Here to support Fox's argument... Philosoraptor

http://memegenerator.net/instance/8908010

Fox & Friends Lash Out At Sanity

So, a day or so ago when Wired published the complete chat logs between Adrian Lamo ("The Homeless Hacker") and Bradley Manning I read through them and noticed a few things which irked me greatly...

The first being that it was no longer a mere possibility that Lamo was trying to use Manning for his own ends, and the other being that Wired basically misreprepresented why they were redacting those logs in the first place. Some of the stuff in the logs makes me wonder how the hell Manning got his security clearance at all, and some of it makes me figure that if Lamo's new meds are working, then he's still a self-centered prick but for real this time. They claimed a number of things about why they redacted the logs, but Lamo leading Manning to believe he had some confidentiality certainly wasn't mentioned, nor that Manning appeared to be about six months and a few bad episodes from looking for a way to hang himself.

If I, myself were confronted with someone saying the sort of things about their general outlook on life that Manning was doing with Lamo, I'd have been ringing up ranking officers and not-so-subtly implying that this kid needs a shrink immediately if not sooner. Lamo simply starts pumping him for information. WTF. Some of the other things Lamo has said to the press about Manning are directly contradicted by what's in these logs. Also, bonus dickhead points for using OTR and saving the logs to rat on someone later.

Frankly it wouldn't surprise me to hear that Lamo was "encouraged" to say certain things about Assange to the press, but it does appear that being a tool is a simpler and equally reasonable explanation for the lies and the backstabbing. Anyway, Glenn Greenwald at Salon does a far better job of exploring these things tactfully than I've got time to.

Far more elegant than "Geez, Lamo is a real dick."

Absolutely. This is pure hilarity. :)

YouTube - ‪My Drunk Kitchen Ep. 4: Not Easy, Bake Oven‬‏

I can think of no more exciting way to put it than that.

Your cellular service provider is trying to get you killed. SMS messages are dangerous enough, but by requiring that any smart phones come with a contract requiring that you maintain a data connection on them (ostensibly because we all need to have a GPS program reminding us how to get to and from the office in case we forgot since yesteraday) there's even more temptation than before to check Facebook updates while driving, to skim through your email, etc etc.

Messing about with your cell phone while you're driving is impossibly stupid, but your cell service provider is determined that your cell phone be an ever-present threat to your attention. Isn't it cool that you pay them for this?

Cell phone companies are trying to kill you

Basically, in case you haven't already heard, WIPO has gone so far off the deep end as to have decided that they want to s**t in the eyes of Public Domain.

No, no, no, a thousand times no, and yes this is the sort of thing that will make it no longer worth telling people they should abide by copyrights.

Adding extra rights to be granted to someone just because they had the money and the power to broadcast something, especially when this applies to works already in the public domain, is no better than fascism.

No, no, no, a thousand times no.

No, no, a thousand times, no 'Broadcast Treaty'

This right here is a perfect example of why you wear protective eyewear when shooting bottle rockets at each other.

Franklin Woman Takes Firework To The Eye

As if the patent system weren't already fucked enough... Congress is now managing to band together make it worse.

Yes, worse.

The backlog of applications isn't really a problem as much as that they hand out patents on pretty much anything. Switching formally to a "first to file" method is stupendously bad, since it would seem to simply be streamlining invention theft by whomever can figure out a way to fill out a patent application for anything not yet patented (which isn't much!). Whether it was invented by someone else, currently in development, or already to-market doesn't seem like it's even going to matter anymore.

We are screwed.

"All your ideas are belong to lawyers."

Your Bogons At Work

“This isn’t the end game; there is something bigger coming down the pipe and what we are seeing right now is a prelude to that.”

...and let's not forget that obsolete fucking blacklist technology is sure to be of great help in defending against APT. ...and everyone should absolutely listen to the man at the helm of that sinking ship, because the bottom of the sea is the new place to be!

The gov't should pay McAfee anyway because then they'll have paid someone a lot of money, and that's just as good as actually doing something useful. Receipts protect against everything. There's also the matter of eventually people are going to realize that a blacklist scanner is a fucking stupid idea whose time has long past, and if McAfee hasn't secured some really big government contracts by then, they will be well and truly fucked.

Ladies and gentlemen, that shit right there is terrorism.

* * *

Honestly, it's bad enough that these fuckers sell useless shit to half of America and tell them it will protect their computers against viruses (provided they're at least three months old, and not particularly agile) that my attitude towards them can generally be considered "furious", but if they gov't starts handing these jokers a single tax dollar while "APT" is mentioned anywhere within a 200 yard radius of the deal, I may just spontaneously combust.

THE COMMIES ARE COMING FOR US! BE AFRAID! GIVE US MONEY!

So, I'd dearly love to know why it is Mark Zuckerberg isn't being asked to stand before a judge and explain himself over hiring that PR firm to trash talk Google to the press. (Don't be a dolt--regardless of what FB claimed their motives were, that's exactly what they did.)

It's pretty clear now the way they intend to "take on" Google is by stirring up press hostility for Google to keep them doing as little as possible with the information they could glean from their users--and then themselves deploying services that are exactly as fishy as the things they're "not quite" accusing Google of doing.

Worthy of note is that Google actually walked away from an application to allow users to use facial recognition software to identify who is in a picture because they didn't like the privacy implications... but Facebook knows that your privacy is their money so they're going to sell it off any way they possibly can.

By default, all the photos you might have put into Facebook are fair game for their software to work out better ways of automatically recognizing your face... the idea being that users can upload a picture of someone, and Facebook will tell them who it is (and companies who might want a really good way to snoop on random passers-by to find out who they are can pay Facebook to use that, I'm sure). So, once again, Facebook does something that exposes formerly private user information to new forms of public scrutiny, and you have to opt-out to avoid it.

If Google has to have government snoops up in their business for two years over some packets that were the equivalent of wifi confetti, Mark Zuckerburg should have an entire committee devoted to watching him while he pees to make sure he's not up to something--just because the word "leak" might be used somewhere in a sentence.

Facebook strips more of your privacy away, by default

I honestly don't know what Tim Ball's problem is.

Proof that drifting is a genetic trait