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The court is making a distinction that may be hard to define because it is somewhat arbitrary and subjective. It's OK for this auction to be advertised locally, but not further from the area? Does this apply to any aggregation or reposting of data that is publicly listed somewhere else, if it mentions identifiable individuals?

This is one area where techies for public interest can fight back with words.

I explain it to friends and family this way:

Neutrality means the ISP delivers whatever you request on a best-effort basis (explanation of best-effort here). Non-neutrality means the ISP gets to auction off your ability to connect to sites/services you want to connect to. In other words, you look at site A and it's fast because A paid the ISP; but site B is slow because they paid less.

And this is wrong because (a) you pay your ISP for connectivity to everywhere, for your own purposes, but you have no say in what they make slow or fast based on side deals. (b) you and the site you're connecting to both have already paid for your respective connections, but without neutrality the sites have to pay more again to avoid artificial slowdowns.

I'm pretty sure that would be a wasted effort. Basically, you could be nearly NSA-proof only if you use your own cert and are prepared to shut down the whole thing when the Feds demand private keys. But then it wouldn't be useful for general email: it will get blacklisted by various parties you would want to exchange email with, unless you use a CA.

Really the only readily-practical approach for NSA-proofing will be something that's user-friendly in the UI and encrypts end to end. This prevents snooping in transit, but still exposes metadata, and of course there are endpoint attacks.

If they can put someone on the case at all, they can then select out cases where one user makes multiple threats, for example, or some similar criterion, and where the likely perpetrators can be identified. Law enforcement never tries to catch 100% of criminals, they just need to pursue the worst in each category and publicize convictions to exert a deterrent effect.

When tweets contain obviously criminal threats, law enforcement ought to be able and willing to get whatever information Twitter has on the senders, at least when the target files a complaint, and prosecutors ought to follow up.

How is this so easy in copyright cases and so hard in cases like this? If a few theoretical dollars in royalties count so much more than safety of innocent citizens, things really are upside down in favor of big money.

I realize there are limited LE and prosecutorial resources, and they have to prioritize etc., but threats like these are prosecuted in "real world" cases all the time. And a few convictions in egregious cases (like this), reported in the news, would probably exert a civilizing effect on the lowlife of Twitter (maybe just motivating them to go elsewhere).

This could never succeed here in the US - (a) general opposition to euthanasia and (b) the amusement park industry would lobby against it because it would scare people away from the regular, milder roller coasters.

It seems mostly academic, as there are much less costly, and not-unpleasant methods - overdose of opiates for example.

For me the link led to an article titled "Woman With Printer Shows the Digital Ease of Bogus Cash". It mentions anti-counterfeiting features in printers but does not address the topic of the submitted title "Does HP track what we print and scan?". The latter would be interesting but this apparently has little to do with it.

Ease of counterfeiting, well that's an interesting topic too.

If you like Thompson's writing or ideas, or would like to observe more of the "gonzo" character, then in addition to the writings check out a 1978 BBC mini-documentary "Fear and loathing in gonzo-vision". A journalist and cameraperson go around with HST for a few days, there are casual interviews, some on-the-scene scenes and some background. Vids with that or similar names may be on youtube (I can't verify right now); also discs and torrents.

Any promises of privacy or security are worthless unless it's on an open licence (GPL equivalent) - and in that case how would payment be enforced? Apparently you are asking a "trick question".

Silk Road relied on Bitcoin and escrow among other things, and presumably the successor will do as well or better with payment security. So it's not quite as simple as "go where the money flows and arrest anyone selling". How do you propose to trace payments? Maybe some careless operators will be nabbed but they are already harder targets than the guy on the street corner, and those following best practices will be more elusive than that.

Kudos to these guys for undermining victimless-crime laws.

Public-utility "last mile", far from being opposed to competition, would facilitate it. The local or state government would own the ROW and maintain the fiber - maybe thru a contractor whose role is restricted to that function. Then your household or business line goes to a box where different companies can compete for slots/ports/whatever, and then you would choose which provider to connect you from there to the big pipes.

The "to the premises" provider would make a regulated profit, just like utility-model water and power companies, and the upstream providers would pay the going rate for their connections to customers, and compete for customers with rates, policies and over-the-top services.

With this author and a lot of people, I agree that network neutrality is vital to the social benefits of the internet, and that the "public utility" model is best. The question, however is how to get there.

Historically, once big-money, rent-seeking [1] entities start profiting from some arrangement, it becomes extremely hard to dislodge them, because they protect their position by hijacking the government to their interests.

There's a little cause for hope in that there might be a mass protest like with SOPA.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

If you are using a site-signed cert and giving intended visitors a corresponding browser cert (being your own CA), and turn on HSTS, I assume the non-bypassable warning page would not be triggered, and the author's reference to "self-signed certs" is an inaccurate shorthand for "site certs the browser doesn't trust a CA for". (If this interpretation is wrong, HSTS would prevent a secure connection in this scenario.)

And if your server is rewriting URLs instead of using 301, then clients are not vulnerable to the redirect loophole and HSTS gives no benefit in that respect?

Part of the problem may be certain animal contacts, such as eating "bush meat" (mentioned in the article, also discussed in the Laurie Garrett book). Maybe a campaign against those practices could be worthwhile

Layperson here, but based on reading I'm a little more pessimistic. The incubation period can be up to 21 days, and the subject can be infectious during that time [1]. Thus there is a plausible worst-case scenario where an undiagnosed carrier flies to a population centre and comes in contact with a lot of people.

Hopefully this could be prevented by contact tracing and other containment as described above, but if one carrier got out and infected people elsewhere, containment efforts might be unable to keep up.

1. http://ebola.emedtv.com/ebola/ebola-incubation-period.html

Reading 'corporation grief' as 'corporate greed' -

To play devil's advocate here for a moment, the drug development and approval processes are crazy expensive, and the pharmacos basically charge what the market will bear for each product, and spread the revenue to all costs - not necessarily allocated by individual drugs. IOW, drug A costs a little and sells for a lot, drug B the reverse, but the total revenue covers the cost and some profit.

At least that's the argument the pharmacos make in public. If this situation is not as it should be, someone should articulate what's wrong and how to fix it. E.g. patients can't afford something they're dying without, but if the vendors are forced to discount for some drugs or some buyers, how is the whole business to be financed?

I can think of arguments for and against various possible reforms, but won't bore you here. We do need something more specific tho.

Agreed. It's very positive that the distribution channels are opening up such that more companies are distributing shows like this -- yet as a casual viewer, it's hardly worthwhile for me to subscribe to Amazon Prime and buy some specialized proprietary device, just for one network's older shows.

And presumably there will be other vendors offering other narrow selections, only on their own or "partner company" devices or DRM-ware. This sort of thing makes sense if you already have the device or service, otherwise it just prices the video files beyond any reasonable market value.

And piracy will continue as long as this "jump thru hoops" mentality goes on: compared to the hassle-laden commercial experience, pirating is convenient, and files are high quality, free from junk, and play on VLC.

The copyright holding companies will probably die off before they realize that they could have done better just selling files. They're convinced that only a few would buy and they would put them on torrents - but if I paid a dollar an episode of a series, with no DRM, trailers, ads or other BS, I wouldn't bother sharing, I'd just refer people to the same source to buy their own copies.

I'm sensitive to this enough to specify 'US' when that's what I mean -- yet, when Europeans (well, N. Europeans in my experience) say "Americans" they're referring to US people. It's probably because US culture, politics, imperialism etc. intrude into their countries and lives a lot more than Canadians, Mexicans or South Americans do.

When I start to submit a dupe, HN usually is smart enough to forward to the page for the already-submitted link (maybe the url was different enough here). In this case, a thread with the same name on the front page at the same time. [ http://www.wired.com/2014/04/coversnitch-eavesdropping-light... ] -- probaby best to go to that one, it has comments already.

The numbers here are actually not alarming, even positive.

In every human population there is a small percentage of people with some ideology that makes them inclined to do harm to others. 3700 anti-black incidents, 1100 anti-semitic, in the US - the population is about 300+ million. The hater-attacker percentage is something like 1 to 3 x 10^-5. That is tiny!

Of course it is deplorable that we have this much, and undoubtedly it implies a larger percentage who are hateful but not crazy enough to attack people. Still it does not seem a crisis. The situation has improved greatly in the US, I think other places have worse problems of this kind (e.g. see waps on this page).

It is intuitive that exposure to a wider range of ideas than found in one's home area undermines religious faith, but interesting to have this confirmed. Anecdotally I have noticed signs of this worldwide.

The phrasing "blame on the internet" (along with college, apparently) implies a bias for religion over more agnostic views, but I guess this is NPR reporting the religionists' interpretation rather than NPR's.

I have a pile of notebooks that need to get into my computer somehow - but images won't help. I would pay for OCR, but AFAIK the technology today is not yet good enough for accurate image-to-text from handwriting.

It's significant that there is this advice, and it supports the point of the article, but this is really insufficient. If you can't be sure of the water quality at the tap (as parent notes, different from the quality at the plant where the utility measures contaminant levels), then it's best to use a filter that removes metals (as well as biological contaminants).

Also people should be aware: the government somehow allows pipes and fittings to be sold as "lead free" when in reality they contain up to a few percent of lead.

Personally I would not consider connecting a TV to the internet. Aside from usability factors, it's hard to assess security (therefore the TV-ware has to be assumed a hazard), there's little transparency into what it's doing, update mechanisms are sketchy at best.

Most new models, it seems, have the so-called "smart" features, but it's harmless if you don't connect it. I just use a TV as a big monitor - plug in a PC and use a wireless keyboard from the comfy sofa.

More curious is why the TV and monitor categories haven't converged. Eventually I predict, they will, when demand for OTA tuners fades and "cord cutting" (as the cable TV industry calls it) goes to higher percentages.

It would make no sense to let the provider say "we're monitoring Al Capone", as this would alert Al Capone. But they're not even allowing the provider to say "certain users are subject to wiretapping at government order". On a huge service like Twitter this would not alert anyone in particular.

Even the above is not as much of a concern - but the same mechanism can silence the providere about more drastic intrusions which compromise the whole service - such as coercing private encryption keys. Lookup the whole Lavabit thing.

Also the working memory and a certain willingness to sit there doing purely mental work for significant periods of time (well I guess the latter is part of 'math/engineering ability'). The working memory aspect is what makes this sub-thread not a complete digression.

One US university used to (may still) have a program where they would take relatively non-technical people off the street, and if they could pass an aptitude test would consider them (interview) for a programmer training course. This test was notorious for the failure rate, but the program consistently produced coders who quickly became able to maintain the university's systems. (Trainees were taught a procedural language for a mainframe, but in the early 2000s they were gradually migrating to web and Java.)

This test, supposedly developed by IBM in the 1960s, had nothing about programming. It was all pattern recognition - look at a series of geometric figures and predict the next, and some variations on this concept.

I was skeptical of the suitability of this test, but the U. was convinced by the apparent results.

I think it's a problem of adjusting to something new.

Looking at alcohol for comparison, societies have evolved cultural norms for dealing with it. In W. Europe for example, wine is part of meals; in UK a pint at the pub is a routine social occasion. In the US, with the heritage of puritans, "reformers" and a younger culture, there is more of an "all or nothing" mentality, the prohibition experiment, and youth drinking to get drunk.

As cannabis legalization spreads, norms will develop to govern what's acceptable in households, coffeeshops, etc.

Somewhat related: presence or absence of diseases in an area may influence social and political systems, according to one theory (http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/bugs-lik...)

For centuries in the western world, the Christian church, which considered this to be in its purview, kept trying different calendar schemes to try to make a set of months, preferably equal, fit neatly into the year.

There have been may solutions tried or proposed, and the history of this has a certain puzzle-like fascination, but it's not clear to me why people cared so much about this. Astronomical periods are OK, apparently, for years and days, yet weeks and calendar months are arbitrarily imposed.