Can't even get to the interview stage for a 'modern' tech job. In my 50s, never attended High School, worked at a radio station when I was 15 (fixing everything but the transmitter) and also mixed sound in theaters and recording studios, desktop publishing and printing. Oh yeah, the tech. From 1979 a consultant installing and maintaining computers and communications circuits, PCs from the days of CP/M, IBM AS/400 mainframes, started the first Freenet and ISP and tourist website in my area, worked for two other ISPs at senior network level, coded in half a dozen languages... from ARCNET to BGP.

So I'm applying for a job at Rackspace in San Antonio some 12 years ago -- having been one of their earliest (4 digit) customer numbers and eminently qualified to manage their servers. Opened the fancy glass doors and discovered that the fucks would not even interview a human being until a flabbergibbit had gabblegosted through their web-based employee applicant supersystem (which I had already done). I left town rather than waiting for the callback that never happened.

And now my tech resume items are further stale -- because stupid-ass 'modern HR supersystems' only ask for job histories going back 'so fa in timer' and I'm a Public Works dude. With a GED. Yes, I'm a Public Works dude because I moved into an area where it was the only job I could land, jetting sewers and fixing water leaks. Now I run a sewer plant in another town.

It's not even age discrimination. All I would ever ask is for a ten minute interview to (briefly) explain my life to someone with the authority to listen and judge. Modern tech, with its emphasis on algos sifting through applicant queues, used that (fucking) convenience as a lazy excuse to break with tradition and stop granting interviews to most, or even many, applicants.

Meanwhile ... finally got that ten minute interview -- from a Public Works department. The department head heard my story and asked, "Why would you want to work here?" I answered without hesitation, "Because I really need the job. And I can do the job."

Moving soon and will try to convince someone that my unique talent stack spanning decades would be valuable to their organization. All it would take is ten minutes. But it is likely I'll be emptying trash cans in the end, because HR is getting more jobbed out and impersonal by the day.

Which is why I didn't mention it right off, though Snowden is quick to argue that point.

But mass storage of communications intercepts without individual reasonable suspicion, whether listened-to or not, may be arguable as a violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Supreme Court should they decide to hear it. It IS a search even if the 'seeing/hearing' is deferred. Under the general theme of unenumerated rights, any action that places the entire population under surveillance indiscriminately cannot argue that any 'reasonable suspicion' justifies it, for it would invariably include all persons worthy and unworthy of suspicion. You'd have to argue that everyone passes the test for suspicion. At that point the pinball machine says TILT and the game is over.

I think the Freedom of Association angle is just as compelling however.

It is hardly a novel perception that compelled disclosure of affiliation with groups engaged in advocacy may constitute as effective a restraint on freedom of association as [affirmative governmental action in other cases.] This Court has recognized the vital relationship between freedom of association and privacy in one's associations. ~Guilt by expressive association: political profiling, surveillance and the privacy of groups, p.636

Mass storage of traffic or communications (and association through metadata not specifically requested by court) is a 'compelled disclosure' to the government. It may be difficult to achieve in practice, but is it too much of a stretch to extend 'houses, papers, and effects' to include verbal or typed communications with others over a network? Think of the archaic meaning and intent here for 'papers'. It has been upheld to include sealed letters in transit and the opening of mail without due process is clearly a 1st amendment violation. This post was a 'letter' from myself to Slashdot, and until it appears on the public page it is a 'paper'.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Says it all, if we have the courage to fight for it.

NSA probably now has access to the direct streams telecoms use to consolidate their billing and geolocatioon data, from taps on the underlying circuits. If it's encrypted then nudge nudge wink wink here's the key. So telecoms no longer need suffer the indignity and PR risk of transmitting the data.

NSA Warrantless Wiretapping is not just an invasion of privacy. They have actually claimed to Congress that they do NOT consider information intercepted and stored indefinitely... to be unlawful at all! Until or unless someone reads it. This subverts Freedom of Association too, since any future tyrant would have access to this cradle-to-grave data of our families and friends and (now! with super-cells!) movements.

To get up to speed quickly this whitepaper by Andrew Clement seems to cover all the bases. Look past the straw man 'Metadata Collection' within it for 'NSA splitter'. Or you might start as I did years ago with James Bamford's fascinating 1982 book Puzzle Palace. While most of it dwells on what is now history and goes on at length about NSA's Charter which explicitly forbid domestic intercepts, there was a single passage in this book that revealed something else. I will quote it because I believe Bamford intended it as a dire warning: "Another indication of NSA's "broadband sweeping of multi-circuited domestic telecommunications trunk lines," David L. Watters told the Senate Intelligence Committee [in 1978!] lies in the Agency's request for an amendment to the wiretap law that would permit NSA to engage in warrantless wiretapping "for the sole purpose of determining the capability of equipment" when such "test period shall be limited... to... ninety days." Continuing, he warned: "Let there be no misunderstanding here. There is only one category of wiretapping equipment or system which requires up to ninety days for test and adjustment, and that system is broadband electronic eavesdropping equipment, the vacuum-cleaner approach to intelligence gathering, the general search of microwave trunk lines. I make this assertion on the strength of actual experience in the electronic intelligence trade and on the strength of over twenty-five years' experience in the telecommunications profession. An ordinary, single-line wire tap requires only five minutes to adjust and test."

Sure this pre-Internet quote discusses microwave, which was the long-line 'broadband' of choice in those days... but NSA's intentions to dig in at places where American citizens speak with each other is clear. Since then, Thomas Drake, Bill Binney and Mark Klein have all come forward alleging domestic surveillance far exceeding 'telephone records'. Klein is of special note, for it is he who revealed the existence of secret Room 641A in the lawsuit Heptig vs AT&T that the Electronic Frontier Foundation took almost to the Supreme Court... who actually declined to hear the case on grounds that the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 protected AT&T from liability for involvement with any illegal activities. Sound normal? This was a law passed after the lawsuit was filed. In response to it, even. Oh.

That should make you a bit angry. We're not talking about telephone records here. We're talking about fiber splitting with drop-in access to the whole slurp. Which also contains voice these days. Any real despot who comes to power will discover that the United States is prepared to deliver real-time private communications and databases of activity for its citizens, cradle to grave, that had been collected with no 'probable cause' whatsoever.

Why the fuck would anyone want to build this thing, unless they were insane?

"Snowden=Traitor" has been picked up in some circles almost as if it was a no-brainer meme. That has never rested easily with me, considering this history and the danger to the Republic that it represents. Was not Snowden warning us just as James Bamford did in 1982, only Snowden's claim is that this awful unaccountable thing has actually been built? One interesting point raised in Snowden's 2014 virtual address at Harvard about his own plight was that as a contactor he swore an oath to defend the Constitution from enemies both foreign and domestic, and yet contractors are exempt from whistleblower protection.

I'm certain Trump is surrounded by folks who are telling him it is all necessary, especially the dubious foreign arrangements. They will only discuss the particulars of domestic traffic intercepted and stored if he nails them to the wall. To learn the extent he will have to ask very careful questions and perhaps, fire some people who are now busy convincing others that the President has no "need to know".

For the first time in a long time we seem to have a President who is capable of forming an opinion on something as if he were a mere citizen... not just some politician whose ego is carried away by access to some cool new 'super-power'.

The existence of domestic NSA warantless collection ensures that what ever the 'shadow government' actually turns out to be, it will have ill-gotten goods on all future leaders... including your own sons and daughters. Do we really need this thing, at this cost?

...specifying the mobile pay system I use most often, in comments. Instead of posting anonymously I decided to use my real account and leave the service anonymous.

Students (and researchers) will finally be able to 1-click their way to success!

And professors (using software instances on the same cloud) will already be using AI grading software that will be fooled by it. It's all reminiscent of this cartoon which is actually a 2009 re-draw of an earlier cartoon by the same artist. It was hilarious until it actually started to happen.

As to the fear-hype about an AI doing something that humans can do just as well (piece together narratives and make things up)? LOL. To sell your startup company to spooky investors on and off the Beltway, nothing boosts your brand like starting some terrifying overblown rumor about your company's technology. The way investors think is, if it's so 'dangerous' in the future the stock will be worth a lot so I'd better get in on the ground floor with the other spooks. And become a rich immoral investor spook.

It's just the beginning. Look out for goofy advertisements that say "A.I. so advanced, to use it we must wear HAZMAT suits!" then you know you will have entered bizzaroland. I saw it all happen before with ads in 70s-80s computer magazines.

repost

My boss slaps a folded-over InfoWorld magazine onto my desk, thick enough to kill a rat with in those days. He says with obvious glee, "How bout dem apples?"

It is Steve Gibson's INFOWORLD column of March 8 and Gibson (with obvious glee) has caught a manufacturer of Hercules graphics cards red-handed. The standard WinBench program had conducted a series of tests --- and in one particular test of text display, in which the phrase "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog's back then sat on a tack" is continuously painted on the screen --- the card performed oddly spectacularly. It was that one score that when combined with the others, ranked the card above the competition. Suspicious, Gibson changed a single letter in the test phrase and the card's score dropped to a reasonable range. The card was apparently recognizing that a test was in progress and 'cheating' by failing to actually over-write this static text repeatedly.

I love the comment by the manufacturer when Gibson contacted them (read it!) but what intrigued the industry the most was that the cheat was not to be found in the Windows driver code, it had been embedded into the firmware of the accelerator chip. In the next Winbench version the test phrase jumped around the lazy screen's back during the test, rendering the cheat obsolete.

Why would a self-driving car company name itself
!! WHAMO !!
?

Being an established computer consultant, I got to provide input when the US Virgin Islands' election system was upgraded, a good friend on the Board of Elections brought over a bunch of brochures for me to review one evening in the early 1980s. There were chad systems ("Punch cards? You must be joking!") and push-button machines ("Where's the paper trail? Do you know what a 'hacker' is?" "It's available but 'costs extra'. Are these people for real??"). And there were optical zoned page scanners.

My friend and I agreed -- his vote on the Board of Elections -- was to keep the paper ballot. People are used to it. If anything, beef up the security and oversight surrounding transport of ballots cast; use bleeding-edge technology cautiously and wisely: do the counting of paper ballots with optical readers. Because just like the money counter machines, you can do it again quickly to see if you get the same result. And if the machines break and the power goes out -- the election process is 'safe', breezes along as smoothly as ever -- only the results are delayed.

Just WHEN was it decided that election results needed to be tallied in hours or minutes? From where did the pressure arise such that hand counting of paper ballots (or in the least, optical scan of same) is too slow? That we instead impose few-vendor centralized no-paper systems that are inherently hackable?

Here's the test I impose. A paper ballot system may also have its problems -- BUT -- any given layman you bring in off the street to observe the tally process will have a clear view of a ballot box's chain of custody. Any layman observing the subsequent counting of those ballots (by hand or optical reader, with verification of random batches to test the reader) has a clear grasp of the process, and can tell whether the system is honest. No one can say if a wholly computerized system is honest. And even if you find someone who claims they are sure, no one can tell whether they are being honest.

If it's Democracy you want, use as simple a voting/tally system as possible; for the tally process use as many human beings as possible, local volunteers as participants and observers. If it's Oligarchy you want, go ahead and totally castrate the process of transparency by implementing insecurity through obscurity, touch screen BS with no hope of verification or recount.

The idea of all-electronic voting really should have been laughed out of the room, once upon a time. This is coming from a techie who favors modernization in other areas of society. xkcd agrees.

My friend on the Board was voted down: they decided to purchase push-button machines from Shouptronics... but at least each station had its own built-in battery backup and built in receipt-type printer that ran a paper tape. Unlike most today.

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From that day long ago when you first heard someone describe their website as an >>>EXPERIENCE<<< ... you know your simple literary text-based past is past. Now it's all about EYEBALLS on the PAGE, and the full extent of what tracking is possible with cookies and cookiecruft in gooblegook URLs that may be embedded levels deep. The HTTP Last-Modified: header is dead, even the ignoble ETAG is fakery-trackery in many cases. Your page has content hidden within it, often built on the fly by JS because the 'experience' requires total compliance and continual browser obsolescence. RSS is just giving it away.

Ironically this comes on the heels of bandwidth and compression techniques that really could have blown us away with triple-to-ten-throughput back in the slow modem and PPP turnaround delay days. I mean, we could have been swimming in text like the Matrix! Instead of the Matrix's goofy nonsense KanjiGreekWhatsits dribbling down from the top of the screen,

IMAGINE a whole generation of children who might have had grown up NOT with the thumb twaddling tile-scrolley Instagram twiddle-screen tiny web page mush and over-resolution JPGs... but with an actual Matrix style of text presentation. They might have learned to read multiple streams in parallel (up/down or lleft/right) with crisp bright text illuminated in the same ANSI color palette that Jesus used.

And when these ANSI text character sprites began to float in a 3D field, now you're talking. Things could recede in Z with axis-flopping ... and the same kids who can solve a Rubik's cube in seconds could keep a mental position within a virtual space, one that would NOT disappear when some WEBFUCK decides it's time for everyone to upgrade ... it would be a style/presentation uniquely their own, that would evolve as an extension of their mind. Instead of this HYPER-LITERATE possible Universe we now have,

Look Ma! It's a rectangle with a talking head! Let's watch it and listen to what it has to say... even though I can read three times as quickly.

AND OF COURSE I'm only generalizing on method when I talk ANSI (though I'm serious about the reduced color palette). By all means make this Matrix-style text sprite environment support Unicode and the world's scripts and symbols. And expandable tiles that represent visual zoomable image and video -- but my rub is those tiles MUST reduce to the size of characters so they join the text stream, not disrupt it. And if you clamor for EMOJIs that's backwards and stupid. Emojis are tools of Big Brother, who's just waiting in the wings for people to express themselves in pictorial symbols so Big Brother can change the symbols overnight.

Haven't met many people, then? What an ugly comment. So insinuating things about other people is your idea of 'harm reduction'? What is your take on my remark about chocolate milk then? I've been a Systems Analyst and consultant by trade, You're an opiate troll.

Wow, for a moment I thought I was on the Internet Movie DataBase. Do you have an actual f opinion of it or is it just 'bad feels' all the way down?

Uh... yes, right down past its Walden Two collectivist ending. Manna is a pretty much a re-telling of Skinner's work, and you should seek out Walden Two and "Uh... read the whole thing." Both are typical of the way socialism is presented as a utopia in the making, in utter disregard to the intermediate steps that break down to chaos and toxic regimes in the real world Manna is a toxic regime imposed on most of the world's population (whose resources are no longer their own) to support a small utopian elite in Australia.

The implication is that the colony in Australia is a model for the rest of the world, but in our actual world it would never end that way with ANY centralized globally system of governance. Manna makes this out to be a friendly computer that knows all, just as BF Skinner imagined a ethereal almost supernatural spirit that led humanity in that direction... but that global computer would (in fact) be re-programmed to sacrifice the needs of many towards the benefit of a few.

(From Manna)
        Everyone is equal
        Everything is reused
        Nothing is anonymous
        Nothing is owned
        Tell the truth
        Do no harm
        Obey the rules
        Live your life
        Better and better

Rules for thee but not for me.

It gets worse than whats-in-inventory. There is a SPECIAL CASE of mechanized disorder regarding items not in inventory. I first experienced this with pharmacies when I had to fill a regular prescription.

I'd show up near the same day of the month like clockwork. Sometimes they'd be able to fill the prescription and sometimes they could not. When they could not I'd head to a competitor and pay a slightly higher price. But I'd always check them first. And sometimes the second store didn't have any either and I had to go to a third place. On the third successive month that I was informed they were out... I held back and watched the clerk who was the head pharmacist and I asked, "Did you write it down?" What do you mean, he said. "The fact that you had to turn away a customer, what the drug is and how many." Oh no, our computer system tells us when we're out and how much to order. "Why isn't it working then? This is the third time I've been turned down." He said, the computer varies the amount we order but it changes from month to month and we have surges of demand and then next month, very little, so we don't order any. "Isn't that strange for prescribed drugs? It means you have no customer loyalty because you turn them away and they stay away. And when someone is told you cannot fill the order, no one writes it down and adds it up. If your computer system doesn't have a way you can record the fact that you turned away a customer, then it is stupider than a human being. Your sales vary because people are being tossed back and forth between pharmacies ny necessity rather then preference. I'll bet your competitors have the same dumb system. If YOU start a log of what customers were turned away for and manually adjust your orders... I'll bet you'd improve your business." It was like a light went on in the attic. They were never short again.

Years later now, many people -- even store managers -- are past the robot stage. I'm one of the only customers that takes managers aside and describes chronic shortages. The answers vary but it's often a shrug of helplessness, especially with computer inventory control and stocking brands like soda and milk. . Chain stores have started to ask customers at checkout, "Did you find everything?" and sometimes they'll become confused if I ask for a slip of paper to write my own note to the manager. Otherwise it falls down the memory hole. I've told managers, "A store without chocolate milk will get walkouts. People will abandon their carts and leave." and the manager was not convinced. "People cannot get full size chocolate milk in convenience stores at a decent price. They have to go to another grocery store anyway, they don't want to wait in two lines, so they'll just leave. Asking at checkout if they found everything isn't enough. How many people leave empty handed?" Hmmm....

Manna by Marshal Brain

Of all the dystopian fiction I have read, THIS story -- though there's no war or zombies in it -- is the most terrifying. Every other dark future has its struggles to survive and challenges to solve. But this story offers no hope at all. It leads past the movie Idiocracy, but not that one, an alternate Idiocracy future where energy drink Brawndo will forever water the crops.