Yup, more latency as you mentioned, and also likely to accompany it- worse audio quality as more calls are put through the same amount of bandwidth. Ain't progress grand? 30 years ago when I was a child, you could flip cable channels with maybe 0.25s latency for the picture to stabalize, now you can stare at a black screen for a few seconds. (not that my ability to waste my life channel surfing is defensible, but it's the same basic issue. And yes, DVR features do outweigh the degradation of channel change latency, but again, I'm just highlighting that tradeoffs are being made, and it isn't always a net win on user experience)

$185,000 is Raqueteering.

Not that I'm accusing Lennart Poettering of cyberwarfare, but a highly relevant anecdote is that when pulseaudio was first thrust upon me in fedora, I and many(?) others discovered that it was only software that was preventing our PC's audio out from being overdriven to the point of health and property risk. I discovered this as my volume, due to bug, instantaneously jumped to 400% as I had my sony earbuds in listening to music. The result was excruciating ear pain for the duration of time (about half a second) it took my body to react and rip the earbuds out of my ears. I wonder (not enough to experiment) what would have happened if my speakers had been connected. It would have certainly taken me more than half a second to cause things to stop, and I'm guessing permanent damange to my speakers may have occurred.

Of course, I'm not sure how expensive it would have been for sony to have put a safety in the earbuds. Still, quite the educational experience that was precisely illustrative of what you described, but in a more personal non-industrial sort of way.

Well, I'm guessing it was more for things like-

Stallman is an ethnic Jew and I think we all know that sometimes Jewish folks are given to exaggeration and hyperbole.

But still, thats wierd because I've made (arguably non credible) death threats against Hillary Clinton and jcr, and somehow I now have 2 accounts with excellent karma. I'd suggest watching, and abandoning your racial stereotyping and focus on the legitimate issue of the ultimate opposite of seperation of church and state going on with Israel.

Still, of the last dozen or so comments of yours I read, your mods do seem pretty consistently unreasonable (compared to mine).

Sadly we do live in a day and age where various political un-topics do exist-

- criticizing Israel on the seperation of church and state
- criticizing China on the Tiananmen Square Mass^H^H^H Incident of 1989
- criticizing the NSA and the tech oligarchs on the laughable insecurity of closed source OS-accessable reflashable without write-enable jumper firmware

etc....

Thank God for the Snowden Revelations. (and yes, the 'god' was a perhaps freudian typo for 'got', but you knew that and deftly jumped on it in an information warfare way anyway. Good Job!

also, in case anybody is reading this for educational purposes I should further clarify-

Yes, Tom did say "victim of regular hack". However today's extraordinary hack is tomorrow's script kiddie 'regular hack'. Also, I was implying "firmwares flashable by the OS, or anyone who has gotten root on the OS via a network hack". There can be firmwares that require physical access (write enable jumper) to reflash. I suspect a conspiracy is responsible for write enable jumpers for firmware flashing disappearing (but I'm pretty paranoid).

Wow, parent god modded to -1 ...

http://cryptome.org/2014/01/nsa-codenames.htm

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/catalog-reveals-nsa-has-back-doors-for-numerous-devices-a-940994.html

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/12/nsa-hacking-catalogue/

Firmware and BIOS are software, not hardware. At least the kind that are stored on read-write flash instead of Read Only Memory. Which is most of them these days I believe.

However, I don't want to detract from your sentiment softening my comments. The kind of threat model I was describing involves mal-firmware that, asside from reports of NSA-level usage, have not (yet) seen widespread known usage from 'ordinary hackers'. For the threat model of non-state-or-mafia-supported-hackers, doing a wipe of drive, and perhaps for extra paranoia a reflash of the bios and any other user-supported-flashable firmwares, is a reasonable track. But if you are worried about the NSA, it is not enough.

Those were the good ol' days. These days everybody knows there are half a dozen backdoors in the various firmwares that even an OS wipe won't get. (disk, network, bios, etc)

that was a pretty harsh response considering I did work in " I might post on slashdot hoping some educted chemists could debunk the issue" as about a third of my comment. Why don't you more constructively work with me on that third, rather than AC ripping me for the other 2/3 as if I hadn't had the qualifier in their.

In all fairness, if I got a job as a TSA agent, and my bosses told me that jars of homemade apple butter could be a threat, I for one would take their word for it. I might post on slashdot hoping some educted chemists could debunk the issue, but I wouldn't presume to know that apple butter didn't happen to be a great masking material for some other explosive material.

Everybody knows that smoking cannabis will lead you to question authority instead of being an automaton willing to launch your nukes without any voice confirmation over the phone.

(If that went over your head, you were probably getting high the last time you watched the first 5 minutes of War Games)

" If someone murders person A then saves person B, we don't compromise and call it manslaughter. We say they are guilty on one count, and not guilty on another. We need to look at Snowden this way."

Who is this 'we' you speak of? While I can't quite quote a specific case contradicting you, I think in practice one must admit that 'we' do this all the time. I think the 'new normal' involves plenty of 4th ammendment violating surveillance, and plenty of looking the other way and selective enforcement.

Personally I have been growing and consuming and distributing cannabis in the state of Kansas for more than 2 years now, documenting publicly on facebook and elsewhere. I've sent 2 emails to kansas.city@ic.fbi.gov about it in the last 2 months. *they don't seem to care*. In fact, between those two emails, we saw the slashdot headline about the FBI removing "law enforcement" as their highest priority, and replacing it with "national security". Boy, shouldn't we just create an agency to handle that and take it off the plate of the FBI so they can get back to law enforcement? (lol)

The new normal of our police state will involve untold amounts of 'looking the other way'. And to 'them' it makes sense. 'They' make up draconian war on drug laws, and then have to contend with the deeper ethical dilemna that locking someone up in a system that has historically tolerated rape, for 10 years, quite likely will prevent that human being from doing something far more beneficial towards society with those 10 years of their life.

I'm sorry, but this is how things seem to be. It's probably always been this way. You may get 90% of judges to agree with your sentiment if discussing the issue with a court reporter, but get them off-the-record and I'll bet they tell you a different story about how the system really works.

mod parent up, it's a pretty important etymology (though I welcome further references to pre-Jesus invocations of the idea)

  38 “Teacher,” said John, “we saw a man driving out demons in your name and we told him to stop, because he was not one of us.” 39 “Do not stop him,” Jesus said. “No one who does a miracle in my name can in the next moment say anything bad about me, 40 for whoever is not against us is for us. 41 I tell you the truth, anyone who gives you a cup of water in my name because you belong to Christ will certainly not lose his reward.

http://bibles.org/NIV/Mark/9

Citation and clarification of statistic requested. I'm guessing the rate of Rodney King style common police brutality has been a fairly steady drop over my lifetime. At least from casual observation of mainstream news sources. I do suspect there is much underhanded 'brutality' going on that merely uses things like 'government blacklisting' (as mentioned in the Seeger news articles today). But as for club blows and kicks raining down on people, I feel like I see less of that in the news over the years, not more. So I worry that one comment, unless you bolster it, really works against the rest of everything you said.

I have found over the last 10 years or so, that it really helps my sanity to see them play these kinds of reindeer games. The thread that helped keep my sanity together thinking about the security vulnerability of all the closed source firmware I was using was this thought- "If my human society and government was anywhere near the sort of thing I could respect and depend on to protect my 'inalienable rights' those in high levels would be talking openly about how as a society we should be considering such potetential surveillance state styles". It was the fact that I was hearing in the public debate, only (not so) vague attempts from all directions to direct the conversation precisely *away* from that center. That is what kept me sane believing that the center really was there, and at the time, in darkness.

Similarly, this summary, if accurate, is an example of the same thing. The hoops, and games they are willing to go through to try and 'normalize' this, after all that has been revealed in the last year- proves in my mind- exactly how bad things really must be.

I may be crazy. That is how I've seen the world in the past 10 years.