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Comment SOHO User (Score 1) 487

How many non technical people know the difference between 64 and 32-bit CPU's? Not a whole lot, if any. For those people, it's a bit daunting when their Linux friend/son/granddaughter/whatever tells them it'd be a great choice and the first thing they see is "Which download? 32 or 64?". Just put the .ISO with both 32-bit and 64-bit with a script that tests if the CPU is 64-bit capable at boot time. Or how about those people that don't know if their Mac has Intel or PPC chipset? Same thing, script at boot time to determine. If it's just two architectures the overhead could be well worth it.

Comment Re:How does custom firmware "lose sales" (Score 1) 190

A PSP homebrew program was released a few weeks ago by the name of ChickHEN. It does not allow play of ISOs or PSX games. It's been downloaded thousands of times. I personally use it for emulators and playing Duke Nukem 3D on my PSP and I still buy my games (although I would make backups for logistical reasons if it was enabled).

Comment Integrity? (Score 5, Interesting) 134

Ok, so they build this massive surveillance cluster. It can listen in and decrypt all information passing through all the major ISP players. Now that they have this information, it goes... where? These machines sit in between routers and the ISP's backbone (they'd have to). This means that they are connected to the internet and/or they have remote administration capabilities (I'm assuming dedicated machines). They can't keep the information local, that would be asinine. It would only take one leak (and there will be one, because there are people in the government who will not agree with this. A secretary somewhere will get a memo that gets put on the Internet) of either a password, username, or even a hint that there is remote admin possibilities and it will launch the fury of the Internet at large. Machines will be hacked (eventually) and data will be leaked. Some of it will be embarrassing to the people, while all of it will be to the government. Or maybe they have some secure server that the machines VPN into and transmit the databases that way. Who knows how they could 'securely' transfer this information they are getting, but VPN seems an obvious answer at the moment. That means they will need to deploy the VPN server IPs to the IT's in the field; it also means the server configuration is in a manual. If the government employee thinks they can get away with it or if they are an ex-employee... there will be a whistle-blower. Wikileaks, I guess it's UK's turn ^^

Comment How are they sorting? (Score 1) 238

I live in the US, but what if I like to be an extra jackass and video tape US officers doing stupid things? I just proxy through the UK and post? Would they really come after me for something so trivial overseas? What if there are 50 people just like me, flooding the site with these videos? This idea won't last much longer, it was just something so the PR people didn't lose their jobs. Awesome! Now you just have to stop all the false videos filed under false pretenses! *stifles giggle*

Communications

NSA Overstepped the Law On Wiretaps 164

Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that legal and operational problems surrounding the NSA's surveillance activities have come under scrutiny from the Obama administration, Congressional intelligence committees, and a secret national security court, and that the NSA had been engaged in 'overcollection' of domestic communications of Americans. The practice has been described as significant and systemic, although one official said it was believed to have been unintentional. The Justice Department has acknowledged that there had been problems with the NSA surveillance operation, but said they had been resolved. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the intelligence community, did not address specific aspects of the surveillance problems, but said in a statement that 'when inadvertent mistakes are made, we take it very seriously and work immediately to correct them.' The intelligence officials said the problems had grown out of changes enacted by Congress last July to the law that regulates the government's wiretapping powers, as well as the challenges posed by enacting a new framework for collecting intelligence on terrorism and spying suspects. Joe Klein at Time Magazine says the bad news is that 'the NSA apparently has been overstepping the law,' but the good news is that 'one of the safeguards in the [FISA Reform] law is a review procedure that seems to have the ability to catch the NSA when it's overstepping — and that the illegal activities have been exposed, and quickly.'"

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