I should probably ignore an AC post, but in case someone reads you...

There's no data to support your theory. The data says that the number of people leaving the workforce has been going up for 10+ years because the workforce is aging, and the baby boomers are starting to retire. People being able to retire isn't unemployment (i.e. people who want jobs not finding them), it's exactly the opposite (people who don't want to work being able to stop working)!

The big about 'free phones' is weird. That was a program started under Reagan, and it's paid for entirely by the telco's, not by the government. And if you quit work to collect unemployment, you'd better be aware that (1) unemployment pays a lot less than having a job, and (2) it only lasts a few months.

Be aware that the majority of people collecting SNAP ("food stamps") are either working full time for crappy employers, or are people (students, elderly, injured vets) that can't work. And, as a society, I think we're ethically required to care for those people, at least enough so they don't starve homeless. A task we're doing a terrible job at already...

Good article. Thanks for posting!

I've run mail servers sending millions of emails (to people who requested them, not SPAM) and you run into these things fairly often. For a big site with tons of users, a request gets things fixed pretty quickly. For a tiny web site, it can take a long time since it doesn't affect many people so it's low priority. So raising a fuss like this is a reasonable thing to try.

BTW, the issue resolved pretty quickly. From what I read, the site added some anti-SPAM headers to their emails and got things cleared up pretty quickly.

True, but that accelerated after NAFTA. In part because the promised protections used to get the votes to pass NAFTA were not delivered on. That history of lying to get profitable deals passed is why it's important not to agree to TPP, etc., without knowing what's actually in it, and not to believe promises about the future.

The site isn't claiming that they're being censored, or that it's a Constitutional free speech issue, just that they're being blocked. It's possible that some anti-spam rule triggered against their site for some reason - anti-spam systems use statistical models and rules, and aren't always right, which is why they all have some appeal mechanism to get human judgement involved. So right now they're trying to get enough public visibility to the issue, demonstrating that the site is legitimate and that many people care about it, which gives whoever's blocking the site to have an incentive to pay attention and fix it.

If they don't raise a fuss, they'll almost certainly be ignored and stay blocked, which isn't a good outcome.

If I had to guess, the site might have gotten flagged by one of the black-listing services, and since many people subscribe to those services the one flag could cause them to be blocked everywhere. So if they can get enough attention to get that service to un-block them, it'll get better everywhere.

What makes you think that when we as a people vote for the government to do something, it's "without the understanding that what we are giving has a price attached to it". Laws that are passed have costs calculated by the CBO, and funding mechanisms attached, as a part of the law. It's only a few right-wing loons that think that some things (e.g. wars, tax breaks to corporations) don't have to be paid for.

You appear to have a lot of misconceptions about TANF (Welfare). Go read http://thinkprogress.org/econo... .

If the people pass laws to promote businesses investing in developing new capabilities (e.g. space flight) then we WANT companies to do that work and thus get those grants, tax breaks, etc. That's how the airline industry got launched in the US, for example - huge government subsidies (airports, air traffic control system) and contracts (for mail delivery) that jump started the US airline industry, which was IMO a brilliant investment, because transportation doesn't just benefit the company providing transportation, it benefits everyone who uses transportation. Highways were another brilliant investment, funding construction companies and thus jobs, and creating a national road system that everyone benefits from.

The subsidies/grants/tax breaks that I object to are the ones that go to mature, profitable industries that don't need any support because they should be able to survive on their own. Oil companies and sports teams are just the most blatant examples. Agri-business corporations don't need subsidies, either - the farming grants should be reserved for the few percent of farmers who are independent, small family farms, and right now the money all goes to huge, profitable corporations that have huge resources and don't need the money, and relatively little to the small farms that need the support to survive the ups-and-downs of farming.

To support your point, note that the unemployment rate goes up and down quite dramatically over time based on the economy, i.e. job availability. That pretty much proves that when people are unemployed it's because they can't find work, not that they're not willing to work.

Exactly right! Votes need to be physically recorded, so they can be physically secured, counted, audited, can only be modified physically in one location, etc. Digitally recorded votes are far too easy to manipulate, and almost all digital voting systems are impossible to audit making them completely untreatable.

This is exactly right - we don't need online voting - it's a horrible idea. The key problem is that it opens up vote fraud to the entire internet, with no oversight or physical control, instead of just people physically in a polling station under the observation of election monitors.

If the goal is to increase voting, the solution is to make election day a national holiday so it's equally accessible to everyone. And everyone involved in voting knows this.

The problem is that while everyone says that they want everyone to vote, one of the two parties knows they are only supported by a minority of the population and they only retain power by keeping the majority from voting, by making voting as difficult as possible.

Interesting review, but the comment you were replying to "As you’d expect, it’s an awkward mess" was not about the Apple Watch, it was about doing a naive port of a *web browser to the Apple Watch where the *browser* was, as you would expect, useless, though an interesting tech demo.

Exactly - "smart watches" aren't particularly for telling time, they are a small display that's visible at a glance for notifications and other information you want easily. For example, my Pebble tells me about my next meeting, including drive time, which is great to be able to easily watch so that I stay on schedule. And it's an activity tracker (running Up software) so I don't need to wear a separate activity tracker band. And it tells me who's calling so that I can decide whether to accept or reject a call w/out pulling my phone out. And check Uber cabs in the area. Think of it as the most valuable 10% of what you can do on a phone, made more convenient so that you don't have to pull your phone out as often.

Nobody dies if they don't have a smart watch, of course, but it does make life easier.

It's a good point that as IoT devices proliferate there are security implications because your house will have dozens or even hundreds of devices all talking TCP/IP using whatever random protocols and implementations each device's manufacturer came up with.

That being said, I think it's unrealistic to imagine that each little company should hire their own security experts to make their own rock-solid stack, because many of these devices are home-made, or made by little startups, etc. And even if every manufacture aggressively tracked technology, users won't upgrade their firmware constantly.

Instead, I'd suggest that a better option would be to standardize the basic communications and develop a FOSS hardened communications stack for IoT devices, and push IoT producers to adopt it, so that everyone at least builds on a secure platform. There are many communications stacks for IoT, but the problem (IMO) is that they're generally proprietary by companies trying to "win" in a battle between IoT stacks, and because there are so many code bases, and they are proprietary, they can't be trusted, and even if they are trusted, they can't be used by all developers because they're tied to proprietary platforms.

So what we need is an IoT stack, secure and efficient enough to run on tiny processors (Arduino...) ideally grounded in an open standards group such as the IETF. And with a marketing program to drive all IoT platforms to adopt it. Of course, there can be multiple competing implementations as there are with all network stacks. That's valuable from a security perspective, because it prevents everyone from running one code base and thus having the same security vulnerabilities. And, of course, competition makes everything better, as they compete to be more efficient, secure, etc. As long as they are interoperable, and based on a fundamentally secure design.

Of course, this won't fix all problems - you can certainly build an insecure app on top of an secure protocol - but at least it'll eliminate a bunch of "basic" problems, like identity and securing streams, etc.

I used to think this way, because if you want to know the time look at a clock or cell phone. Then I got a Pebble, and found that it's fantastically useful to have little bits of info pushed to your wrist to see at a glance, and to have your watch know your schedule and location rather than just the time, so it can tell you things like "you should leave for your next appointment now, given where you are and where you need to be and the traffic". Then you only need to pull out your phone occasionally, she you want to actually talk with someone or use a large screen. It's very convenient.

The article isn't actually about end-to-end email security, but about using web-based email, because you can't trust the contents of the browser window. The answer, of course, is to use a Mail app, and not web-based email. If you use a mail app, end-to-end security works great!

The real problem that needs solving isn't hacking PGP into web-mail, it's making certificate management user-friendly. And that's not even that hard to do!