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Comment Ordered one (Score 2) 135

I was considering a fitness band and went with this one. It is $199 and has more sensors than the iWatch or Fitbit charge. Seemed like a good deal to try out and it works with all the smartphones. http://www.neowin.net/news/spe...

It is pretty cool -- it has GPS, Heart beat monitor, sweat monitor, etc... hopefully it works well.

Comment Re:ApplePay vs CurrentC (Score 2) 631

You don't think ApplePay or Google Wallet is collecting data?

Apple Pay is nothing standard. Who cares if it uses NFC or a QR code. You completely missed my point.
Apple Pay is completely a lock-in. If you want to use ApplePay you are locked into using Apple and Apple will be getting a cut from the credit companies, etc... There is nothing "standard" about Apple Pay.
Oh I forgot, I apple can do no wrong.

Comment ApplePay vs CurrentC (Score -1, Flamebait) 631

I don't want ApplePay to win. That basically makes 1 Vendor control of the way we pay for things. No cool. Apple doesn't play nice with others and it would become their way or the highway.

At least with CurrentC it is a group of retailers all having to agree on a standard. It doesn't appear to be great and is something I probably won't use. But I would rather support something managed by a group of different people with vested interests vs 1 company.

Comment Re:This just in, spy wants spy rules to stay (Score 5, Insightful) 316

I have to agree. The NSA may or may not have stopped any attacks with this snooping. They can of course point to attacks they claim to have stopped, but sadly we can't verify any of that. Instead we can point to the Boston Marathon Bombings where the US Government was informed by other countries to watch out for these guys and we still did nothing.

We also have the Fort Hood shooting. Where any Army person was using army computers to contact terrorists and went on to shoot up an army base. Where was the NSA there?

"Days after the shooting, reports in the media revealed that a Joint Terrorism Task Force had been aware of e-mail communications between Hasan and the Yemen-based cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who had been monitored by the NSA as a security threat, and that Hasan's colleagues had been aware of his increasing radicalization for several years. The failure to prevent the shootings led the Defense Department and the FBI to commission investigations, and for Congress to hold hearings."
Government

Could Snowden Have Been Stopped In 2009? 247

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "The NYT reports that when Edward Snowden was working as a CIA technician in Geneva in 2009, his supervisor wrote a derogatory report in his personnel file, noting a distinct change in the young man's behavior and work habits, as well as a troubling suspicion that Snowden was trying to break into classified computer files to which he was not authorized to have access. But the red flags went unheeded and Snowden left the CIA to become a contractor for the NSA so that four years later he could leak thousands of classified documents. In hindsight, officials say, the report by Snowden's supervisor and the agency's suspicions might have been the first serious warnings of the disclosures to come, and the biggest missed opportunity to review Snowden's top-secret clearance or at least put his future work at the NSA under much greater scrutiny. Had Booz Allen or the NSA seen Snowden's CIA file before hiring him, it almost certainly would have affected his employment says Dashiell Bennett. 'The weakness of the system was if derogatory information came in, he could still keep his security clearance and move to another job, and the information wasn't passed on,' says a Republican lawmaker who has been briefed on Snowden's activities. It's difficult to tell what would have happened had NSA supervisors been made aware of the warning the CIA issued Snowden in what is called a 'derog' in federal personnel policy parlance."
Space

Hubble Finds Sign That Habitable Planets Could Exist Beyond Solar System 57

cold fjord writes with this excerpt from the BBC: "Astronomers have detected the tell-tale signs of a shattered asteroid being eaten by a dead star, or white dwarf. The Hubble telescope spotted the event some 150 light-years from Earth. The researchers tell Science Magazine that the chemical signatures in the star's atmosphere indicate the asteroid must contain a lot of water. This makes it the first time both water and a rocky surface — key components for habitable planets — have been found together beyond our Solar System. ... Of the 1,000 planets so far identified beyond our Solar System, none has been definitively associated with the presence of water." More at Smithsonian Magazine.
Censorship

US Officials Rebuke India's Request To Subpoena Facebook, Google 96

hypnosec writes "U.S. officials have told the Indian Government that they will not be able to serve summons to the executives of companies like Google and Facebook because they are not convinced that the content hosted on these sites can cause violence and that these summons impact 'free speech principles.' The reply comes as a response to India's request to the US to help serve papers to 11 Internet companies accused of hosting content on their sites that was meant to fuel communal hatred and violence. The U.S. authorities said that there are limitations when it comes to protection on free speech — when the speech comprises a true threat or provokes imminent violence — but in this particular case there is not sufficient evidence of either of these."
Privacy

Siri Keeps Your Data For Two Years 124

New submitter LeadSongDog writes with news that Apple has provided information on how long it holds onto voice search data used by its digital assistant software Siri. Speaking to Wired, an Apple representative said the data is kept for two years after the initial query. "Here’s what happens. Whenever you speak into Apple’s voice activated personal digital assistant, it ships it off to Apple’s data farm for analysis. Apple generates a random numbers to represent the user and it associates the voice files with that number. This number — not your Apple user ID or email address — represents you as far as Siri’s back-end voice analysis system is concerned. Once the voice recording is six months old, Apple “disassociates” your user number from the clip, deleting the number from the voice file. But it keeps these disassociated files for up to 18 more months for testing and product improvement purposes." This information came in response to requests for clarification of Siri's privacy policy, which was not very clear as written. The director of privacy group Big Brother Watch said, "There needs to be a very high justification for retaining such intrusive data for longer than is absolutely necessary to provide the service."

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