> The government claims that encrypted communications are "increasingly being used by terrorist groups and organized criminals to avoid detection and disruption," without citing evidence

I know it isn't popular to say that a claim should be accepted without evidence, but I think it would be ignorant to assume that more and more terrorist groups and organized criminals are not using encrypted communications.

I think the editor left off the sponsored tag.

Well the study isn't linked and there is no citation. The summary alludes to how ridiculous the claim is though. You cannot compare a 30 second television spot in the middle of a show that a viewer is engaged in and listening to with an online advertisement. They are two different things.

I suspect this isn't at all related to millennials. Probably more of a people thing.

Maybe so.

They are betting pretty big on enough people paying up that they will make money.

Seems poorly thought out though. On the one hand, doing it quickly without notice means some people are more likely to pony up to fix things quickly. On the other hand, changing terms without notice breaks trust and probably isn't good for the long haul.

Maybe they are trying to nab a lot of cash before calling it quits.

Perhaps where you're from... most people I know who have gone to physiotherapy have ended up in physio sessions three times a week doing various stretching and exercise.

Yes... haven't you heard of micro aggressions? (i.e. aggressions against devices with microprocessors) It's all the talk these days.

Over the weekend, somebody put together a useless tool that scans executable files for PNG images containing useless Adobe Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) metadata. Some small amount of extra data was found, and a report was written about it. The report might be useful to somebody, but slashdot doesn't need or use this stuff. Thanks to editors and reviewers who don't pay any attention, it's very easy for these reports to get published amongst actual news. So easy, many news sites like reddit are chock full of them. But you can appreciate my surprise when I discovered the report on slashdot itself!

The summary says this specifically with respect to hard drives, which actually makes some sense, especially in the age of SSDs.

I don't know how many articles I've read here on the subject of recycling computers and the number of commenters who have said the only way to do it is to take the platters out and drive a nail through them and such.

Would you not expect Apple to do the same?

SSDs are even trickier because you can't do something like the secure wipe procedures where you overwrite with 1s and then 0s repeatedly. When SSDs exhaust their write cycles they mark the particular segment as no longer usable and leave them as they are. However, the data stays, so if you can bypass the drive controller I presume you could still read the data.

Eh... I don't think automated car people want you to believe driving is risky. I think all that is desired is the recognition that some risk exists, and just because there is risk involved in automated cars does not mean it is riskier than human driving.

Not the OP, but I don't think that's what was meant... it was more a statement of the fact that if somebody has the money to pay $5 for a coffee or $100 a month for a cell phone plan, then they aren't foregoing the theatre because they can't afford it. Rather, they are choosing to spend money on coffee and cell phone plans instead.

Codec is short for encode/decode. So a hardware codec would be a chip that performs encoding and decoding of an audio stream. They probably could have used a software codec and ran it on the CPU, but seemingly instead opted to use a hardware codec that would be more optimized for the particular algorithm they were using.

I noticed that too, but assumed it meant they had a hardware codec chip. Something like: http://www.ebay.com/itm/AKM-AK...

But the kind of interesting thing here is that discriminating on things based on language skills (deemed to be directly related to the job here by the government), are usually limitations of the law *allowing* employer's to be discriminatory. In this case, the government is *requiring* the employer (Uber) to discriminate and apply these standards.

It would be interesting if there was some way to get a sense of what the baseline language expectations are? Is this just trying to stick it to Uber because they don't like them and are trying to find a way to make it harder for them (and thus are the language expectations, as Uber claimed, too stringent?) or do these drivers really not understand enough language to perform the job competently?

I'm struggling to understand why Uber drivers would need to much proficiency in written English; but maybe that's just me (have only taken Uber a few times but have never had the driver have to write something down).

It depends what you're trying to protect. One might be more interested in protecting company secrets than hiding evidence. Sort of like the case a while back where a NASA engineer (might have been a difference agency - don't recall exactly) had his device searched at the border. He hadn't committed a crime, but there were secrets on his phone that might need to be protected from unauthorized access.

I wonder if that is why the words "a certain type of fasting diet can trigger the pancreas to regenerate itself" were chosen, and not just "a fasting diet can trigger..."