I'm not saying that this is the solution for everything. But it's a hammer that could be used more often than it is...
Specifically, I'm saying that when it becomes a monster, you just let it crash, burn and die...

I see let's of office people maintaining semi-critical client lists in excel... They would be a lot better of hacking up something ugly in access, php, asp3, ruby or whatever. Even if it crashes and burns some day... Their excel spreadsheet is slow to use (because it's all manual) and easy to mess up, it'll crash and burn all the time.

I'm not suggestion that things now implemented as nice solutions should be hacked... But that things currently implemented as stupid manual processes ought to be hacked.

Guns are for girls... I always carry a dead man's switch to the 500 pounds of TNT I keep under my bed.
Nobody robs me and gets away with it...

I think of it as the nuclear option (patent pending).

Hmm... We'll see. Imagine what would happen if you hired secretaries who could code. I'm not saying CS graduates as secretaries.
But people who can write some horribly ugly and unmaintainable php/mysql applications.
There are so many work processes that could be automated. And the current manual implementation of these processes is so buggy, that a poor software implementation would likely be better..
Maybe it's okay to write software that solves the job here and now... And that you don't try to maintain :)


You can't build giant core products like this. But you can make many useful tools, very fast, very cheap, and enhance productivity of your organization.

I think there is a big market for shitty code that solves problems. Today many processes aren't digitized, because it's too expensive.

it's basically, privacy issue... chrome will send everything you type in the address bar to servers. That is who search and address bar are split in Firefox.

Well, Firefox 29 does also improve builtin web developer tools significantly.

Nobody complains about good old fashion spying... Such as hiring a PI to follow a suspect around.
The invasion of privacy conducted at the hands of the NSA is so extensive that it makes whatever records Stasi was making look like childs play.

It's the unprecedented scale that is the big problem.... Then there is the legality of industrial espionage in a civilized world, etc... And the fact that you normally don't conduct criminal activities within the territory of your allies.

It's DRM'ed media on windows routed through kernel space? Then it must be the superior thing to do :)

Like I said, I'm not expert... And certainly not qualified for risk analysis in this field.

But I suspect that as a guiding principle, regulation tries to ensure that all parts of the industrialized food chain are traceable. Such that a steak can be traced to butcher, farm, cow, food, original of food... etc.
Presumably there is a limit to how far back it makes sense to go... And presumable, it doesn't make sense to regulate traceability and testing of of small food sources, hence, the previous exception. But with industry growth, maybe they are reconsidering the previous exception.

We know that mad-cow disease has origins in food. I suspect there are other diseases that spread through food too...
It isn't hard to imagine a brewery that doesn't clean it's disposal trucks between loads and suddenly starts poisoning the food chain with something nasty.

Interesting... But in the case of a messenger service, AIM could probably modify their EULA and claim copyright on all messages exchanged over the network.
In which case DMCA would apply.

Out of curiosity: which countries do you think of? :)

Even stasi, east german secret policy during the cold war, didn't conduct surveillance at the scale as US government.


Considering credit card penetration in the US, etc. I would suspect you have better privacy in China. Though, you right to disagree might be slightly reduced :)

What does it matter?
The company could put that in the EULA...

But what would it change. Even if the company is truly nice, and truly wants to do honor it's agreement. It can be force to disclose data to the NSA and not talk about it.
Even, if there was a law, there would be a secret law circumventing it. In the current political landscape this isn't far fetched.
In fact it's naive to think things like this don't take place.

Exactly... And being US based, you can't trust what they say anyway, because they can be legally order to lie to you.

It really, doesn't matter what they say... At the end of the day, the US doesn't have a legal framework to support safe use of private data for good, without risks that it may end up at NSA (or big insurance companies).

Closing this was the only way, given the current political landscape in the US big data is never safe.

In the US, yes....
Just imagine if AIM had encrypted the communication with a key hardcoded into their client... Then accessing the server with a third party client could be unauthorized access of computer system in violation of the computer fraud act, or at least violation of DMCA, by breaking DRM.

I like said it last time (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5047921&cid=46783413) and Snowden just confirmed here (better worded though).
"If we are to test the truth of officials' claims, we must first give them an opportunity to make those claims"

In slashdot profit style:
1) Ask a question about which an official will lie,
2) Expose the truth,
3) ......
4) Profit

Do you have a better plan?