The point of going dark is to make surveillance expensive. You want "them" to spend as much money as possible. Currently, just about everyone sends plaintext through the Interbutt, for example. Archiving all of this in a building in Utah and using search technology to sift through it, building "instant dossiers," is well within the budget capabilities of many governments.

If everyone uses encryption, there isn't enough computing power in the universe to sift through all of that. At that point, "they" will have to devote actual warm bodies to do surveillance, aka "spies." Spies cost money. They cost a not insignificant amount of money to train and require weekly paychecks. Plus they are quite a bit slower than computers sifting through plain text and unencrypted Skype calls.

What we want to do is break their budgets.

The only drawback to all of this is the instant you mention encryption to Joe User, you get this glassy eyed stare, dead eyes, like a doll's eyes, to butcher a line from Jaws.

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BMO

"That's because Republicans believe in the free market not communism."

Funny, the current bunch Ds are typically to the right of Reagan.

And no, the Rs aren't in favor of any kind of free market either. And "free markets" don't exist, ever - they are an imaginary construct much like "friction free inclined planes" in physics.

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BMO

It's these 3rd party ad server farms that get hacked and start serving out this shit. Doesn't matter if it's Yahoo, CNN, Drudge, MSNBC, Fox News...etc. If they have a contact with one of these ad agencies (and they all do), all it takes is for one of the infected servers to rotate into view for the end user. Really nasty stuff.

This. So much this. And there are ad networks that will host anything given the right amount of money and lack of care. I sure as hell don't allow ad networks to display their crapware on any machine, no matter the architecture/OS. With adblock-plus, privacy badger, and ghostery installed on a client, third party crap gets enough of a heave-ho to make even going to places like gawker "inoffensive."

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BMO

The post didn't exactly disappear. It's on the Wayback Machine.

https://web.archive.org/web/20...

Playing "Mr. Language Person" aka Dave Barry:

It's not "want to do." It's "wont to do."

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BMO

The "tinfoil hat brigade" as you put it has gone from loonies to prescient given the facts from the last 20 years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X...

Just one example.

Oh, and hello there Cold Fijord.

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BMO

"so where do we get the next generation of major league players from?"

Brown & Sharpe (now a tiny little division of Hexagon AB) used to be the preeminent machine tool manufacturer in the US.

One of my previous bosses was told by one of the Sharpes that the day the company died was the day they stopped training apprentices.

Short-term-profits-at-any-cost amounts to eating your seed corn and then sowing the ground with salt.

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BMO

Yet another self-obsessed legal "expurt" suing over a ham sandwich"

Horace Edwards, who identifies himself as a retired naval officer and the former secretary of the Kansas Department of Transportation, has filed a lawsuit in Kansas federal court that seeks a constructive trust over monies derived from the distribution of Citizenfour. .

Court: Does he have standing
Court looks
He hasn't been damaged, You must have some sort of injury, financial or physical, or whatever, to have any standing in a tort.
Court: Come back when you have standing, now go away and stop wasting our time.

The only "person" who can bring an action that has any weight behind it is the US Government, or some other person who has been directly harmed. That would be under the purview of the Justice Department or one of the armed services or someone who has suffered some loss that must be made whole.

Granted that I have a "GED in Law," but that's my best bet as to what's going to happen.

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BMO

So, assuming Microsoft is sincere

That's a pretty fuckin' big assumption there, guy.

>BMO goes back to read the Halloween documents

The Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, A Sincere Microsoft Board Member, and a Rabbi (a Rabbi is required in every joke) come to a 4-way stop/intersection at the same time.

Who goes first?

The Rabbi, because the others don't fuckin' exist.

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BMO

Otherwise it's potentially just a matter of inserting a tiny reprogramable USB stick when there are few cashiers on and the cashier who is on isn't looking for a few seconds (ie two people walking into a Staples store can pull this off really easily).

Indeed, so much this.

I've seen open USB ports on all sorts of POS terminals and it just boggles my mind, especially because I've been in industrial environments in small companies where hot-gluing USB ports shut is a matter of course.

You can buy a USB flash drive that sits almost flush and if you take a little bit of elbow-grease and sandpaper, you can get it to sit flush easily.

So I don't see how big companies like Staples, who have the actual budget to look at security this way, don't even bother to do the basics like this. It's time we start fining/class action lawsuit-ing firms that don't even do the least bit of security, with amounts of money that actually hurt and not take "5 minutes of profits" to pay.

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BMO

Peer Name Resolution.

The problem is that it's patent encumbered, by Mickeysoft, so it's useless.

There is also something called Hierarchical DHT-based name resolution.

Abstract:

Information-centric network (ICN) architectures are an increasingly important approach for the future Internet. Several ICN approaches are based on a flat object ID namespace and require some kind of global name resolution service to translate object IDs into network addresses. Building a world-wide NRS for a flat namespace with 10^1^6 expected IDs is challenging because of requirements such as scalability, low latency, efficient network utilization, and anycast routing that selects the most suitable copies. In this paper, we present a general hierarchical NRS framework for flat ID namespaces. The framework meets those requirements by the following properties: The registration and request forwarding matches the underlying network topology, exploits request locality, supports domain-specific copies of binding entries, can offer constant hop resolution (depending on the chosen underlying forwarding scheme), and provides scoping of publications. Our general NRS framework is flexible and supports different instantiations. These instantiations offer an important trade-off between resolution-domain (i.e. subsystem) autonomy (simplifying deployment) and reduced latency, maintenance overhead, and memory requirements. To evaluate this trade-off and explore the design space, we have designed two specific instantiations of our general NRS framework: MDHT and HSkip. We have performed a theoretical analysis and a simulation-based evaluation of both systems. In addition, we have published an implementation of the MDHT system as open source. Results indicate that an average request latency of (well) below 100ms is achievable in both systems for a global system with 12 million NRS nodes while meeting our other specific requirements. These results imply that a flat namespace can be adopted on a global scale, opening up several design alternatives for information-centric network architectures.

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm...

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BMO

Oh look at the poor persecuted "christian" that is so bent out of shape because his publicly funded school or courthouse doesn't have a monument to the 10 commandments. Paying 5 or 6 figures for a monument, as has happened in the past, is an endorsement.

Look, numbnuts, it's not "your" school or courthouse, it's our school and our courthouse, and "us" includes atheists, hindi, buddhists, jews, etc., as well as christians, or so-called "christians" that have completely forgotten the Sermon on the Mount.

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BMO

I'll bet they paid off NYS atty general Eliot Spitzer to shame the major ISPs into dropping usenet entirely because of "child porn."

You're right. Sony is shitting itself not because of movies being prematurely released to the 'net, but evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

I'm buying popcorn.

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BMO

There was one direct attack at the GPL that might've had teeth had it not occurred in the fetid imagination of a certain Daniel Wallace.

Dan Wallace tried to get the GPL considered invalid because it amounted to price fixing and a Sherman Act violation. He claimed the harm was that the Free and free properties of Linux operating systems locked him out of the market, even though he didn't actually have a product to market.

He was duly struck down hard by a de novo appellate court decision.

That was probably the only "legitimate" attack on the GPL. Any others are, like you said, shooting the plaintiff in his own foot.

http://www.internetcases.com/l...

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BMO

>Yeah, but how far can you make it in FUCKING LOS ANGELES

Probably a lot easier since the roads aren't FUCKING CATTLE PATHS THAT GOT PAVED OVER.

Crikes, you're stupid.

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BMO

I'm an urban cyclist.

I can make it from Arlington MA to Downtown Boston no problem, down Mass Ave, one of the most traveled roads anywhere.

And I don't feel like it's suicidal at all. Then again I don't bike like a moron and I pay attention to traffic laws. Clipless pedals help a lot.

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BMO