No, not specifically. I only mean in general sense that the less people understand their rights the less apt they are to defend them and the more people accept increasing government power the more apt we are to create an environment where such a regime could thrive. I wouldn't technically categorize anything currently happening in the U.S. as fascism.

Not sure of the specifics on "24", but many cop drama's like "Criminal Minds" dumb down the viewers perception of their rights. They always seem to be able to instantly find any information about anyone through online means including by hacking and there is absolutely zero discussion of a warrant or any approval. It's just OK because they are trying to catch the super evil bad guy. If your perception of the constitution, your rights and the limitations on police power where based on television, you likely wouldn't have a clue what they are actually supposed to be allowed to do. From the few episodes of "24" I've seen I believe the same issues exist there.

First: on the passage of SOPA, those damn fuckers, unbelievable. Second: If Comcast starts inspecting my traffic, I am absolutely going to lose my shit. Canceling my service is not nearly enough. It's not the job of a customer's ISP to police their activity.

A lot of the technology itself has gotten easier, the products available are robust and fully developed. The difficulty is often as it always has been in the human side of the business. People in the past didn't have options outside of IT and we used to actually be able to say no when someone wanted to bring in their own device or use some outside service. IT didn't used to have much power, but now we have almost none. Businesses pay us because we are experts in our field, but then constantly make decisions that contradict our input. So what if marketing wants some cloud thing, since when should their desires matter in the equation? I long for management that says "I don't give a fuck what you want. Tell us what you need, we can define the solution if one is warranted." My job got easier when I stopped fighting the businesses on decisions, but now I know I'm not actually doing what I think is in the interests of the companies I work for, rather just bending with the wind so nobody actually has to deal with conflict.

Yahoo isn't particularly modern. They are in transition trying to be modern while being shackled to their legacy. They are about to lose me as a customer. The new versions of their mobile apps for Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Finance ask for way to many permissions. Next time I have to get a new phone and I can't have the old versions their apps are history and so is my account. Not good for them since I'm one of the hold outs that pays for POP mail access, which I'm glad to have so I can suck down all my mail to reduce it's exposure to Big Data and do it in an encrypted format. I'm sorry for Yahoo that Google fooled us all into thinking they were "less commercial" in their early days due the lack of ads on the search page, what fools we were. Now Google is a monster we all helped create and we killed all their competition.

Anyone have a polite way of telling people that you don't want them to take digital photos of you without sounding like a paranoid antisocial weirdo?

I only use really bad blurry pictures for my own profile pics on the web and I don't let people tag me in posts, but the sheer number of pics that I show up in online without my consent means most likely Facebook and the like will ID me even though I don't participate. It really annoys me that even in party situations the social norm is not to ask for any consent or even tell people you are about to take a photo. They just want to document their social life for world to see and I want the opposite, a completely undocumented social life.

There is nothing wrong with that attitude and it isn't all that uncommon, but at the same time it's reasonable for the rest of us not to want that. I had to pay $2 extra for a magazine at the grocery store just so it wouldn't end up in my consumer profile. I don't have a solution for getting Google and Facebook paid without whoring out my personal information, but I really think I should be able to walk into the grocery store and get my discounts for being a loyal shopper without them taking every scrap of information they can and linking it into some damn profile I wish didn't exist. I can choose not to use Google and Facebook, but I really can't reasonably avoid brick and mortar stores. This future cashless society is also going to be a privacy-less society if we continue on our current path. I don't consider it to be in my best interest to have every detail of my existence known by a bunch of corporate marketing weasels. Granted, they don't actually care what I do on a the weekend, they just want to sell me more of whatever that is, but once information is recorded and organized and available online we lose all control of who sees it and for what reason.

Agreed. I read it and I don't see where it authorizes any collection, but rather states limits on retention of information collected under other authorization. Writer Julian Hattem and Rep. Justin Amash need to get their facts strait. If you want to attack the that bill the better argument would be, why the fuck do they get to keep the unauthorized stuff for 5 years? 120 days ought to be enough time to decide if the content is or isn't legally justified to retain, even at the pace of government. Instead of filtering and retaining current data of interest, they want a crystal ball that can see five years into the past even for data belonging to U.S. persons not suspected of any wrong doing. Oh, and if you encrypt it, then they have no retention limit. Then again we don't have it that bad today. Henry Ford used to send men to his factory workers homes and if they had too many liquor bottles around, they would be warned and reinspected shortly there after. I'd call that more invasive than reading my email.

To quote TFA:
"Hidden in the law is âoea troubling new provision that for the first time statutorily authorizes spying on U.S. citizens without legal process,â Amash told other lawmakers. That provision allows âoethe acquisition, retention, and disseminationâ of Americansâ(TM) communications without a court order or subpoena."

I really hope someone can tell me that isn't as bad or as pervasive as that sounds. I wasn't surprised the USA Freedom Act didn't pass, but I didn't think we were going fully in the other direction.

I'd like to add to that, I am also concerned about high frequency trading and AI making stock trading decisions autonomously. One TV program talking about the industry had an industry kingpin that said that they were getting out of the "traders being masters of the universe" model and now they were relying much more on analytics and autonomous automation. I see that as a whole new level of hubris and it introduces many unknown, unknowns. The high frequency trading to me, offers little actual value to the market. If a trader buys a stock and sells it in less than five minutes, it's more likely they are trying to profit from manipulation than from a legitimate investment strategy. The flash crash was a good warning, that changed nothing.

Abso-fucking-lutely. I don't get why the media is participating in their lie or why there isn't some government action from the FTC to shut down that fabrication of their business model. Most drivers take you where you want to go for profit, period. I have nothing against Uber except that they are using the blatant lie of "ride sharing" to circumvent the regulations that apply to everyone else. Fuck anyone that engages in that deception. No responsible journalist should be willing to refer to Uber as a ride sharing service, it's a transportation service.

They have gadgets that just suck the data off your phone. My friend here in the US had one used on his during a traffic stop because the police know his history. They just plug it in suck down the data and don't say a word (before Riley). Encryption should work, but I don't think a screen lock is going to help much, though it doesn't hurt. The reality is the only %100 effective method is to never have anything incriminating on your phone EVER. GPS is a sticky wicket because your whereabouts could be recorded at a time when you couldn't know ahead of time that you were going to be involved in a criminal incident, a bar fight for example.

Some FUD for sure, but there are legitimate concerns. I personally don't want any of my health info online anywhere for any reason. This is both for potential abuse and also because I believe the health care industry and some government agencies are completely unprepared to secure this data. I also will say that the more people have to question the privacy of their health data the more it will lend itself to people editing their treatment. If a person cannot feel 100% confident that a mental health issue or the like will remain private then they will be less likely to accept treatment.

AI doesn't need autonomy to do great harm. I've said I don't see a huge risk in AI in the form of robots and I still hold to that. The kind of AI I fear is that where actual people with misguided ideas will use AI in ways that are harmful. AI could start making all sorts of decisions based on Big Data and arbitrary algorithms and people could blindly trust what the computer says without adequately understanding the complexity or the potential harm. Want a loan, the computer decides, want a job - let's see if the computer says you are OK. Want to start a public works project, the computer will tell us if it's a good use of funds. I fear unethical humans programing AI computers to things and then just stepping back and taking no responsibility for the outcomes as they effect individuals.

Just because a person creates a hashtag and they get people using it to express thoughts from a like minded point of view doesn't mean they should control it. If others later use it to speak from an alternate point of view whether productive or not, that is just what you get. If you want to hear public commentary, part of that is hearing how many in the public really feel, which isn't always pretty. I guess they'll just have to figure out how to censor tweets from people who aren't politically correct. It's OK people don't actually like open discourse, they like to talk to like minded people who can reenforce how right they are about the issues.