Snowden could have chosen to leak his documents anonymously through a Congressman. Amash would have loved to blame Obama for evil. Wyden is always good on these issues. And he probably could have done so anonymously, because the NSA can't piss off Congress or they all get fired

That'd be the same Wyden who already knew a lot of what Snowden revealed and felt he couldn't say anything because it was all classified? The same Congress that discovered they'd been lied to, openly, baldly and repeatedly, and did diddly squat because it was a high ranking member of the security state who did it?

Good one. Snowden did what he did because the entire US political structure has been subverted by the military to such an extent that there is nobody left who will hold them genuinely accountable. The press won't do it. Congress won't do it. The courts won't do it. The only guy left who will do it was a 30 year old former spy. That's what America is, now.

Well, you'd be naive if you believed the German's weren't spying on us in some fashion.

Given that the US Gov is collectively shitting bricks over China allegedly spying on America and is busy indicting Chinese government employees, actually you'd be naive to believe Germany is doing anything like what the NSA has been doing. Do you think if Germany had managed to tap Obama and was busy following his phone around, taping his conversations with his generals etc America would just blow it off and say "oh no problem, we knew you were doing that and we're cool with it"? Of course not.

Goddamn yanks. That's the whole problem with America summed up right there - the division of the world into only two categories, domestic and foreign, patriot and traitor. As if other countries and other people don't even exist. Then you wonder why a whopping 70% of under 30 in Europe want to give Snowden asylum i.e. they would jump at the chance to massively piss off the USA and cause a diplomatic crisis. That's what they think of America.

I'm not convinced the NSA is collecting more information about me than Google is

Then you haven't been paying attention. The NSA has been collecting everything from Google via fibre taps, and lots more in addition. So by definition they are collecting more.

How is XMPP in any way comparable to Twitter?

They never really explained why federation wouldn't work or why XMPP wasn't sufficient for their needs. As far as I can tell, this was purely to thicken the walls on the garden.

I think it's obvious isn't it? The "Hangouts" product works in a fundamentally different way to XMPP. In particular, it's trying to be a WhatsApp competitor, which means users are identified by things which are not JIDs, like verified phone numbers and Google+ profiles. What's more the entire thing on mobile runs over the C2DM system which uses tightly packed binary protocols to save bandwidth and battery instead of XML. GTalk had been architecturally moving away from XMPP for years as the product evolved, it's hardly surprising that this trend continued.

As to why they stopped caring about federation, I'd guess the answer is: nobody uses it (except spammers). Heck, I'm a technical guy with lots of technical colleagues and friends, mostly using GTalk, and zero of them use a federated XMPP server. XMPP just is not competitive and is a market failure as a result. Or can you give me one good, solid reason why an ordinary person would want to use a non-Google XMPP server? No ideology please, just practical things. I can't think of one.

The European Economic Area is not identical to the European Union. For example Switzerland has most of the free trade agreements but does not have to obey random dictats from Brussels.

The vast majority of ISPs in this country do not have the vast majority of customers. The vast majority of end users (you know - ma and pa Facebook user) are on Comcast, Verizon, AT&T or Time Warner (soon to be Comcast). Comcast and Time Warner are content providers as well as bandwidth providers. Verizon and AT&T are the old phone company monopolies (AT&T and GTE). With that oligarchy of companies, policies and pricing set will drive the market. As far as the majority of money going to fees - the last year each of the companies mentioned didn't exactly have losses or even just make a couple bucks. Record profits - not quite.. but definitely in the range so the race to the bottom is still putting the gold plate on the swimming pools. As far as streaming - how many of those Facebook posts have videos attached to them? 25 cute cat doing something adorable videos a day will start to knock on those bandwidth caps fairly quickly. And lately those videos don't require you to click on them to start - they run quietly in the background and you don't notice them until you turn up the sound.

Don't mix up business users with consumers - different animals with different use patterns. And for a history - look at cell phone - and land line usage. (wondering if you're old enough to remember when calling cross-country was a once a month thing to talk to grandma instead of doing so on a whim)

Did you read the paper? I did. That's what the research does. It turns out that there isn't a lot of malicious MITM out there, and what little does exist is done by malware on the same machine. The other MITM "attacks" are things like corporate proxies, etc.

The most interesting thing about this research is that it rather decimates the oft-repeated meme that SSL is broken and gets busted all the time. The data doesn't show that.

Pax Americana as a theory might hold water, if it weren't for the fact that the USA has spent most of the latter half of the 20th century fighting wars that it started itself. How many active wars did the USA decisively stop by itself? None? Bosnia might have been an example, except that would be better described as being ended by NATO, in fact Operation Deliberate Force had 15 nations take part. It would probably have worked out the same even if the USA did not take part.

It's deeply unclear that the USA is single handedly responsible for a net drop in state-on-state violence. Certainly just looking at surface facts would suggest it's the opposite: the world would have been even more peaceful if the USA had a less aggressive foreign policy.

It's actually a bit of a muddled critique ("I will say 20% of jobs are BS but I won't say which ones") that attempts to convince people that they shouldn't criticize other jobs they might think were overpaid (like unionized auto workers, as specifically cited) just because the complainer has a job they are unhappy with. In short, it's a load of academic twaddle, but interesting as a conversation starter.

Right on the money. Actually he does identify some job categories he thinks are BS at the end - an entirely arbitrary list that labels actuaries as having BS jobs, but poets not! Right, because insurance is so useless!

That said I agree it's useful to start interesting conversations, even if the article itself is largely nonsense. The question of why we aren't all living lives of idle leisure is an interesting one to explore. I can think of several explanations. One is that many of us are essentially idle. Unemployment figures exclude people who have stopped looking for work. If you look at raw data series (graph here) you can see that actual employment has been steadily falling since the 1960's in the USA, typically taking a dive after each recession, then regaining some but not all of the previous employment. This is not what futurists envisioned because this is a form of enforced idleness, but then again, in a world where machines do all the drudge work wouldn't we expect that to surface as unemployment? We'd only see this as a problem due to a hard-wired cultural expectation that unemployment is immoral and working is ethically superior. The transition to a world of leisure would require rewriting of that fundamental component of our psyche which clearly has not been happening.

Selling you something at a higher price than you'd like to pay is not "extortion".

Regardless, issuing certificates involves real work. If you'd like to do that work for free, in perpetuity, eating the costs on your own, then please do! The internet community will love you for it.

Mexico has a tight restriction on guns yet their murder rate is 23.7, Switzerland where every adult over 18 is issued a true assault rifle has a murder rate of 0.7. It is not the gun laws that cause problems it is the culture.

Mexico has tight restrictions on guns yet are flooded with guns from the USA. This effect is so severe that researchers have actually studied the effect on Mexican homicide rates from the lapsing of the US Federal Assault Weapons Ban, which had a ten year sunset rule.

Switzerland does have a lot of guns .... at home, as part of their military system. There is no culture of people carrying around guns with them in civilian life just in case they get randomly attacked for no reason. I live in Switzerland. I've not spent a huge amount of time in the USA, just visits over the years, yet I've seen there a bar with a "no guns" sign outside. This is something I have yet to encounter here.

But even if it is due to culture, you aren't going to turn the USA into Switzerland, so stop blaming culture (which implies that's how to fix it). Instead look to the UK, which has a culture far closer to America's. The UK experienced steadily growing gun crime rates for decades (graph on page 4), with very small occasional falls being quickly reversed by growth again. The big jumps in 1998 and 2002 are due to changes in counting methods - so you can mentally smooth the graph if you like. A few years after the UK passed much stricter gun control laws firearms offences started to fall dramatically and have continued falling every year.

I've noticed that UK statistics are frequently abused by gun rights advocates in the USA. Ways I've seen them be distorted include: chopping off the earlier years and then trying to claim that passing gun control laws made gun crime go up (it was going up anyway and the big jump was due to counting method changes), and claims that the UK has more violent crime than the USA (the category of "violent crime" excludes homicide, because the stats are collected through surveys and dead people don't reply to surveys, homicide rates are over 4x higher in America).

Something else to consider about the UK experience is that the stats cover up a lot of interesting detail, like the fact that whilst there are still firearms offences they are almost invariably committed with used guns and that provides a lot of evidence that can be used to bring the cases to resolution. "Clean guns" that have never been used before are exceptionally rare. In the USA they're the norm because it's so easy to buy new guns, so why leave a trail of evidence? Ammo is also hard to obtain. Some gangs have tried to make their own, but their home made ammo is far less deadly than professionally manufactured ammo.

I do not expect the USA to actually ever shift itself on the issue of gun control, even though it stands practically alone amongst developed countries. Instead American's who don't want to fear getting shot should simply leave.

Whilst it might not be for everyone, here I am sitting at my PC looking at my Computer Science books (purchased between 1995 and 1998) and I don't think I've opened any of them in the past 10 years (looking at you "Unix System Programming" by Haviland and Salama, reprinted in 1994).

If I get a DRM free digital version after the course has ended and the pricing is right, then this might actually be more useful than a pile of dead wood taking up space on my bookshelf - most of which is probably long out of date.

It's not the end of blogging in Russia. What it means is that Russians who want to blog will blog on sites hosted outside the country, where all traffic is run through SSL.

There's no point for the administration to go fry big names like the NY Times or Washington Post when all they were doing is re-reporting material already obtained by foreign press.

Now imagine what would have happened if Snowden had provided his materials only to the NY Times. Oh, wait, we don't have to imagine. We know what would have happened because previous leakers did that, only to find the NYT was already under the thumb and they chose not to publish. In fact Snowden explicitly said he wasn't going to trust American media to publish things about the NSA because they had a history of self censorship in this regard, causing them huge embarrassment.

They pass their information to the military that assassinates them instead. Is this meant to be better?