Posts by Do Not Fold Spindle Mutilate

Tomorrow Water thinks we should colocate datacenters and sewage plants

I worked at a firm which integrated the cooling system with the city water supply. The cold water, in Canada, is cold so that means less air conditioning expenses. That was fine until the city had to shut off the water supply for a few hours to do some sort of repair and there was not enough air con to compensate. So the data centre had to shut down for a while.

No change control? Without suitable planning, a change can be as good as an arrest

Level 99: Managment actively tries to stop controling changes.

I am retired because:

1) Management said give all the passwords to production to the consultant. Your job is not to look over his shoulder. You will start supporting the application in production at 8 am tomorrow.

2) Management threatened to have me fired when I was clearly stating that the disaster recovery site cannot recover our production systems.

3) Management chose to not put quantity and quality into the testing procedures. I was told that if the change does not work in production it should be rolled back. Management did not understand that rolling back the change would require a service outage of more than 24 hours and did not know if the user's application could handle an outage of that length.

(The manager responsible for disaster recovery was eventually fired. A whole bunch of professional dbas left because of management wanting speed not quality.)

Photographer seeks $12m in copyright damages over claims Capcom ripped off her snaps in Resident Evil 4 art

As an owner of a copy of the physical book, the book says:

On the cover of the book "Visual Research for Artists, Architects and Designers". "

On the frontmatter "All rights reserved".

At the back "About the CD-ROM", ... "The CD images can be used by artists and designer is developing concepts, preparing presentations for clients, and communicating visual information to others. "

The readme.txt on the cd also says "All images copyright (c)1996 by Judy A. Juracek"

If the exact image is used then there a copyright problem. I looked at this exact phrase a couple of years ago to see if the images could be used in non-commercial manner but decided the keyword and intention of the book is research. Look at the pictures get inspired but create your own work.

UK to introduce new laws and a code of practice for police wanting to rifle through mobile phone messages

Re: The device can only be examined by police investigating or prosecuting crime

I've been stopped by cops a couple of times for "routine checks" that are clearly not investigating a specific crime but that the individual cop wants to get a promotion by nabbing more criminals. The cop chooses to harass individuals who have no power in the current situation.

I understand that there is a lot of sarcasm in your comment but the cops were always implying they were investigating while just doing random searches.

You only need pen and paper to fool this OpenAI computer vision code. Just write down what you want it to see

Re: Perfect crime

Jedi? No, this is IBM's "This page intentionally left blank" style guide:

https://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/9780132101301/samplepages/0132101300.pdf

Of course style would be overpriced, and the page is no longer actually blank.

Apologies for the wait, we're overwhelmed. Yes, this is the hospital. You need to what?! Do a software licence audit?

Oracle did not (does not?) have software to SUM() the number of licences needed.

Some of Oracle's licences are by named person, that is a specific user and not their non-sick replacement which would require another license. Other licences are based on ever changing Oracle based voodoo estimate of cpu chip power with multicpu costing more. Other licences depend on who might use the results so if the public uses the results then 8 billion licenses. Oh yea, since you feel that the software is not perfect and need a development, test, and acceptance test databases all of those must be paid for separately.

Computer Associates used to be very very bad for licenses. They met Ross Perot of EDS and so on.

It makes MicroSloth method of counting licences / seats like paying a gas bill.

Theranos destroyed crucial subpoenaed SQL blood test database, can't unlock backups, prosecutors say

But it takes lots of work to look stupid

Lost a password or lost a unguessable password? Perhaps the government should release the encrypted version and put a reward on cracking the encryption. Anyone up for using John the Ripper? https://github.com/openwall/john

This is the reason why I removed my name from a companies software. I thought they were going to get sued and would go after the patsy dba. Left the company to y2k work.

After ten years, the Google vs Oracle API copyright mega-battle finally hit the Supreme Court – and we listened in

The purpose of the Supreme Coart is not to decide who is guilty.

As a non-lawyer Canadian former programmer and DBA, was told by a lawyer that the Supreme Court of Canada does not decide who is guilty because that is all done by the lower courts. The purpose of the Supreme Court was to hear new strong novel arguments about how lower courts were misunderstanding the law. If the U.S. Supreme Court is a similar body, then the question in front of the court is Google's proposal to overturn another court's decision. I have not read the other courts decision. If the US Supreme Court rules in favour of Oracle but does not make any grand statements about software in general then not much will change other than money moving from pocket to pocket. My own feeling is that Google wanted to use the organization and structure expressed in the API, that is to me an API can express new ways of organizing complex things and therefore is subject to copyright, but was unwilling to pay the price. They copied the code and got caught. They should have created their own virtual machine, or paid for a licence from someone else. Having the same definition for one function is not a problem but having > 11,000 lines is copyright violation.

I hated doing support for Oracle databases because Oracle was expensive and many thing did not actually work. Oracle did not have a reliable program to do backups while I was supporting them so each company had to write their own. So I don't want Oracle to get any money but that is legally correct decision, from my point of view.

The author of the article, and many of the commentators have added valued knowledge about the case. Thank you. If you want to listen to the oral arguments

https://www.c-span.org/video/?469263-1/google-v-oracle-america-oral-argument

For other cases:

https://www.c-span.org/supremeCourt/

Internet use up 40 per cent in San Francisco Bay Area – but you know what’s even higher? Yep, alcohol, weed use

Dont pass that spiff cause it is tainted with spit.

You don't share a drink because bugs will be shared with it. So don't pass around the spiff

Alleged Vault 7 leaker trial finale: Want to know the CIA's password for its top-secret hacking tools? 123ABCdef

Re: toxic personalities are cheaper than well rounded personalities.

There are brilliant people with well rounded personalities, or at least non-toxic personalities. The issue is that they have the ability to get hired by more companies for a variety of jobs. The company that hires a brilliant but toxic person is not willing to pay the dollar cost for a rounded person. For example while taking a masters degree a group project was required. One of the students did their full share of the work and would later give polite helpful, teachable, comments to the others in the group about their parts. She did this all through the group project and she was doing another non-bachelor degree program at the same time. I don't know who would have the money to hire her but she deserved five to ten times my salary.

Hey GitLab, the 1970s called and want their sexism back: Saleswomen told to wear short skirts, heels and 'step it up'

British Columbia (Canada) high heels cannot legally be required.

Was the meeting to be in Vancouver, BC, Canada or Vancouver, Washington State USA? The BC Workers Compensation Act prohibits the mandatory wearing of high heels. https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2017PREM0047-001151

I also thought the employer could not force women to wear a dress. The women are allowed to wear pants. This was a ruling because a restaurant required the women servers to wear high heels and a black dress. (I have not heard of any discrimination law suits about guys being fired for wearing a dress.)

Gin and gone-ic: Rometty out as IBM CEO, cloud supremo Arvind Krishna takes over, Red Hat boss is president

Did the desire to hire Arvind Krishna cause IBM to buy Red Hat?

Which came first? Did they know of Krishna and wanted to find out more about how he runs a company or did they buy Red Hat then found a replacement for the CEO? Was buying Red Hat part of the hiring negotiation? "If you want me, you have to buy Red Hat." or was the purchase of Red Hat completely and separately done from the hiring of a new ceo?

I've been away from mainframes for about three decades so sorry if this question is not good. But does IBM actually design and manufacture its own hardware or is IBM mainly a software / services company?

After four years, Rust-based Redox OS is nearly self-hosting

Do you have links for further reading on your ideas?

Your comments interest me and I would like to learn more about them. If you could, do you have links to articles which expand on your comments? Specifically (1) MicroKernal problems ex Minix vs Linix. (2) Drivers need direct memory interaction.

I took an operating system course many decades ago, when the machine was an IBM 370 and was just being replaced by Amhdal. I am now a retired former DBA.

Thank you.

White Screen of Death: Admins up in arms after experimental Google emission borks Chrome

So what are you going to do about it? Replace Chrome with Edge?????

Would the experiment code gone over to Microsloth and pushed out with Edge?

https://s270.photobucket.com/user/ltattrie/media/humour/EDGE%20browser.png.html

Captain's coffee calamity causes transatlantic flight diversion

Turbulance would throw the coffee cup in a cup holder all over the place.

If the pilots put on the seat belt sign because there might be turbulence do they also belt down their coffee cups? When things get thrown around the passenger area are things thrown around the cockpit also? (Do pilots get airsick?)

For real this time, get your butt off Python 2: No updates, no nothing after 1 January 2020

Chromebooks have an expiry date

Gosh, Gevil corporation makes there chromebook os expire in six years. After that no security fixes so the owner becomes a magnet for ransomware.

The real reason the expiry is a problem is that most companies expect that software should be completely free. Companies are not willing to pay now and not willing to pay later. To get a budget for an upgrade (not python) I told the CFO that auditors would not approve the financial statements because the software was out of date and could not be relied upon. Only when the CFO realized his job was "on the line" did he authorize a minimal amount of money to do minimal upgrades.

Our hero returns home £500 richer thanks to senior dev's appalling security hygiene

Password must be politally correct

When I was hired a god id had the password 'god', without quotes of course. So after a couple of months the password had to be changed and since there was no minimum length another new hire changed the password to 'allah'. A bunch of Evangelist Christians complained verbally. I replied that I would change things and what I actually changed was the title of the standards 'Bible' to 'Policy and Procedures.'

Fed-up graphic design outfit dangles cash to anyone who can free infosec of hoodie pics

If a hacker spilled data onto the world wide ocean would it look like this?

https://s270.photobucket.com/user/ltattrie/media/DeepWater_data_spill.jpg.html?sort=4&o=3

Spri-Mobile? T-Print? Time to think of a nickname: The Sprint/T-Mobile US merger is go

Re: T-Mint

The new company nick name should be sPILE. The connection is there but the through put is a SPrint-tmobILE.

I say, Eaton boys are flogging spare capacity on data centre UPS systems to keep lights on in Ireland

Re: Really?

You are correct Sir! The symptom is the energy company cannot supply enough power to customers is a good warning that the UPS will be needed for your own purposes. For example when there is a high demand for power, there is a higher chance the power will go out. A company with a UPS which plugs into this contract has management betting that there will be small general power reductions which can be resolved by the UPS but not small general power reductions followed by a large power reductions where the UPS is needed for the data centre.

I am of the opinion that UPSes cause as many outages as they solve but the hope is that the outages are at scheduled days and times.

Ever yearn for the Windows 95 shutdown sound? TADA! There's an Electron app for that

Always changed the sound to ...

The shutdown sound was almost always changed to Daffy Duck saying "No, No, No. Not the wed wone. Don't ever press the wed wone." On occasion it was changed to Porky Pig "That, that, that's all folks."

I'm sure I have proper id. It must be in my coat.

Western Dig revenues take $0.82bn spanking from US tax shake-up

Re: Why are they western?

The reason companies register in the US is because that is where the investers put their money. If a company wants to build a new plant and needs money the US with all of those Wall Street brokers can find you the money. It may be shares, bonds or other types such as a separate company which builds buildings to lease to you, separate companies which will lease machinery. Thus the only money up front which you need is for the new specialized equipment allowing an expansion to be riskier buy initially cheaper. Money comes from all over the world to the US to be invested so if you want investment money go to where it is which is the US.

Developers, developers, developers: How 'serverless' crowd dropped ops like it's hot

Thank you Mr. Pott for the informative article.

Your article explained Lambda in a way that was understandable to me. Someone in a companies management will end up saying "We can't budget for AWS / Lambda because things just get triggered and we don't know why. Just pay the $#$$%! bills."

Merry Christmas and hope for no "emergency" calls from users.

Past, present and future: A year in hyperconvergence

Supported by == Spam ad by

Please support truth in advertising by clearly stating the article was paid for by HPE.

Major Oracle E-business suite upgrade coming in 2019. Or maybe 2020

Headline should be Oracle admits "expensive licences have no new functionality for on prem"

Godwin could not say what was in the future releases because he does not know what will be in them. So the headline is completely wrong. The correct headline could be "Major Fear Uncertainty and Doubt for 2019 or 2020 or when the world comes to an end." or "Customers burn money for licenses while Larry fiddles with point releases." or "No News, Read Ads, Keep Moving On."

Welcome to the Rise of the Machine-to-Machine. Isn't it time to 'block off' some data ducts?

Web 4 all, web sees all.

The main new change is that most people have a smart phone so they are very frequently using the internet. The previous Web versions were about removing walls between people and companies but now the people are feeling too exposed so they want to build walls. For example software can be purchased at an online Microsoft store or an online Apple store but the store takes a significant percentage of the gross before passing on the rest to someone else. They have replaced the physical mall walls with an electronic mall walls. Apple has done very well at its walled garden.

Has the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon been reduced by a couple of degrees because of the connections online? If so, are people trying to regain their privacy by building barriers in the next version of the web.

As a side note I would suggest that the Web 4.0 is the quickly updating applications which automatically download new versions. I no longer seem to have full control or understand of what is happening on my computer or phone.

Tesla's driverless car software chief steps down

Driverless software now has Driverless Management

Seems like a perfect fit. If there is no need for a car driver in the car because the software does all the work then there is no need for an organization driver, management, to create all of the obtuse emails and weird vision statements.

Lenovo's 2017 X1 Carbon is a mixed bag

Re: Heavy Sleeper

To Hibernate a pc likely requires that a copy of all memory needs to be written to the SSD. So very suddenly, on my machine 8 gb, a lot reads and multiple writes need to happen on the SSD because of the very nature of how a SSD works. Then in a very short period of time the power will be shut off. A couple of years ago on my machine the retail store replaced the SSD twice because of failure. Both failures happened when I told Windows to hibernate. The clerk suggested that the hibernation was the issue and suggested not to do that in the future. I have not done hibernation and the problem has not happened again but that does not prove that hibernation was the problem and newer SSDs may not have the same problem. Oh and by the way, if a SSD fails the whole SSD is unreadable so you need to ensure you have a good working backup and restore procedure.

Ditching your call centre for an app? Be careful not to get SAP-slapped

Oracle wanted to charge for a million users or more

A decade ago Oracle told my employer that a web facing application would have to pay for every potential user. Since everyone in the city with a population of a million could use the application then everyone would need a license. The salesperson was hoping the commission would be enough to retire. We changed things and fudged things enough to hope we were not violating the licenses far enough to be sued.

Dear sysadmin: This is how you stay relevant

IBM Canada to get additional $6 million to do system work outside office hours

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/cost-to-fix-payroll-system-could-hit-50-million-ottawa-reveals/article31755962/

" For instance, the government will pay to ensure that system maintenance takes place during evenings, overnights and weekends to improve capacity during the day" Gosh, was there someone actually signing contracts which allowed disruptive system maintenance to occur during the day?

Microsoft drops dogma, open-sources Chakra JavaScript engine

What is "Lowerer" in the green box in the purple box?

Parser and Interpreter are words that I understand but what is a Lowerer in the context of JIT? I've done some searches but cannot find anything that is related.

This storage startup dedupes what to do what? How?

Does anyone have stats on how often hash collisions occur in zfs or netapp?

If zfs and netapp have options to compare the whole block when a hash collision occurs is there any reporting on how often the collisions occur? A faster hash routine might have some collisions but if those collisions are handled properly then an overall speed up may happen.

Dell buying EMC: Is this the end times, or the road to salvation?

Will Dell put the large dollars into R&D?

Dell may be able to reduce costs by replacing specialized sales people with online orders. But if the money is not put toward products that work well together then the whole company will fail. I would hate to see Dell become another Computer Associates which bought companies and then soaked the customers for maintenance but provided no improved products.

If Dell can make the commodity hardware work smoothly together in an enterprise cloud then Dell will be bigger and better than HP, and Amazon. VM is an engine that could drive many changes if given directions and money.

I cannae dae it, cap'n! Why I had to quit the madness of frontline IT

Your health is more important than the company.

You are completely correct Trevor. My recommendation is to try to save as much of your own money so that you can retire as soon as possible. The companies are only going to cut IT spending even more. The stress can or will take a toll on you physically and / or mentally. Eating junk food or sugar to keep going and alcohol to wind down in moderation is fine but the stress can push the body too far. Watch out for depression and see a medical doctor if needed. The people here and many others do care about you.

I almost got fired because I kept on complaining that the expensive off site recovery process didn't work. It took three long years before things were corrected. Every lightening storm still makes me jumpy.

How good a techie are you? Objective about yourself and your skills?

Let me tell you about CIPS then sign it because it is meaningless.

CIPS wants to portray itself as Medical Doctors, Engineers and Chartered Accountants but they are not. As a CIPS member for more than a decade let me tell you that CIPS is an organization for consultants to meet for drinks. Salespeople and managers are CIPS members. There are very few people who do anything more than sit in meetings, talk and send emails. CIPS talks big but that is because the regular jobs of the members is to talk big. If signing the form means that you can get another consulting job then sign the form because that is the purpose of CIPS which is to show that the members are better than the people behind the counter at Best Buy. There will be many CIPS members that have been in similar situations where the formal education does not match up with the check boxes on the cross border forms. It might be worthwhile to hire someone to get the specifics about the requirements for cross border working.

My understanding is the standards for other "professional" jobs such as hair cutting and fixing car brakes have more requirements because they are considered to have a direct consequence on the health of the public than the IT jobs. That is the context of the professionalism. It is wonderful that you take your professionalism seriously and I encourage you on that because it distinguishes you from all the others who don't give a damn.

Your knowledge, experience, and that you care about the quality of the product given to the customer says much more about you than a formal degree from a self serving group such as CIPS or a self serving institution such as a university. I also hate calculus and have never used it outside of a calculus course so I feel it does not need to be taught to 99% of the people who are required to learn it. A practical course on statistics would have been much much more worthwhile.

If you cannot decide what to do, do what I did: buy a sports car. You can see the Miata being driven around in the snow even in the middle of winter.

Sysadmin with EBOLA? Gartner's issued advice to debug your biz

Re: I love Gartner. In Canada we had the SARS epidemic

Management asked our software group to consider what should be done if SARS started to spread through the town. Our group was able to define what could be done by working from home. We felt the biggest problem would be getting management to declare an internal emergency to focus on production support and stop all development. We hoped, assumed, that contract developers would be still willing to work from their homes on production support if they were still being paid.

SDI Wars: EMC must FORGET ARRAYS, adapt or disappear

Is this a hardware+software company having trouble moving to software only company?

As the price of commodity hardware drops the buyers have a harder time to justify the higher price of custom hardware. Is EMC having trouble moving from a hardware + software company to mainly software company? Other companies have had big internal political problems when the people who controlled the hardware side of the company were losing political power to the software side. Is the price of commodity SSDs going to drop so low that traditional spinning rust manufacturers go out of business? In some sense the part of the disk controller software has moved to the ssd controller and is included in the commodity price.

Oracle does not innovate or create new products that customers want. EMC does try to be better. I could see EMC / VM trying to create a software defined "lights out" infrastructure but it will take much internal pushing aside the hardware team. In contrast Oracle would do a lot marketing with a rebranded snake oil Java vm and only achieve huff and puff.

Facebook, Apple: LADIES! Why not FREEZE your EGGS? It's on the company!

Men will be paid less than women

Since men cannot receive this benefit this is discrimination against men. The employer must pay equal money for equal work. Women who choose while young not to have children will also not benefit and thus will receive fewer benefits.

It's a pain in the ASCII, so what can be done to make patching easier?

For home use the free Secunia scanner updater to check and update lots of aps

The Secunia scanner updater will check for many apps and provide the updates. Free for home use. It is not quick but it does work and updates lots of open source packages.

http://secunia.com/vulnerability_scanning/personal/

What I'm not sure of is how much info they collect on the application usage and then sell it to the world.

Twitter can trigger psychosis in users

Author says 'Twitter psychosis is not real.'

An interesting review by someone who studies neurology:

http://neurocritic.blogspot.ca/2014/07/twitter-psychosis-as-cultural-artifact.html

Dumping gear in the public cloud: It's about ease of use, stupid

Thank you Trevor for the thoughts.

Thank you. It is items like this that keep me reading your writings. I would also suggest that the some decision makers do not see the near by people as useful so a "shortcut around bureaucracy" is seen as being efficient.

We sent a probe SIX BILLION km to measure temperature of a COMET doing 135,000 km/h

Forcast for the next 10 days: cold

-70 C and that is not considering the wind chill. The wind is at least 135,000 km/h but it is likely a dry cold.

Speedy storage server sales stumps sysadmin scribe: Who buys this?

Or perhaps ...

1) The user's requirements of the servers is very skewed with very important transactions on one server and non-important stuff on all others. Thus the people budget do not share the money for overall benefit but choose products which have direct benefit to their specific server.

2) The very important transactions are very time sensitive and there cannot be delays that might happen if other servers were doing heavy i/o such as being completely refreshed. If a server is being used for real time trading of stocks then the user might have a fear of unknown caused delays which rumor might be virtualization.

3) The CSA is relatively newish so there is heavy advertising to tell potential buyers about the product. I wonder if the purpose is actually to postpone upgrading the server. If the cost of a new server is very significant and requires much management justification, planning, reporting, budgeting then the CSA might increase transaction throughput enough to postpone the managers paperwork.

Where the HELL is my ROBOT BUTLER?

Re: GM is recalling millions of cars because of faulty 50 cent ignition switch.

My apologies for not being clearer. Will you trust a robotic butler holding a carving knife to understand how to carve a roast without carving you? If voice commands rely on cell tower connections to a another site for processing what will happen when the connection is suddenly dropped like many current cell phone connections? The quality of products should slowly go up but it will not happen quickly the way Trevor is suggesting. I am not someone who bought a GM car but someone who bought a Ford Pinto with Firestone 500 tires many decades ago. While Ford's quality has gone up GM's seems to have gone down. As someone who has fought Oracle to try to get them to increase the quality of their software I found that "quality" was often only skin deep and not to be relied on.

GM is recalling millions of cars because of faulty 50 cent ignition switch.

Trevor is arguing that thin client will prevail but I am not so sure that it will happen quickly. If all things work correctly it may happen soon but if things are buggy and connections, files, phone calls, transactions are dropped, lost or unreliable then the fat client will continue. In general, with proper competition, software quality is getting better.

The robot butler should not be made by GM which is currently recalling millions of cars due to a faulty ignition switch. It will be an interesting era when self driving cars (tired and drunk), trains (oil cars exploded killing many), and airplane (Malaysian airlines), start to be allowed or become required because of presumed better safety.

Who will recover your data if disaster strikes?

An easy to use backup to a different geographic area would be good.

Many backups are either on site or to a near by site. But serious weather problems and electrical blackouts can happen over a larger area so an easy cloud backup to a different geographic area would be good.

Disaster recovery? What do you do if you have outsourced your call center to the Philippines and a hurricane hits? What is the average wait time?

How many apps does it take to back up your data?

I do not believe that a single backup application is the best because it does not not know the specific gritty application details however a general purpose backup application is great for all of those miscellaneous applications. Use an OS specific backup app to backup the OS because there seems to be hidden files and files with extra "this file cannot be read". Database have to have their own backup software to ensure transactionally correct backups.

Oh yea, also make a separate small "in case of emergency" backup which can be used to create a minimal system to start the recovery process.

A multiapp method is way more work but the single applications do not seem to have the documentation that I would like see and understand that the application provider has thoroughly tested the app. For example try to get a list of files which the backup application does not backup.

It's now or never for old sysadmins to learn new tricks

Very true and applies to database administrators as well.

The ideas are very true and apply to database administrators. I chose to retire because the cuts were happening without the proper software to automate the monitoring and updates. Also Oracle was directly telling upper management that their software would do all the work of a dba. May I suggest a slight difference in attitude between us. The article seems to imply that the cause is the financial cuts from the customers but there should also be the technical person automating there own job out of existence. If similar work has been done multiple times then automate as much as possible and move on to larger problems. But what are those larger problems? Perhaps much better failover / backup / recovery or quicker security patching, or better testing / auditing to insure high quality software infrastructure?

A real problem is the market place seems to change quicker with Apple and Microsoft causing massive changes in the OS and interface in a relatively short period of time, it becomes difficult to set out a new path of what software product to learn.

There will always be a need for someone to install the NSA secret monitoring software.

Microsoft's cloud leaves manual transmission behind

Your cattle can be any colour as long as it is black.

Will the customers be willing to pay for your pet customizations if the cost of a cattle server is cheaper? Decades ago the same thing was being said by clerks filling out dozens of financial forms. All of those jobs are gone because most companies buy financial software packages. Now they are automating the jobs of the people who are left. Outside the world of computing when there is a significant price difference between a cheaper mass market product and a higher priced customized item lots of people buy the cheaper / cheapest. There is some market for tailors, independent mechanics and personal chefs but McDonalds servers billions of burgers. Would you like fries with your cattle server?

Bye. Turn the lights out when you are gone. I retired from being a dba because the companies treating me like a pet, a person, changed to treating me like cattle, an expense or a steer.

NSA Prism: Why I'm boycotting US cloud tech - and you should too

Canadian surveillance approved (today's headline Globe & Mail newspaper)

hi,

I agree with much of what you say Trevor but this is the front page headline on today's Globe and Mail:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/data-collection-program-got-green-light-from-mackay-in-2011/article12444909/ I am not surprised. The article does not have much detail but seems to say it has the telephone meta data. The article says "In Canada, a regime of ministerial directives - decrees not scrutinized by Parliament - have authorized the broad surveillance programs."