Don't I wish.

A cynic might argue that the key difference in this case was that, for a change, the ISP's, and not merely defendants, were challenging the subpoenas; but of course we all know that justice is 'blind'.

An ingrate might bemoan the Court's failure to address the key underlying fallacy in the "John Doe" cases, that because someone pays the bill for an internet account that automatically makes them a copyright infringer; but who's complaining over that slight omission?

A malcontent like myself might be a little unhappy that it took the courts ten (10) years to finally come to grips with the personal jurisdiction issue, which would have been obvious to 9 out of 10 second year law students from the get go, and I personally have been pointing it out and writing about it since 2005; but at least they finally did get there.

And a philosopher might wonder how much suffering might have been spared had the courts followed the law back in 2004 when the John Doe madness started; but of course I'm a lawyer, not a philosopher. :)

Bottom line, though: this is a good thing, a very good thing. Ten (10) years late in coming, but good nonetheless. - R.B. )

In short: turtles all the way down.

Not 100% sure, I don't work on that system, but I strongly suspect it's by encrypting the crypto keys with a master symmetric key and replicating/backing up the encrypted ball-o-keys as needed. The master key itself lives in an HSM; backups of the HSM are handled with the usual HSM approach of "M of N physical smartcards".

Where I work, we use large-scale tape backup (complete with robots), but tapes are so crappy that you basically have to treat them as write-once media anyway, so you have the same problems. (And tape drives are a consumable, but that's another story.) We solved this by encrypting each backup batch with a unique symmetric crypto key, and when a backup expires a cron job throws away the crypto key and marks the batch as "deleted" in our tape index. If all the batches present on a given tape end up deleted, only then do we bother to recall the physical tape from off-site storage and throw it out.

Has the bonus that we don't have to trust the security of our off-site storage provider.

Wait, you think tech companies are part of the "system of control" but McJobs aren't? I worked 5 years at Wal-mart and it made me want to scrub away the filth by the time I quit. Even as a lowly overnight shelf stocker, I was complicit in helping to operate one of the most exploitative companies on the face of the earth. Wal-mart has committed serious acts of economic devastation (e.g. classic monopoly abuses like dumping), has bribed and corrupted third-world governments, and has used monopsony power to price-pressure suppliers into cutting corners on product quality and into depressing workers' wages (sometimes to the point of looking the other way when suppliers use literal slave labor). And the Waltons have used their Wal-mart wealth to push an explicitly conservative (evangelical Christian, anti-abortion, anti-gay) political agenda.

I mean, fuck. VMWare mostly just overcharges for neat software you could get for free and convinces idiot CTOs to buy licenses for it. That's peanuts to Wal-mart. And even Wal-mart is barely a blip compared to some other companies I can name off the top of my head. And the fast food chains like McDonald's and Wendy's rank only slightly less evil than Wal-mart (no slavery AFAIK, but look at e.g. their quest to addict us to their food by soaking everything in sodium and saturated fat, or their recent pressure on the FDA to loosen regulations on use of diseased animals for human consumption).

On the package signing: you're doing a piss-poor job of convincing me that poor key hygiene at VMWare was nefarious NSA tinkering, as opposed to some VP with password "password1" handing down security decisions or some fool sysadmin who runs everything from a "sudo -i" shell because it's easier than learning how chmod works. Consider this: RSA, a company that sells security and only security, had their SecurID key material stolen 3 years ago because they were idiots and didn't air-gap the key material for their signature commercial product. The profit motive doesn't explain running one's business into the ground. Total ignorance of security practices (and crypto in particular) is just too common to blindly attribute every bad practice to NSA nefariousness. Even at a company like RSA, where we're 95% sure they did weaken security for NSA bribes. Frankly, it doesn't surprise me that other people perceived you as a loon -- you're not justifying your claims at all. "Snowden, therefore X" is not an argument.

The reason for that is that people equate "Global Warming" with "hot summers". That's bogus. The greenhouse effect isn't about direct sunlight; it prevents heat from escaping; therefore it affects low temperatures more than it affects high temperatures, and it affects winter more than it affects summer. The Arctic and Antarctic are the places that are changing the most drastically, and that's far removed from your average Joe's day to day "ermigahrd its sooo hot" experience.

But warming the poles more than the temperate latitudes evens out the temperature difference between them, and that has huge consequences from a weather standpoint. Temperature differences drive the jet streams; a polar jet stream is a 100mph~200mph river of air that circles the planet 5 miles up, and if you live in a temperate latitude (e.g. the US, Europe, China, south Australia) then a polar jet streams is responsible for everything nice about your weather. A polar jet stream blocks cold dry air from plunging equatorward (and warm moist air from surging poleward), and it also shepherds weather systems from west to east, forcing them to keep moving. Without a jet stream, weather would just sit in place for weeks or months at a time, causing droughts or flooding depending on whether a high pressure system or a low pressure system decided to set up shop over your head. (Either possibility is a disaster for agriculture and local ecology.) But thanks to CO2-induced polar warming, the jet streams have been creeping equatorward a little bit each year and they've been weakening. With weaker jet streams, we can expect things like polar vortex plunges and balmy temperatures in Alaska and 15%-of-normal-rainfall droughts in California and 115 F heat waves in Australia to become regular occurrences. (These things are all happening right now, if you haven't been paying attention, and they're all a consequence of polar jet stream shenanigans, which are getting more common and more extreme as of late.)

Like the jet streams, ocean currents are also driven by temperature differences, so ocean currents will eventually start to shift if polar warming continues. That will have far-reaching consequences, because ocean currents determine evaporation rates and thus where precipitation falls, but ocean current changes are very hard to predict because we have so little data to work from. This hasn't really affected us yet, but the El Niño vs La Niña dichotomy (drought vs flooding; where you live determines which one brings which) gives a small taste of how much power the ocean has over the weather (and how big the effect will be once we do get our first permanent ocean current shifts). That awful The Day After Tomorrow film was mostly made of bogus-science-from-hell, but it was very loosely based on a real-world hypothesis that freshwater glacial melt could disrupt the thermohaline circulation that powers the Gulf Stream, the ocean current that keeps the UK and northern Europe warm. (The UK is at the same latitude as the Gulf of Alaska, suggesting it would be as cold as Alaska if the Gulf Stream were disrupted. The Gulf Stream weakened 30% from 1957 to 2005, which causes some concern.)

It's also worth noting that the changes are being buffered by the ocean, but that's not without consequence either. The ocean has been absorbing tremendous amounts of CO2, and that has seriously reduced CO2's greenhouse warming impact and bought us time before the Arctic temperature situation gets completely out of hand. But when CO2 dissolves in water it forms carbonic acid (H2CO3) -- that's why flat soda tastes disgusting: carbonation adds acidity (tartness) -- and now the ocean's pH is getting so acidic that coral reefs are dying en masse. The loss of biodiversity dominoes up the food chain to fish that human industry cares about. Coral reef biodiversity has also been a fruitful source of drug discovery ideas, so the pharmaceutical industry will suffer a bit from coral reef deaths too. And beyond coral, the falling ocean pH is also hurting shellfish operations because the water is now too acidic for baby oysters to mineralize their shells. The Pacific Northwest's oyster industry has started suffering from this problem in the last couple of years and is now resorting to artificial hatcheries to stay in business. Expect to see the global shellfish industry in dire straits within the next decade or two.

The situation is horrendously complicated. There's no way you could summarize it with two English words, no matter how pithy. But "Climate Change" is a little closer to the reality than "Global Warming".

I once got asked a question which I found hurtful and offensive, and felt tempted to 'blow up' the interview at that point. Fortunately, I resisted the temptation. As it turns out, the question was his way of introducing the next thing, which was telling me that he was offering me the job.

Here's my report on the actual ruling which is being reviewed: 2nd Circuit affirms denial of plaintiffs' preliminary injunction motion in WNET v Aereo

I guess it would take a litigator to notice this, but it's quite unusual that a preliminary injunction denial would be getting this kind of appellate attention.

In the first place, it was unusual for an interlocutory appeal to be granted from the denial of the preliminary injunction motion. In federal court usually you can only appeal from a final judgment.

Similarly, apart from the fact that it's always rare for a certiorari petition to be granted, it's especially tough where the appeal is not from a final judgment, but just from a preliminary injunction denial which does not dispose of the whole case.

This is like saying "mathematics is false, because no human being can know if a statement should be an axiom or not". In both cases the subordinate "because" clause is trivially true, but not logically related to the independent clause it pretends to justify. Mathematics is a tool for generating models, some of which are useful for approximating how the real world behaves; utilitarianism is a subtool within mathematics that's appropriate for generating models of the part of reality we call "human morality".

Every proposed moral system has been used to justify at least an atrocity or two at some point: utilitarianism, deontology, moral relativism, moral absolutism, every goddamn religion you care to name — even Buddhism! (What the hell, right?) The truth is that people choose an action, then they justify their action by creating a post hoc story that rationalizes why the chosen action was Right, and it makes no sense to blame the justification instead of the choice.

Morality itself is a pattern in the brain that shapes what one chooses — how one resolves the balance between conflicting goals — and it's not actually an object-level belief that one can directly observe with conscious thought. If you give people books to read about object-level moral beliefs, the readers don't become more moral or less moral, they just get better at crafting post hoc justifications.

(Also, as it turns out utilitarianism was not a great model for human behavior by itself, but it actually does pretty well if you extend it with uncertainty in the Bayesian sense. Moreso if you go the extra step and add causality to the model (fixing the edge cases that crop up in more nai:ve decision theories that treat actions as evidence). If the space of possible futures is small enough, you can even wrestle the conditional probabilities into submission, e.g. using Judea Pearl's causal networks, and get concrete answers that take that uncertainty into account — still a high bar, but more tractable than "noooo, it's not worth doing unless it's perfect". Many human behaviors that seem irrational in a Homo economicus utilitarian calculus suddenly look perfectly rational if you model the study participant as, say, a Pearlian estimator with a low computed probability for P(stranger will actually give $100|stranger says they'll give $100 if I were to do X AND I counterfactual-do(X)).)

It's really quite simple. A lot of Google projects started from a handful of people going "you know what would be a cool idea?" and doing it with very little approval or red tape (the fabled 20% time). That's certainly the only explanation I can think of for DART, at any rate.

Go is basically what you get when you hire a former Plan 9 developer, expose him to Google's internal hermetic build system (where a 100MiB binary is small), then let him build cool stuff to keep him from getting bored.

Disclaimer: I work at Google but do not speak for my employer. I don't work on any of the teams mentioned in your post. The information in this post is already available to the public in various places.

True, it does exist -- I've used it myself -- but it's incredibly awkward to use and has some real oddities when it comes to terminal emulation.

Only Goobuntu is available. It's Ubuntu Precise Pangolin plus some light policy customization (internal base-install *.debs; some Puppet stuff).

Google employee here (but I don't speak for my employer and I am basing this purely on anecdotal observation, not hard data).

I'm only familiar with my impressions from the engineering side, so I don't know much about the sales and marketing side of things, but nearly all of the engineers use Linux desktops (unless they're developing client software, like Chrome). Laptops are a different story. As a Bay Area-wide phenomenon, software engineers sure like their Macbooks, and this place is no exception. A few of us run Linux laptops, but my impression is that Macbooks outnumber Linux laptops plus Chromebooks combined. But the internal hardware requisition site is now offering the Pixel (indeed, recommending it instead of Macbooks), so this should change with time.

There's also the matter of hardware refresh cycles. The Pixel is not even a year old yet, and it hasn't been available for requisitions for its entire lifespan, so a good number of employees haven't yet had the chance to switch even if they want to. (Returned working laptops are refurbished and reused, so turning over the inventory will take longer than you might expect.) Also, lack of VPN or native SSH impeded the Chromebook's internal usefulness in the early days, but today hardly anything still requires VPN (it works now regardless) and the Secure Shell app is pretty workable (set it "Open as Window" so that ^W goes to the terminal). And... well, the early Chromebooks had anemic hardware specs, which is not true of the Pixel.