coopdog

If the client source proves that the message is properly encrypted though (they're using PGP), the servers can be as insecure as the open internet and it should be ok

I hope so. I wonder if Defcon was shaping up to be only feds this year, or if there were indications of coming conflict.

I think active rejection by your peers is a reasonable punishment for unconscionable activities in the community. And the reverse should be true for anyone who quits in disgust.

It won't fix the problem completely, but it will have an effect on recruitment and retention. Even if feds in the intelligence industry move to more reasonable IT fields within government, or take contracts as civilian pen testers.

But are they criminals just because drugs are illegal, and they got sent to prison where crime is all they learned? Has the adversarial relationship been heightened by both sides?

When you send the police to war, the people become the enemy. The goal should be deterring the behavior not taking these people down and stomping them hard in retribution.

Actually Korean pilots (civilian) are also known to have too strong a respect for hierarchy. I remember seeing an episode of air crash investigating where that was officially reported as a factor, so it isn't even just the military where that can be a risk.

I think the bigger question is when do we grant an information automata the right to survive? If we use evolutionary algorithms with survival as a selection bias (just like humans) eventually creatures that 'think' like us should emerge.

Whereas there are intelligent automata, like say a search engine, that absolutely could not care either way whether you turn it off or not. The survival selection bias is the difference, and it's seeing something struggle to survive that activates our empathy emotions to save it.

I imagine we'll know the line of when it would be 'evil' to go against our own instincts and turn off an intelligent automata that wants to survive when we see it

I've found that agencies often lie with regard to rates and get away with it because of their leverage due to the panels. If you check the governments mandatory reporting regarding contracts (often very hard to search) you might find they're paying far more for you than for military staff, regardless of what you're receiving.

This is classic journalism. People are wired to consume stories about other people. Collections of facts and abstract concepts appeal to hackers, engineers and analytical types, who are in the minority as most people can't stomach that kind of information.

Journalists always add a face to a story, and Snowden is that face. I'd say it's actually kind of encouraging because it means the message has been tailored for the mainstream and/or mainstream readers are interested.

How can two companies negotiate when one knows every detail of the other, but not vice versa. One will always take everything 'left on the table' from the negotiation, and the other will just scrape along until a bump in the road, where they'll have no fat left to survive and will go bankrupt.

The US needs to show that there are proper checks and balances on their information collection, that the data only leaves company servers when a judge signs off that there's reasonable suspicion of a crime, and that anyone subpoenaed gets automatically notified after some reasonable period of time.

And those laws were debated by Germans, about how much they should know about each other. If they had all truly decided that everyone should be open, and that they could vote it away later, then everything's good.

Having Americans spy on everyday Germans, that's completely different.

It's one thing for an American on the street to see a German and size him up to see if he's a threat. Does he have a weapon, is he of sound mind, etc. It's completely another to follow him home, peek through the windows, poke through his phone, computer, trash, and then say you're only defending yourself and that everyone does it. The level of intrusion is unreasonable.

He's pro filtering and censorship, a very dangerous and unpopular policy. To the point where he's willing to go against 90% of the population either because he wants to force his point of view on people or is willing to pander to an incredibly opinionated minority for votes.

No matter what else you do, that characteristic doesn't belong in a representative democracy.

The opposition leader (Abbott) is worse on the matter - see RU486, but two wrongs don't make a right, and it's a great thing that he's gone.

Soldiers everywhere are drooling over the idea of never getting soaked again.

It'd be interesting to know how those back channel communications occurred one day. One can only assume the NSA would be putting every scrap of their attention on monitoring anyone even remotely connected to Snowden.

Amazing. I wonder though, what happens to the HIV?

What I got from the video is that they modify the virus so it won't cause disease and rather just modifies the host t-cells to recognize cancer. Does the virus remain in the host system? Can it still spread? If it spreads what happens to the newly infected person: cancer proof, nothing or HIV?

Specific desired actions that are realistic within the current legal frameworks. Go pirate party.

Dodged a bullet, anyone can see your answers were at least a good as the phone book one. Nothing worse than a managers who relies on authority to backup their flawed decisions just to spare their own ego. Sounds like a toxic org culture

I'm pretty sure that was written by a lawyer according to talking points from PR and given a glance and stamp by the CEO

Really it's all for nothing though until the politics are sorted out

Given that it's from a lawyer also, who no offence are often skilled at lying by telling only the truth, it does make me a little hesitant to accept this. I'd rather hear it directly from the CEO or some senior engineer, in the hope that they'd know there's not some legal loophole they have to tread carefully around as they speak.

Great that Google are saying this though. Let's fix the politics, stop the secret court rulings and gag orders and have them say it one last time, along with the approximate number of users effected by all requests ever.

That's a different business and they could definitely sign up as third party servicers with Tesla (ie to charge Tesla for any warranty services they provide), but they just want to hold onto the dealership fees on top. Not that I can blame them, but this isn't an area where regulation benefits consumers.

Honestly both the major parties here are such dud choices (so bad that a third party won a seat in the lower house last election), and with PRISM hopefully becoming a voting issue the pirate party are surely going to get some notice this election. Thank the FSM for preferential voting

But they can only get massive pipes of data via legally compelling a company, which means they need to either have a footprint in the USA or US employees willing to betray their company for their government.

I'd imagine using zero days to crack into foreign companies would only be for the most specific of information, making them theoretically safer from general abuse.

It doesn't quite answer the question but I've been thinking something like Open Stack could be the future. You write your cloud apps for open stack, then the user can select where they deploy it, be it in a family/community set of open stack compatible servers, corporate servers or some trusted local open stack service.

Great, now we get access to the worlds corporate secrets too. I wonder which companies will be the beneficiaries..

I've always thought spreadsheets were a great indicator of B2B startup ideas. Just find a spreadsheet that's key to a process that now involves multiple people, hasn't changed in a while and is relatively important and you probably have a SAAS right there.

The only problem is having the business agree to store data on your servers, something that's getting harder and harder these days thanks to the greed of some agencies

I don't think it's Zucks fault and there's nothing he can do, but he's still going to hurt for this. It's a political and governance problem and can only be solved at those levels.

Until we're sure that intelligence agencies can't lie at senate hearings, secret courts and laws don't exist, and we're sure the government can't force CEOs to lie, we just can't be sure

And until foreigners get the same right to at least a judge overseeing a warrant we're going to see a move away from US companies no matter where in the world they are.

That just says you can't publish exploits derived from the ones they've told you about until they've published the original ones themselves. It doesn't say you can't use, abuse and defend against them yourself. You're effectively buying zero days.

Somewhat true but I find Scala's inferred typing a surprisingly great compromise between the two.

For example:

val i = 1;

i = "some string" // throws a compiler error, because it knows i is an integer

It's great when you haven't declared the types, you change for example an int to a double or a class to some other class (eg swapping a data structure) and it just flows through the code base without problems like a dynamically typed language.

It can also be pretty useful to look up types when they get complex in the middle of some function, like a Map[List[(String,SomeObject)]] (a map of lists of (String,SomeObject) tuples). Allowing the types to get complex lets me focus on the problem while giving a crutch to quickly remember where it's at half way through (and while finding other methods/source of data) and keep moving towards the solution.

There are different levels. Up to a point they take everything you declare as true in conjunction with some basic checks. At the highest levels they assume everything you say is false, until investigated and proven true.

I still think the article makes a good point though, you just don't know who the hell has access to your data unless you keep it on your own servers or host the data in a country with extremely transparent privacy and law enforcement governance.

I don't care about privacy for my personal (not corporate) information from Google. The worst they can do is disconnect me, and I can always leave them.

I do care about that an organisation with the power to legally kill or imprison me without trial, with the world's strongest military and a penchant for punishing anyone who embarasses them has all of my data, including who I associate with, what I say and whereever I go. In fact not just my data, the data of their political opponents and the journalists that keep the system honest.

If not Obama, someone at the head of the table is going to abuse this information one day.

But what if the FISA request is 'everything'. Yes they're complying, someone gives it a look over then adds everything and keeps it updated in real time.

They don't have direct access to the servers, they're complying with the law, they have everyone's data.

The worst bit is that this is all kept secret. If it's all so acceptable then why didn't the public at least get told.

Oh god, so he is a walrus..