Exactly, it's news when it ruins a middle class white man's life, but nobody cares about the millions of people born in poor urban neighborhoods whose lives were ruined from the day they born, because their community was ravaged by drugs, crime and the revolving door of incarceration, and where they have no role models except drug dealers and prostitutes. I think it was Lupe Fiasco who said, if you have no chance at life, why even try?
For the same reason that people choose Facebook web hosting over their own privacy protected servers. They are not tech savvy and know little to nothing about security. They don't even know what keys are. 10 years ago, they just knew that Hushmail offered encrypted email. It was the first service anybody heard of that did that. The non-tech savvy crowd is the niche that services like Hushmail exploit.
Limitations of message size won't solve that because the messages will be broken into hundreds of pieces, just like they are on Usenet. In theory you could limit the total amount of content coming from an end point, but it's probably not feasible in an anonymous system.
That's what I've been using and it works great. Some of their US nodes are slow, probably because overloaded, but I maxed out my 20 Mbit internet connection testing their UK London server.
Edit: I should also point out that a $20 Linode box just for VPN is overkill. If you really want to go the VPS route, there are plenty of sub-$10 VPS providers in the UK.
You said to describe the product from the perspective of the user, not the developer, but then you preferred the developer description of Java (language, library, VM) over the user description (play games, chat with people, view images in 3D). It does seem like your average person landing on the Java page cares more about the second list. I mean, what the hell is a virtual machine anyway?
Unlike oil company executives, zero climate scientist salaries depend on global warming being true. That's just not how or why academic researchers get paid. They push the "agenda" because that's the model the data supports.
Debian has the Debian Free Software Guidelines and the community as whole is less supportive of proprietary software, not to mention that it's all volunteers. I think Valve would rather work with a company-supported distro like Ubuntu, which focuses on just working.
In any case, the client may very well run on Debian, it just won't be officially tested or certified by Valve (for now).
This looks like it's mostly targeted at sex predators, but I wonder if the system is also activated if you jokingly tell a friend that they are "smoking crack".
The difference is that most Skype users don't even know they are carrying traffic for the network. The client silently punches a whole in their router and makes itself a pain to close (for example by reconfiguring what the red X does) without ever explaining why it wants to keep running so badly.
Unless it's recorded, there's a good chance they won't believe you. Oh, you have a bruise? That could have been caused by anything. Judges and juries tend to side with cops. So cops have little to gain by recording everything, which is of course why they are generally against it. They outlawed it in Illinois before it was overturned.
That could deanonymize you. Lots of public places have cameras. On the other hand, have you ever tried creating a Google/YouTube or Facebook accout over Tor? They want SMS verification. So you have to buy a prepaid phone somewhere and that store will likely have cameras too. It's more difficult than you think.
Well, "Knowingly accesses and without permission... uses any data" would make the accessing and transmission of contacts (a la Path and many other apps) illegal. Except there's probably a clause somewhere that you agreed to without reading which lets them do that, and the same may be true here.
You mean like a CA? Of course they could do that, but then it wouldn't be Windows Certified (it would just be Somebody-Else Certified), which is how OEMs want to brand their products. This is all about dealing with Microsoft's hegemony.
I'm convinced that all the people repeating the mantra about memory and CPU use switched away a year ago and haven't actually tried a recent version. The alternative (to being ignorant) is that they are flat out liars, because anyone who has tried a recent version knows point blank that they are wrong.
I might add, if you think 15 years in prison for using Skype is outrageous, what is the penalty for refusing to cooperate with a US court order or National Security Letter? And how is that functionally different from what Ethiopia is doing? The consequences are the same: surveillance, any time, anywhere the authorities please.
You don't need fancy technology to snoop on people in America. All the companies are based in the US, so it's just a matter of the government compelling them to build the spy mechanisms into their products or turn over their data. Ethiopia is functionally doing the same thing (massive surveillance of its populace), but without the power to influence these companies, it just bans the products.
Yet another problem created by cloud storage. If instead of putting everything on a community storage service we took Eben Moglen's suggestion of storing everything in our homes (which would require better bandwidth and ISP AUPs, of course) our data would be in the best legally protected place in society. It won't happen. The cloud will win because it has bigger corporate backers, but this is another example of how technology solves one problem while simultaneously creating another.
Since time immemorial students have shared information on good and bad professors. This will be yet another thing that is passed along. Don't take his section, he forces you to buy a code. Take her section and you can use my book.
It will get to the point that we need biometric scanners or implanted RFID chips with private keys to do authentication, since brute forcing even unrememberable passwords will be trivial eventually.
If it was Israel, I'd bet dollars to donuts that they got help from American agencies. Either way, a professional government agency somewhere, which apparently knows a lot about cryptology and presumably computer forensics, designed this thing and issued a data shredding command. My point still stands in that the number (and types) of writes they did would be very informative.
> The command located every Flame file sitting on a PC, removed it and then overwrote memory locations with gibberish to thwart forensic examination.
I'd like to know how many writes it did since this would finally settle the issue of whether FBI / NSA can read erased data. If one write is good enough for them, you know they can't recover anything with one write either.
Interestingly, when reddit upgraded to bcrypt, they refused to do this because so many users don't know their passwords and it would lock lots of people out of their accounts forever (remember, reddit doesn't require email addresses to register).
Pretty much. The idea that a lone polymath experimenting in his basement, a la Ben Franklin or James Maxwell, could make a genuinely important scientific discovery, disappeared a long time ago. We're chasing the long tail of knowledge. Each increment will get harder, more complex and more expensive over time, and that's factoring in the technology that makes modern science so much easier and cheaper, or even possible.
If you wanted to sequence a piece of DNA in the 1980s (an entire genome was laughably out of the question), you would use Sanger's method and get a few hundred base pairs in a month. Maybe an entire gene in 3 months. Now we can sequence whole bacterial genomes or genotype a million SNPs in an afternoon, but gaining new, important knowledge is still much more expensive.