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).

No. The ultimate power rides with the people. It wasn't the (then non-existent) US government that won the war with Britain, it was the US people. Governments on the acquiescence of the people. If the people strongly enough object to the actions of the government, then the government can often fall. We saw that in the US, Russia, Libya, Egypt, etc.

The constitution is meant to mollify the people -- it's a pact: You let us rule, and we promise to abide by these rules.

It's almost a catch-22: The more a government violates it's constitution, the more oppressive it needs to be... because the more it fears it's people getting together and rising up against it.

They're known as Star chambers

There are now a number of Linux distros that are more "Windows-like" than Windows-8. For people who need a supported OS but don't need faster hardware, just installing Linux on top of (or beside) XP would work well. Their data would stay stable, and they'd be able to use wine for some of the XP applications that they may still need access to for compatibility purposes.

For many medium-sized to large organizations, switching to Linux and re-tooling any Windows dependent software would probably be a cheaper than spending(in some cases) thousands of dollars per seat to (unnecessarily) upgrade to Windows 8 machines, (re)license the necessary extra software and then retrain everybody on the new operating system.

Somebody could probably make big money building and selling Windows -> Linux conversion kits for companies like that.

I'd be inclined to use openBSD over Linux -- they take their security seriously, so you're less likely to have a random hole that some chinese hacker can exploit.

For people wondering why not use a managed switch -- that's too easy for the production people to figure out and attach the wire to another port 'trying to get things to work' without your 'help', The technical solution is actually trivial. Keeping the staff from blundering their way around it is the hard part. Run the software on something tiny -- like a raspberry pi (with a USB - Ethernet adapter for the second port) that you can stick someplace unobtrusive. It'll be a little black box that doesn't advertise what it really does, and (hopefully) doesn't attract much attention (security by obscurity).

Pull the network down for a day or two, and then install the small box while 'fixing' the system. Let things stay open for a couple of weeks or a month, before announcing your policy changes.