What if the last windows OS you purchased was XP, then you bought a mac and never looked back.
You (I) have an XP machine that could be used for something, but don't want to pay MS anymore money. Patches for security vulnerabilities in XP exist and could be distributed at no cost (they could even be put in an open repository with MS just providing a signature key).
Instead, Microsoft has decided to try to make a business around handing out critical patches.

Another way to look at it though, is that for a monopoly to refuse to provide security patches for free is a combination of criminal negligence (abetting a nuisance or point of contagion) and cynical pressure on past customers to make new purchases. And newer OS versions also have security holes, I'm sure after XP they will do the same for Windows 7 users one day. Personally I use mac and linux now if at all possible. Though one large company I consult for has XP all over their network. And I do still have some XP VMs, and some old computers with XP on them that are in a closet. They might be useful to someone if they weren't insecure.

Here's what I think is stupid. A gigantic company makes a very widely used product that is riddled with dangerous flaws. They say they stop supporting it, but also refuse to provide for free any security patches that they do develop. Actually, in another era it would be called criminal as in obstructing users from conducting safe operations. Providing security patches to fix manufacturing flaws should not be a business model, especially when failing to patch a system makes a creative nuisance to others.

At the risk of saying something sane in this thread, I would like to suggest that the department of homeland security provide a budget to a small number of expert software engineers to solve and distribute signed unbloated security patches, if Microsoft finds itself in the poor house and cannot afford to assign some people to this task. Instead of using security vulnerabilities to drive profits, MS should be incentivized to develop secure systems to drive profits.

I would expect Lawrence Lessig's MAYDAY SuperPAC could solve this.
As far as I can see, it aims to set up congressmen who will take money out of governing, and I bet it will also wipe out FCC corruption and reset pointers to net neutrality as a consequence of where I expect it will go.
https://mayone.us/
http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/...

p.s. I would like to add that if by some chance someone could share names of alcohol based deodorants and someone could reverse engineer their ingredients into an OPEN SOURCE product I would totally prefer to make it myself, if possible, and avoid putting all kinds of nasty things on (a number of soaps irritate too). Anybody out there? I even read somewhere that petroleum products are used in food (fast food I guess) and am I the only one who has once or twice smelled petroleum fumes in urine? (Yeah gross but on the other hand, what the fuck is up with that! We should be open sourcing all this stuff to try and avoid what might turn into toxins or unhealthy chemicals in the body, and i don't mean replacing food or going nuts. I'd like to also hear from an expert whether any of these products are really dangerous and why some may be irritating if they aren't. My $0.02.

Correct, I found the same thing when I tried a deodorant that was basically just alcohol.
Deodorants is one thing I carefully read the label on everything. Stay away from stuff with aluminum and if possible zinc. Stay away from that crazy shit with propane in it (one of the AXE products) that says don't go near flame!! I also stay away as much as i can from petroleum byproducts.
Fact is, alcohol works better than all of this stuff because as far as I can tell it kills the bacteria that make you smell. It was sold in a small glass bottle with roller sphere and I can never find it anywhere ever again.
You may notice that popular brands sold in all the stores actually have extremely different ingredients lists within the same brand even.
I go by what irritates but I'd like to see somewhere that actually takes it all apart with someone who understands chemistry and the body.

While Chris aims to collapse time and technology layers to make an immediate, reactive environment, another way forward, or perhaps a way of leveraging it, is to make the environment more intelligent.

Much programming involves implementation of commonly understood patterns and thus can be automated, if the space is well understood.

I think a community project toward building an engine (call it an AI agent if you wish) that conceptually understands programming and can actually do it would be a good thing (... except because, SkyNet).

Such a system could have a unified understanding of a large project which would improve the deliverability of systems like obamacare or applications based on an open source stack, while empowering common users by leveraging the power of their own computers to help them solve problems and build their own tools, for example through chatting or drawing figures.

In the past I've imagined this as a way of utilizing more of the power of the desktop computer, to actually solve the user's problems and do common tasks that can be easily explained. A hot key that pops up a small window to chat with a bot would be more useful than Apple's Automator. As I have recently been spelunking in a system I have been asked to localize for an Asian language / net environment (based on drupal so tons of modules and deep undocumented complexity) I can appreciate anybody who would like to simplify herculean tasks.

It might be able to make sense of something as broad and chaotic as the obamacare system or the open source stack. I imagine it would be something a bit more intelligent than Frotz and could even help a child direct his own inquiry into the world around him or her. Computers have a lot of power and the next stage probably is finding out how to unlock their power without requiring years of study and hair-pulling. At least I would like to see systems gain introspection and share standard definitions of objects and functionality to reduce the replication of effort that is probably 90% of what developers do today.

The original yeast had 50,000 copies of the chromosome which were discarded, replacing them with just a single copy of it because they were deemed irrelevant, and when the yeast remained alive it was called "hardy". IANA biochemist but still, one might think 50,000 copies could have an advantage as if cellular processes were to hit them randomly and transparently (like 50,000 disks in a RAID mirror where you don't know which physical disk was actually accessed) then a mutation in one copy would have 50,000 times less chance of hurting the cell. That the cell remains alive only means that in the hours it took for cell division to be proven no mutations occurred, but instead of this meaning the cell is hardy it could actually be 50,000 times more susceptible to mutation or other Bad Things.

Another possibility is that there are very subtle differences among the 50,000 copies, perhaps in just a small number of genes, among which the cell could switch in the event of environmental change, or it could even encode information "learned" over the course of evolution by the strain. Switch to this copy if you are being attacked by this pathogen, or if you see a lot of this nutrient around you, etc. Again this would be the definition of "hardy" so the scientist again would be wrong. Of course this is just a layman's view, have not read the paper, they probably don't care, etc. Anybody with a degree care to comment?

If you woild read the site before
commenting you would see schools
are also targeted.
Of course it is mote important to
save lives though wouldn't you agree?

800 NANOMETER resolution due to
fascinating optics holding a glass
sphere up to your eye can obtain
2000x magnification! Woohoo!
Check out the website and arxiv pdf.
He uses origami techniques to
structurally engineer the paper to
compensate for buckling among other things.
Awesomeness!

He has had successes where others could not supply the necessary creativity, so I think you owe him an apology. IANAP but assume you find superdeterminism insane because it would need to account for preselecting the myriad of fluctuations that would affect a RNG, and not due to religious reaction to the loss of destiny in which the
Universe is set in steel.
It seems to this non-physicist that if the Universe is a simulation (another insane idea) it would be possible to choose solely the desiref outcome and trace back upstream to automatically select the required fluctuations.
Repugnant perhaps, but two insanities just might provide a soution.
  http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki...

Matrix multiplication means picking up where multiple factors can be combined to produce a high score. It can analyze threat = capability x intent. I think this approach can be used as much by the individual trying to get a handle on reality (multiply news by what you know is possible) as by a massive organization (crunch data streams to find exploitable juicy bits).
If you think this way you will be paranoid. But, if you just want to imagine where things can go if they get even worse than they are now, say if unlimited resources are deployed by utterly immoral actors, it can be useful.
For example, without formal training I came up with the above threat equation. After typing the equation into Google, it turns out that it is correct and part of formal risk/threat assessment calculations. I figure that's because it is common sense.
http://www.aci-na.org/sites/de...

Capability matrix:
Look. The entire data stream starting from the time a Kinect is plugged into electrical power can be automatically saved forever in a quiet data center.
XBox+Kinect is a very powerful listening device because of its smarts. It can download a program or search parameters and seek high-quality data, such as a conversation with a certain person's name in it, and filter it before sending it upstream. It can also compress a raw feed and gradually upload it over time.
So if anyone ever does something criminal or suggestive, like maybe your child has a party and someone does drugs in the living room, that data can be silently tagged and stored without any human's knowledge.
Any of your computers, or any computer ever in your vicinity throughout your daily life, or the lives of other people, can do the same thing. Just silently record at all times. There are too many ways it can be done in software. Free apps, buggy malware, browsers..
All phones, networked hardware, your car's On-Star navigation system and black box, can be additional channels.

Intent matrix:
Years later, if someone wants to find something on you they just make a mining query.
Queries can ultimately matrix multiply all locations x all channels x all individuals x all conversations files or positioning data.
Such as any conversation that mentions a target name or keyword ever held in front of anybody's XBox, personal laptop, tablet, wall phone, mobile phone, desk at work in any company. If you ignore any difficulty associated with processing/telecom/power/time capacity you will understand that rather than simply being "overheard" it is like you are leading your life by crawling over a jungle-gym moving from one data capture point to another. Your life over time and space, and those of all people with whom you interact, together become an immense transparent crystal object that can be observed at one's convenience from any angle.

Matrix Product: (exploitable output, or the threat)
Forget trying to end-run around the NSA, there is no point. But worry about other actors.
The U.S. data will be privately owned and controlled by other actors.
Any big company or country has a chance at subverting these streams and building their own global capacity.
A criminal organization could pressure a Verizon sysadmin.
The captured data does not have to go to court. It can be shown to someone else, or to you in order to embarrass you into tilting you towards a given course of action, for example if a target was shown video capturing an infidelity. The actor can dial in any degree of formality, truth or fairness.
Data that might have saved you (such as data proving innocence or entrapment) can be deleted, ignored, or modified in whatever private data center it is stored.
Parallel construction means all of this dark activity, a dark war against humanity, can be kept in the dark, but leveraged when some other expedient is selected.

Comments:
Once you or someone many steps removed who you don't even know has been targeted or an annotation has been made, all past and future activity can be scheduled for heightened investigation, including active installation of subversions to improve the data feed.
It can be quite impersonal, like a game of chess. And there is no way to remove your tag.
Since tangential conversations and proximity drive data insights, "living with sincerity and honesty" is irrelevant.
One might hope that automated moral agents (strong AI) might one day swing things in the other direction, but they don't exist except in science fiction at this point and anything close to it is owned by the organizations doing the collation.

No more disinfectant bio-barrier between Earth and the rest of the Galaxy.
Like turning off your firewall, what could possibly go wrong?

A psychopath brags.
Either that, or the facebook guys asked him to say it.

Someone had to say it ;)

Call me old school but transparent interception of https does not increase my feeling of safety. It breaks the net and any security I might imagine in a transaction. This technology will make it really easy for anyone to do what for example Microsoft does to Skype connections (which is why Skype isn't allowed in my company). It provides for any number of decryption points to be created between you and your bank or whatever. The doc suggests that it can be used for both anonymization and deep inspection, positing that both are "good". I think it depends on who the user is whether one is desirable or not. As for a company pushing corporate certificates down its users' throats without them knowing it, I think this is pretty dangerous. The Internet is such a pervasive part of life now that if not informed, a user has a reasonable expectation that his or her communications will not be intercepted and possibly reformulated. It is like an operator listening to your conversation and being able to interject words into the conversation that you both think the other has said. Perhaps some people who don't remember a time when there was no social media don't get it. However I think a company should trust its employees and not intercept communications leaving the company, it is despicable immoral and weakens human dignity.

If there are such overarching security issues like multimillion dollar contracts or secret plans that are worth alienating your workforce, then you should tell them and also install other demeaning but powerful security technology like biometrics, laser fields, strip searches, etc. The idea that some guys sat down to write this document and imagined that the "good" uses of this would not be massively overshadowed by the horrible uses of it is just so appalling it nauseated me to read it.

Yes this sort of thing is going on now. But no, I don't think it is a good direction for society, I am not talking about national security forces but about corporations who will find plenty of reasons to implement this, so that while the desired "responsibility to management" i.e. load balancing, security monitoring, whatever is performed, there will become much more generally available back doors into any available communication ready waiting for someone who thinks it might be neat to open the door. The technology works regardless of whether there is a court order or anyone responsible in the vicinity. You may think I am paranoid but I think it is one thing when the police need wiretapping to catch mobsters. (I doubt they would catch any terrorists that way but who knows.) But it is another thing when the campus police, the kindergarten babysitter, every tom dick and harry with a web/phone/video startup is going to see this as a fresh new playing field. If they want to outlaw ssl fine. But I don't want to be using ssl and not know if it really is working or not because my ISP or phone company or cable company feels a need to be a man in the middle. Must the net be infinitely porous? They just can't leave shiny toys alone.

So.. ham radio. Radio Club Venezolano. National Emergency Network. Satellite Dishes. ISS. Free hosting. Google... Facebook... friends.
There are probably a bunch of ways to get information in/out of Venezuela, at least in a one-way burst.
On the other hand http://www.yv5rcv.org/ tweets pane shows "Hmm, an empty timeline. That's wierd." Ouch.