intherdfield

> No, it succeeded. Nothing he revealed was in fact illegal or unconstitutional. Neither the law nor the Constitution mandates all good things, nor bans all bad things. 'I don't like it' is unsufficient proof of illegality.

No, he exposed a federal crime being committed by the Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper.

He exposed how the Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper committed perjury (a federal crime in this instance) by lying to Congress and the American people about mass surveillance.

Is the counter argument that senior government officials should be allowed to lie to Congress about surveillance of American citizens?

And from wikipedia[1]: "Two U.S. representatives accused Clapper of perjury for telling a Congressional committee in March 2013, that the NSA does not collect any type of data at all on millions of Americans. One senator asked for his resignation, and a group of 26 senators complained about Clapper's responses under questioning. Media observers have described Clapper as having lied under oath, having obstructed justice, and having given false testimony."

Clapper changed his story a few times but eventually described this as something like "I forgot what we were talking about" but only after the perjury was exposed. Attorney General Eric Holder basically said he just forgot something and no charges necessary. One interpretation of this is as overt government corruption. It's relevant that Holder recently said he believes Snowden performed a public service.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_R._Clapper

The WebRTC functionality isn't being removed, just the built in video chat/sharing that was powered by Telefonica.

You can still use a site like https://talky.io/ with Firefox (and I expect there are other sites) if you're looking for Skype or Facebook alternatives. I don't know if there are WebRTC sites that have sane address books, but I would hope so. I've heard talky.io works well, but haven't used it.

Would the NSA prefer to have these dumps be vaguely attributed to an insider?

I wonder if they would because any mistake in handling data calls into question their competence which calls into question their ability to keep that big database safe. The one with all our call records, etc.

I had the same experience years ago. Checking again today on my GMail account shows that partial string searches (or prefixes) don't work at all, but I don't really notice it because it gives good search suggestions in the popup.

For example, if I search for a partial string, say the first part of my last name, GMail finds no messages. But there are hundreds of messages from my family members with the same last name in my inbox.

Another example: searching for Verizo results in "no messages found", but GMail recommends I search for Verizon and that shows all the messages I expect (at a glance.)

What is meant here IS NOT that every Firefox user would be browsing using Tor.

The idea is that the Tor Browser would be standard Firefox with certain strong privacy settings enabled. i.e., the Tor project wouldn't have to patch Firefox source and recompile because their patches would already be in Firefox, just run-time disabled. They wouldn't have to maintain their own set of patches that could be broken by Firefox development. For Tor, stock Firefox would be launched with those (strong privacy) settings enabled.

Tor might have to rework their patches to live in Firefox in this way, but it would simplify their work because Firefox development wouldn't cause upstream breakage of the Tor browser.

> Thanks for the link. I didn't know Cantrill basically imploded.

That wasn't written by bcantrill. He hasn't imploded yet, as far as we all know. Unless that was when Oracle bought Sun and he's been operating in the imploded state since.

To add more of an explanation to your comment.

Yes, in those simple terms, it would be 1) simpler to coordinate multiple threads in the same process compared to multiple processes, and 2) more efficient too.

1 is true because any system you might use to communicate between processes would involve an IPC layer and with a single process, you could use an identical system with the IPC removed.

2 is true because multiple threads in the same process can communicate directly without requiring IPC (which requires data serialization, shared memory for performance, and more system calls). i.e, sharing data has much higher cost using IPC. You can skip some serialization if you use shared memory, but you still need to set that up and manage shared buffers. (Different applications might share data in different ways so that the IPC overhead becomes negligible, but non-IPC could always be implemented faster.)

But the benefit gained from using multiple processes for a web browser (that is essentially a VM for running untrusted JS/web code) is security in the face of bugs. It comes from how operating systems provide tried-and-tested process isolation. If sites from separate origins are rendered or parsed in their own process, some types of browser bugs are harder to exploit to gain access to data from other origins. And for bugs that just cause crashes without security implications, you can crash a single tab and let other tabs continue, let the main UI continue.

On its own, that is good, but not great.

The big benefit is that the big 3 operating systems that browser developers are concerned with provide some level of per-process sandboxing. For example, one can launch a process with a limited set of privileges such that the only thing that process is allowed to do is communicate via IPC and compute stuff. The operating system enforces this for you. Provided you have a strong IPC layer, a process with such limited privileges can do very little damage if it is compromised.

Developing a strong IPC layer is not extremely difficult as it essentially boils down to reading a stream of messages from an untrusted source and detecting invalid messages without compromising yourself.

Just pointing out that the judge who authorized the warrant didn't say that. From the article:

Judge Bowman, who authorized the warrant, said he could not talk about the case and referred me to his colleague Judge William Downing, who spoke about some of the underlying issues. "When we get into things like this," he said, "anonymizing stuff, that’s well over my head technologically, then it becomes very murky and hazy.

It goes on to say, referring to the report,

"For those projects to work, the companies need to offer internet access with no strings attached, the World Bank says. At one point, it calls out Facebook’s recent efforts to provide free internet access to consumers in some countries – but only to access Facebook."

> i punch it at full throttle to 65mph every time i use an > on-ramp. i bought a performance car to use it as advertised. > > perfectly legal, and appropriate, when traffic permits.

It's not perfectly legal. Look up reckless driving or exhibition of speed laws. If you have a modern performance car and you do this in front of a cop, you're very likely to get a ticket. (An older car's full throttle might be too slow to concern a police officer and the laws are vague to allow the police officer's discretion.)

One can't legally use a performance car as advertised on public roads.

> in fact, if you don't, you're probably a shitty driver

I think you just mean you have to be at appropriate speed for a safe merge, but is full throttle really required? Unlikely.

I'm really sorry to hear about what happened. I wish you the best of luck in finding a new job. The pizza party idea sounds demeaning and silly.

Now is not the time for advice on communication, but I can't help but comment on this, sorry. Take this with a grain of salt because I wasn't in the room. Should the manager be able to handle your questions better? Yes. But, consider this rhetorical question, was your aim to embarrass the manager or improve the situation? Even though you were presented with something ridiculous, from the manager's perspective, you embarrassed him in front of his reports. Criticizing someone (or an extension of them such as their work) in a group setting can be very destructive. In a situation like that, I recommend talking to the manager one-on-one afterwards. That gives the manager the opportunity to do something that fixes this and to be a good manager that listens to his employees and comes up with incentives that might actually work. If the manager doesn't want that outcome, don't waste your time there. Your manager might be childish and unprofessional. He might just lack the empathy required to understand your perspective without it being explained to him. If he is the former, and you don't want to get fired, you have to act in a way that is acceptable to someone childish and unprofessional. I think a good manager would handle your points and questions and give you some kind of response whether it be 1) I'll look into fixing this or 2) sorry, I can't fix this. They say good managers are hard to find.

Game of Thrones is available for streaming on Amazon Instant Video.

> For a criminal trial, a specific law must be broken.

Perjury. I don't understand the subtleties of this law, but my ordinary man interpretation is telling me that if you are a government official, you are allowed to lie under oath in a court, with no repercussions.

Quoting Wikipedia,

Wyden then asked Director Clapper, "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" He responded, "No, sir." Wyden asked "It does not."[31] and Clapper said "Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertantly perhaps collect, but not wittingly."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_R._Clapper