salient

I don't understand why Microsoft even calls the two tablets the same, when they couldn't be any different from the software, hardware and price perspectives.

The only explanation I can come up with is that they're trying to confuse the consume and think that one is just as good as the other (you can do the same things with both), and this title "Surface Music Kit", even though it's just for the Surface Pro device, proves my point.

> Leaving pretty much the entire IT infrastructure vulnerable seems like a very dangerous strategy.

From NSA's perspective? I'm not so sure. A severe attack on US infrastructure would probably mean just more money and more legal power thrown at NSA to "fix it". Then NSA will continue to do what they've done so far - put most of that "security" money, into offensive capabilities. So the cycle will continue, as the systems remain vulnerable.

VLC doesn't even seem to be fully ported to Android yet.

I used to support Chromebooks. Not anymore. Having every last bit of your data "in the cloud" has turned out to be a very dangerous concept, especially since Google (and many other cloud providers) don't provide any kind of easy client-side encryption options before uploading the data to the "cloud".

I've never agreed much with Krugman's theories, but at least he understands a thing or two about economy. However, what I've always found him to be always clueless about is - technology. You have a better chance finding a more insightful tech article from a random tech blogger than from Krugman. He always misses the point. Without exception. I don't know even why he keeps doing this to himself. He just ends up embarrassing himself.

How can Bitcoin, a technology, that has shown so much promise, in many other ways besides being "money" (which some still disagree it is), be "evil"?

Also, as someone else has mentioned, he says FIAT money is backed by men with fun, and Bitcoin by "nothing" (another point where he shows just how little he understands technology in general), yet Bitcoin is the "evil" one?

Well there's P2P file sharing through WebRTC:

https://www.sharefest.me/

Life isn't black and white. What that means is that maybe US should get involved in some situations, and not get involved in others. So you don't have to think that either you get involved in no situation, or in all situations outside of the country.

I think US has done at least as much damage [1] as it has helped, which is why the situations need to very weighted very carefully, especially in the past decade or two, when it seems it has mostly used humanitarian excuses to get involved in new conflicts but with the main agenda of helping its economic interests, which is quite far from the goal of "helping others" for the sake of it.

[1] http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/CIAtimeline.html

That was a great one. So was this by Jacob Appelbaum from last year, where he was already saying (pre-Snowden) that the chief of NSA is probably the most powerful man on the planet:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mnuofn_DXw

That's why EU and everyone else is waiting for US to pass strong laws that prohibit US gov doing that, and for them to acknowledge the EU laws for data protection, before they can trust US companies at all.

At least if US passes such laws, they know that instead of risking losing all of its foreign customers, Cisco would rather sue the US government next time, backed by those new laws. This is why this reaction is such a good thing. It's exactly what's supposed to happen to end forced backdoors by the NSA into products bought by foreigners.

I agree. I don't know how that number was reached, but if the potential for losses is $180 billion already, then the long term losses might reach $1 trillion, maybe more. There are so many companies that change so slowly. They probably won't give up on the US products and services within 6 months. It might take them 2 years, 3 years, or even 5 years. So there are probably many more foreign customers thinking about dumping US companies, but they just can't do it yet. But that doesn't mean they will get their future contracts if nothing (radically) changes until then.

Maybe you just aren't paying attention:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/101291247

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/09/nsa-spying-braz...

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/10/nsa-busted-conducting...

There are a lot of things that we thought it would be "outrageous" for NSA to do, and yet we found out later they're doing them. If anything, NSA is more interested in spying on corporations for the purpose of economic espionage than anything else. Why else would Germany be spied upon by the NSA as much as China is?

http://www.theverge.com/2013/6/30/4481670/nsa-spying-in-germ...

No, it's the best possible reaction (not for US, obviously, but they deserve it). This sends a message to US and US companies.

Also, in case you haven't paid attention the US government was hacking into one of the biggest US companies already - Google and Yahoo, while they had deals to get pre-encryption data with Microsoft and others.

Also, NSA themselves said all encrypted data is captured, regardless of where is coming from, "just to be sure".

This deal was probably made pre-Snowden revelations. I doubt any of the world's governments are so eager to deploy US-controlled machines in their institutions and schools, especially if they are "cloud-only".

Seems like the Gates Foundation is mostly a front for a profit-seeking venture.

What's even more confusing is that after we've settled that 3840x2160 is 4k, which is 4x the pixels of 1920x1080, just like 8k is 4x the pixels of 4k, instead of calling 1920x1080 "2k", everyone is starting to call 2560x1440 "2k", even though 4k is only ~2x the pixels of 2560x1440.

I actually prefer UHD being promoted, because I wouldn't want us to switch to another weird resolution now, and I want videos to just scale up perfectly.

Classic blaming of the messenger.

That can apply to other apps and products, but much less so to crypto tools. It's basically one of the reasons why new crypto algorithms only start being used after 5 years of being in the wild, and many more in pre-release research.

Not only did they add that after the fact, when they saw people were coming to their site to see it, but it seems they've also asked Google to flag all Youtube videos with it.

Wow. How can they claim copyright on that? Wasn't the video made by Snowden himself? It certainly seemed like a video taken with a phone (480p recording, too).

What type of OTR improvements suggested by Trevor Perrin did you use. The same ones TextSecure will be using?

https://whispersystems.org/blog/advanced-ratcheting/

The white paper is down the page a little:

http://okturtles.com/other/dnsnmc_okturtles_overview.pdf

I'd be interested to see another comparison with DNSCurve on your page (http://okturtles.com/#DNSNMC):

http://dnscurve.org/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8EGA834Nok

It seems Aaron Swartz has inspired so many great projects. It makes me sad that he's no longer with us from such a young age. It seems he had a lot of potential to change things for the better.

> "A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They'll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves, an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought. And that's a problem, because privacy matters"

I think that's the most important part of his message.

Jesus. Do you even read your own source before posting? The author seems just as confused as you are, since he's the one posting the Novell comments, and saying it's actually about Nortel, when it's not.

From your own source, here's what Microsoft said:

> Google says we bought -- Novell -- patents to keep them from Google. Really? We asked them to bid jointly with us. They said no.

Also here's why Google didn't buy them:

http://venturebeat.com/2011/08/04/google-we-didnt-co-bid-on-...

> “A joint acquisition of the Novell patents that gave all parties a license would have eliminated any protection these patents could offer to Android against attacks from Microsoft and its bidding partners. Making sure that we would be unable to assert these patents to defend Android — and having us pay for the privilege — must have seemed like an ingenious strategy to them. We didn’t fall for it.”

Joining Microsoft to buy those patents would've made those patents useless for Google in the fight against Microsoft. Google is trying to buy up patents to defend against Microsoft. They can't do that if they can't assert those patents against Microsoft.

If I may try an analogy, say someone is coming at you with a knife, and you have nothing to defend yourself than a toy gun, and that person knows it's a toy gun. How useful is that gun threatening going to be to scare the guy with the knife away. Pretty useless no? Well that's the same thing with the Novell patents.

Universities have patents for the purpose of selling them, no? If a company is making something and wants to use it, then they buy the patent. No different from today in that case. The only difference is that trolls can't buy the same patents in order to sue others, like IV, Rockstar, and others are doing.

If you've been following the situation you'd know that isn't true. Rockstar was built for the whole purpose of suing Google.

And use them "for themselves"? Rockstar is a little more than a shell company.

For crying out loud. Will people stop confusing Nortel with Novell!!

That was about Novell patents - different company, and it all happened about a year earlier before Nortel thing went down. Completely different situations. Stop confusing them. I see this misinformation spread everywhere when there's a story about Rockstar.

http://venturebeat.com/2011/08/04/google-we-didnt-co-bid-on-...

If he did, they'd just yell that he put everyone in life-threatening danger, like they did with Manning and also Wikileaks. I guess he wanted to avoid that level of accusations, although people like Mike Rogers still say that about him anyway:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131223/02311625673/rep-mi...

You should hold it at 30C3 instead (unless it's too late to sign-up now).

NSA didn't need to backdoor DES when they just forced everyone to use weak keys:

> 1979 - Present, DES: The Data Encryption Standard was altered by the NSA to make it harder to mathematically attack but easier to attack via Brute Force methods. The original version of DES, called Lucifer, used a block and key length of 128-bits and was vulnerable to differential cryptanalysis. NSA requested that the already small DES key size of 64-bits be shrunk even more to 48-bits, IBM resisted and they compromised on 56-bits11. This key size allowed the NSA to break communications secured by DES.

http://ethanheilman.tumblr.com/post/70646748808/a-brief-hist...

This is why any known NSA employee from security standards groups (including IETF and Trusted Computing Group [1]) must be forbidden to participate in the making of that standard. Their role there can only be seen as to facilitate weakening of the standards, either by weakening the algorithms themselves, or if that's too hard and/or obvious, to convince everyone else to use a weaker version of it (which NIST kind of tried to do with SHA-3 recently, too).

As long as there's any chance of NSA being involved even remotely in a security standard, I'm going to lose faith in that whole standard and the group.

[1] - http://www.securitycurrent.com/en/writers/richard-stiennon/i...

Recalling her is the only option if she doesn't resign from the position of Chief of Senate Intelligence. She's way too dangerous in that position to be left there. No real reform of the NSA will happen with her there. I still remember how disgusted I was with her when she kept asking everyone to just end it with the debate already and just extend FISA Amendments Act until 2017, last year.