Comment Re:Open source? (Score 1) 215
The article and another one like it I saw on the Guardian indicates that the NSA will intercept your mail (called an interception! ) and "configure" any hardware you ordered then send it on its way.
The article and another one like it I saw on the Guardian indicates that the NSA will intercept your mail (called an interception! ) and "configure" any hardware you ordered then send it on its way.
However, they are expanding the market for computers generally considered. Like everyone else, I have a bunch of each and will continue to do so into the foreseeable future.
Oh and, Long Live Desktop Computers with replaceable, chooseable parts.
The vascular part I am guessing / noting / observing.. it's a
The rest of it is information readily available . The general topic goes by the name of neural plasticity which is broken down into functional and structural .
It's not the thing I research specifically so I am not loaded down with bookmarks for you but I know all about it from undergrad
For people with no neuroscience background there's books like The Brain That Changes Itself and of course it's a big area of research- pulled from the web without much effort:
http://www.jneurosci.org/content/29/10/3019.full.pdf
http://psyserv06.psy.sbg.ac.at:5916/fetch/PDF/21906988.pdf
Some notes on one methodology:
http://dbm.neuro.uni-jena.de/pdf-files/May-TICS11.pdf
Aside from that, what exactly do you think phenomena like PTSD are? Purely disembodied psychological issues? If you've were or have ever repeatedly sustained hard study, you'd notice that your whole "self" changes in response to your efforts. You're smarter, your experience of everyday life is richer etc etc. This goes on as long as you're willing to inflict a good measure of discomfort on yourself.
By the same token, leaving your studies for a time then coming back is an extraordinarily punishing affair. Along with feelings of inadequacy and bewilderment when faced with the same material you left even a few short weeks ago, there's a sense of awe at your own former self's output and level of functioning.
Like the song says:
When you're up / looks like a long ways down
When you're down / looks like a long ways up
Cheers
USB ports will take literally any instruction at face value and execute it. In the eyes of a USB port, there is no such thing as malware.
Any kind of sustained, concentrated thinking does this. The brain is very reactive and adapts quickly , instantly to stresses put on it in terms of not only coordination , balance and physical skill but also higher cognitive functions, abstract reasoning, emotional reasoning, meditation, self control, anything you can name. I have noticed generally the more vascular and active the tissue, the faster it adapts. Brains change like that. Muscles recover after 5 or so days. Tendons take weeks to heal. Bones take a even longer to heal (change).
Franklin sued to pay people to steal corpses so he and his friends could dissect them and learn about anatomy. This was very highly illegal in Colonial America. They had a basement in a where he was staying . It was a part of the Enlighenment impulse to to come to understand reality through natural science without the *benefit* of the intermediaries of his day the Church and the King, who were glad to tell you everything you needed to know about any topic whatsoever.
As is sometimes the case with facts about historical Americans you have to go overseas to get a unbiased analysis of what was going on. US web pages will tell you Franklin this universally curious and endlessly inventive guy, golly, just knew nothing about what was happening in the basement of the house he lived- he was more interested in non-squimish subject matter like physics . Overseas of course they're less sensitive to the idea that one of our Founding Fathers may have been involved in grave robbing and dissecting corpses merely for curiosity's sake:
The article is filled with inaccuracies which all support this person's conclusion that, essentially "ho hum, nothing can be done and nothing will be done".
It's in the scope of domestic intelligence that we can see the most likelihood of change. Unfortunately, much smart money is now going on the bet that in the long run the result of all these revelations will actually be more domestic surveillance (under various changing names and labels) not less!
First he cites that bastion of liberal liberty, equality and fraternity, France, explicit legalization of their spy agency's domestic surveillance as evidence that the EU is "going there" en masse, with the spy agencies chortling all the way.:
For example, just weeks ago, and shortly after a high level French ex-intelligence official was quoted as saying essentially that "we don't resent NSA, we simply envy them!" France passed legislation legalizing a vast range of repressive domestic surveillance practices.
News stories immediately proclaimed this to be an enormous expansion of French spying. But observers in the know noted that in reality this kind of surveillance had been going on by the French government for a very long time -- the new legislation simply made it explicitly legal.
The reality is much more nuanced in a number of important ways.
First note that the EU directive that mandates private carriers retain IP and telephony metadata , the EU Data Retention Directive, stipulates a much shorter time frame- just two years- than the "forever and a day" time frame the NSA allows itself.
This is not nothing. It's harder to blackmail politicians for what they did in their youths if you don't happen to have that data laying around to mine at the time they become politicians later in life.
In general it limits the time frame at which abuse could be aided by super-god-knowledge of the target's most intimate details.
Neither does the fact of the DRD in EU support this statement:
So, the handwriting appears increasingly clear. Pressure will rise to move the responsibility for holding this data corpus from NSA per se, back to the carriers or perhaps some ersatz independent org, but the data will still be collected. And despite calls for more limited access by NSA and other agencies , one can safely assume that whatever access they say they really, truly need for national security, they're going to get -- one way or another. There's simply no obvious way that there will be a real return to any actual, meaningful, truly individualized search warrant requirement (no matter how any changes are ostensibly framed to the public).
The reason it doesn't support it is because, under the DRD, a *court order* is needed by the intelligence agencies before they can access the metadata held by the telcos. That is a significant barrier, and in fact more in line with what has traditionally been the case in the US and which falls within societal comfort levels - a search warrant being issued to the police upon presentation of probably cause to a court.
Secondly, and in contrast to the tone of this blog entry, there is significant political resistance within the EU by a number of nations which has resulted in the rejection of the DRD by the highest courts of the respective nations.
https://www.eff.org/issues/mandatory-data-retention/eu
Nations now fighting the Directive include Cyprus, Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, and Romania. The DRD was adopted in Romania, but declared unconstitutional in 2009. In February 2011, Cyprus declared their national data retention law unconstitutional. The Courts in Bulgaria declared their mandatory data retention laws unconstitutional and the German law adopting the Directive was declared unconstitutional in March 2010. In March 2011, the law transposing the EU Directive in the Czech Republic was annulled by the country's constitutional court. Lithuania's law implementing the Directive was declared unconstitutional before the law took effect. Hungary's implementation of the directive is still under review by the Constitutional Court of Hungary. Some members of the European Union have refused to adopt the DRD into their national laws. In addition to Germany, Sweden continues to delay the implementation of the DRD. The European Commission has referred Sweden back to the European Court for failing to transpose the EU legislation into national law. In Slovakia, the NGO European Information Society Institute is opposing the Slovakian data retention implementation law.
This is a vastly different picture of reality than what the blogger presents:
The truth is that this sort of government mandated telecom data retention regime has long been the wet dream of government agencies in the U.S. and around the world -- a major push in this direction has been taking place in the EU for quite some time (despite the dissembling by Europe's leaders regarding surveillance -- the hypocrisy is palpable).
This is troublesome:
It's this focus on "privatizing" this kind of government mandated data collection that is of especial concern. Because while the data retention policies of Big Telecom vary widely today both by company and across a range of services (telephone and text message metadata, text message content, and so on), we can bet our bottom dollars that any move toward privatization will come complete with mandated retention periods that in many cases will exceed the time that the data is retained today. Even more importantly, these telecom companies will almost certainly be prohibited from deciding to hold the data for shorter periods, but likely will be permitted to hold it longer if they choose, still available pretty much on demand to the government.
Overall the entire tone of the article seems to be: the war's already lost, why fight it? Maybe we'd all be better off with the NSA holding the data! Well, guess it just doesn't matter either way. Damn Snowden- he really blew this for us, now things are going to get worse! Too bad!
I don't know about you, but personally, I've never had any negative dealings with NSA.
Well,actually, this kind of begs the elephant in the room question- none of us knows if we've had dealing with the NSA or not. That's the whole reason people are upset- the specter of Big Brother silently watching and recording and assigning "point" which, when enough accumulate put you in a "category" which has real world consequences ranging from perpetual monitoring of communications to job candidate rejection to promotion denial, to job loss to unemployability to the no-fly list to targeted for framing or assassination.
So Lauren if you've never had any bad dealings with the NSA then you know more about your dealings with the NSA (presumably they were good then ?) than the rest of us do.
Of course, the best of all worlds would be not holding onto telco metadata in the first place. But if you really think that's going to happen, I'd like to talk to you about the potential purchase of a New York City bridge spanning the East River.
Sorry, this has the feel of speaking so as not to offend. It offers faint sympathies to "privacy concerns" while encouraging the reader to frame the issue as a "done deal" whose end they are helpless to determine- encouraging a kind of learned helplessness in the reader.
100% unacceptable. Whatever your position on this- and I am much more nuanced on this topic than it might appear from this post- it's 100% unacceptable to allow yourself to start thinking you cannot effect the outcome of your democracy. This is a big fucking deal and everyone needs to be informed, be reasoning it through, be researching questions that strike you as important and to be making full use of the fantastic power to gather factual information the internet provides you. This is democracy in action , this is what it means to not be shrugging off the issues of your own times but engaging full on for the sake of yourself and future generations.
Please god not me. Please god not me....Please god
They're hiding under the floorboards!
They're hiding under the floorboards!
My kids are hiding under the floorboards !!!!!!
Now they can do this with armed with evidence. Or not. People aren't machines created to adjudicate based on evidence. For those who are interested in doing so however, it's there to support or refute their arguments. This is a good thing since *there is no other working alternative to deciding things on a rational basis*.
The government never does anything to any established university or the elites that populate them. This has to be counted as an industry, like the Too Big To Fail banks and the oil companies and the telcos, whose members are elites and have an entirely different set of rules applied to them.
Consider the price of university; it's purely a product of government subsidies with no relation to either the overall economy or the customer's ability to pay. In order to sustain these prices, bankruptcy protection has had to be removed from their customers. This would be the same bankruptcy protection enjoyed by Lehman Brothers after they were their first of the banks to implode during 2008 financial fraud, and which allowed Lehman Brothers CEO take a taxpayer funded deca-million dollar golden parachute out the door.
There are not even ordinary consumer protections for a lousy product. If I buy something and it's just terrible, I can take it back. If I take a class and it's a joke and the prof is unintelligible , I have no way of getting my money back.
A slap on the wrist? You don't say? The scales of justice will make up for the imbalance. We'll jail-for-life some inner city kid in California who's third strike is selling a dime bag and whose first tow strikes were a schoolyard fight and shoplifting. After all, THOSE people are the ones committing crimes form whom society desperately needs to be protected....
For some of the younger readers: snapchat can't actually guarantee that your photo is deleted, so don't send anything you don't want all over the web, as ever.
For instance, anyone you send your photo to could screen capture your photo before it disappears, then pass that screen capture around.
Someone could also be between you and your recipient and be capturing everything you send.
Just so you know.
Nice comment. Good points, good job, thanks.
I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"
