Posts by dssf

Facebook strips away a bit more of your privacy – but won't say why

"Check out with facebook"

BTW, yesterday, I passed a CVS store and saw on the display of at self checkout register "Check Out With Facebook", and thought .....

Do No Evil? This makes it all the more IMPERATIVE

Do No Evil? This makes it all the more IMPERATIVE that Google rolls out a patch to create a "vault" feature within our contacts.

Facebook and others should NEVER be allowed to just READ or access or download contact data wholesale. The biggest, most egregious evil google has so far committed is allowing 3rd party apps to read data of this nature, and, worse, that is has so far remained silent on the future of a vault feature. At least from where I'm sitting that what it appears to be.

Possibly attractive use of fb, maybe, for me...

If FB offered:

-- an alternative to indiegogo and the need for a paypal card

-- an escrow account to hold by receivings

-- to pay me and only me (based on my passport photo, or my thumbprint if i walk into their office and give a face pic and thumb print), minus a small fee

-- to help coordinate collection of the taxes for me

-- to help coordinate matching me with non-predatory investors or donors (donors preferred)

-- to help me craft an air-tight, ironclad legal contract to protec my intellectual property no matter what kind of counter-offer contract an "investor" (call some of them "end vestors")

-- to help destitute inventors re-establish creditworthiness, banking accounts, or a FB Debit Card from the Bank of FB (at least where I can use and receive funds -- I definitely would take cash advances/withdrawals to keep certain purchases anonymous, mind you...)

Then, THEN, boy would I ready to scan in my passport photo and share more info in my profile to more, RELEVANT marketing.

With all the BILLIONS in the bank FB has, fb, IBM, MS, Oracle, HP, and a slew of others in Silicon Valley could foster even MORE tech boom for the USA, or the USA and the world. The next tech boom might very well be not the cloud, but biotech. Until then, there are many ideas I'm sitting on, and I've be goddamned if I turn them over in a screwy contract, only to see them parsed, hacked up, whored out, and myself screwed out of royalties or future say in their use.

(C) 2013-08-30 DSSF (This is a summary of something I wrote only a few days ago, out of frustration, but had not made up my mind about where to send it. Thanks, ElReg for your timely artical and forum on this. Maybe it'll help me and countless others if I help facebook?)

(Yes, this is also a jab at indiegogo and at PayPal).

Google goes back to the future with SQL F1 database

I wonder how many countries envy such a query and campaign power

I wonder how many countries envy such a query and campaign power. Why, imagine the things that could be done if one replaced "AdWords" with "Crimes and achievements" and "Campaigns" with "persons and events", and so on.

Eventually, every living person will end up in such a database, and all his or her birth, education, socioeconomic, social, criminal, work, and health factors will be on tap for anyone needing a quick socket wrench or disposable "instant agent", but one who does not know that s/he really IS a TOOL, so to speak.

OTOH, employment agencies (government or commercial) could instantly force unemployed people to take on jobs to continuously receive benefits until a real, sustained job arrives.

Anyone collecting fingerprints form dining room glasses; hairs and bodily fluids from hotel beds and hangers; blood in emergeency rooms, hair in barber shops and salons, ANYONE wanting to be paid for clandestinely forwarding such materials to some drop box could be an instant agent.

How soon before, as a matter of "business survival" before companies like Google, Yahoo, MS, and others fine-tune their meta data collection to mesh with "brokers"? Pretty soon, we all could be part of....

YuNiMaTrIx 001, attached as a node in some pri/sec/tert ajunct....(well, to bring the Borg into this), and we won't necessarily have Swedish family names...

NSA: NOBODY could stop Snowden – he was A SYSADMIN

BTW, if the NSA allowed "Tor" or similar sytems to do remote login

BTW, if the NSA allowed "Tor" or similar sytems to do remote login, or used things like "Go To My PC" from virtually ghosty nodes, and relies solely on embedded, interspersed, sychronous and asynchronous creds (maybe some quantum-computer-like stuff), then all bets potentially could be off.

If Snowden worked alone, and bypassed quantum-like creds filtering, then, possibly he IS a genious. But, and tthis is a huge but, but if he had an accomplice, a deeply sympathetic one, then things may get ugly really fast -- assuming they knew the breech/breach (both spellings) would be investigated, the only thing could possibly resort to doing would be to put in system-wide account-compromising accesses and maybe even a few time bombs to make the investigation painful and take 10-20 years to unravel, in which case, Snond and his Mr/Mrs Punneymini might have lived those 10-20 years quietly and carefully, since everyone in the organization would be so compromised that most of them woulld have to be fired, not even transferred or even demoted. Just binned, without prejudice, which might mean some handsome severence packages in the even that no prospective employer would be insterested in hiring such terminated people.

Sucks all the way around -- except for those possibly receiving without-prejudice termination packages to retire and never apply for another Intel or SysAdmin job in this lifetime....

Holes like that can be costly, painful, and destructive to any nation's national security efforts. Effectively, Snond and any involvved accomplices may have may have for some time caused NSA to mean "Negated, Sieved, Abbotoired" until they plug the leaks, loopholes, and locks better.

"The NSA is reportedly only now piecing together the exact steps Snowden took to infiltrate its systems, including identifying specific users whose accounts he used to access documents. But there's no clear paper trail – investigators are said to be looking for red-flag discrepancies, such as accounts that were accessed while their owners were on vacation.

Once he began collecting documents, Snowden was surely also emboldened by the fact that, as a contractor working for Booz Allen Hamilton in Hawaii, he never once needed to set foot in NSA headquarters. Instead, he could access the files he wanted from a computer terminal some 5,000 miles away."

How about also looking for multiple and concurrently-used logins? Someone could be on vacation and legitimately be accessing a file under orders (not to work for more than 20 minutes, but to open a file and relate or communicate some critical number or name or term, then log off and resume vacation)?

How about if the Snarget (SnowdenTarget) is in a protracte meeting that surely is likely to involved being logged on to access training, reporting, or other reports? That person might legitimately be granted by IT to have 3 or 4 concurrent logins, crossing various zones, regions, buildings, and so on, either under one login name, or a login name but with different passwords, or different login names (to obscure WHICH employee is accessing files when a security breach cannot be allowed to show how much deep access a director has, say) and diffferent passwords.

Now, if the Snarget is in that meeting, and no alarms/tripwires are in effect, and if Snowden or a Snow-a-Like knows this and exploits it, it might be hard to prove who was doing what -- well, until enough auditors go over all the logins and parse them via a database. The database query might be as simple as (in lay language, not structured query language):

-- Get access info on the files known to be compromised

-- find the intermediate and presumed origin (travel path) of credentials/tokens/logins used to get to the files

-- find the servers that passed on/forwarded these credentials

-- display the time zones, normal working hours, and workstation locations for the user accounts involved

-- display the HR records showing valid work hours of the user accounts involved

-- display the Payroll records of the user accounts involved (to find terms, actuals, and non-hidden "consultants" and informants, etc

-- display the IT credentials/rights/escalated privileges histories

-- find banking and one-time payee records of user accounts for active and termed accounts

-- correlate all and look for anomalies for unions/sets related to NSA and NSA-contractors and NSA-approved "special login entities" (stools, triple agents, and similars)

-- correlate all with IT repair jobs and locate which data scrubs of sensitivce hardware have two or three-person control/integrity/wipe/destruction verification

-- interview/debrief all involved user accounts and nearby workspace colleagues for "intel" not in a database, about James Snond (Snowden/Bond)

Re: In response to "A" Key Removal..

Couldn't one who is quite skilled, without even being brilliant, just enter control codes or such to replace the missing "A" key from the keyboard? Or, add to the system, a file containing the necessary executable/binary, and with escalated privileges, traverse, hop, skip, and jump along and do login?

Just asking...

Snowden is great news for hybrid cloud says VMware

Isn't the "cloud" all smoke and mirrors, anyway?

Isn't the "cloud" all smoke and mirrors, anyway?

Just euphemistically/metaphorically elevated ether-meshes...

It is not as if a meterological cloud can just ffffffff away the bytes. What WOULD bite is if enough hardware got shut down, say, by EMP, tactically discharged over a period of weeks. No nukes are required, IIUC. If one is willing to kill the cloud base stations, the "cloud makers" will be dancing on hooves and prancing with wolves...

United Nations to grill US over alleged NSA bugging of its HQ – report

Re: Shows the danger of encrypted voice communications

Oh, sorry bout that.

I meant "underground restrooms", not "underground stations", hehehe.

BTW, in the Hangangjin station last year, i saw old women (over 50 or so), with haunched backs, stunted stature/height cleaning the platform ventilation ducts. One was on top of the rolling scaffold, the other pushing. They removed each and every vent register, took them to the at-floor/recessed water spigots, and hand/towel washed each one. BART doesn't even do that for the fucking TRAINS' IN-CAR ventilation. Hell, I'm more worried about ambient airborne pathogens in the train due to unchecked filth, not about terrorists. But, it was humbling, seeing those old ladies work harder than most people under 40 not in construction trades.

And, old women clean the restrooms even when men are urinating at a wall-mounted urinal. It's ordinary, non-problematic there, in SK. In the USA, it's grounds for screaming sexual harassment and to summon the police and almost cause a riot, figuratively speaking.

BTW, in SK, due to the proximity of NK, and the bellicosity about tturning SK into a roiling sea of flames, SK train stations -- every single one I've been in (dozens out of the hundreds), there are fire and chemical escape hoods, fire extinguishers, live-action and animated videos, even state-of-the-art LCDs and TV screens.

Shanghai's stations were similarly endowed, except they have the leg up by having toilet rooms, one-person-per, if I saw one under renovation correctly. The beauty o fthat is that if one eats excessive spicy stuff, no need to battle-clamp one's sphinctre while dawdling or mummy-sacheting to a toilet 5 levels and 100 feet above via a combination of escalators and mezzanine-level staircases that equal 2 full floor heights, hahhaha. Of course, we're speaking about different cultural values. The feces on SF's streets (I have to dodge them DAILY) constitutes a greater environmental and psychological threat to social order than do terrists -- well, so long as the terrists are not actually stiring shit up...

Re: Shows the danger of encrypted voice communications

Meanwhile, in Shanghai, the subway stations have gasoline/other sniffers that force most riders to comply, and the subways have toilets ON the platform, maybe 20 meters or more underground, whereas, in "world class city" San Francisco, any tourist or local exiting BART and MUNI at stations below ground will be greeted with a sign "Due to heightened security, all underground stations are closed indefinitely/until further notice", signs that have been up probably since 2001. (Is this the case in New York City, Los Angeles, Boston, or other places? Does anyone know? If so, that could point up what I posit in the next paragraph...)

I think it has less to do with security than it does with money and lack of desire to pay those pricey union sanitation engineers. Or, it could be a way to deprive IV-injection drugs abusers of a place to shoot up and pass out with blood painting the ceiling.

Anyway, if AQ was testing and toying with the US Intel community, their winning coups is in making the US run around impeding travel of tourists and US nationals alike, plus putting many people on edge, wasting money, and other downstream effects.

Fortunately, so far, nothing appears to be going on.

Re: Shame, well, maybe the UN and Germany aren't protecting Snowden (yet)

Because he went TO Russia with Love, and there is Putin on da Ritz?

Seriously, though, I wonder how this might have played in the 35-years sentencing of Manning. Is Manning's volcano seeming more akin to a baking soda experimental release?

The only way to undo Snowden's snowball or "Snowdenlanche" is to go back in time and state "You are being apprehended for whistleblowing/crimes you WILL commit."

The piercing of "inviolability" probably has been done by other governments, too, but as only Snowden's avalanche is under scrutiny (at least on this scale), then, for now, the USA will (unless this is all just political moaning for public consumption) probably have to gird up for economic blowback, as that may be deemed the only way to make a meaningful slap. Anything harder will just cascade into a global economic meltdown the world cannot withstand and will be loath to instigate.

OTOH, the USA may have snooped so much dirt on these other countries that they do not dare retaliate legally or economically as the USA could just trot out audio and video clips, and state "Say, do you recall the minutes of your meeting on 22 July, 2012, about 1500 hours, between the Secretary and the debriefed 'diplomats' discussing your cooperation with us, the USA? Imagine your domestic backlash if that were to somehow get out...."

Botched court doc outs Google as respondent in national security flap

Re: Don't they have a word-search to redact documents? Really?

Re: Don't they have a word-search to redact documents? Really?

OK, this one is jokes-free/politically-neutral...

In the 90s, what I used to do was:

-- Edit the doc

-- Think about the mistakes ms made with doc revisions (recall the one about the doc having something to the effect of "[client] is such an idiot and a waste of our time and efforts converting them to [product name]..."

-- Copy the text to a notepad file, to hell with special formatting (mostly gimmicky anyway, and showy-offy)

-- Close the original .doc/.lwp/.wp file saving it for future edits

-- Close the word processing app

-- Reopen the app

-- Paste in the TEXT FILE's contents

-- Re-do all the textual formatting, making NO incriminating or politically embarrassing commentary updates and adding/causing NO FURTHER revisions.

-- Save that document as "SANITIZED Verson of DOC [document name]

But, with massive work flow, CRM, CMS, and similar programs, data can be far-flung, and content control might be dodgy or troublesome if online/offline backups are mid-stream. So, some sort of parallel, mini, pre-publishing platform might be needed so that publishers can be more confient that embarrassing or contract-killing revisions do not resurface. All this, of course, presumes there is no malicious or mean intent to expose the embarrassing stuff.

In the case of court docs, find-and-replace should have been sufficient, especially with and without wildcard searches on the term "Google". Simply searching on "G*g*l* should have sufficed, unless the document is compount, and edited in real-time by other contributors/editors and too many in-stream saves are actively uindermining document sanitizers. In that case, an on-screen warning to finalize all edits to enable security sanitization to take place should have led to locking the file and forcing all involved to walk to a secure room to team-read the publication-pending document.

Well, in theory...

GOOGLE's BACK!

That wa some FAST delousing! I bet their server farms are smokkkkin' hahaha... (I don't smoke...)

Re: Google is working fine here

Section 31 will be on to you shortly, hehehe

my mistake. might be dns or something at the public library

since the library machines see google and blogspot. My tablet sees picassa, but not google or blogspot, tho.

Fun fun fun...

Seems confirmed

unless it is a local area issue, but a girl i interrupted in a restaurant also cannot access google.

A guy walking out said, "i applaud google for holding out as long as they did. At&t, those bastards, they rushed to help do everything they could to help them"... Well, time will tell what is up...

i meant gmail, lol...

but, i cannit access blogspot, either. Maybe google is doing housecleaning as an audit for an ass-ripping judge who may be quite angry right now....

Is anyone else having issues with accessing gmai, play, or google at all?

For the pas hour or so, it has been erratic, then inaccessinle. Other sites were for awhile, which might be due to google possibly falling over. Or, maybe it is just me...

i have not yet received any nsl todate,

i have not yet received any nsl todate, and certainly not since my last post that i have received any...

Pulsars: the GPS beacons of the cosmos

Re: @Emo (was: @Thesheep (was: @jake))

Jake, your use of the term "mea culpa" preceded mine, and makes me wonder about the astronomical odds off it in two different uses in the same topic.

Cheers!

Re: @Thesheep (was: @jake)

Wow! You're taking me back to 1992, when I bought my first computer:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80486DX2

Which had a 486dx2 66, a Spyder/Spider graphics card, tower casee, other stuff, and cost me about $1990. Back when home computers were FINANCED. Thanks for the memory lane trip/voyage!

"Black holes don't suck" But, they WILL

Blow you away with the awesome highly-localized compression and dialating crushingness.

OTHO, black holes could turn out to be all touchy-feely, as in Multi-Endpoint Anuses of the Uniwerse Cosmically Upending Leading Physicists Assumptions (MEAU CULPA), hahahha...

In THAT case, this WOULD be one "Fantastic Voyage" (in terms of the movie AND the song, jingling on a journey from one ass-end off the uniewers to the other. Iff that's so, then EVERYwhere in the uniwerse can be be equi-distributed ass-ends of the uniwerse, no better, no worse tan anyplace in the uniworse...

Maybe Crewman Daniels was shot backwards in time again?

Section 31, aka the NSA in current/old Earth 2013, will be setting temporal sslapp/sstymyy/zzapp coordinates for XP Deng. If he gets too close to threatening the Temporal Commission, XP will be "x'd" out, and his zeal in name Deng will be rewarded with a resounding (pulsars warbles and stellar nursery dazzling flashes) dong.

Kudos for the discovery, but don't let Admiral/Crewman Braxton come after you! He almost eradicated Janeway, were it not for some help by 7 of mine, umm, 9.

Seriously, thought, imagine if his/their discovery leads to finding a wormhole or "subspace eddy" or or other equivalent in the STreknobabble. It might do wonders for humanity if funding is directed to feeding probes of various sizes and signal strength into to find our where it ends up, or how many places they end up. Imagine the sudden surge of human focus, redirection away from other Terran issues. Why, with wormholes we could cover vast distances...

(SLAPPPPPPP)

Ah, shit, wait, i was forced to awaken from the dream of a lifetime. WTF, do I see Talosians and their jelanium veins throbbing?

Salesforce rival SugarCRM scores $40m from Goldman Sachs

For SugarCRM...

This must be "schweet"

For SalesForce, this might be an unwelcome cash-source-force horse...

British spooks seize tech from Snowden journo's boyfriend at airport

Re: Could be worse ... The beginnings of Section 31?

GCHQ probably has a multiphasic/bayronic quadrantal, triaxilating magneton scanner and can do a hghly localized baryon sweep to find the "data-transporting" DNA traveller...

On 2% of occasions, the invaded subject dies...

This may interest some, though:

"Journalist's Partner Threatens Legal Action Over Heathrow Detention"

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323608504579024644124166008.html

Maybe this is an exercise

Maybe this is an exercise to set a precedent in which one power will definitely nab a person of interest in a transit hub, and maybe via use of non-law-enforcement agents.

(Interesting that they did not assail him with charges of gay porn transport...)

How long before foreign powers start placing in in-transit centers "standby rendition artists/agents" who rotate between airports (to avoid suspicion if they were to stay in a single location (not in a hotel in the in-transit area, but in the waiting air/lounges) for more than 24 hours), waiting for a digital blurp containing the "go-grab code" to knock out or daze someone enough to make them compliant enough to put on a plane and whisk (wisk?) away to a non-interfering country?

If this is not already in the playbooks for these spooks, then I wonder why it has not happened yet, or at least not enough to be in the news. Maybe Snowden's arrival to the Russian airport with all those mazes of rooms, hallways, tunnels, and magic doors saved his ass from being nabbed by triple-agents playing more than 3 sides.

Nabbing someone's gear probably means something indeed was what they were after, or at least a copy of what they wanted. It may be that another party has another copy in transit, and he was a high-alert decoy, and some other undetected person in the loop slipped by. This probably was a high-stakes info transfer, and if they relied on just getting Miranda through, undoubtedly not going to have the right to have his equipment in his possession, would be an unsafe move.

But, keeping his gear away from him probably could mean:

-- the spooks who are scanning it found nothing incriminating, but just want to send a warning the world "we'll TAKE your shit from you even if you didn't personally do something wrong, if you are associated with someone we thoroughly despise.", or

-- it could be they used forensics techniques that somehow slipped up their search techniques

-- they found something, but it is heavily encrypted, will take some time, and might even be only a portion of what they are after, and is somehow possibly a dual-key to decrypt the other part of the file still out there (if such an encryp/decrypt process exists.

How long before confiscating a person's gear TURNS such people into "terrists"? Yes, we all are supposed to remember the mantra "back up, back up, back up!", but some people forget the meaning of having a reliable backup. Still, theft is theft, whether by a thief on the street or a government agent carrying a badge and unverified warrant.

Sust jome thandom roughts thrunning rough mi mynd

Facebook reassures adland: We've got s**tloads of users

Re: They May be Cooking the Books, Baking in New Users

Oh, in that "vein", fb can claim "we have shOtloads of new, blank slate users coming down the shoot, hahaha

They May be Cooking the Books, Baking in New Users

They May be Cooking the Books, Baking in New Users

In a bid for a seminally novel way of boosting new business.

This could be a "Corporate E-Z-Bake Oven" to profits....

Adding "gusto" and "spunk" to the growth, synergies, and low level of duplications, and eggstreamly high "active node count", hahaha

http://mashable.com/2011/08/01/facebook-expecting-option/

Now, to keep the daily ticker/status higher, they'll offer to select, upscale parents a "FLOGIN -- Fetal Login" apparatus, to "display 'baby's' heartbeat and love of Facebook..."

Talk about being "hooked at birth", hahaha. But, inactive users will internally be spoken of as "denoded", "lost connections", "latent reconnects", and "delayed packets" in the "stream of consciousness that is OURS".

First, babies were mostly "accidents". Silly people are "hatched". If the spawn of Satan, dropped out of a jackal's ass, hahaha. Now, babies will be "uploaded" then "downloaded".

Maybe Facebook will design and patent a premature "Borg Maturation Chamber", and Palo Alto will be the neural plexus? Facebook will "link and connect" people from -- not cradle to grave , but -- fertilization to decomposition...

Maybe some enter, prising, uninvited, un-end-vaded Swedish Swimmers will sneak in some "ball cutters" at the company's next all-male swim fest?

Samsung faces Brazilian rap: Factory bods work '15hrs without break'

Re: It is only getting worse.. This is SLAVish Copying and

This is SLAVish Copying and...

SLAVish DRIVING in the continuum of humanity and profits-seeking execs and amoral shareholders.

I wonder, though, will this be a TV News Channel story?:

Will Samsung be sued for slavish copying? Or, fined for Slave-driving. Details at 6....

Elon Musk unveils Hyperloop – the subsonic tube of tomorrow

Well, IF it works, then it will be

LIKE, OMG, TOTALLY Toobyouluhr....

Feds arrest rogue trucker after GPS jamming borks New Jersey airport test

How long before this or a variation of it is employed by cell phone thieves?

How long before this or a variation of it is employed by cell phone thieves?

It will be scary for some, but, evidence bags presumably do the same thing when the phone is in transit.

(IIRC, on /., or on theregister, it was mentioned that police use the bags to prevent owners or criminals whose phones were seized for investigations from disabling or remote-wiping the phones.

New blinged-up 'iPhone 5S' touted by Jobs FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE

Re: New iPhone? Does that mean...

"Future Imperfect"?

Hahaha, reminds me of an episode from Star Trek: The Next Generation. The way it is written up makes it seem the Phone has "parallels" (no relation to a VM, unless it is somehow tied in to parallel universes, which brings up the ST: TNG "Parallels" episode...)

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallels_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)

Funny how a blinged-up phone could be a "future charade", too.

Think of other blinged up phones, there may be some parallels. After all, Ryker and Worf had a nexus of "birthday" surprises. Maybe the iPhone will experience a "birthday" and alternate uniwerse, too?

Managed to drag Trek into this, but haven't considered any "communicator", PADD, VISOR, or fancy watch angles...

Oracle Team USA sailors admit breaking America's Cup rules

Re: Yeah, little technical things...lllolll...

Anyone using them may not be sailing, but they WOULD be "winging" it, hahaha....

And, to not be busted by officials/observers, they'd have to be flying on a wing and a prayer...

NSA gets burned by a sysadmin, decides to burn 90% of its sysadmins

Re: No people-

There will be carbon-based guards (not reinforced tungsten carbide guards with treads and flesh-searing-lasers/masers), just to make it possible to levy "murder" charges when one of these silos is flooded, gassed, or set alight (or, if you have a transporter, aloft). It's just that the guards do not truly understand how expendable they are.

Maybe in that case, if that is the ONLY reason they are there, they should thus know just how expendable they are, and maybe the WON'T be cried for.

Re: that machines are probably better at doing "Where's my spaceship already!?"

I think your spaceship is being built by Section 31. I'm just not sure whether the Temporal Integrity Commission has allowed Section 31 to stay in one or more than one timeline. You'll just have to wade into the stream and hope to find it.

US taxmen told to hush up shadowy drug squad unit laundering NSA intel

Well, Snowden's secure email got burned and run out of business...

What makes anyone think that "secure crypto" will hide what is truly criminal in endeavor or what any government *suspects* is criminal?

As for what software types or tools aid in such investigations, once again, "Visual Analytics", which I, IIRC, saw as far back as 1999 or 2004. It is a friggin' awesome, cool suite of tools. I like it because of its power and eye-candy-like drag-n-drop query interface, if that is what the visuals were when I stumbled upon the company's web site. I think it was around 99. Between tools or offshoot tools like Visual Analytics and live phone and email tapping, and keyboard and microwave sniffing, those on the shit list will be on it until prosecuted or until they cause a cold trail and fall off the radar because of some sense of integrity in agents who choose NOT to fabricate or enhance incriminating evidence.

I'm not FOR bulk recording, but then again, how can it be put back into the bottle? But, now that more and more people will be wary, those truly up to no good will have to go through a lot of expense to get out of what they are doing, mask it better, or muddy up the auditing process to end up being prosecuted for lesser time in the clink as opposed to multiple lifetiimes behind bars.

Those who are NOT doing anything but are somehow on the shit list/watch list better be satyrists, comedians, protected journalists, or or genuine but harmless nutters, or just some commentator all over the map as to be "unpinnable" (tho not impervious to framing, hahaha). In any case those who are not criminals and not harmful or opportunistic whistleblowers will have to learn to self-moderate. Self-moderation is probably the "fall back contingency" most governments, anyway. Cheaper to cultivate self-censorship than to imprison 20% of the country, warp or crash the economy through "holing" jobs, or killing off companies. These tools used against the crims can make iron-clad positions so that a company can be forced to come clean, change its board of directors, and preserve jobs rather than burn down a whole company if only the Board was corrupt with a few other non-Board officers' complicity.

Well, that is, except when enough of the employees were implicated and the Government fragged the entire company, as happened recently in a rare case.

Snowden's secure email provider Lavabit shuts down under gag order

Pre-emptive Denial of Receipt of Gag Order

Apparently, Levinson an plenty of people in his line of work who are known entities did not on their sites and in their correspondence/letterhead post "X number of of days and as yet not served a gag order/silencing letter; not yet supboenaed to submit information on a client..."

If they posted these regularly, then the next thing to display would be "any cessation of these daily tickers means you should be suspicious of us and burn your connections to, with, or through us for your own peace of mind..."

I've been saying that off and on, and I think I even put such language in an articles of incorporation for one business plan I filed, even though normally such matter is not submitted with an Articles of Incorporation submission. But, a coffee shop could be an unwitting participant in compromising its clients from WITHIN the demarc when the governments could and SHOULD do their dirty shit on their own instead of forcing proprietors to be their unnecessary conduit or else be burned out of an income stream. Way to go, uncle sam. Compromise the integrity of people whose business models are theoretially legal, as-yet/to-date not illegal, and depend on trust through-and-through.

I'm not in that line of work, and do not want to be, but, so far, I've never been issued any investigatory letters nor any gag orders. I've done nothing nor engaged in any knowing or intentional contact with anyone who would cause me to be dragged into any such investigation. Since I value my freedom, I avoid risky or dodgy people. OTOH, any vicious enough operatives could just concoct situations to "burn" or punish those who dare say what I just wrote. Could I be such a target? Who knows?

Google sniffs at MySQL fork MariaDB: Yum. Have an engineer

MySQL GUI tools?

Are those tools just for devs and sysadmins, or are they going to be end-user/"cubicle-dweller"-friendly?

I've over the years felt crestfallen when attempting to ditch Lotus Approach for some decade-plus-long projects I've developed, and the MySQL "GUI" tools are just completely, utterly show-stopping from my perspective when thinking as an end-user. I've tried using MySQL as the data back end and Lotus Approach as the front end, but that just introduces needless complexity no sane end-user will put up with if trying to become their own local admin.

For a decade or longer now, I dare think, MySQL squandered the opportunity to make deeper penetration into more offices and IT shops by deliberately or dismissively failing to create for their backend what Lotus bought and extended for the multiple back-end databases.

I fear that, with the end of life of Lotus SmartSuite, or maybe the discontinuation of support for Lotus SmartSuite, that IBM might be one of those unnamed sponsors slipping some money to the MariaDB support, maybe to hedge bets and put an axe in the middle of Oracle's canoe. But, I sure as hell wish that supporters of MariaDB would consider and enable the creation of a Lotus Approach-like front end, upated to year 2013/2014 capabilite, and, and, even make for-pay versions of the interface to ensure some sort of professional support that is not dependent upon sponsors who may have other feelings such as dismissing end users.

I want to convert my Lotus Approach-based "apps" or plausible products to something that would allow for Asian fonts in the db back end, as well as on the GUI, and to allow for italics and bolding of characters within a text field not just the entire text string. I could probably reasonably charge $50-$100 for my pending products, and maybe even manage to make $10-$20 per-sale contributions back to MariaDB or the Open Source Community. But, I cannot do that as long as nobody out there makes for me and my future end users/customers a database front end that is clean and crisp and fairly/reasonably stableas Lotus Approach.

Worse, once SmartSuite is no longer supported by IBM, I wonder what'll become of it. I wonder if they'll finally allow Sue Sloan to buy it off their hands. I don't particularly want to learn Lotus Script, as I don't have the bandwidth to become a developer. Macros and formulas suit me pretty well, and I think my end users of the future who buy an unlocked/modifiable version could learn maros and formulas well enough. I'd probably also offer different licenses to facilitate the continued re-contribution to Open Source, too.

Well, this plaintiff wailing is getting long-winded...

Patent tank VirnetX fires 'secure domain name' design claim at Apple

God/Gods/Lords of Kobol, please corporeally FACTORY RECALL

God/Gods/Lords of Kobol, please corporeally RECYCLE

The writers, submitters, defenders, and granters of that patent, and ban them from reincarnation!

What assholes. The Article/Claim 1, if sent back into 1948, would have precluded Novell and Windows System Admin/Network Admin courses if those two, among dozens of other, companies did not agree to pay royalties.

The fact that the Claims in their hokey, piece-of-shit patent are stating "mobile phone" is specious and all-grabbing. It should have NEVER withstood scrutiny, and the USPTO, once again, showed/shows that it is too care-free and pay-accepting in granting dubious, specious, unworthy patents.

I, too, have my gripes with Apple, but, I hope they nuts-kick these shits so hard they need a time machine just to stop coughing from the deep, stilettoed kick Apple and the rest of the industry need to issue as a final issue.

Jeeze!

Facebook turns tables on profile stalkers with News Feed tweak

If FB CARED, or wanted to

If FB CARED, or wanted to

It could add hot buttons to offer to the users/subscribers:

-- Constrain to one of these time frames: today/yesterday/last week/last month/custom

- Most viewed stories/links by this person

- Least viewed stories/links

Seen by the poser's friends/non-friends/followers/all/custom

Oh, wait, that would probably end up a highly-paid paid-for option for the advertisers to suss out what adverts to position, to seek impressions and make more conversions more likely...

Beam me up? Not in the life of this universe

Copies likely will not be sent ahead of or instead of people...

People want to enjoy this little thing called "direct, first-hand experience..."

Lingering fingerprint fingering fingered in iOS 7 for NEW iPHONE

Samaritan mode, anyone?

How many times have we wanted to lend our phone out of sympathy, but chafed at doing so because the one we're helping could rummage through our device?

Just lock the phone and then tell the "samaritee" to submit a scanned print, the print is uploaded to the server of choice or the ISP, and then the user presses a "Samaritan" button. All calls would be forcibly limited to local or emergency, and all would be subject to recording. If the phone is not returned to the owner within the time secretly set by the owner, and disarmed in that timeframe, then the local police would be silently dispatched to the cell's location.

I wonder how many lost phone, Samsung, Apple, or Google people thought of this. Maybe they did, maybe they didn't.

But, now, as a rule, I WILL NOT share my phone with ANYONE whom I do not know or whom I do not want rummaging through my phone to peruse or delete things or surreptitious install on my phone something not friendly to me.

Sounds easy to implement, easy to use, and easy to refine. Would prevent or at least reduce misuse of the device, make it virtually worthless to steal (unless stolen for parts or can be reprogrammed, or is stolen to cause economic and psychological grief to the owner), and would reduce political wrangling and tech resistance.

Somebody, widely disseminate this to ensure it is committed to the Open Source realm if it is not yet patented or copyrighted the way I have envisaged.

First burger made of TEST-TUBE MEAT to be eaten on August 5

Can it compete with Bean Curd and Tofu?

Can it compete with Bean Curd and Tofu?

Or will its ability to compete rely on manipulating those two in tourd and beanfu?

Hahahah.

(Factually, though, I like both, including natto and kimchi. After months of eating kimchi last year in Korea (I also ate it a good deal in the US before then, for years), my health test results showed improvement over last year, despite the fact that in Korea, for 5 months, I did very little exercise compared to before going to Korea.)

Also, is this beef-making process "multi-generational", as in, is it different from Dow/Monsanto/whomever with their genetically-crippled seeds that produces "sterile/non-multi-generational" seeds, the intent being to force farmers to endlessly return to the seed trough?

And, how many generations of this meat product will make it OK for monks and vegans to knowingly consume without hesitation?

I can just see a new Wendy's Commercial... "Where's the..."

I can just see a new Wendy's Commercial... "Where's the BEEF?!"

LOL!!!!!!!

New in Android 4.3: At last we get a grip on privacy-invading crApps

Will there be a way to report to the FBI all usa-crossing apps

Will there be a way to report to the FBI all usa-crossing apps tha try to steal, access, or link to denied content?

Hell, if companies can report unauthorized access attempts, then so should users be able to. Clog up the FBI and force it to deal with these companies. If the FBI and Homeland Security lbosmcan be appropriated and made to look appropriate when DVDs start the feature film or other content, the users should be able to send warnings to dvelopers who atrempt unauthorized crawling, trawling, and hauling of user content.

This means nailing in the ass the likes of skype, facebook, kakao, and hundreds of thousands of others that wantonly steal data without clearly asking for case-by-cases access and permission. An off the cuff analogy I can think of would be the random legit door-to-door insurance sales rep stating to some unwittin home occupant "By even LISTENING to me, not just allowing me into your abode, you grant me worldwite, perpetual, non-revocable permission to ransack your home or mind for any data I can find, use it as I see fit-- to perform it, to share it with my tributary partners, tomredevelop it, to use it against you in any conceivable way throughout the universe, and even to SUE YOU if you try to compete with my employer or EVEN me with YOUR OWN content."

Well, at least that is what it seems is coming down the pike, if not already happening.

Re: Huh

Fb probably is making the phone silently phone home, or they are probably embedding a special packet in their call TO a phone, and when either or either cannot shake hands, they send the user an online prompt about updating his or her contact info and phone. Probably it helps them correlate phones to users and helps them either fudge on reported data and work on heis... Umm, acquiring new, fresh users.

Beijing offers cons reduced sentences for friendly Tweets

Re: Obvious next stage - work off your sentence in advance... "You are being arrested...

... For crimes you WILL commit..."

For an answer to that, you'll need to either find a way and a time to contact the PRTC (People's Republic's Temporal Commission), or maybe find Silik and find a way to reach out to two people: Daniels and Silik...

Linux 3.11 to be known as 'Linux for Workgroups'

Hahhaha, reminds me of the later, "32-bit extensions and a graphical shell" definition...

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Windows

"Windows 95/98, (n): 32 bit extension and a graphical shell for a 16 bit patch to an 8 bit operating system originally coded for a 4 bit microprossessor, written by a 2 bit company that can't stand 1 bit of competition. "

The funniest bit is the descending, by half, adjectivals...

Brilliant when people can make math and humor intersect so silky-smooth as that.... Especially if read in the early 1900's, Walter Winchell, or even the Visine commercial voices, hahahaha

Feds BANNED from DEF CON by founder (who is Obama's cyber-expert)

Which CEO is a Fed Game

"Which CEO, CTO, CFO, Etc is a Fed" Game

Now, this would be an interesting game to play.

OTOH, it might become a matter of becoming a subject of economic and reputation destruction once real Feds really get outed.

Or, it might cause collateral damage when boards averse to unwelcome plants start dismissing key officers out of paranoia or just to make a point...

Play this game at your own risk. Prior outing success not an indicator or guarantee of future success. Losers may be never seen again or may never be seen again. You have been warned...

Based on a TRUE STORY...