I can't believe I didn't guess that this was the particular flavor of corporate whoring that Gates and Zuckerberg were up to. Get into the educational pipeline with whatever education issue is hot (it started as just STEM, but then shifted to women in STEM when that started sizzling, if you'll remember). Get some big names to attach their reputations to its success. Then start selling ad space to Disney, who can't get much traction buying ad space inside the schools themselves. I should have guessed, but I didn't. I just thought they were after the data.

Pi hundred million. Nothing more to say, but I'm guessing if I don't add more I will run into the lameness filter.

There's a religious refrain, "Pray to God but row toward shore." It means you should ask for God's help, but that doesn't mean you should just sit there in the boat and wait to be saved.

From the Cryptome PDF:
Yesterday the USA Freedom Act was blocked in the Senate as it failed to garner the 60 votes required to move forward. Presumably the bill would have imposed limits on NSA surveillance. Careful scrutiny of the billâ(TM)s text however reveals yet another mere gesture of reform, one that would codify and entrench existing surveillance capabilities rather than eliminate them.

We didn't really lose anything. The government chose not to pass a platitude. That's probably not going to change until we manage to fix the twin problem of fear and hatred, being stoked by those who gain from emotionalism.

In the meantime, we need to row toward shore. Keep working on all the cryptography solutions you have time to help with. If you have an interest in meme propagation on social media or propaganda, see if you can figure out some ways to weaken the grip of emotionalism. I am, and it's fun.

Sometimes your nation calls on you for service. Sometimes you have to know what it needs even if it doesn't know how to ask.

I saw this yesterday and tried, so hard, to be the skeptic poking holes in a feminist's overreaction -- and failed. This thing is just awful. The best I could come up with was, "Well, there are valuable people on software development teams who do design. I value them immensely, because I can't do it."

Well, sure, and maybe they should also put out a book titled, "I can be a game designer." But that's not the title, and (I can tell you from personal experience) women make fine software engineers. Some great, some awful, most somewhere in between -- just like guys. If they want to make a book with a title about Barbie being a software engineer, they should just tell that story.

>> when you want to do something without being watched, you use TOR with clean hardware and connectivity.

> So what is clean? I can only think of an Ubuntu VM, default install with maybe one or two addons in Firefox to delete cookies. Nothing that changes or adds fonts...

That's a fairly good version. I think it's about how extreme you want to go and how secure you feel you need to be. You could grab a fresh laptop off Craig's List and only use it for a few days. You could get a Raspberry Pi with no writable storage and change the MAC address every time you power it up. Or, at the other end of the spectrum, you could just have one laptop that you only use for your alternate persona, and always use it for that, if what you need is pseudonymity instead of anonymity (that's the most aggressive thing I do, actually, being one of those people who doesn't actually have anything to hide, but still believes in privacy as a matter of principle).

And, of course, every step you take is a good one. It all helps to confound those who would violate what I believe are inalienable rights.

Frequency allocations, overseen by the FCC, are a government protected monopoly.

Frequency competition has the most clear natural limits on competition of any of the carriage technologies you mention, but they exist for all of them. If more than one carrier uses the same slice of spectrum, they all degrade. Laissez-faire does a horrible job of maximizing production with wireless spectrum. Easements for wires and the natural barrier to entry of sinking new cables create a similar problem with wired carriage.

The FCC is not creating fiat carriage monopolies, they are managing natural limitations to carriage competition.

It is worth noting that there are genuine fiat monopolies at the local and state levels, but those are almost always created by the corporations through lobbying, partnerships, or collusion, not by the unaided whim of a bureaucrat.

which form of Net Neutrality? A) protocol neutral? B) endpoint neutral?

Both -- the carrier should not make prioritization decisions for me. My network and software should handle that, since my ISP can't know which packets are highest priority to me.

I am convinced that government regulators will find a third definition for Net Neutrality

That is a good reason to be eternally vigilant of the FCC, and the Internet is worth our effort. It is not a good reason to abdicate the decision to the ISPs, whose financial interests and both naturally- and regulatory- limited competition ensures a market-inefficient solution. The ISPs have the privilege of operating the carriage of our network for a profit. If they don't want that privilege, they can sell their gear and rights-of-way to a competitor. Both Google and municipal operations are wiping the floor with the incumbents everywhere they pop up.

As to the will of the people--we're talking net neutrality. People support it because they like the word "Neutral."

There may be some like that, but people like me, who have been working on the Internet since before hypertext, support it because the idea of letting ISPs make deals for fast lanes is about as stupid as allowing the electric company make deals with companies to cut off electricity to their competitors.

The best days to announce things like, "We've decided to completely ignore the will of the people and do what the guys with wheelbarrows full of money tell us to" are the days right before Thanksgiving and right before Christmas. My bet is on Nov. 25, leaving a day to get home to family, but Nov 26, or Dec 19, 22, or 23 would not surprise me.

We can also say with some certainty when they won't announce; Dec 2, 9, or 16 -- Tuesdays during full work weeks -- are extremely unlikely.

Basically what they are saying is that you should not use Tor at home or at work, but in other places, where you don't do your normal browsing.

Close, but not quite ideal. You should use TOR at home to do strictly legitimate things, to create the haystack in which the needles can be hidden. Then, when you want to do something without being watched, you use TOR with clean hardware and connectivity. Also, when travelling to your clean connectivity, leave your cell phone and other tracking devices at home, and do it somewhere with lots of other people.

'With Gamergate, it's not enough to ignore the trolls.'

It may not be sufficient, and if you have good ideas to add please do. But an effective solution to any problem must be both sufficient and necessary. And in this case, ignoring the trolls is necessary, even if you do not find it to be sufficient.

Trolls gain steam from attention. Any strategy for shutting down trolls must include ignoring them. There may be additional tactics that are worth employing, like advocating courtesy in Internet communications, but "don't feed the trolls" is a required part of the solution.

That it is realistic to have highways wide enough that there will never be congestion?

Obviously not, and you can't possibly think I do think that. So I can only conclude that your question is not sincere, but meant to be dismissive. That is neither mature nor productive.

In a real internet (in fact on the internet for its entire existence), the network is managed.

The provider should be managing the allocation of data based on the subscribers' contracts, not on who they are connecting to, the content of the packets, what port it is on, what protocol it is using, or anything else. People who need high speed should order high speed packages. People who need low latency should pay for low latency. People who need both should pay for both.

Different data has different priorities, it just does.

Of course it does, but the ISP cannot know which data has what priority based on the port, protocol, endpoints, or packet content. Only the end user can determine those things, and the ISP making contradictory decisions is a breach of the data carriage obligation under which we have granted them privileges like rights-of-way and protection from liability for the data they transport.

Email and web traffic can tolerate significantly higher latencies, for example.

Bullshit. You don't know which of my traffic is higher priority. The end user can and should have network management tools, but the ISP better damned well not decide that my kids watching Nemo in HD is more important than my rsync transfer of a log file telling me why the master server just barfed. That is my choice, not the ISP's.

Similarly, almost everyone agrees that ISPs have some responsibility to control network performance in a manner that guarantees the best service for the most number of people,

Bullshit. Just, bullshit. Citation needed. No, people who understand networks do not believe that the pipeline providers should be doing traffic prioritization based on endpoints.

or that prioritizes certain traffic over others in the event of an emergency.

Vague fear mongering. What if the network companies prioritize the wrong things in their search for a little more revenue and something bad happens to the children? THINK OF THE CHILDREN!

These are all issues that a careful set of regulations could preserve while still mandating neutral traffic treatment in the majority of cases, but it's a level of nuance that most discussions of the topic don't touch. The larger and more serious problem with net neutrality as its often defined, however, is that it typically deals only with the "last mile," or the types and nature of the filtering an ISP can apply to your personal connection.

I don't know if this is intentional or not, but throwing piles of vaguely related and confusing facts at a story then saying, "Therefore, we shouldn't regulate now!" is a standard tactic from the Koch plalybook. Shove it.

The public, including tens of thousands of network administrators, have spoken without equivocation: We want net neutrality. Period. When the ISPs come up with better regulation, they can propose it, and we will consider it. Until then, we will not move an inch on our demand for Net Neutrality. It has worked since the first day of the Internet. It is why the Internet made so many people, including the ISPs, rich. If they don't like it, they can GTFO or DIAF.

I don't care what they say, software written with Emacs is way better than software writen with Vi!