In every single, and I mean without exception, every single consulting company that I worked for/with the "security specialists" were full of shit assholes. The guys who were in charge of the actual network were very well trained and capable security people but they weren't marketing themselves as specialists. The security guys just spouted endless paranoia and blah blah'd about military grade security. Yet when put to a test not a single one of them could exploit a linux system that hadn't had an upgrade in a year.

What they didn't have in skill they made up in swagger and threats. If consultants in the company didn't submit their laptops to them for a security audit they got all shitty saying how our laziness would take down the company. So my solution was to hand them a laptop that I would get fresh from IT with nothing installed, no documents, and fully up to date. Then I would laugh at their report where they would say that I had all kinds of unencrypted documents and had installed insecure software on the laptop. Then when I showed this to upper management they got even angrier that I had wasted what otherwise would have been valuable billing hours, even though it was they who wanted to audit all the computers.

But the thing that finally broke their stranglehold over the company's management was when they bullied their way into a friend's project devastating his budget after they convinced the client he was working for that his unaudited system would leave their company wide open. So he made a mirror image of their laptop from a backup, changed the background to a picture of two guys having sex with the company logo of the client on the face of the guy getting it and a picture of the security "expert" over the face of the guy giving it. Then on the way to the meeting he swapped laptops. Security expert was fired that day.

If the supreme court rules against your law there should be an instant by-election for anyone who voted for the stupid law in question.

I checked the 10+ years selection yet literally tomorrow I am switching. But most interestingly I am dumping not only my ISP but my phone line with it. The new ISP will be giving me internet only and I will be getting my phone from an online service. The savings will be around $40 per month.

This is a couple of years after dumping my cable for Netflix.

So what I want now is some kind of data service that lets me cut off my ISP. I don't know how that would work but I suspect that 10+ years ago the cable/telephone companies didn't see much of a threat from anyone.

The moment I read the words "ad hominem" I just think, "High school debating technique 23." Its like these assholes who bring up Godwin's law to somehow reduce the validity of making comparisons to Hitler and/or the Nazis.

I said this before Heartbleed when everyone thought that OpenSSL was the best and the programmer who made it, gods. The code is crap. The variable names 70s style crap. The file structure crap. The multi platforming methodology crap. The function names crap. The API crap.

To call it spaghetti code is insulting to visual basic programmers everywhere.

To me this is like what people are realizing with many police departments; it isn't just a few bad apples. If the good apples condone the bad apples then they are all bad apples. It is the same with OpenSSL it was a shitty project before heartbleed and keeping anyone with the project from those days is just wrong. If they were programmers with the slightest sense of decency or capability they would have grouped together and forked the project.

Yes you have hit what the Princeton study nailed. If it matters to the rich elites they get their way; this then leaves the remaining issues to the public to squabble over. Thus gun control, abortion, death penalty, etc all are left on the table. But if for some weird reason abortion became a profit engine for a Fortune 500 company then it would be taken off the table. [Following misspellings to avoid shill searches] Campaine Fineance reform, fud labeling, farmasootical reform, wired TeeVee reform, lowering rates for sellphone companies, halthcare ensurance company reform, guys-who-store-money reform, and my favorite: no eelectroonic vooting.

For any politician and especially party to genuinely take these on is pretty much the end of the show for them.

This is not an American phenomena. Just about all elections everywhere end up with politicians promising "Change" "Hope" or "A better future." But even if one party replaces the other the forces that put them there have the exact same agendas and thus nothing changes. Quite simply there are no billion dollar loobby groups fighting any of the above with vaguely the exception of eco groups who no longer seem to have the big domestic companies as their primary targets.

I like this guy but he seems to come along with the occasional show stopper. For instance in Canada we have a Double Plus Good Patriot Act called Bill C-51. We also have effectively 3 parties, 2 of whom support Bill C-51. Can you figure out which one I am voting for?

Instead of the law trying to pick a winner on this one just make the law that the disposition of the embryos must be contracted before the service can be provided. Then have a very steep fine for any clinic that doesn't obtain and properly store that contract. Then mandate that there is a maintained copy of a "suggested" set of common contracts that are continually updated to reflect any edge cases that end up in the courts such as one of the partners become mentally incompetent etc.

This way some morality police lawmakers can't step in and turn this in to an abortion/anti-abortion debate where the actual consumer of these services then lose.

I misspelled it so that that Disqus PR drones wouldn't find the comment. So I will reply with a question, does Disqus aggregate customers' data and sell any of it?

Google Searches are promoting Alien abduction, antivax crap, white supremacy, black power, that Elvis is still alive, that Hitler died in Argentina in 1986, that Hitler has clones, and that Aspartame isn't bad for you.

The key is that most people quickly develop a sense that they have landed somewhere bad in a moment; just like most people have developed an internal ad-blocker for their eyeballs for that occasional ad that slips through.

"This domain is for sale." is a huge give away for instance.

It is easy to find customers in need of 2 inch simulacrums; voodoo dolls! If a little jute doll with a bit of your victim's hair having a pin stuck into it will cause pain then sticking a pin into a 3D printed one should blow holes in them like they were shot with Dirty Harry's 44 magnum.

If the Twitter US employees have zero access to the twitter Ireland data that would just be odd. A great setup but odd. Also there will certainly be US employee in Ireland; employees that plan on returning to the US someday.

Some NSA good slides up to you in your favourite Dublin pub and hands you this warrant with all kinds of legal threats on it. What do you do? Threats like 20 years in solitary confinement. Yes they are way on the wrong side of morality but the reality is that the US court system more often than not is bowing down to this sort of authoritarian behaviour. So even if you win in the end the costs will be extraordinary.

This has long been one of my predictions with robots; that when they are actually good at something they will be awesome. So many of our manufactured goods are becoming fantastically reliable because of the reduced reliance on humans. When you buy stuff it just rarely comes broken anymore. Also if you look at the failure graphs on many goods the graph is becoming less and less a bell curve and just a giant spike at the point where some critical part will just wear out due to physics rather than sloppy manufacturing.

But where I see them really kicking ass and taking names is in agriculture where you could have a robot sweep down a field of fruit and only harvest that fruit that is perfectly ripe, then to come back hours later and harvest the now ripe fruit, and so on for the entire harvest. The same with earlier phases of growing, such as diligently picking the weeds every day, or watering and fertilizing only those plants that exactly need it. Can you imagine some working walking along taking soil samples by each plant and then making the correct adjustments. Or picking the bugs off each plant and crushing them?

Then there will be things like road construction, landscaping, building construction, road maintenance, etc. With these I can see a situation where not only are the robots cheaper at doing these things but they do them with such perfection that people would take any suggestion to use people as just foolish. For instance right now my city is filled with potholes and cracks in the road that will pretty much certainly become potholes. I would love a robot that went around filling these in to perfection. 50-100 of these robots could probably keep the streets in my city basically perfect. The same with sidewalk/park/road cleaning robots as the streets in my city are filthy. The occasional large sweeping machine is just not enough. Again 50-100 machines could make my city Truman show perfect.

It seems to me that with a warrant that Stingray is 100% unnecessary, thus this device entirely exists so that there are no inconvenient records being kept by the cell companies. Also, and probably more importantly, this is no doubt causing crappy cell service. Cell towers are very carefully engineered and to have a stingray system somehow playing man in the middle games of any sort would be causing poor reception.

So quite simply I hope that the various cell manufacturers are presently working on technology that won't allow a cellphone to connect with anything but the known towers. Plus I hope that the FCC is going to shut these down. If the police are allowed to use these without a warrant than why can't I use a stingray to gather interesting marketing data about my customers? Didn't google end up in a pile of trouble for mopping up wifi data with their streetview cars?

By scattering I am thinking physically, as in how you would draw people who can't go personal solar if you were colouring these people on the grid then as opposed to how you would colour people still on the grid now. Now the grid would be pretty much a solid colour of those who are on the grid. But post off grid it would be the city center and some patches in industrial areas outside the city core. That is a whole lot of grid (not much smaller than today's) to be supported by far fewer customers.

I will make a prediction. Before 10 years some North American utility will attempt to create a law that all occupied houses must maintain a minimum connection to the grid. This minimum would of course come with a fairly steep minimum charge. They will really fear even a small group of upper middle class people just snipping the wires because the cost to actually produce the electricity to a house is fairly negligible compared to the overall cost of the entire grid. Thus the loss of even 5% of the customers could result in the utility approaching zero profits. The worst part is that these customer would typically be reliable bill payers, and above average consumers. This will scare the shit out of the utilities.