This is just pr, they are talking about fighting police level warrants. It says nothing about NSA level mass surveillance (aka PRISM). I would love to see Google, Microsoft, and Facebook collectively decide they aren't going to give the NSA any more records for mass surveillance. What is the government going to do, shut them down? The US tech industry would shut down overnight. None of these companies are small fish that can be bullied or shut down without causing serious repercussions to the government. Their compliance is clearly more voluntary than they admit.
Well refusing to allow a shady Israel company to handle your wiretaps would be anti-Semitic! /s
We should also note that unlike the NSA, Israel follows no international laws and does as it pleases, including boarding humanitarian vessels and executing people in international waters. I don't think Mossad will be showing any restraint at all in how they use this information to blackmail and manipulate (and assassinate) people for their own ends.
You pay more, for more, if it costs more to give you more. In this case it is not costing these internet service providers a single dime to fulfill Netflix's bandwidth. Do you think the same companies would be willing to offer a vastly reduced rate to the millions of older subscribers who only take an internet package to keep in touch with their kids on Facebook and Skype and maybe read some news? No, they won't. They are only interested in increasing costs for everyone, without actually delivering anything more. This is artificial scarcity and extortion, exactly the same thing the mobile companies like Verizon are doing. Prove to us that their networks are currently at maximum capacity and that Netflix's bandwidth is taxing their network beyond that capacity. Less we forget, these companies built their networks with money stolen from tax payers in returned for broken promises.
No because this is artificial scarcity. It does not cost these big internet service providers a single dime more to serve up Netflix than it does to serve up Wikipedia pages. The issue here is the relentless corporate greed that is going to make them continue to squeeze customers and content providers to get more and more profits without offering more service. After the bandwidth caps and the Netflix (content provider) extortions, they will find new reasons to force people to pay more money for the existing internet service they have always been using. This is what happens when you have no competition and you want profits going up year after year. The only cure is for the government to step in and slap some regulations down.
The reason there hasn't been much discussion is because the state controls the parameters of discussion through heavy use of propaganda and intimidation, and they don't like the questions that get asked when we ask why.
The truth is they don't want to kill us at large. Not even the most militant groups have ever taken issue directly with the American people as a whole, in fact many of them quite the opposite. Their issue is with the American government and its allied state actors who are the chief executors of its foreign policy. However when one side has disproportionate strength, and the political outlets to change are closed to you, and you are systematically disenfranchised, guerrilla warfare (aka terrorism) becomes the only way to strike back at your tormentors.
The state actors do not want their foreign policy and their violence (direct and indirect) to become the subject of the discussion. So instead they spin narratives about how the enemy is pure evil, how his hatred is irrational and fanatical and cannot be reasoned with or understood, and because of that, we have no choice but to kill as many of them as possible all the time because otherwise they would leave their relatively impoverished lands thousands of miles away and come here to kill us. Does it sound ridiculous? That's because it is.
Rather than condense hours of Noam Chomsky lectures that go in great detail about this subject, I will paraphrase his conclusion: The best way to stop terrorism domestically is to stop carrying out acts of terrorism overseas. But the American government has no intention of stopping so unfortunately you will be kept in the Orwellian state of fear they are orchestrating.
>I see this move as FB ensuring a healthy portfolio and healthy future stock price for their investors by getting the jump on patents and technology of a sure fire success emerging market.
That statement is precisely why this is such a big problem. Facebook getting their greedy paws on VR patents will all but limit innovation in VR and squeeze small players out of the market. There is nothing to like about this deal.
I would argue the NSA threat is actually worse. The NSA has the kind of funding and clout to pull off what other hackers and nation-states can't. They are sowing the seeds for tyranny as we speak, and if you think their mission directive can't be changed on a dime to be much worse (similiar to how they were quietly switched from purely foreign signals intelligence to domestic mass surveillance without much ado), you have much to learn about how volatile politics can be.
Could these hacking incidents against Mt Gox have been the work of the NSA? It is extremely unlikely to be Karpeles because hurting Mt Gox would send the price of Bitcoin tumbling, so he would be stealing from himself.
It could be other staff that worked for him or maybe just organized crime, sure. But who really has a motive to destroy faith in cryptocurrencies by hurting trust in the exchanges that make it appealing to use by everyday people? Mostly the American government, which does not want to see any competitor to the dollar as a global international reserve currency. I'm not saying Bitcoin was going to take that spot, but when Bitcoin suddenly gets popular internationally and even the Central Bank of China is talking about it, there is definitely a looming threat that exists for the dollar.
We know the NSA has managed to attack all kinds of routers, firewalls, and servers. We know they conduct acts of sabotage against so called enemies, and we know they have the expertise needed to exploit the weaknesses in the system. Now obviously this is just speculation, but I think simple theft doesn't make sense if you know you won't be able to dump a large amount of stolen Bitcoin without being noticed, and without also losing a lot of money from the panic you created in other investors.
I would really like to know why Google is fighting so hard to keep this video up when they regularly remove anti-Judaism, anti-Israel, and other distasteful content under "hate speech" or other offensive content guidelines. You can't act like you're protecting freedom of speech when you remove videos offensive to some groups but not others, that just reeks of bias.
More importantly the sleazeball who made this movie lied to the actors involved about what kind of movie it was and abused their trust and left them fearing for their safety. There has to be a recourse that allows people like that to demand the performance be taken down since they were tricked. If someone tells you they need a clip of you saying a few lines for the local news and puts your content into a snuff film instead, you would want that video taken down too.
It's a little bit hard to take this seriously. If someone found a 0day in the filesystems or thumbnail renderers they would take the easiest approach and try to spread the bug as fast as possible before it gets patched (the way worms normally work), not drop a random usb and hope someone tries to mount it in a system that is configured in the fight way to allow that exploit to work. They might do it in a targeted attack against a single user who accesses secure airgapped systems but the odds that such a person would go plug it into a secure system out of curiosity (assuming the USB port is even available) is slim.
You know what is a better idea for stopping attackers rather than molesting random people at the airport? Not having terrorism as a foreign policy. Like Noam Chomsky says, the best way to stop terrorism domestically is not to carry acts of terrorism out all over the world.
This is a nice idea in theory, but after all the NSA revelations, we should all be very weary of cloud based data storage. Mozilla is based in the US, so what is stopping the NSA issuing them demands to hand over the user accounts? Browser data is just too detailed and sensitive, I would rather run Firefox portable off a flash drive and carry it with me.
Yeah because "terrorists" who hate America use Facebook and Skype to discuss their terroristy plans and the good old NSA was only wiretapping all those services to protect us.
There needs to be more shunning of NSA collaborators in the tech community. The NSA has only been able to achieve this Orwellian level of surveillance through the cooperation of big tech companies and considers them crucial to their operations. If caving to the NSA has social consequences among the tech community, there will be a lot more resistance against their future demands.
The problem is that without prosecutions and serious jail time, nothing is going to change. If the government has a precedent where it can violate the highest laws of the land and do whatever it wants in the name of national security, and create its own secret readings of laws that contradict other laws, there is nothing stopping them from carrying out new secret programs while they pretend to end the ones that were exposed. They will say they stopped mass wiretapping and just create a new ultra-secret designated program that does the same thing because there was no consequences for the previous law breaking.