salient

Probably Daniel Ellsberg. I don't know if he actually had higher approval rate than Nixon, but considering Nixon had to resign after that, I'm thinking he did. There are also a lot of parallels between Ellsberg and Snowden, and a lot of parallels between Nixon and Obama, too, for that matter.

I actually think what Obama did (or continued to do) was much worse that what Nixon did in regards to the mass surveillance and spying. Nixon would've been impeached if he would've pushed the spying machine so far. In fact, he was almost impeached for what he did then, too, which is why he resigned first to save himself the life-long shame. Maybe Obama can learn from that and do the same.

It's also the NYT that protected Ellsberg back then, although I'd say the NYT has been very reactive in Snowden's case, and TheGuardian was the most pro-active one in defending him, by far.

I recommend watching this documentary about Ellsberg.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwXylIaJ_Lg

If only there were more people like Ellsberg, Manning and Snowden, and we wouldn't have to wait decades before the crimes and lies of the military industrial complex or the government get exposed. That would be something, but for that to happen, people need to ask for much, much stronger whistleblower laws. Heck, it should be a Constitutional amendment, because I think whistleblowing is absolutely vital to a properly functional democracy. Without it, governments become rotten and corrupt, and the the public can only react decades later when it's too much to bear. It shouldn't be like that. The public should be able to react to government wrongdoing a lot sooner, to correct the course.

Can this be fixed by changing the firmware to OpenWRT or DD-WRT?

Michael Hayden, former chief of NSA, recently said that the young people should give up on their "romanticized" idea of transparency (for the government). That's some irony for you, considering his NSA is the one that started going after "total information awareness", by collecting everything on everyone, and trying to kill privacy and anonymity worldwide.

Why isn't his idea "romanticized", too? Also, if anything, it's the governments that should have total transparency, not the citizens. They are the public people working on the interest of the public, and the public should be able to verify that what they're doing is in its interest. Instead, we see the opposite. They're trying to make every person an open book to them, while they're increasingly denying FOIA requests, to the point where even the police does it (NYPD especially).

That's not how it's supposed to work. Maybe Hayden and the others that think like him, should give up on the idea of "romanticized" tyranny, that they want to establish.

We have laser connection to the moon now, actually. And he was right about fiber optic cables, too.

Median salaries can't and don't show anything about inequality in salaries, though. If the salaries of the "top 10 percent continued to grow", while the "median salary" is roughly the same, then that means the salaries of the bottom 80-90 percent have dropped by a lot more since 1969, and there have been other charts showing this.

They have FBI doing that for them, and ATF [1], and who knows who else. I think many of these agencies are starting to ask for funding specifically for these sort of "operations", where they not only try and convince people to commit crimes, but give them all the funding and resources they need to commit them, too.

We've gotten to the point where the government has to manufacture or invent crimes in order to arrest people. Even the War on Drugs isn't enough for them anymore. They need more. I'm actually really curious what will happen when the War on Drugs will end. Because that would leave a huge hole in their plan to criminalize just about everyone.

Will they start sending SWAT teams to people's homes for pirating movies? Will they start arrest people on the street for pissing them off somehow? I don't know, but I'm really curious what would happen. I certainly don't expect them to just lay back and ease up on the arrests, if the War on Drug is over.

[1] http://www.jsonline.com/watchdog/watchdogreports/atf-uses-ro...

By the way, I hear you can't really "wipe" data on SSD drives. I don't remember why exactly though. Probably some fault-tolerant mechanism. Or maybe it's what NSA has been asking HDD OEMs to make from the beginning.

Child porn? So they are worried people are bringing child porn into the country through laptops? What the hell? I mean I'm not saying it's never going to happen, but what a ridiculous compromise to make.

It seems to me judges are starting to be co-opted by the corrupt power in US, too, lately. It's probably because many of them are starting to be given positions by corrupt administrations that are in favor of the surveillance state. This is also why I'm terrified about Obama naming any Supreme Court Justices by the time he leaves Office. The current Supreme Court is definitely not perfect, but I think so far they've erred on the side of privacy. I worry that balance will change if Obama gets to name 1 or 2 Justices.

As an example, ACLU had a talk at 30C3 where they mention Valerie Caproni, FBI's top lawyer until 2011, and how she was very focused on increasing surveillance capabilities for the FBI through "legal backdoors". And then she was recently named a federal judge in New York. I wouldn't be surprised if this was her giving this ruling, but just goes to show how good judges are starting to be replaced by bad ones, in favor of the surveillance and police state.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txRdOjgokQ4&feature=youtu.be&...

Messages by carrier pigeon? Sounds pretty "mobile" to me.

I think the point is Bitcoin is revolutionary in many ways than just being a digital currency. It's also P2P, and these type of technologies seem very hard to shut down by governments, after reaching critical mass. There are probably a lot of things governments could do to slow it down, but I'm not sure they could kill it.

It doesn't actually talk much about why Bitcoin and other currencies like it were/are a "bad idea" for the economy. It mainly talks about how governments wanted to kill them, and how they succeed in the past (something that may prove much harder with Bitcoin, even if they do want to do that, which so far at least, most don't want to do).

I don't know how much they overlap, but Steve Gibson was saying recently in one of this latest Security Now podcasts that what FIDO is trying to do is inferior to his recently launched SQRL protocol. He starts talking about it at 0:56:

http://twit.tv/show/security-now/435

He says the FIDO spec is overdesigned, and everyone there has their own interests, it's tied to certain technologies, and it's not free. SQRL on the other hand generates the keys on the fly instead of storing them on the phone for each website. If a hacker steals your identity, you can also get it back with SQRL - you can't with FIDO. He says SQRL is also much easier to implement.

https://www.grc.com/sqrl/sqrl.htm

http://www.sqrl.pl/ (fan-made)

Also, an interesting excerpt from Wikipedia, referring to when he announced the protocol for the first time:

> Within 2 days of the airing of this podcast, both the W3C and Google expressed interest in working on the standard.[2]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQRL

It seems the more transactions are on exchanges, the lower they make the rate. Some like Bitpay I think offer flat rates per month, too, for businesses (starting at something like $30 a month, no extra commissions).

So while Bitcoin's transaction fees may not be zero, it does seem like it's trending towards zero, much like the price of everything else on the web trends towards zero.

Yes. I would disregard comparisons with BitMessage. I don't think they really target the same market. BitMessage wants to be more of a private snooping-free e-mail system. Twister wants to be more of a public decentralized social network (resistant to censorship).

There may be some technical overlap and functionality overlap, but I think they are more different than similar. It's like saying Gmail is the same as Twitter, since you can also broadcast messages with Gmail, and you can also send private messages with Twitter. But the two really aren't the same.

Don't confuse the end of Moore's Law with the end of computer technology progress. Moore's Law is actually a pretty specific law. It says the amount of transistors in the same amount of space doubles every 2 years. We're reaching the "end of Moore's Law", because we're getting to the point where we're close to making a transistor the size of an atom, which I think is pretty much the end of "doubling the number of transistors in the same amount of space every 2 years".

That doesn't mean that after we reach this limit we won't be making quantum computers, or use other materials like graphene transistors that can probably reach TerraHertz clock speeds, which may even improve at a rate of 2x every 2 years, too. But it wouldn't be "Moore's Law".

We're also working on "brain-like" computers, but I think these and quantum computers will become "mainstream", in a general-purpose way (not just for very specific tasks), in a few decades, which should be quite a while after Moore's Law dies (in the 2020's).

So the most likely thing is that we'll use other kind of materials for the same type of "classical computers" for the next few decades, even after the end of Moore's Law, but they will improve through increasing their clock speed or through other ways, rather than getting that extra performance from adding more transistors.

I'm still not convinced any one entity deserves to keep a creation for so long under monopoly given by the society (some interesting discussions in 1869 [1] about this), but let's assume they do. I'd still like to see a system where you only get copyright for new works for 5 years. Then you have to pay $1,000 to renew it for another 5 years. And then the fee increases geometrically (and also adjusted to inflation), to something like $1 million+ after 50+ years, because if the work is worth that much to you after so much time, then you should be able to pay for it, and it would also "give back" to the society that keeps granting you the monopoly for that work.

Then the average lifetime of copyright monopolies should be around 15 years, which is actually about what it was when copyright laws were first created (the average would be dragged down a lot by people who wouldn't care about stuff they made in a week enough to pay $1,000 5 years later, but most of the "real works" that would be worth it, will probably have it for around 30 years or so.

We see it with books that after 10 years most of them are basically dead, and nobody cares about them anymore (can't find that link right now, but some of you probably know what I'm referring to). There are some "Mickeys" here and there that are relevant 100 years later under copyright, but it's more like 1 in a million works. The rest is abandoned - but it still retains the copyright on it so nobody can re-use it to improve the culture of the society (even if it just means having a company like Google find all the old books and digitize them, something they've barely won, and is actually getting appealed right now). I think that's just wrong.

[1] - http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130503/17414322946/discus...

From what I can tell its main focus is not to be an alternative to Tor, but a censorship-resistant P2P Twitter alternative. Or if you will, a "true" P2P social network (Diaspora, Status.net always relied on federated servers, which weren't that "decentralized", and normal users would've never hosted their own servers anyway).

I've noticed this before. They start sounding the trumpet about some dangers, after they already do them themselves - like when they said that cyber-attacks should be considered acts of war because they can put infrastructures in danger, basically months before they launched Stuxnet against Iran, or when they started warning about cyber-attacks putting banks in danger, and then we found out this year that NSA can access bank accounts and even modify them.

So next time when they warn about some other danger, I think we can assume they've already done it themselves to others. As for the "IP stealing" that they keep accusing China of, it may be true, but NSA probably steals information from other corporations more than anyone, since they have access to everything, and I'm not so sure China does, too. Most of the world's Internet traffic goes through US, and they have access to that, and as we've seen to the private networks of the world's largest service companies, too, like Google, Yahoo and so on. They also have access to most of Europe's data through UK/Sweden cables. China doesn't have any of this, and could only dream of such access.

First off, I don't think anyone except "tinfoil hats" really imagined the scale of NSA spying. Who really thought the NSA would try to subvert the cryptographic standards they pretend to create to "secure systems"? Who really thought they'd go to US service and hardware companies and ask them to implement backdoors for them?

Also, there's a big difference between letting NSA protect US against Real Threats - real national security people-are-going-to-die threats, and spying not just on every single citizen on the planet (which includes corporate espionage), but on American citizens and companies, too.

Just like everyone has a little "evil" in them, without all of us being Hitler, the NSA can do a little bit of spying on important targets, without going 10/10 on the scale of evil spying.

So no, I really don't think "this is their job" or that "everyone knew they were doing this". I think the vast majority of people thought NSA would be reasonable with their spying.

I also hate it when people say, "didn't you see when they passed the Patriot Act? You should've expected this." Perhaps, but if you go back to when they passed it, they did it in literally hours, and if you watch Bush speak about it [1], he makes it sound as if they are only going to use it to spy on the terrorists' communications - not everyone's. Going by how fast they passed the bill, and how few details were offered, you can't really blame most people for "not knowing".

Heck, it was even called the "anti-terrorism bill" on TV, so I don't think people imagined that meant all of their communications are going to be swept up, because they were now thinking everyone is a potential terrorist (which is what "collecting it all" means) until proven otherwise by their systems.

[1] - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfRcfTakhFo

You can't even average that out, because the vast majority of those 13,000 "terrorist attacks", if true, are certainly inside countries where they are basically at war with each other. And in many of those countries, US contributes to the kill count, although I assume these reports don't count that as "terrorism", even as they blow up 15 people going to a wedding.

As Schneier recently said, assume everything is vulnerable by default [1], and work with the machines having that in mind. Until everything from the hardware level to the OS and applications is open source (which is pretty much the way FSF has always told us it should be, because they feared the outcome we've already seen), we can't trust them, and even then we have to be very careful about bugs.

[1] - http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/an-interview-with-bruce-sch...

And people can't wait until they get OS-level DRM like in Windows 8 and Chromebooks, just to play Netflix in "HTML5", even though it plays just fine now in Silverlight, and TPM in their hardware?

I don't think they really know what they're asking for. Once the Pandora's box is open, you can't put the evil back inside. You'll regret ever wanting that "safety" or "convenience" feature, when it will make your computer a lot less safe (from the vendors themselves, government censorship, etc) and a lot less convenient (when everything you want to use has frustrating OS-level DRM enabled).

Wake up and smell the coffee. If it can be abused, it will be abused.

It certainly read like an ad for IBM.

For starters, I'd probably use this over Bitmessage for the easier to use UI alone. This one also seems to be a little more focused on public messages, too. It looks like a fully decentralized version of Twitter, which could be more appealing to some people.

Could Dart or other languages in the browser solve this problem of not being able to do crypto properly in the browser, or is this a more fundamental problem of having crypto inside a browser in the first place?

Greenwald's speech was great, but so far the most interesting one to me has been Jacob Appelbaum's speech where he gives a lot more technical details (including new information) about how the NSA is hacking systems and how far they are willing to go, like wanting to create a "Great Firewall of Earth" or even radiating people with up to 1KW in order to get what's in their computer, which just proves how out of control and power hungry the NSA is and how indefensible their actions are, despite what some of the NSA HN users around here or their supporters might say.

Highly recommend it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0w36GAyZIA

This is starting to become sort of trend with Apple.

I thought the NSA wasn't "attacking domestic citizens"? They can't excuse this one away as an "error" anymore. NSA/Obama administration lied. Again. What a surprise.

And boy are these NSA stories flagged into oblivion or what? NSA/FBI psy-ops or just good ol' HN folks "getting bored" with the NSA abuses?

I think that already existed for years, and Apple is pretty much the only one in Europe who offers an adapter for their charger, while everyone else uses micro-USB.

So I may be wrong, but I think this is about actually forcing Apple to provide micro-USB directly.

I wouldn't go to Krugman for technology insights. This is the same guy who basically said the Internet has no future, and now he's repeating it for Bitcoin.

This is only going to get worse if they make drones autonomous, which this TED talk shows they have a lot of reasons for why they will want to make them autonomous, unless there's huge public outcry demanding a ban:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMYYx_im5QI