oldspewey spewed:
"I am secretly hopeful that this will eventually turn into a great big litigation circle-jerk."

Turn into? Isn't that what we've had for the last ten years? Big tech companies saying, "I'll let you jerk my patent if I can jerk yours . . ." And "Hey, small fry! His portfolio is unzipped. Let's all jerk his patent. He won't fight back."

And then there are the trolls walking around fully exposed. "I got this biiggg patent from a friend, and you seem to be jerking it. Pay up! And pay up big!"

This big auto-erotic drama has taken the place of a working patent system. Patents are supposed to increase innovation. But under the current orgy, patents are government subsidized tools of aggression that can be hurled at a less-than-witting enemy.

What's the failure? Even about photos, what's the failure? And you mention others?

My strategy seems to be clearer and clearer. 1) have a facebook account in your real name for old friends and new acquaintances to find you. Don't put many details there. Check to make sure no one is taggin photos of you under your real name as well. 2) When people friend you there, send them to your relaxed, open other facebook account under an alias where they can discuss and post photos under your alternate ID relatively freely. Period. Why people accept any system that forces them to use their real name on internet forums is beyond me. The Australian "sheeple" term comes to mind.

We can get so much more exploration done using many small and comparatively inexpensive probes sent on special missions than we can by spending HUGE amounts to send people to the moon -- again. As they say, "been there done that". Much better to have two satellites apiece orbiting around every planet, more robots for Mars, Mercury, Titan, etc. We can do this now with our current budget and learn much from it. When we get the technology to send people to space, we'll go. Going now would be like Columbus trying to discover the Indies in a rowboat with his elementary school friends.

I personally think ID cards and pervasive CCTV monitoring would be a good thing IFF the data were fed directly into an independent, accredited agency which only released or confirmed data under strict guidelines. However: A national ID doesn't have a prayer of being implemented in America anytime soon. The UK can't even pull this off, and those "apathetes" let their government watch them everywhere.

One strategy would be to flood such sites with scripts that make salacious stories and insert random names and hacked student lists if available. Flood the sites with everyone's name. That is the most direct way to finally convince the low-hanging fruit that the sites have no credibility.

You want to strap a gas engine onto an electric car? Why don't you go all out? Just run a belt from the rear axle to your generator and then you can charge as you go. You'll never need to charge it again ;-)

I don't know why anybody hasn't linked the two together, but SMS control codes are how the police get your phone to send your GPS coordinates when making a 911 call. Control codes are also there for turning the mic on and broadcasting the audio -- and who knows what else? (look up "roaming bug" for more info.)

You're missing a few GB of hard disk space for each DVD you've ripped.

She is a minor. Minor's are protected by child porn laws because they cannot give their consent for sexual activity. So, how can she be accountable for posting what she is unaccountable for appearing in? Either she is a minor deserving protection, or she is an adult who can consent to being photographed. You can't have it both ways!

I don't want to undermine the protest against the general creep of privacy invasion, but this should also be seen as a call to use aliases, TOR, proxy servers, incognito, or the like anytime you search for something potentially sensitive. I like posting under my real name, but I've started posting more political/taboo musings under aliases, which also develop their own reputations. My IP address is still recorded somewhere, but what I'm saying is not so bad. And yes, I know I'm late to the alias game . . . For the more revolutionary stuff that the NSA or the like *might* find interesting one day, I use incognito (TOR). Having a net where I didn't have to do this would be great, but depending on corporations words that they don't record IP addresses, etc., is producing a situation even more dangerous, one in which there is a false sense of security.

You buy/make 2 NAS with RAID 5 or 6. Your friend somewhere far away does the same. One of your NAS's becomes his, and vice versa. You set them up to mirror each other. If your house burns down or the contents get stolen, you buy/make two new NAS and get the data back from your friend. Upgrade in 5 years and continue indefinitely.

All this talk of just using Photoshop to alter the images is just wrong-headed.

Photoshop's code is closed. Adobe, as well as every other closed-source image editor, could have long ago been "contacted" by agents from the NSA et al. and been "persuaded" under terms of an NDA to include watermark analogs in all images passing through their apps.

This happened with printer manufacturers; why would anyone assume it hasn't happened with image editors (and video and music everything else)? http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/printers/docucolor/

The cameras themselves may even have such tagging info included. Just 1% of the pixels shifted in a predetermined matrix (and compensated for in neighboring pixels) could easily and practically invisibly contain make, model, serial number, and date of file creation.

If this info is in thew hardware, even using open-source editors wouldn't ensure ID-free files.

What is needed, for images, would be an open-source photo ID stripper. This would be an app that: 1) removes all EXIF data from jpegs. 2) reconstitutes the photo by rendering, then applying an algorithm that slightly changes nearly every pixel (including slightly altering progressively larger sections of the photo in case specific pixels don't hold the data but areas do), and then re-compressing the image.

It could even be trained on specific cameras to remove hot and cold pixels.

This would be true anonymity.