We voted for this guy to roll back the surveillance state, get out of the torture business, and retract our forces from Iraq. He had one job - roll back what someone else initiated - and he utterly failed.

>> I suspect a lot of people welcome this crap with open arms

How'd those past couple of mid-term elections go for the current pro-surveillance party (D)?

I find it interesting that we're getting great investigative journalism out of places like The Wall Street Journal - reread the name if you don't see the irony - rather than the New York Times, the Washington Post, etc. What ELSE do you guys know about that you haven't revealed yet?

>> ad-free subscription music service

Heh. For now. (See cable TV.)

Dunno. I'm an adult, and I pay for my own Internet access, so I can swear without my parent's naughty word filter catching it. How 'bout you?

>> gridlock...nation's retailers

Er...lobbiest fails to do job, so panic?

>> they would bear the brunt of whatever legislation is passed....there are 47 different state-based security breach notification laws

In other words, they want a single Federal law to replace all the state laws, which would do two things: 1) allow them to concentrate their efforts on watering down the federal law 2) take the ability for people to collect damages against it out of state courts and 3) reduce their notification costs because they would only do the bare minimum required by the federal law (e.g., filing it in a basement drawer marked with "beware the leopard"). I see no "brunt" here. (IANAL)

Most of Facebook is moms reposting the same jokes and images over and over again. I actually think I see where Zuckerburg might going with this: since media companies are getting smarter about packing their mass-market content as "clips" (e.g., Jimmy Fallon's bits), they're getting easier for mere mortals to post. However, I don't think any significant portion of videos will actually get posted to Facebook - instead it'll all still be hosted on YouTube, media sites (e.g., NBC) or somewhere else.