Or any Google product: they're in bed with the very government who's very clearly turned rogue against the US population, and they'll sell you out on request.

1/ MPAA / RIAA lie - news at 10
2/ PR statements are bullshit - news at 10

Where's the surprise here?

This.

I was watching the news the other day. They were reporting that the UN was considering what to do about Kim Jong Un and his horrid regime's human rights violations, in the wake of the Sony cyber-attack.

The first thing that crossed my mind was: the only thing that prompted the UN to start worrying about the poor North Koreans is essentially a computer attack on some big corporation, and the damage it did to its bottom line. Before that, they really didn't give much of a shit, did they?

The UN was really crass, both with their response and with their timing, and if it doesn't show you with glaring clarity whose interests they really have at heart, nothing else will.

I think what happened most likely was, NK officials went to China, hired "internet baddies", and paid them to fuck Sony Pictures in the ass with their biggest internet broomstick.

No technical expertise or infrastructure needed.

That's what happens when you reliquish control of your digital life for the sake of the superficial convenience of not having to maintain your own hardware and perform your own backups: when the third party you entrust your data to decides you can't have it anymore, all you can do is bitch and moan and ask politely to get back what's rightfully yours. But *you* don't decide: your comfortable and convenient digital jailer does.

At the end of the day, Apple customers only have themselves to blame for what Apple does to them. And the same goes for Google, Microsoft and all the others, when they decide to shaft their own userbase without warning.

Scoring high on intelligence tests only proves you know how to answer intelligence tests. Everybody knows IQ scores are no indication of intelligence.

Also, IQ tests often favors those who have received a good education: for instance, if you ask a math question to someone who doesn't know math, they're bound to score low. Does that mean that person is stupid? No, it just means they don't have the means to answer the test.

And of course, conveniently, which section of the population chronically receives the worst levels education? People of color of course. It's a self-perpetuating myth...

But I'll grant you this: whites and blacks *are* different: the former produce less melanin than the latter. That's as much as you can say with 100% certainty about the two.

I think the most important piece of news of this story is that Wikipedia is no better than Google or Facebook, and exploits/sells search data too.

They made the assumption that if a disease is spreading somewhere, there people start looking for information about the disease on wikipedia

Imagine the potential: if a lot of search logs contain "EBOL-AAAARGH", they'll know a particularly fast-acting variant of the virus has emerged.

Seems Mozilla has sold out. Which makes their choice of DuckDuckGo as default search engine interesting: have they sold out too?

The thing with DDG is, I'd be happy to believe their no-tracking pitch, but I can't quite understand how they're gonna make money out of a free search engine without it...

Choice #1: my smartphone isn't encrypted, the FBI "protects" my safety

Choice #2: my smartphone is encrypted, the FBI can't get to my data.

I choose #2 thank you very much.

the next giant leap in ubiquitous mass surveillance.

I just can't wait for all the devices that surround me to snitch on me and report all my life habits to their corporate or state masters 24/7...

A surprising number of sites use CloudFlare. The trouble with CloudFlare is, if you want to stay anonymous on the internet using Tor, you're SOL, as they serve you captchas every 3 pages when they see a connection coming from a Tor exit node.

So essentially, if you're a Tor user, CloudFlare:

- Renders a sizeable portion of the internet unusuable for you
- Makes money on your back by making you solve captcha, and turning you into a human OCR.

CloudFlare and Google (which also serve captchas to Tor users, only fewer exit nodes are concerned) are quickly making Tor unusable, which must make the NSA wet their pants.

Making Up Names Of Bills With Cleverly Crafted Backronyms Is So Fucking Annoying.

Cuban cigar smokers in the US don't have a PAC to push through changes. They're just not a big enough special interest group.

Rich people can get Cuban cigars without any problem whatsoever, embargo or not. Hell, JFK smoked Havanas during the Cuban missile crisis.

Normal rules and laws don't apply to the one percentile...

How to distinguish whether the phone user is driving a car or riding a bus?

At least you can exclude all iPhone owners from that particular test: people who can afford Apple products are so not riding busses... Or if they do, they probably know better than to whip out a multi-hundred-dollar device begging to be stolen onboard the bus.