What if the allegations are true?

Then he's still a better choice than LePen anyway.

It is odd that the joke is being labeled "homophobic."

What's actually happening is a bunch of alt-right dipshits are pretending to be offended because they can target a liberal by doing so. It's essentially a false flag operation. Moreover, they lack the self-awareness to tell the difference between what Colbert said and actual homophobic slurs, so it's no wonder they're labeling it inaccurately.

Point taken, but it's not as if I trust my third-party VoIP provider, cellular phone provider, or indeed the trunk of the US phone system either...

I was speaking generally about what it means to be a police state. But if you want to go back to the narrower topic at hand, that's fine too:

All they need to do is not illegally stream copyrighted content.

Oh it's that easy, eh? I'm not sure I agree.

First of all, consider the fact that pretty much everything on the Internet is copyrighted. That means -- technically -- this law applies even to web pages as much as it does audio or video.

Second, remember that this doesn't just criminalize knowingly uploading something without authorization, or even downloading it and knowingly keeping the local copy without authorization; it criminalizes mere "streaming." Consider the fact that in many cases, you have to "stream" something (i.e., download it to your temporary cache, without intending to save it permanently) -- such as a web page -- just to see what it is. You literally can't know if a particular act breaks the law until after you've done it!

Third, copyright infringement cannot be determined just by looking at the act of streaming itself the mere fact that a copyright on the content in question exists, but instead hinges entirely on whether you have permission from the copyright holder or not. In many cases, even seemingly-legitimate downloading could turn out to be copyright infringement. For example, even mainstream, legitimate sites like Youtube have infringing content uploaded to them all the time and there's pretty much no way for you as a third-party to know whether the uploader had permission from the copyright holder or not. Moreover, even if you're downloading/streaming from a site controlled by the copyright holder himself (which you would think should imply tacit permission), you might be violating something in the fine print of the ToS which revokes your permission and thus criminalizes you.

And sure, you might say -- like the copyright-maximalist quoted in the article does -- that "the new law will most likely target individuals and groups making a business out of selling illegal content." But the fact remains that this law could be used to nail pretty much anyone to the wall for a 10-year prison sentence, if the prosecutor was pissed off at them enough. And that's fundamentally unjust.

To illustrate my point: if you're in the UK, you are now a felon. Why? Because of the following:

I, mrchaotica, as the author and copyright holder of this Slashdot post, hereby declare that any access, streaming, or downloading of it by the person with username "91degrees" is unuthorized and thus copyright infringement.

Too bad you had to commit the crime to find out about it, huh?

My wife and I do the same thing, except with Google Voice and an ObiTalk. Since Google Voice does not provide 911, my account is hooked up indirectly through a third-party VoIP service (PhonePower). It works out to be slightly cheaper than your solution ($50 up-front and $35/year for the ObiTalk + PhonePower vs. $200 up-front + (apparently) $5/month for Ooma).

The first step is to criminalize enough normal, common behavior that everyone becomes a criminal. The second step is to selectively arrest dissidents and people with inconvenient ideas not for opposing the people in power, but for breaking the "legitimate" and "reasonable" laws.

For example, the United States has been a police state since at least the Nixon administration. Here's a quote from Nixon's former aide, John Ehrlichman, illustrating the point:

"You want to know what this [the passage of the Controlled Substances Act and the "War on Drugs"] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

You know what's even faster than that? E-mail. Paste the rejected candidates' addresses into the BCC field and you're done.

(There are ways to send SMS to multiple recipients at once too, but as far as I know they're less ubiquitously available. Also, copying and pasting on phones sucks.)

There's a spectrum of acceptability here. I was* okay with Google knowing my contacts because it's clearly necessary in order to (for example) make Gmail or Google Voice work properly. However, I'm not okay with LinkedIn exfiltrating my entire address book just because I installed their Android app (because my entire list of contacts is absolutely not either required nor desired in order to use LinkedIn). This Truecaller app is even worse than that.

(* This was before they started tying everything to everything else such that contact info now shows up in Google Maps and whatnot. Now I'm in the process of ditching Google entirely.)

GIven the shady behavior, I have to question whether the phone uses actual CyanogenMod (or rather, LineageOS, these days), or if it uses a vendor-controlled fork of CyanogenMod that the vendor infected with malware. It could be that everyone who bought the device was trojaned from the beginning and didn't realize it because of the branding.

I just think this sounds ridiculous.

I'm allegedly a millennial (at least of the "Oregon Trail" generation), and I concur.

You know what every single person with a text-message-capable smartphone also has? A fucking phone! One that he can make a phone call with, and have a conversation with the interviewer using his voice! It's shocking, I know, but it's true!

$55k is 1/3 - 1/2 of a year's pay for a programmer (outside of Silicon Valley, anyway). Is it that unreasonable to think that replacing a few inner loops with parallel algorithms couldn't be done by one programmer in four to six months?

I mean, maybe if it's a horrible rat's nest of cross-cutting side effects that requires rewriting the entire program, then sure, that could be a tall order. But if it doesn't require large-scale modifications of data structures and such it seems doable.

Let's make this absolutely fucking crystal clear: the prosecution has every single bit of data from those phones in its possession. What they're demanding is that the defendants help them interpret it, and that's what violates the defendants' rights.

WTF? What you wrote was literally one word off from the first line of El Condor Pasa by Simon and Garfunkel (and at least one person managed to misquote it the same way previously).

More to the point, what's your goddamn problem? You're clearly some kind of idiotically furious nutjob if you're going to get that bent out of shape at the (apparently) heinous accusation that you might have been making a pop-culture reference! And if not a reference, then what the hell else was it supposed to be?! It had nothing to do with curing AIDS, zombies (as referenced by the post it was written in reply to), or any animal mentioned in the article. I admit, I'm baffled -- I can only assume you're just a comprehensively absurd dipshit who likes posting random nonsense for no good reason!

What do obscure, misquoted song lyrics have to do with anything?

Also, I thought "10" (which is really 9, they just didn't want people to see how behind Mac OS X they are...)

"Windows 9" can't exist because Microsoft of Microsoft's previous idiotic naming decisions. There's tons of existing software with string-based version detection that wouldn't be able to tell "Windows 9" apart from "Windows 95" or "Windows 98."