Sorry to be nit-picky, but that sounds conspiracy theory-ish. The link you provided does not back-up your claim of the NSA having hacked the Starwood database. The linked article makes it sound like as a by-product of massively vacuuming up internet traffic, GCHQ has been able to track hotel booking confirmations sent to gov.whatever addresses. Which is noteworthy but (legally and morally) not as sinister as active measures.
I'm interested in your argument to why fiction is not time "wasted"! Would you mind discussing? I have thought about this a lot and personally only read non-fiction, but am always interested in other viewpoints.
From what's publically known, the email to The Intercept related to their podcast, of which we supposedly was a listener and not to the matter at hand.
Blendle is a solution to a very different problem. Blendle provides unbundling for popular magazines and newspapers, i.e. you can selectively read single articles for < 1€ rather than having to buy a full issue of the paper in question.
It's really well done, but basically does what the iTunes store did for MP3s.
What Medium faces is a rather different beast: Trying to reach the holy grail of finding non-advertising funding for journalism (ideally, without a subscription-based model).
From your blog post: "The cables or other releases could be posted on torrent sites, signed by the Wikileaks organization, and it would be just as effective at generating the media circus and necessary public attention that they seek."
There's your biggest misconception about how the media and world/people's attention works right there.
Why do you think no layperson knows what the heck cryptome is, although they have been leaking stuff for far longer than Wikileaks? Why do you think cryptome (probably) hasn't changed anything and hasn't made anyone aware of anything?
You need the most publicity you can get as a leaking platform, as much as it will kill you (by making a person synonymous to the mission and providing an attack window) at the same time. And actual mass publicity will not be generated by putting it out there via bittorrent, which the majority of journalists don't even know about.
It's also ridiculously outdated. It's from 1957 and based on an outdated, traditional understanding of "big" industrial/engineering companies and their employees ("the little guys"). Also, it protects the companies' interests to the detriment of the employees' interests, which is understandable given that it is based on a war-time law (WWII) which was supposed to support German war engineering.
I read his book, "You are not a gadget", and found it really thought-provoking and inspiring to focus more on real-world stuff I needed to do and less on reading about the ever latest fad that has no impact on my life whatsoever.
As always, was it the book or my state of mind/stage in my life during which I read the book that made me change my mind about re-prioritizing? I don't know. But I'd recommend the book for an alternative perspective not often heard in the TechCr/otherblogs/Forbes/BW hype cycle that is the tech (esp consumer internet) world.
FWIW, the book didn't strike me as elitist at all. I didn't know anything about him before, so I was strictly considering his arguments for their merits.
Edit: Just finished the Smithsonian article, which I consider singularly unhelpful in really understanding the points he makes in his book. Do not judge his book or his arguments by this article. The article is an incoherent mess.
Is the most obvious question being adressed in any jurisdiction yet? - Do you legally have to disclose your results to any insurance company you already have an existing contract with or prior to any new insurance contract?
By chance, I just read a typical life insurance contract and it already stated that if you have undergone a genetic testing, you do have to disclose your results if you enter into a life insurance contract >300.000€. This was stipulated in the contract and not under general German contract law. If you do not disclose your results, the company can void the contract any time and/or terminate it any time in the future.
This is going to be THE most important issue with genetic testing - the implications for your insurance contracts. Obviously, your test results can have massively positive or negative results.
You have a smart marketing ploy with the "Privacy made in Germany" slogan. Similar to "German engineering", instantly recognizable. Also, great looking product.
I wonder though, I am a German lawyer myself and under the impression that German data privacy laws (which I am not specialised in) are not that different from US/UK/generic EU country laws. Do you have any research or comparisons on that?
Because I see two ways how my data might get misappropriated anyway: either by your hosting provider, over which you have no control whatsoever if you don't own the physical servers, or by a police investigation, with which you have to comply anyway. So what exactly does German privacy protection buy me here?
Your site is awesome! I've been looking for a way to read without distractions and without having to enter every single article into instapaper.
What many people underestimate is that summaries have an inherent problem: bias. No two people are ever going to summarize an article the exact same way - much less so when it comes to politics etc. So before I use a site to read summaries, I have to trust the brand (I trust The Economist, for they mostly differentiate between reporting and editorializing) and I will never ever trust an anonymous bunch of people (the "crowdsourcing" summaries-solution) to accurately summarize without bias. I value as-close-to-objective-reporting-as-possible very highly - judgments I can make my own.
I was seriously shocked to see that the iPhone's native client leaked that bad. 2 questions:
1) Is it possible for an app to leak less?
2) Is the 'leakage' already commonly exploited by firms for specific means? (proving you saw something etc.)
One other thing: It can be read on several pastebins that once anon/antisec had secured access to the StratFor data, sabu unsuccessfully tried to get Wikileaks to pay for the data. Which didn't happen of course. The incident also made him seem highly suspect to other members of anon/antisec as that clearly violated their M.O.
Which to me, all seems as if the FBI accidentally stumbled unto a chance to try to stick severe charges against Wikileaks (which they have been trying to prosecute for willfully cooperating with the enemy all along) and blowing it. Still, they will have gained interesting insights into how submissions to WL work now and perhaps, to everyone's surprise, they succeeded in getting to Assange somehow.
This article consists of a lot of baseless speculations and conjecture.
Under German law e.g. there is a clear difference for an agent provocateur to directly incite specific felonies ("we have to hack company x by doing y") compared to just generally staying 'within cover' by proclaiming generic plans ("let's harm bad companies"). I don't know about US law, but so far I have not seen evidence of him behaving in the former and not the latter way. FBI would have to have been really stupid to not have instructed him quite specifiy on this issue, and law enforcement is generally not stupid, especially in high profile cases. So don't count on entrapment.
Also, who has ever seen evidence that sabu - and by extension the FBI - has ever actually 'hacked' after being turned? To the contrary, the only logs I have ever seen (within indictment), indicate (as far as I can remember) that it was anarchos who did the actual hacking of StratFor. According to the conversatiom logs between sabu and anarchos I have read it seems as if anarchos kept other members of Anon/antisec mostly in the dark as to the details of the operation. On currently publicly available information, anarchos seeme to have done the actual 'hacking' on his own and only needed help (ftp'ing data sets for backup) afterwards. Also note that the FBI server was not the only server the data was transferred to. But providing a server to save evidence and to generally support (but not incite) a crime fits much better with the legal framework for agent provocateurs.
Also, one has to remember the general model of how anon operates - it, if by chance, resembles a need-to-know basis similar to military or intelligence operations. Do not assume their 'leader' knew exactly what any one 'member' (of what? Anon is by defintion not a specifiable group, even sub-groups are constantly changing) was specifically up to at any moment.
It's also not very insightful to blindly trust the FBI assertion that sabu was caught because he logged onto IRC just once (!) without a proxy. Given that he was always operating with proxies, bouncers and under TOR, and also given that he was publicly 'doxed' wrongly beforehand (but also correctly (!) before being visited by the FBI), why would a single unprotected login lead the FBI to actually following up on the IP and paying the 'IP address a visit', so to speak. It's possible, sure, but is it probable?
For me, another possibility is more probable: sabu was a bit too forthcoming with personal, identifiable information when on IRC and chatting with people he assumed to know. Is it only a nice coincidence that laurelai, another member of anon, was visited by the FBI in the months before sabu was turned? Laurelai has admitted to the visit and even to talking to the FBI for hours, but has maintained to not habe snitched. Believable? I don't know - but it's at least more probable as to why they got to sabu. It's also standard operating procedure for the FBI to rely on several informants to get to the big guys. They very often go forthe - more reliable - human intel instead of 'internet logs'.
There is a bunch of other stuff which doesn't add up, but probably no one cares. This is why I don't read newspapers anymore. I can make up baseless conjecture and end up misinformed all by myself, thank you very much.
Great article from The Economist on what mistakes Kodak made and what led them to bankruptcy compared to Fujifilm:
http://www.economist.com/node/21542796
Awesome, so politians now have two large constituencies to milk: big media and internet-savvy technology companies/the general tech-savvy public.
See, the only one profiting from this ordeal irrelevant of how it plays out are politicians. They get to enlarge their power and money base whenever anyone thinks an issue best be regulated by law.
You obviously aren't power-crazed, or else you would know exactly how to do it.
Reading the recent Vanity Fair (character assassination) piece on Rebekah Brooks[1], you come to realize that she and Kissinger share a great many traits, being power-crazed the least amongst them. So, to answer your question, just look at what Brooks did and you will know how Murdoch does it, as she is him, exemplified. The essence is 'plausible deniability' and getting others to do stuff for you without you explicitly knowing the details. This leads to the non-existence of a "smoking gun", which any prosecutor would need considering you have some very select 'friends' in very high places (Prime Minister level etc).
Some select quotes:
"It was not that Brooks ever lied. She simply “allowed myths to grow and never challenged them,” says Roy Greenslade, the media commentator, who has known her for..."
"I ran the same department that she did, and every week we’d see the bills from the private investigators: £2,000, £4,000.” However, he can’t be sure she always knew what they were doing."
"“She’d get you to do things,” says another former News of the World reporter. “She had this charisma, this magnetic attraction,” he says. “She would praise to high heaven, make you feel like you were on top of the world. It was only afterwards that you realized you were manipulated.”
"Even out drinking after work, “she did not get pissed, ever. She never let her guard down,” and never spoke about her past."
"“Rebekah Wade used to have dinner with Blair and Brown and play them off against each other.” It was artful, he says, the way she made each man think that she was on his side."