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Comment Re:"Erroneous" or not... (Score 1) 18

Was anyone harmed by this error?

Good question. Seeing as how the government doesn't send apology letters to everyone whose data they "accidentally" hoovered up and potentially abused in any number of inventive and worrying ways, how are they to know what harm they may have suffered as a result?

Regardless, they've all been harmed statutorily as there was no probable cause for any warrant to issue for their data. The Constitution doesn't have a "no harm, no foul" clause.

Comment This is Starbucks' real business (Score 4, Insightful) 73

I saw an interesting post a few years ago whose thesis was that Starbucks isn't a coffee company; it's a poorly-regulated bank, masquerading as a gift card company, which happens to own some coffee shops on the side. Someone broke down all of the company's public reports to demonstrate that the vast majority of their income derives from investing the money customers pre-load onto gift cards (whether they ever spend it, or not). The amount of cash that Starbucks holds "on deposit" through gift cards rivals the assets of some of the larger banks. I wish I could find the post again.

Comment Re:Isn't that the plot of the Matrix? (Score 1) 256

While I agree with you in principle, there are practical problems with nuclear power.

The first is that they usually end up a lot more expensive to build, run, and decommission than estimated in the planning stage; partly due to stringent regulation, as well as the required expertise. Nuclear does need strong oversight, because it's way too tempting for operators to start cutting corners to save operating costs, and we have multiple examples of nuclear contamination when that happened. Yes, new designs are a lot safer - they're also more expensive, which is one reason that they haven't really been built. It's more cost effective to run old plants long past their original design date, which of course has risks.

The second is public acceptance. If green lobby groups had that kind of power to influence government policy, we wouldn't have a carbon crisis in the first place. The oil and gas lobbies are extremely well funded, and that's what's ultimately kept them top of the pile - money talks. Radioactive and nuclear are maximum NIMBY, that's just the general public's view of nuclear, and it has been since at least the 70s. Coal plants emit more radioactive waste in the smoke than an equivalent rated nuclear reactor, but that is definitely not the public perception, and swinging the public behind radical energy-policy change is going to be hard enough without also trying to sell nuclear as the solution which has a very poor general public image, not least due to Chernobyl and Fukushima.

Lastly, and the biggest one really - it's just too late. We should have embarked on mass building nuclear 20-30 years ago, but we didn't, and we have to deal with where we are now. We need to be bring online non-carbon energy plants fast, not in 15 years when new nuke plants would finally be going online. Not that we shouldn't start on new nuclear plants too to kill off the hardest-to-replace carbon plants, but to avoid the 2deg point we need to stop building carbon plants right now, and aggressively decommission the existing ones as the carbon footprint extends for decades for every plant. Solar and wind plants can go up relatively quickly, grid redesign to decentralise can continue more aggressively, and the improvements and lowered costs will get here sooner if we're actually building them in bulk rather than waiting for theoretical tech improvements.

As a species we've made some pretty bad decisions, but our lack of action on energy production even though we knew the consequences looks like it might well be the worst. The perfect being the enemy of the good applies just as much to not building solar and wind plants today as it does to not building nuclear plants in the past. Frankly, I'm not bothered personally whether we build nuclear, solar or both, as long as we start getting non-carbon power online fast.

Because otherwise insane(ly expensive) geoengineering projects like TFA - with major drawbacks - will be our last ditch chance.

Comment Alternatives (Score 0) 122

If you don't like or trust CloudFlare but the WHOIS privacy protection is important to you, the registrar Porkbun also offers free WHOIS privacy, and their rates are reasonable. I've been slowly migrating my domains there for these reasons, plus their easy DNSSEC support.

Comment Re:My plug ins work (Score 0) 294

Well, here's my mileage:

These aren't all show-stoppers, but they define how I use Firefox. I spend at least 8 hours a day at a computer, much of it in a browser. Over the years I've tailored my environment to best suit my needs, my productivity, my usage patterns. The ability to heavily customize the browser's interface and behavior was the whole point of Firefox. Unfortunately, much of that capability died with the move to WebExtensions.

Comment Re:This could be massive (Score 4, Interesting) 416

I have a sneaking suspicion Intel shares will fall through the floor

Intel's CEO agrees; a couple weeks ago he sold all the Intel stock he can. If he'd dumped any more shares, he would have had to forfeit his job. That isn't a man who's confident about the future of his company...

Comment Re:Allowing their DNS to be poisoned indicates a l (Score 1) 83

And what CA that my browser trusts are you going to use to sign a domain you don't own?

To quote Brianna Keilar: "Most of them?" A lot of CAs offer instantly-issued DV certificates now. All you have to do is place a verification file on the target domain, or create a special A record in the DNS, in order to prove to the CA that you control the domain. If I can manipulate the DNS such that wikileaks.org points at my server (even temporarily), I can get the CA to issue me a valid certificate for wikileaks.org. They're likely to revoke it once the tampering is discovered, but that could be many hours later and your browser will trust it in the meantime.

One possible mitigation is Key Pinning. This can potentially alert users to a certificate mismatch, but only if they've visited that site in the past 30-60 days and their browser knows what the keys for the valid certificate are supposed to look like.

Comment Re:SO MUCH WINNING (Score 3, Insightful) 642

Maybe, just maybe, so much of the media coverage of Trump is negative because the things his administration is doing (or not doing) are perceived negatively by a large part of the population. Maybe it's because numerous things Trump promised to accomplish "on day one," or in the first month of his term, or in the first 100 days of his term haven't been done. Maybe it's because Americans figured out they prefer having imperfect health care as opposed to none at all, and they kinda like having clean water that isn't full of coal fly ash. Maybe it's because day after day, more shady connections between Russia and the Trump camp are revealed, and the administration bungles more cover-up attempts. Maybe it's because the president looks outright incompetent having his appointees and White House staff continually infighting, resigning, getting fired, recusing themselves, and finding themselves under investigation by the FBI. Maybe it's because the public doesn't quite approve of Trump's nepotistic despotism, or the very troubling appearance that he's christened his son-in-law to do an end run around various posts that are supposed to require Congressional approval. Maybe most of America doesn't like having an increasingly angry, childish, petulant, petty, racist buffoon being the person who represents them in front of the world.

Nahhh, can't be any of that; it's the (((librul media globalist elites))) who are the problem, right?

Comment Re:Huh? (Score 5, Interesting) 486

They put up a blog post explaining their decision a little while ago.

I take some umbrage at Cloudflare's rationale. Their position regarding this site, as well as various other sites, seems to be "we're just a proxy." The issue with that defense is that by proxying for a site, the Cloudflare service hides and obfuscates whatever provider is actually hosting the content. This is a) by design, and b) necessary in order to make the DDoS protection effective. That doesn't make it any less problematic.

Cloudflare wants to pass the buck somewhere else in the "infrastructure stack," as they call it, and I don't necessarily disagree that what amounts to a glorified transit provider is the wrong place to be implementing blocks. But given the very nature of Cloudflare's service, how does one figure out where else to complain? When a site is using Cloudflare, all roads dead end in Cloudflare's network. The site's name servers are in the cloudflare.com domain. The site's A records are inside Cloudflare IP space. Cloudflare is the primary visible service provider in these scenarios, whether they host any content or not.

Case in point, I've watched this story play out with some interest over the past couple of days. I still have no idea where Daily Stormer's content was actually being hosted. It almost certainly would have violated the AUP/TOS of that hosting provider, and they probably would have terminated the site directly. But with Cloudflare in the way, no one knows who to complain to.

When your business model is being a black-box opaque front for all comers, don't be surprised when the world directs its anger at you.

Comment Re:The real questions.. (Score 1) 133

Why were the NSA spying on someone who was possibly involved in copyright infringement?

Economic espionage. NSA has been doing it for decades, despite it not being part of their charter. The most well-known example, and one of few that have become public, is from the 90s. NSA gathered SIGINT for (American) McDonnell-Douglas that allowed them to snatch a $6B Saudi aircraft order away from (European) Airbus. You can bet this sort of thing happens all the time when those sorts of dollar amounts are in play. MPAA claims piracy costs them billions, ergo, call in the NSA and let the laws be damned.

Comment Re:Anonymity (Score 4, Insightful) 130

Yes.

By the by, most terrorists are already known to law enforcement by the time they do whatever it is they're going to do. How many times have we heard "the FBI had previously investigated the suspect" or "British counter-terror officials had been monitoring the attacker for several years?" Anonymity isn't really the issue, and even if it were, I'm not going to live my life afraid of terrorists.

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