The bottom line - good time to point out why you shouldn’t use the same password on different web services, and that the big picture having to do with Wikileak’s vision of a little less secrecy, and a little bit more transparency, ultimately better serves the world and gives power to the people whose collective consciousness, if not brainwashed, is supposed to be shaping the way we live.

For the record:

1. MemeStreams does not store passwords in cleartext.
2. I don't think providing a resource for hosting someone's stolen personal email or stolen password list "better serves the world and gives power to the people." I think its downright crooked and in fact I think its legally actionable. These are not "leaks." There is a grey area between the defending the people's right to know and violating someone's personal privacy, but disclosing a password list is firmly on the dark side of the spectrum.

RE: Bill O’Reilly’s web site hacked, attackers release personal details of users

CypherGhost wrote:

As I watched a Super Target being built near my office, I wondered why they were laying bricks by hand. Surely this repetitive job could be automated by some sort of giant robot scaffold?

This brick laying robot takes the idea a step further.

Its important, when you think about automation, to think about it in economic terms rather than in technological terms. The fundamental issues is whether the robots are more or less expensive than the wages of the brick layers.

In Japan, you see a lot of robots because they don't have a lot of immigration nor do they have a lot of teenagers, and so they don't have a lot of people to fill the kinds of jobs you'd pay minimum wage for.

In China, on the other hand, you have an economy that is still developing and so there are tons of people who'd kill for a job at any wage, and so a lot of construction gets done in old fashioned ways with fewer tools and automation (and safety protection) than you see in the west. The people are cheaper than the machines.

In the US, we're somewhere in the middle. We have a sophisticated economy, but we have more teenagers than Japan and a healthy supply of immigrants.

That means that the amount of robots that you have is a matter of government policy. Asimov wrote about labor unions competing against robots, but thats not science fiction. Its actually happening in America today, whether people realize it or not.

This is really the other side of the immigration debate that people don't understand. Everyone agrees that the status quo is unacceptable. You cannot have people living in your society who aren't allowed to be there. You must either change their legal status or you must kick them out. What people don't understand is the roll they play in the economy and the costs associated with kicking them out...

RE: MAKE: Blog: Robotic brick laying system ensures light and airflow to plants

flynn23 wrote:

Whoever produced this deserves a MacArthur genius grant. Watch it all the way through, unless you start to hyperventilate.

Contrary to popular belief, I am not responsible for this, although it is uncannily similar to what I would've produced. I give high props to whoever put this together.

ATL you're next!

You bicycle riding douchebags will never make it south of Corky's BBQ! God willing, they will run you infidels all the way back to that atrocious statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest! Finally, an opportunity to melt that fucking thing down! Allah, Akbar!

RE: Nashville's Gas Crisis: Inside the Metro Bunker? - Nashville Scene

Old Policy:

The U.S. Customs Service must guard the rights of individuals being inspected to ensure their personal privacy is protected. Therefore, as a general rule, Customs officers should not read personal correspondence

New Policy:

In the course of a border search, and absent individualized suspicion, officers can review and analyze the information transported by any individual attempting to enter, reenter, depart, pass through, or reside in the United States.

Same old fucking excuse:

DHS spokeswoman Amy Kudwa says "The decision to change standards reflects the realities of the post 9/11 environment."

New Border Search Policy Far Broader, New Documents Reveal | Threat Level from Wired.com

Google sees the mobile phone as a ubiquitous sensor network.

You will be carrying with you, 24x7 (a recent study of Chinese mobile customers showed that the majority of them sleep within a meter of their phones), a very powerful, always connected, sensor-rich device. And the cool thing is, so will everyone else.

I wonder if the CALEA/key escrow ideas will be extended to a requirement that you keep a government backdoor running on your phone...

Official Google Blog: The future of mobile

Up to 10,000 staff at the New York office of the bankrupt investment bank Lehman Brothers will share a bonus pool set aside for them that is worth $2.5bn (£1.4bn), Barclays Bank, which is buying the business, confirmed last night.

Sick.

Fury at $2.5bn bonus for Lehman's New York staff - Business News, Business - The Independent

Comcast has joined pretty much every other ISP in New York by shutting off access to newsgroups, effective two days ago, although current users will still have access through October 25th.

The Cuomo crackdown continues.

Comcast: Comcast Joins NY's Anti-Newsgroup Crowd, Shuts Off Access

All federal agencies are deploying DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) on the .gov top-level domain, and some expect that once that rollout is complete, banks and other businesses might be encouraged to follow suit for their sites.

Feds tighten security on .gov - Network World

Julian Sanchez of Ars Technica passed on a statement from an Obama campaign representative who points out that the changes in wording highlighted by Versionista aren't the whole story, and that more Obama tech-plan details are now available in a PDF, saying "there is absolutely no substantive change to our policy - folks who want more information can click to get our full plan."

Thats an important point, but the PDF has also not been updated to include Joe Biden's name, either. Its possible that content revisions are planned to the PDF after the website update has been completed. Given the structural nature of the changes that have been made to the website, it would make sense for the PDF to be updated to reflect this. If that is not the plan, the Obama campaign needs to make a very clear public statement about this and not rely on a staffer who sent an email to a guy at a website who told someone who works at Slashdot.

Slashdot | Obama Significantly Revises Technology Positions

Mike the Usurper wrote:

dmv wrote:
A side-by-side comparison of the language changes on Obama's Technology position. Not good... and do they imagine there is not versioning software out there to highlight this? These are not just linguistic changes.

But then again, I guess he's running on Change...

Some of it isn't, some of it is, some of it is response to various attacks, some is clarification and some is condensing. There are some significant changes, but the version checking isn't as extreme as it looks because you have sections moved which are tracked as new, which were simply cut and pasted into new zones.

Significant yes, but not as big as described.

I think its huge! There is one section, Employ Technology and Innovation to Solve Our Nation’s Most Pressing Problems, which was cut and pasted and therefore tracks as new.

The majority of the edits consist of a massive cutting of specific policy ideas. For example, a very specific 4 point platform on safeguarding privacy rights, an 8 point platform on government transparency, and a 5 point plan for broadband competitiveness, as well as 4 of the 5 points on protecting children online were completely deleted, and in their place we have simple platitudes that mean almost nothing and that any candidate from any party is likely to agree to. Calling this "condensing" is far too generous. We're left with almost no idea what Obama actually promises to do about technology issues, but rather just a list of issues that he cares about without specific policy prescriptions. That means we are likely to see more of the same from his administration that we've been seeing for years on these issues.

Oh, wait, I see that we added one specific promise to protect corporate intellectual property rights abroad, which could only have come from Biden. Thats a major change in policy! I'll bet the addition of that point will cause a stampede of donations from the netroots!

One could get the impression that Biden's team had a large influence on this editing overall, as his name is deliberately added in several places. If that is true, it would mean that Biden is having a big impact on Obama's domestic policy, something Obama supporters have been quick to ensure us was not going to be the case.

Of course, both texts vastly overstate the power of the Presidency to create policy. Both campaigns are guilty of this. One gets the impression that most Americans have absolutely no idea how the federal government of the United States actually works, and people in politics embrace the confusion rather than combating it, as its not like anyone actually gets held to task on campaign promises...

Regardless, the bottom line is that if Biden's influence adds an authoritarian element to Obama's domestic policy positions and whitewashes his technology positions, it will leave his campaign with very little for me to get excited about, and I don't think I'm alone there.

RE: Versionista: Page comparison