walid

Well do consider that Google Maps/Earth don't zoom too much because of security and privacy reasons. If you consider everyday technology that is accessible like https://www.urthecast.com/ and how clear it is then it wouldn't be impossible to get clearer imagery from spy satellites. Maybe not actual text but a blurry view of that 6 inch touch screen.

You set a scenario for a potential disaster but what has surveillance done to protect those in times square on new year. This question has no answer and the answer if it exists is NOT something a democracy has access to.

So if surveillance is an answer to a potential terror plot then what needs to be known is whether it can actually be effective. Terror plots are not the norm of human life. They are feared more because we humans are designed by nature to be afraid first when we see a lion, run away and think later. If we stood there contemplating the possibility of of having a deep conversation with that lion that lion would have managed to have a meal deep in its stomach. Thought is very low on mother nature's agenda. Even other great apes don't comment here! Basically we are more afraid of the danger because we are primed to be so. I guess what I'm trying to say is that while fear is a danger is a logical thing it shouldn't be the only thing to consider when deciding on surveillance. Currently it is the only reason presented to the public and it is not good enough on its own.

On the 2 points you raise:

1/ I agree with you on the premise that it is somehow inevitable but it is a lawless arena today.

2/ Also the single person does end up having more capability but also protection from them is also more possible.

But the problem with it is that in its current form surveillance is secret and the decision of action based on the surveillance is done in secret. There is an exclusion of democracy in any country when it comes to surveillance. Laws governing response to surveilled information are non-existent. This means we don't as a people have known effective means of using surveillance nor can we come to know unwanted side effects. Also citizens of a democracy are treated as unqualified individuals to know about surveillance. There used to be a caste system in the past of people who were worthy and those who are not. Kingdoms, dictatorships and communist states are the classical examples. Today the caste system is whether you belong to the surveillance community or not. Yes we need it but we need it to be governed by rules. Surveillance is a product of wanting to have an upper hand on the international landscape however we are discovering that it is slipping into domestic situations like the parallel construction cases exposed by Snowden. So while surveillance is inevitable and necessary it really is the wild wild west of government.

I just remembered. Mubarak the ex-dictator of Egypt became a dictator because of the surveillance apparatus created by his predecessor Jamal Abdul Nasser.

No the comment is not about dictators, it is about democracies falling.

Update: take for example google/twitter/facebook and how they have a lot of control over what we do online. Because they have that info they can influence our lives. Facebook's mood experiment is a recent example. Also if a picture of an election candidate is shared a lot, that candidate gets more votes by causation. Google/twitter/facebook don't have a political agenda behind their abilities and people are concerned about their influence. It makes more sense to be concerned about politically controlled agencies.

Yes.

OMG this guy is trying so hard to be the ultimate contrarian!

The true prior art is the door bolt. Slide to unlock. Bringing the same method and procedure to a phone or car shouldn't warrant patent protection.

The right move for the wrong reasons.

> We engage in controlled risk.

This is probably why your children are much less prone to socially objectionable activities; they get it out of their system.

On the other hand, I think it is the easy access of information and videos on the Internet about everything that help younger people be less curious about what will happen if they do this and that. I don't think it is parents stopping their kids or the neighbours calling the police. Neighbours used to call the police in the past too. Those police were the parents themselves.

Cool but a rather restrictive license.

Most likely it is your extensions. I have the same issues when I load one particular extension which I can't live without. Unfortunately Firefox's major weakness is its major strength.

The word processor can spay the Firevixen :)

The CEOs should have gone to jail for this. They literally conspired against honest workers.

This is why I'm concerned. With Google pushing the price of online storage down and Box filing for its IPO we might end up with a damaged reputation of online storage companies and result in probably tanking Box's future revenues. The biggest loser will be us consumers since we'll end up with less choices if companies go bust.

Will this end up devaluing Dropbox in its future IPO?

I rely a lot of searching the history and bookmarks from the address bar while the search box heads directly to the search engine and suggests instant results. I also like the privacy I get for not feeding everything I type into Google.

> -Cease copying Chrome's UI

Is it because you want Firefox to be distinct with its own aesthetic or that Chrome is ugly. I don't understand why people keep on bringing this up as if there is much in Chrome's UI to copy. Chrome UI is just tabs with a menu button to the right. And it is open source, a.k.a you may copy it if you will.

Will the CEOs ever go to jail for this. This is clearly more than a TOS violation, which can land people in jail.

Well, the ISS is older than XP so I'm not surprised that it was upgraded to XP sometime later.

C'mon. There's a little of extra news that wasn't published before. It wasn't known who got the virus on board and that part about Kaspersky knowing about it is new to me.

Well, your comment made me read the whole article before commenting. The reference to Pluto made me hit the back button.

Although I'm very much miffed by the excessive surveillance of every country these days I don't find this to be the same. Companies and organizations do have the right to check up on people's activities in some manner. If your car wasn't paid for and it belongs to the bank now, I think the bank has the right to know where it is to repossess it. I think this is one of the ugly truths of reality rather than a matter of abusive behavior.

I read a half of the article and it doesn't seem to mention where from, but all you need is a camera with image recognition. Number plates are much easier to spot than faces since they are very uniform and flat and would only be translated in an image.

I think this is a matter for regulation because unlike a regulation deciding what you can and can't do, this is a regulation of advertising your product. App developers, myself included, have a responsibility of being honest to customers about what they are getting. Currently many freemium app descriptions tout the "free" and intentionally divert buyers attention from the fact that they have to pay later. Payment advertising is sometimes completely ignored and players feel that they are buying as a form of game play rather than as a buying transaction tied to real money.

The original story in Arabic talks about sources publishing online but don't provide any link or other info. Searching for the story online in Arabic only comes up with Syrian news sites and Syrian allies news sites warning against an the Islamist group; in other words the regime and its allies seem to be fear mongering against the resistance. No other credible news site is publishing the story. CNN has published that another site published the story, also no links or proof.

I don't know for sure what happened and I can't prove anything. But this seems so one sided and heavily politicized kinda like ObamaCare Death Panels.

In your first point you skip that the reason why Aaron was able to get into the system was that MIT was a breeding place for the hack culture and didn't clamp down on security like keeping the door of the switches closet open and allowing highly privileged access to its network. If it was locked or entry was prohibited then it would have been outright against set rules. It wasn't. This means according to MIT's followed traditions he did what everyone else was capable of doing and it was not against the law because heavy use of the network and access to the switches room was allowed.

As for your second point it doesn't hold. The kerfuffle around the NSA is partly because it was collecting data from the ISPs without a warrant and 4th amendment rights are being violated. In this case MIT is in the same position as the ISPs while not having immunity over their actions like ISPs did.

LMAO!

Don't be baffled. When was the last time you went to the movies to see the ordinary life of that normal person called Tony Stark. Buzz is what we desire. As for the TCP/IP and OSI differences, you are being slightly iffy. While they are definitely designed differently, TCP/IP only coalesces OSI layers to make programming simple for the task at hand.

Well I have to say that some command/API names on unixes for example are horrible. What's up with killing processes. Can't we just say terminate. Since software is mostly developed by a geeky bunch we sometimes forget that we are actually making something to be presented in an appealing manner to a buyer/licenser.