Pretty fucking stupid, actually. And generally speaking, they're right.

He got a well-deserved heckling at BlackHat this summer: http://www.businessinsider.com/keith-alexander-gets-heckled-at-black-hat-2013-7

Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"

The first one is a NAS for about 10 TB of USB drives: http://things-linux.blogspot.com/2013/07/delicious-raspberry-pi.html

The second one is part of my home entertainment system running XBMC: http://things-linux.blogspot.com/2013/07/a-second-helping-of-pi.html

The third one is just for playing around with.

My company has a project that is funded by NIH, and as part of our project work we are collecting tweet data from the 1% API stream for use in epidemiological research. Up until last week, the python (tweetsream-based) application that was collecting the data was running on an AWS EC2 compute instance. Without any warning or comment from Twitter, we started getting the '401 Unauthorized' error, and our data collection requests were blacklisted.

Twitter's support system seems designed to prevent users from submitting a support ticket. After 4 or 5 tries, I finally managed to get a ticket into their system, but only received robo-responses that did not address the blacklisting issue. Finally, a couple of days latter my colleagues and I were able to determine (empirically) that some or all twitter apps being hosted by AWS were being similarly blacklisted.

My solution was to move the data collection application to a non-AWS server.

I realize that the 1% API sample data is free, but I don't really think that justifies Twitter presenting an impenetrable support system to its user base.

The first one is being used for this: http://things-linux.blogspot.com/2013/07/delicious-raspberry-pi.html
The second one for this: http://things-linux.blogspot.com/2013/07/a-second-helping-of-pi.html

The third is for experimentation.

Linux Mint

When it's convenient to do so: http://things-linux.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-fine-art-of-corporate-fibbing.html

Or maybe "Keysone Kops" is a more accurate characterization.

And let them sort it out on their own.

The story left out the part about when General Alexander said that all of this NSA civilian surveillance was to protect American freedom, and somebody in the audience shouted, "BULLSHIT!"

It got a bit lively after that...

$KaChing$