Praising the agencies as silent heros, he nevertheless admitted there had been errors by the agencies since both of Rigby’s murderers, Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, had been known to the security services for some time.
So, they were being watched, to some extent. According to the article, one was being watched more than the other, but the one who made the comments on some US-based service was the one they were watching less.
However, he admitted there was legal uncertainty about the duty of internet companies based in the US to cooperate with UK agencies due to conflicting laws in the US. The company that did not inform the agencies has not been named by the government."
It doesn't sound like they were asking in quite the right way.
Downing Street sources said Cameron did not expect to make any more progress on communication data laws this side of a general election. But he made clear his support for greater powers for the agencies, saying: “Are we prepared to have a means of communication using the internet which we do not have the means to intercept? My answer is no.”
Unless the Prime Minister means "using rubber hose cryptanalysis," he's bound to end up disappointed.
The data the article presents really just shows a ton of Netflix traffic breaking the Internet for other users. Shouldn't all that adaptive bitrate stuff make it NOT break other flows? Apparently, not so much. Did Netflix respond by making their video delivery less aggressive, the way Bittorrent did with LEDBAT? No.
What did we learn?
1) Netflix breaks any link it's on. Period. Full stop. The rest of the Internet only gets through when Netflix isn't peered together with it.
2) Therefore ISPs -- ALL ISPs -- bad.
3) Therefore Net Neutrality so Netflix can break the Internet.
Of course, one might be tempted to conclude that big data users should work out their own peering and financial arrangements so that they don't mess up the Internet, but that would make one a corporate shill.
Google as having a bunch of great APIs that let you do all sorts of fantastic things, but stuff that would have been absolutely trivial to do in MS Office 15 or 20 years ago using VBA (minus the web part, which was barely around) were hard to impossible to make happen.
Want that input form to look nice? Want the submitter to be able to preview it or edit what was on it later? Good luck doing that without building a whole different front-end. Google docs lets you use a form to add lines to a spreadsheet, but that's pretty much where the magic ends. I hacked in editing the thing by sending out links that pre-populate fields in a second spreadsheet which Google docs copies over to the first spreadsheet. Yes, it's stupid. No, it's not me. It's Google.
If you're a developer on Google docs and reading this... thanks for making it possible to add a line to a spreadsheet from an ugly form. I am so sorry that they make you do these crappy "20%" effort projects that you're not really proud of and that aren't good enough to help anyone. I know you probably want to put in the time to make a great HTML5 form builder or make it easy to manage an entry using a unique key or validate input in some way, but it's so difficult to focus on those Friday afternoons. So, don't worry about it. Those charities didn't need that technology anyway. Right?
Your job sounds great. Make some friends on your team and learn what you can from them. Maybe buy a book or RTFM or do a side project. The training will always be offered again somewhere else, and Vegas is a hole.
Use the conference time to fix whatever's going on in your life -- that sounds way more important. Feel free to post here about that!
Good luck!
Where there's a will, there's a relative.