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Comment Re:Thanks a lot (Score 1) 208

by thej1nx (#45447179) Attached to: Object Lessons: Evan Booth's Post-Checkpoint Airport Weapons
Dear "Genius"(and I use the word loosely), I should remind you that mere box-cutters were sufficient for 911 hijackers. If you had an ounce of brain, you would have realized that airport and plane toilets provide complete privacy to construct these devices at leisure. And once you have the explosives rigged up, the fire-making ones can be placed near a seat to take out a couple of passengers to create panic. All this is moot however.

The only reason you cannot and shall not have another 911 is because, earlier there was an expectation amongst crew and passengers that if they complied, there was a very reasonable chance that they would get to survive, but now people would simply take any would-be hijackers apart. So if there is another attack vector, it will likely be very very similar to 26/11 mumbai attacks. A very public suicide mission to attack people in crowded mall or landmark, like the Kenya westgate shopping mall attack. You do NOT need the TSA anymore. Passengers on the plane are now all the security one needs. TSA is just a waste of money post-911. But as far as effectiveness of gadgets is considered, they would have been considered pretty effective pre-911 since they can actually kill a person or two. They would have worked just effectively as box-cutters. in a pre-911 world. But post-911 what one should expect is mumbai 26/11 style attacks. Sadly, terrorism sponsoring states like Pakistan are actually being funded by USA to do trial-runs of such attacks on rival countries, before they are launched against US itself. And that is the real problem. You guys fund, train create your own terrorists, to get your own nation attacked. And then you geniuses think that spying on, and strip-searching your own citizens will solve that problem for you.
The Internet

Comcast Donates Heavily To Defeat Mayor Who Is Bringing Gigabit Fiber To Seattle 356

Posted by Soulskill from the you've-lost-the-torrenter-vote dept.
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Andrea Peterson reports in the Washington Post that one of Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn's big policy initiatives has been expanding the quality and quantity of high-speed Internet access throughout the city. However incumbent providers, particularly Comcast, have invested heavily in defeating McGinn in the mayoral election. While Comcast denies there is any connection between McGinn's broadband policies and their donations, the company has given thousands of dollars to PACs that have, in turn, given heavily to anti-McGinn groups. One of McGinn's core promises in the 2009 campaign was to 'develop a city-wide broadband system.' The mayor considered creating a citywide broadband system as a public utility, like water or electricity. But aides say that would have been too expensive, so the mayor settled on public-private partnerships using city-owned dark fiber. This dark fiber was laid down starting in 1995, and the mayor's office now says there are some 535 miles of it, only a fraction of which is being used. In June, the partnership, called Gigabit Squared, announced pricing for its Seattle service: $45 dollars a month for 100 Mbps service or $80 a month for 1 Gbps service plus a one-time installation cost of $350 that will be waived for customers signing a one-year contract. For comparison, Comcast, one of the primary Internet providers in the area, offers 105 Mbps service in the area for $114.99 a month, according to their website. If Comcast is indeed attempting to sway the election, it would fall in line with a larger pattern of telecom interests lobbying against municipal efforts to create their own municipal broadband systems or leveraging city-owner fiber resources to create more competition for incumbent providers. Peterson writes, '...if Comcast's donations help Murray defeat McGinn, it will send a powerful message to mayors in other American cities considering initiatives to increase broadband competition.'"

Comment Re:When (Score 4, Insightful) 201

How about being reasonable, and having it as "You broke laws and made profit illegally, so we take away ALL of that illegal portion of your profits that was made illegally and charge a 5-10% penalty on top of that, so that it is no longer profitable for you to break our laws" ?

Corporations care just for the profits. If it is profitable for them to break laws, despite the current penalties involved, they will do so. Make it unprofitable and they are as law-abiding as the next guy.

You know, it might be kinda better than all that xenophobic bullshit about FOREIGNERS making profittttsss off you.... and trying to shut them down and costing even the legitimately employed folks of the company, their jobs. But I guess, racism and xenophobia is more popular...
Censorship

UK Prime Minister Threatens To Block Further Snowden Revelations 431

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the on-with-their-heads dept.
Bruce66423 writes "From the article: 'In a statement to MPs on Monday about last week's European summit in Brussels, where he warned of the dangers of a "lah-di-dah, airy-fairy view" about the dangers of leaks, the prime minister said his preference was to talk to newspapers rather than resort to the courts. But he said it would be difficult to avoid acting if newspapers declined to heed government advice.' So that will achieve something won't it? Don't these politicians understand that blocking publication in just the UK achieves nothing? The information is held outside the UK, and will be published there; all he's doing is showing his real colors."
Privacy

Citizen Eavesdrops On Former NSA Director Michael Hayden's Phone Call 390

Posted by Soulskill from the daily-schadenfreude dept.
McGruber writes "The Washington Post has the news that former head of the NSA Michael Hayden took a call while on the Acela train between D.C. and Boston. Hayden was talking to a journalist 'on background', which means the reporter is not allowed to cite Hayden by name. Unfortunately for Hayden, another train passenger overhead the call and live-tweeted it. 'Mattzie continued to livetweet Hayden’s conversations slamming the Obama administration, all the while insisting that he be referred to only on background. The conversation also seemed to touch on Hayden’s time as the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency under President George W. Bush as well. "Hayden was bragging about rendition and black sites a minute ago," Mattzie wrote. Hayden has in the past defended the use of waterboarding against detainees held in various sites around the world, and dismissed torture as a "legal term."'"
Privacy

Sorm: Russia Intends To Monitor "All Communications" At Sochi Olympics 193

Posted by timothy from the step-lively-comrade dept.
dryriver writes with this excerpt from The Guardian: "Athletes and spectators attending the Winter Olympics in Sochi in February will face some of the most invasive and systematic spying and surveillance in the history of the Games, documents shared with the Guardian show. Russia's powerful FSB security service plans to ensure that no communication by competitors or spectators goes unmonitored during the event, according to a dossier compiled by a team of Russian investigative journalists looking into preparations for the 2014 Games. The journalists ... found that major amendments have been made to telephone and Wi-Fi networks in the Black Sea resort to ensure extensive and all-permeating monitoring and filtering of all traffic, using Sorm, Russia's system for intercepting phone and internet communications. Ron Deibert, a professor at the University of Toronto and director of Citizen Lab, which co-operated with the Sochi research, describes the Sorm amendments as "Prism on steroids", referring to the programme used by the NSA in the US and revealed to the Guardian by the whistleblower Edward Snowden."

Comment Re:All? (Score 1) 491

by thej1nx (#44874389) Attached to: Can Internet Pseudonymity Be Saved?
Think of it this way. Let us take the number two reason for such breaches of personal privacy(money being the number one reason), i.e. terrorism.

If you were actually a foreign terrorist, and for some insane reason you did decide to discuss your "super secret plans" in email or over phone, unless you are completely retarded as well, you will use your local dialect instead of English. And you will use common words or phrase *in your own dialect* as previously agreed codewords. You will NOT communicate in English. So NSA might flag the foreign language conversation as suspicious, but I doubt there will be a perfect automatic speech translation in place that can immediately translate. And even if you had someone translate ever single piece of foreign language conversation, you still will have to deal with guessing what the code words mean.

In other words, a sweeping eavesdropping program will get you zilch unless you even for a second believe the other guys to be total morons. They might be insane, but they are not at least that. Only time you will have results by eavesdropping is if you already knew someone to be a terrorist, and were monitoring all their calls and tried to assume everything to be a terrorist communication.

The other situation where you will have results is, if we change the definition of results to "eavesdrop on our own troublemaker citizens and political opponents and have blackmail material on them to ensure we stay in power". Now *those* are the guys who will communicate in a language your eavesdropper program can listen to and collect material on. Think of collecting bits and pieces of info on every time someone mentions your political opponent's name and sifting through that to see if you can find anything on him to ensure his complete submission.

And unless you want to have a de facto dictatorship cemented even further and no chances of having even a semblance of democracy, feel free to sacrifice privacy. You will eventually sacrificing your freedom or liberty too.

Comment Re:How is this news? (Score 2) 617

by thej1nx (#44853771) Attached to: How Amateurs Destroyed the Professional Music Business
What internet has really done is killed the middle men and studios. Your average professional musician was getting a miniscule fraction of the payouts anyways. Internet and computers simply allows them to record the music and distribute it, without needing the studios/middle men. Even they got a few cents off each copy purchased at app stores, they still end up earning the same for a million copies downloaded. Quality of studio recordings? Well people who want higher quality, will pay for it. But apparently public has already ruled on that. It is music studios and middle men, who are failing to adopt. The music studios in any case were fleecing both sides, first the artist for allowing him to record his music and then overpricing it for the public. And on top of that, only ones public got to hear were the musicians that studios selected. Much better musicians were ignored by them due to lesser "charisma" or whatever. Take Milli va Nilli case for example. The studios blatantly stole the song and presented it as the work of another, just because they thought that original musicians were not "presentable". And on top of that, digital media single song downloads ensure that I do not need to pay for the whole damned album when only one song in it is good. As such, even the musicians have to ensure that each of their songs is good, if they want people to pay for it. As such the music quality on average can only go up, instead of down.
Handhelds

Can Even Apple Make a Watch Insanely Smart? 196

Posted by timothy from the humbly-submit-display-size-matters dept.
theodp writes "Throwing some cold water on the buzz surrounding the Galaxy Gear Smartwatch launch, The New Yorker's Matt Buchanan questions how smart a watch can really be. Calling offerings like the Galaxy Gear useful but not the stuff of dreams and revolutions, Buchanan writes, 'So there remains a strange undercurrent of hope that somebody-Apple-will figure out, soon, some grander vision for wearable technology, transforming it from something that people have vaguely imagined into something people intensely desire. It did it for smartphones, once, and again, for tablets. The question that Apple has been charged with, since nobody has definitively answered it yet, is whether the lack of an invention that truly carries us beyond the last five hundred years of wrist-mounted technology is the result of a failure of imagination or simply a fact of nature-that a watch will always just be a watch, no matter how smart it might think it is.' So, will you be an early adopter and drink Samsung's or Sony's smartwatch Kool-Aid, wait to see what Apple comes up with, or hold out for a Windows Forearm Pad 8?"

Comment Re:Not seeing a problem with that. (Score 4, Informative) 219

NICNET (http://www.nic.in) has long been used in India for government mails and official data. You literally have dedicated VSAT connections etc. to it in offices, and it is a separate network in itself.

The Indian army too for obvious reasons, just like its counterparts everywhere, maintains its own nationwide network, and does not allows internet connections to it.

All they are asking is, that officials use these network, which are NOT public, instead of allowing the data to pass over any backbone that US has control over. And thus no classified data is expected to ever hit any backbone that is in US control.
Medicine

Soda Makes Five-Year-Olds Break Your Stuff, Science Finds 287

Posted by Soulskill from the just-like-alcohol-and-teenagers dept.
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Shakira F. Suglia and co-authors surveyed 2,929 mothers of five-year-olds (PDF) and found that 43 percent of the kids consumed at least one serving of soft drinks per day. About four percent of those children (or 110 of them), drank more than four soft drinks per day, and became 'more than twice as likely to destroy things belonging to others, get into fights, and physically attack people.' In the past, soda and its various strains have been related to depression, irritability, aggression, suicidal thoughts, and delusions of sweepstake-winning grandeur. Of course, this study didn't find out what types of soda the children had consumed."

Comment Re:mexico drug wars is bad for makeing phones (Score 3, Interesting) 110

by thej1nx (#44571785) Attached to: Brazil Sues Samsung Over Worker Conditions
Criticizing American government is racism? If you are talking about the stereotype of Americans being ignorant dumb-asses, well that does exists, but is largely due to your allowing the said politicians to be in power, and yet having delusional beliefs about yourself to be a democracy. Normally the world wouldn't care btw, except for your insane laws and policies being exported out to rest of us as well eventually via treaties.

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