Posts by Marketing Hack
1081 posts • joined Thursday 18th June 2009 23:05 GMT
Cell phones linked to increased African violence
AT&T call drop rage?
Re: @ Ian62
P.S.--because internet traffic/social media is harder to map to a person geographically, the NSA has instituted a test where they can scoop up data as long as their test indicates at least a 51% chance that the data/content was not made by a U.S. resident. Hardly confidence-inspiring, but at least us Americans get SOME protection from our own government.
@ Ian62
"4) What about data for non-nationals? If the person isn't a US national, do the US laws apply? (equally to other countries)."
The short answers to this question are "You're screwed" and that the NSA is hoovering up somewhere between "a little and a lot" of your data. The Foreign Intelligence & Surveillance Act (the "FISA" you are now hearing so much about) only protects residents of the US of A. Outside of the U.S., even expat U.S. citizens are fair game, because they live under the laws of the various countries they reside in. Really the only procedural limit for foreign residents is "How much can we surveil until country X gets so pissed off at us that the cost outweighs the benefit." There are obviously practical and infrastructure limits as well.
Also, it is hardly uncommon for country X to outsource it's local dirty work to the NSA or other country's spooks. The NSA can get around local laws and social mores about snooping, and the local government gets the data while still ostensibly keeping its hands clean.
So in the race to build the tallest elevator we have reached the Finnish line?
You're a great audience! I'm here all week!!
Re: Too true
Hey, it's progress! Dick Cheney used to beat up oompa-loompas and THEN go to his desk!
Cornwall is going to get mountains
Imagine jet-setters 50 million years from now. "Val d'Isere and Zermat are so dead these days. Penzance is bangin' though!"
Re: Excellent News
/strumming on a guitar
"Your love sucked me dry as an orange, and it's your fault, just like the Gorringe!"
(Needs work, but fortunately I have at least 20 million years to finish it and get the band back together.....)
That bag of Soylent makes me want to say.....
Edward G. Robinson, is that you?
First, they came for the badgers.....
Badger badgering leaves bumpkins buggered!!!
@Franklin
I'll believe that this draws customers when I see it!
Re: Next we find out that the NSA recently bought all rights to "1984"
Hey, it takes real work to be this cynical about the powers that be!!
Dear Mr. Hart-Davis.....
On the behalf of the NSA and the American people, I would like to apologize for our agency's misuse of your family's intellectual property. We will be contacting you shortly to negotiate a license for this image as well as appropriate compens..........Eh, screw it. We'll just have you disappeared and erase all signs of your website. Would you like pine scent or lemon on the black bag when we scoop you up?
Most Sincerely,
The NSA
As amateurish as the NSA slides are.....
I rather prefer them to the Powerpoint consultant's version. Obviously one of those technically proficient types who assumes that because he knows what Apple's/FB's/Etc. logos are, then everyone knows.
Also that gray slide background makes the slides look even more Orwellian,
Next we find out that the NSA recently bought all rights to "1984"
Cunning bastards are running a false flag operation to jack up their return on investment!!
Beware the Romulan goldfish!!
Those sneaky bastards are always encroaching on the Neutral Zone......
Mr. Clapper, nobody is saying that what you are doing is illegal
What we are saying is that it A) isn't right and B) should probably be illegal.
@ Matt Bryant
1. And yet, we have Congressmen like Jim Sensenbrenner, who helped write the Patriot act, and he is complaining about the abuse of the law. He anticipated that the act would streamline the gathering of intel on specific named individuals or groups for whom there was a suspicion that they might be sympathizing with or planning terror attacks. Not a datamart on the whole U.S. population including phone records, credit card transactions and internet activities
2. How does a pol who is not privy to the extent of these programs out another pol's support of these programs? I hate thieves and rapists, but since criminals don't make me privy to their activities I have yet to be able to name and shame one, much call the cops on them.
3. The U.S. FISA courts rarely, if ever, deny a warrant for this surveillance. Part of this is their place in the bureaucracy that performs this snooping. Part is also the bureaucratic rules around the FISA court. For instance, there is no "privacy counsel" that gets to put forward a case why a given warrant SHOULDN'T be granted. There is just the intel community putting forward their argument why the activity should be blessed. Legal protections for foreign citizens are even less. There isn't even FISA court oversight for them.
On a professional level, I will stick to Marketing. On a political level, it's my right (at least it was my right) as a citizen to oppose what I perceive to be unjust and intrusive governance.
the PM insisted that UK spooks "operate within the law".
AGAIN, there are problems with this statement:
1. Classified programs operate based on an interpretation of the law. And because that interpretation happens outside the public's scope of knowledge, there is no public awareness to counteract the usual bureaucratic and political pressures towards the most authoritarian interpetation of the laws in question.
2. UK spooks operate within the law and don't look at UK internet/data traffic without ministerial approval. And that ministerial approval is classified, so only the spooks the the pols know what's going on. It's not like there is an annoucement that "due to a perceived threat, the PM has OK'd the monitoring of emails for half of Leeds", or "5 families in London", or a "select group of 89 potential terrorist sypathizers"
3. And GCHQ doesn't need to access Brit internet traffic directly. They can get the NSA to read emails/whatever for them and then give them a report on what they found. So now they aren't accessing Brit's data, just the report. Likewise the NSA can offshore it's domestic surveillance to the GCHQ. This kind of bending the meaning of words is why you had indignant tech execs saying "that we don't give the NSA DIRECT access to our servers". That's just legalese for "We copy a bunch of stuff for the NSA and put it into a data warehouse so that they don't slow down our servers and we can plead that there is no direct access"
I like Waze, so I am not excited about Google hoovering them up.
All I have to say really. We'll see if Google forces us to log in to use Waze now....
Good op-ed, but unfortunately Canada is probably part of the system.
For generations now, the Canucks have been part of U.S. early warning and monitoring systems, because of their proximity to the Soviet Union. And all those NSA listening sites all over the world? They aren't there because the locals had some extra commercial real estate, they are there because the local government made an agreement with the U.S.--"Sure, you can come in and build your electronic intelligence gathering facility in our country. And no, you don't have to share your spytech and methods with us. However, the information you gather...."
Are Canadians getting their phone records recorded? Don't know, though it is certainly possible. But any time the Canadian government wants your internet activity, all they have to do is call it up on a terminal or client that probably ultimately queries databases run out of Fort Meade, Maryland.
It's rather like military spending. In their hearts, a lot of the industrialized world realize that broadly speaking, the U.S. military protects their interests at sea and in important regions around the world. They've outsourced their strategic projection to the Pentagon. The same thing has happened with the NSA. Financially, it's a good deal, but that doesn't mean it comes for free.
Re: And for non-US citizens?
Non-Americans don't vote in American elections, so we can trample on their freedoms even if hundreds of millions of them are supposed to be our allies and eroding little things like Common Law indirectly undermines the U.S. Constituion that was based on common law. But hey, all that stuff was done by a bunch of dead foreigners and guys wearing goofy buckled shoes, so for today, let the good times roll and damn the consequences!
In the meantime, back at GCHQ they are probably piously ready to roll out "We don't spy on British citizens (because we are too busy spying on 310 million Americans through a reciprocal arrangement with the NSA that does the job of Brit-snooping for us).
So disappointing.....
That so many Americans have been allowed themselves to be duped by the fear of terrorists. It was bad enough when it started out as warrantless wiretaps to watch Americans and their overseas calls. Now it's everybody calling anywhere on every wireless network, plus their IP voice/data traffic, plus their social media, and I'd have to say that there is a 90%+ chance that an as-yet undisclosed program is watching our wireline traffic.
Lately there have been a number of Nixon vs. Obama comparisons in the media, so here's mine:
Nixon era: "We had to destroy the village in order to save it"
Obama era: We have to destroy freedom in order to save it
And it's not like we have a great option to Obama's cynicism. Let's face it, the Demos and Republicans are the Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum of the surveillance state....
The lovebot from "Serenity"
"He killed me, Mal. Killed me with a sword....." I also like the little wave she gives when she is first introduced.
Paris, while she still trumps the android competition!!
Whew! Just when you thought that your Bratwurst was a mouthful!!
I guess some good does come from the EU after all!
(Glad I don't have to marketing hack auf Deutsch!!)
Dear IT professionals, please put your stuff on the cloud where we can see it.
Love,
The NSA
@David W.
Eh, I'd rather see the same story about EA......
In other news, France is celebrating this upcoming June 22nd.....
As the 63rd annual Franco-German non-hostility day!!
(What's Mandarin for "Slap some lipstick on that pig!"?)
Sounds like some battlecruiser turned up the EMP too high!
Mr. Sulu, set phasers to server crash!!
"The American government has said it has no plans to charge Australian-born Assange"
But we have started flying drone missions over Ecuador, and the U.S. State Department has asked what make and color of car will pick up Assange at the airport when he arrives. Why? "Dunno, we're just curious I guess..."
Re: Beagle did find intelligent life on Mars!!!
P.S.--Congrats to the Mars Express team for keeping the probe going so long!! Mars Express plays second fiddle to Voyager/Opportunity's "little trains that could" act, but a decade in orbit over Mars is quite an accomplishment!!
Beagle did find intelligent life on Mars!!!
Unfortunately it pancaked directly on top of it. However, if you pick up the remains of the probe you can extract some very interesting DNA samples from the underside!
There are explanations other than water....
Imagine how long it took the Martians to smooth out the corners on all those pebbles, and then bind them together and place them so they would look like a riparian deposit. Can Opportunity's spectorgraph detect paste residues??
Re: Um, bad analogy in bringing up Christopher Columbus.....
My point exactly on the number of ships. You are counting on one ship to get you there and back, if something happens, you are marooned on Mars or in space.
As for not being able to turn around, my point is that even Columbus was close to WANTING to turn around. Will people remain enthused about the mission over the whole transit?
Columbus and his crew were motivated by a desire for fame as well. I'm just saying that its nice to have additional motivations
Um, bad analogy in bringing up Christopher Columbus.....
1) A lot of potential voyage of discovery sailors did do the fatality maths, which is why Columbus had to sweep the local prisons and rely on royal conscripts to fill out his crews.
2) Columbus' voyage had a SHORTER transit time than the legs to and from Mars.
3) Despite this shorter journey, Columbus' crew nearly did mutiny over fears of never seeing home again, and Columbus himself was a couple days from turning for home when he made landfall.
4) One of Columbus' captains sailed off on his own for most of the period after Columbus had made landfall. We don't exactly want people going their own way during your multi-hundreds of billions of Dollars space odyssey.
5) Columbus lost his biggest ship to a shipwreck, and consequently had to leave nearly 40 men behind in the Indies. These men all died by the time Columbus returned on his second voyage.
6) Columbus' crew was motivated by easy access to the fabled riches of the Indies and a chance to better their position if they did survive. A trip to Mars is not going to offer these powerful motivators.
Unfortunately....
You've got the trip to Mars, during which it sounds like you will surpass the career limit on radiation.
Then you land and have more exposure on Mars, which has a negligible magnetic field. Your added risk there depends on how much time you spend on the Red Planet, but I would think that one month would be the minimum surface time considering the time and expense of the transit to Mars.
Then you have the radiation on the trip home.
So my thinking is:
1) got to get a cheap way to get cargo into orbit, so you can build a more robustly shielded spacecraft
2) Advances in cancer therapy over the next couple decades will help
3) Send astronauts who are past their child-bearing ages (Don't want to pass along radiation-induced genetic damage to the young ones)
4) If all else fails--send the mission in a craft lined with bags of popcorn with real butter. It's light, hydrogen-rich and it's a long way to Mars and back! Have to make room onboard for a big-screen TV, a sofa and a chest of Blu-Rays as well......
So let me get this straight....
Your internet comments can currently get banned is you were to post "I hate Muslim extremists/MPs abusing expenses/drunken louts taking over city centers on Friday night/street criminals/greedy bankers and we should shoot them". So now the new proposal is that your speech should get censored if you say "I hate Muslim extremists/MPs abusing expenses/drunken louts taking over city centers/street criminals/greedy bankers, and we should do something about them."?
For various reasons I am more attuned to American vs. British language differences than most people, but I never knew the phrase "government overreach" was one of those things that is only heard on the left side of the pond. (Or perhaps I am wrong, but any British posts using that phrase are instantly deleted by "HM Ministry of Approved Thought")
Re: Now let's see
"The Emperor asks the impossible!....I need more gray blocks"
Isn't this how "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes" started??
From schlock horror cult film to damning prophetic tract!!
(Just want to make sure that when I open the vegatable crisper, nothing that looks like selected icon comes leaping out at me!)
Pfft, I'm not impressed.......
Since it was a national holiday, Syfy channel was showing a chimeric geneological nightmare documentary marathon yesterday, and apparently Dinoshark thawed out after millions of years of icy entombment. Last I saw, he was running rampant off of Puerto Vallarta!!
(On a more serious level, I can't watch these crap Syfy channel movies, but I admire their chutzpah in reinventing the schlock horror genre. Apparently all you have to do is come up with two somewhat dangerous animals, and then make an unintentionally funny crap film starring the resulting nightmarish genetic hybrid. Yesterday's titles that I noticed while channel surfing included "Sharktopus", "Piranhaconda" and the afore-mentioned Dinoshark.)
Fracking is useful, and should be encouraged....
But then, so is beer. Hmmm, quite the conundrum.....
Food printer cartridges=future source of 50% of HP's profits?
Choose correct Meg Whitman response below:
A) Pressing fingertips together ala Montgomery Burns and breathily hissing "Excellent!"
B) Stroke white Persian cat while watching liftoff of rocket bearing food printer
C) Sitting in dark corner suite saying "Everything is transpiring as I have forseen...."
Re: Did you just put the mockers on LOHAN?
If the launchpad does have problems come Sept. 14, may I suggest the following subtitle on the bad news?
"Launch team unable to get it up for LOHAN"
OK, I'm outta here!!
P.S.--Make sure the new Playmonaut is wearing a tiny life preserver....
British-involved efforts to pollute the U.S. of A....
Couldn't do it with redcoats and Hessians, so One Direction is just the latest move in a long history of trying to subvert the American way of life?
I knew there was a reason that Brits are always the bad guys in movies!!
(Actually, it would be interesting to find out how much of "Hollywood studio seeking villain for major motion picture--English accent required" is some kind of American cultural memory)
Maybe it shows the Star Wars Galaxy being acquired by the Disney galaxy?
You saw it on El Reg first!!
Government contractor embarrassed and uses law to CYA....
How about cancelling Terracom's contract for putting so much personal information stupidly at risk. And WGET is sophisticated in the same sense that downloading sports stat data using a web browser and then putting that data into Excel is "sophisticated"
This is just Ed Miliband posturing with Labor's anti-corporate base....
If Miliband was serious about legislation to solve these tax avoidance issues, he would be speaking quietly with his colleagues in Parliament to build concensus for a change.
Instead, he's out bashing Google publicly at Google's own event. This is all about Ed trying to convince Labor supporters that he is on the side of workers against big, bad corporations.
The good news is....
We'll know exactly what we are about to get hit by!
Here's some ideas for album tracks....
-Committee Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)
-Workin' (Through) the Weekend
-What About Now (the Deadline Song)
Submitted with humble apologies to Marvin Gay, Loverboy and Daughtry!!
Meanwhile, back on Capital Hill.....
Committee Chair: Welcome to today's hearing on corporate tax policy. Testifying today is Apple Chairman and CEO Tim Cook. We'll open the questioning with the Senator from the great state of Iowa!
Senator: Mr. Cook, why does Apple pay so little in corporate income tax?
Tim Cook: Because the way you guys wrote the laws let's us get away with it.
Committee Chair: And that concludes the substantial portion of today's hearing. I'd like to thank Mr. Cook for attending and I would like to remind everyone that this hearing will be broadcast on CSPAN channel 2 at 3 PM Eastern tomorrow. Have a great day, and drive home safely!
Of course now sadistic companies will change their call center routing....
Can't have customers penetrating the bureaucracy, after all!!
