> Few have even heard about these services.

After demonoid ended I couldn't find any good torrent sites. But now my government publishes a list of the best sites every month. I'm really grateful to them for calling my attention to them.

Perhaps the people commenting on the US border situation are Europeans, who are used to crossing the borders between the various European countries, where nothing like this happens.

Indeed, I remember travelling through the "Iron Curtain" in my youth with no thought that anything like this might occur to me.

The filtering allegedly works by checking every URL that you visit for porn (I've no idea how); if porn is found, not only are you blocked from seeing the URL, but it is also added to a blacklist.

The point of the article is that this checking is being done for everyone, even if they don't want filtering. So the ISP is, in effect, compiling a list of the URLs visited by their customers who do not want to be filtered.

And that list is being compiled on hardware that is alleged to be under the control of a foreign, potentially hostile, government.

So, if all the money goes to the BREIN organisation, who actually gets it?
Do they share it out amongst their employees (secretaries, cleaners,...), or does one person in charge get very very rich?

Still, at 63 degrees north in Siberia they won't have so much trouble keeping the liquid oxygen in the fuel tanks cold.

Finding people who want to work there might be a problem, though. Although, on second thoughts, it might be a better job than working in the salt mines.

Given the number of bad things that happen on airlines, the software could just assign a risk of "zero" to everything. This would be just as accurate as any other way of finding a non-existent needle in a haystack.

IANAL, but: intent may be irrelevant in this case. The current fashion is to make so-called "strict liability" laws, especially in the area of "child protection". For example, in the UK, if there are child-porn pictures on your computer, then you are guily of an offence, regardless of how they got there. I don't know, but the same may apply in this case.

The beauty of this is that it allows the police to arrest people like this unfortunate person and put them in jail without all the tedious arguments about whether they intended do harm or whether it was an accident. A jury will be told "if he sent the message then he is guilty, even if it was a mistake".

Indeed, it is even possible for a policeman to force someone to do something against their will, and then arrest them for it. Google the case of "Winzar (1983)" if you don't believe me.

To apply the fix, everyone involved must cooperate and spend a lot of money upgrading.

The alternative is to carry without ipv6: this will create an artificial scarcity of ipv4 addresses. They will become more and more valuable, so existing businesses will be able to make more and more money renting them out: as no more are available, nobody else will be able to join the cartel to get a slice of the pie.

So: the choice is: spend a lot of money on ipv6 now to help the customer, or screw the customer over and head towards a cartel-dominated future. Surely ipv6 is doomed.

I'm still using a keyboard that came with the big 5-pin din connector. Some years ago I cut it off and soldered on a 6-pin min-din instead. That in turn is now plugged into a PS2-to-USB converter cable.

So: would you say that you have an expert level of skill and knowledge on this particular topic?

It's important for politicians to ensure that voters in poor countries to have mobile phones. Their use has revolutionized democratic elections in many countries.

Before, when a politician bought your vote, you had no way to prove how you actually voted. So the politicians had to trust the people to vote the way they were told.

Now, when the politician visits your village, you just show him the picture you took of your voting paper on your mobile phone in order to collect your bribe.

Why bother with customers at all? Just track the people walking past the store, charge each of them $5, and leave the country with a big bag of cash before the police can catch up with you.

Credit card transactions with no audit trail: what could possibly go wrong?

I remember a salesman from IBM coming to show us one of the early Microchannel machines.

He proudly told us about its wonderful security feature: if you changed any hardware, you could not boot it unless you had a magic floppy disk containing some magic security files.

Then he switched it on to demonstrate it. It was as dead as a dodo. He then remembered that he had removed a network card just before bringing it to us. And he had forgotten to bring the magic floppy with him.

Exit one very red-faced salesman. And we vowed never to buy any of that crap.