Depends. If your walking through the airport involves border transit, NO probable cause is needed - they can confiscate your laptop at any time, and retain it for up to 24 hours without warrant or cause, during which time a bit-for-bit copy of your drive is likely to be taken. With the quantity of overseas travelers it isn't super common, but enough of a concern that I took a virgin laptop with anything useful stored in AES-256 sparse volumes when going across the pond, or left the files back home which I could get to via internal VPN (some larger files needed to be taken with just due to time required to pull them over a long-distance WAN link).

Anyone else get a slightly uneasy feeling at the idea of crop-dusting entire areas of land with living bacteria that glow?

What assurances do we have that the bacteria won't mutate, self-replicate, or turn against its master in the form of some horrendous new super-bug that makes the 20,000 land-mine casualties a year seem like a drop in a bucket?

"That's a ridiculously low amount of money for an agency that's charged with a major component of our future and probably the whole future of the Earth and its inhabitants."

The scale compared to defense spending implies the amount of resources necessary just to keep humanity from destroying itself, before NASA can keep nature from doing it for us.

Funny part is I give NASA better odds, though the people in charge of our world's various militaries also have a lot of personal profit to gain and lose by ensuring general continuity of human inhabitance, so they aren't as likely to push the "annihilate" button as some might think.

Yeah... Submit your DNA profile to a for-profit corporation that lets you do things with it through a web interface. Your info will never be hacked. Your info will never be sold. Your info will never be given to government agencies. Trust us.

What could possibly go wrong here?

What I find interesting is that you assume *everyone* is thinking you are a terrorist. I certainly don't think that every time I see someone of middle eastern descent, the same as I don't assume every Mexican jumped the border and is here illegally, or every black person is dealing crack, or...

I'm not trying to make light of your experiences, and I can only imagine the kinds of things you've certainly experienced. In a better world, maybe it wouldn't happen. But please don't just lump all of us into some expectation that we all think you're up to something. Fact is I know a fair amount of white folks that are into things a lot scarier than you probably are. Personally I look for *people* that are up to something, not based on any ethnic reasoning. Some of us are in point of fact capable of looking at people as people, instead of an ethnic box of crayons.

I hope one day you have better experiences being who you are, where you are, I truly do. Society needs to evolve everywhere.

Where to begin...

1. Constant track of your child's whereabouts, being sent to a corporate entity. Talk about the ultimate database of marketing data, and you know that'll be up for grabs.
2. ANY security flaws in their system open it up for a myriad of privacy violations. Not to mention, as someone else pointed out, it's an instant "find me a victim" site for a kidnapper/pedophile if they can access the information.
3. If you're like most parents, this is for that rare time the kid ISN'T with you for some reason. The rest of the time, it's really a way to track the parents to within 10 feet on Google Maps. You think that won't be profiled, purchased, and tied to something else?
4. Yeah hey, let's get our future criminals-to-be used to the idea of ankle bracelets. This is no different, you just don't get hunted by cops if you take it off (though the whole idea of it is so you can be hunted by cops easily).
5. Hey Parents - Try being a parent! It's an amazing concept that doesn't require electronic leashes, and actually teaches your kids things that will be useful in life beyond "nobody else trusts you, so you shouldn't trust anyone either".

If my kid one day gives me a reason to drop the e-Leash hammer, then so be it, but I'd like to think I will be a better parent in the meantime that it may not be necessary, rather than one of those dopes that watches their kid getting hauled off to jail wondering where it all went wrong.

The National Weather Service also doesn't "officially license" ANY of those other sites. They provide raw weather information they collect, and other folks just download and interpret it. These other sites do not use NWS (weather.gov) as a backend except to get information from them, and if you look on these respective sites they will have the boilerplate "data provided by NWS" disclaimer that anyone who uses that data is required to display. That disclaimer is a long step from any sort of official licensing or endorsement, however. I could go write a weather site right now (and have done so in the past) and use that data legally just by displaying the "NWS wuz here" message, without even telling them I'm doing it.

I worked for a large company post-9/11 with fingers in most major industries, including a significant presence in travel (whether you knew it or not). Part of the data collection they did was essentially building profiles of everyone, including all of the information this guy obtained. The government couldn't legally collect the data, but being a private corporation, this place could. Naturally collecting all of that is really only useful for spying on people, so there was never any real doubt as to what happened to it. The rabbit hole goes a fair bit deeper into what you do and how that information is linked, and that was all just at this one company.

You mean to tell me I can seriously charge people $15K just to show them how to get a life?

I am building an Internet Addict detention center in my basement as we speak! I'll let them out for play time twice a day and occasional feedings, as long as they mow the lawn and clean the kitchen. Plus the extra money should help me get a DS3 dropped in so I can surf 24x7 in style.

Right about the time Bing went public, I noticed IE7 on a virtual machine I hadn't patched in a while magically started sending me there instead for bad URL's. Whether this was a redirect of MS Live Search, or something where IE had a Bing "timebomb" enabled at some point once MS knew when the service would light up, it's something I surely didn't enable -- and am having a very hard time disabling. Fortunately I use FF for everything except a couple work apps that still cling to IE, so my forced Bing episodes are few and far between.

Guess if you can't win 'em over with marketing, you can force them through redirection. I'm just waiting for MS Antitrust 2.0 to come out.

As someone who has run a non-profit benefiting children's charities since 2004, maybe I can offer some insight here: People that do this full time still have to pay mortgages, car payments, feed their own kids, etc. Now my own org doesn't pull in enough money to make appreciable donations and pay a staff, so ALL of us are fully volunteer -- which is why it's nothing more than a part-time side project (that sometimes requires a full-time effort; fortunately I have an understanding employer). However I can't exactly vilify charitable programs that do pay staff full time, because the amount of effort needed to do this work is staggering, and truly not understood until you've been there. It's not like any other job, and I still think the people that dedicate their time/lives to it are a special breed. Granted there are some out there making a lot of money from a foundation or what have you, but I think the majority that take a salary due to it being their *only* job are paid considerably less than what they would be doing a similar level of work at any for-profit company.

Regarding Angel Flight, since you went there... Consider that AF does not pay the costs of the flights!! The pilots do, often at great expense to themselves. It's certainly easy to understand why their fund raising efforts might be a little heavy on the administrative side, and I wouldn't really consider those funds "lost" as you put it. The majority of their work involves coordinating efforts between people that need help and those that can give it, with nobody receiving financial benefit for it. That doesn't make their work any less important, or the people that are helped any less needful of it.

Some charities spend almost everything on their mission. Others spend what they can on it after paying operating costs (which even all-volunteer orgs like mine incur). Others cover salaries of full time staff in addition to whatever else. There are a wide range of ways to run a non-profit, each with benefits, pitfalls, etc, and unless the staff is not adhering to the mission of the org then none of those are necessarily bad. Also consider that a full time staff might very well allow them to raise more money (kinda the point of doing that), such that while the percentage moved to administrative things is now higher, the actual amount available to support their cause is higher. Percentage distribution does not tell the whole story, and if the staff is doing their jobs then their positions should be quite justified. Sometimes to raise the kind of money you need to, it requires having people devote all of their time to it. Just the way it works.

Now I am not trying to attack you, just clear up some common misconceptions that just because a charity has a certain fund distribution or chooses to pay a staff, they have somehow strayed from the definition of what being a charity is all about. You have to look much deeper at what is actually taking place, and at what difference they are making in the world, before you can make that call. AFW is a great example of one that initially might appear to be less charitable than it seems, but when you dig into it you realize that they do some amazing things for a lot of people, and are supported by a lot of organizations for a reason. There are probably thousands of similar examples, and thousands more that go the other way.

-----"The new steganographic system, dubbed retransmission steganography (RSTEG), relies on the sender and receiver using software that deliberately asks for retransmission even when email data packets are received successfully (PDF). 'The sender then retransmits the packet but with some secret data inserted in it.' Could a careful eavesdropper spot that RSTEG is being used because the first sent packet is different from the one containing the secret message? As long as the system is not over-used, apparently not, because if a packet is corrupted, the original packet and the retransmitted one will differ from each other anyway, masking the use of RSTEG."------

Ok so we're re-tran'ing on packets we claim to be corrupt, but that were received successfully. So by monitoring traffic and keeping careful note of which packet the retransmit is requested on, and seeing what the checksum of that packet was, we will know whether an anomalous request is being sent. Basically the checksum of an uncorrupted packet will be correct, so while not a conclusive test, it's a tip off that something is up (either malicious intent, or a network problem downstream between the monitor and the receiving host causing corruption). Some analysis can also be done at this point to compare the frequency of these with run of the mill retransmits and possibly detect odd behavior. Yes it will be mixed in with noise, but I think with some careful observation a pattern could be recognized.

Some other ways off the top of my head to go about this:
- Remote host intentionally sends a corrupt packet in response first, which is actually some creatively XOR'd version of what was expected but intended to look like typical upstream nonsense. The retransmit, which is now keyed off an actual corrupt packet, sends what should be there. The receiver can then combine the two into a meaningful secret message, while not actually sending retransmit req's for properly assembled packets. IMO this is only really detectable by abnormally high levels of retrans, or something which knows the trick and proactively tries to reassemble the information. Encrypt it and likely it will never appear as anything more than line garbage.
- Since the only thing that must remain constant is the destination (or does it?), why not distribute this. Set it up using a botnet, and since these are very small messages now being spread out across a hundred hosts (or more), the requirements to monitor and detect traffic and then correlate it go up significantly. Will a single slightly "off" packet from a host trigger an alarm? Probably not. Spread out the signal distribution over a bunch of servers to receive the traffic as well and it will probably never be noticed.

From TFA:
"Another geoengineering option he mentioned was the use of so-called artificial trees to suck carbon dioxide â" the chief human-caused greenhouse gas â" out of the air and store it. At first that seemed prohibitively expensive, but a re-examination of the approach shows it might be less costly, he said."

Umm, how about this: Let's just stop cutting down the trees we do have, and let forests grow?

It seems like mother nature has a perfectly workable plan for recycling CO2; in fact it even USES CO2, making oxygen we so love and crave! Rather than trying to re-engineer and deploy fake trees that merely store the stuff for who knows how long, why not just let natural processes work for a change? Is this SO hard to do?

It's really quite simple: Any time you buy something, go plug an ethernet cable into the back of your router and do it from the wire. Now you haven't actually used your home Wifi access to enact in trade, and are therefore not responsible to log a damn thing.

Furthermore if my ISP is logging everything I do for two years regardless, I highly doubt what my home system logs is of any consequence unless they just need more ammo to conduct a search - which is an interesting possibility - getting a subpoena to nab your gear based on "access to logs". My guess is the existence of the logs is really not as useful as the reason to enter your home.

It's all a bunch of Orwellian bullshit anyway. I have no intention of logging anything. Maybe I can rent some colo space in some country that isn't a police state (if it exists) and run an encrypted proxy. Log that, bitches!