Online, You're Being Watched At All Times; Act Accordingly. 299
An anonymous reader writes "Kaspersky Lab's Internet security expert Costin Raiu discusses internet surveillance claims that you should assume that you're being watched at all times. The article reports that Raiu conducts his online activities under the assumption that his movements are being monitored by government hackers. Raiu: 'I operate under the principle that my computer is owned by at least three governments' ... 'this is not meant as a scare tactic, but a rather as a statement of fact that should now be the default setting for everyone.'"
Early Posts Win With Beta (Score:4, Informative)
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4766259&cid=46193879 [slashdot.org]
Re:Early Posts Win With Beta (Score:5, Informative)
We have plans to implement direct linking to comments. It's been on our to-do list since before the recent expansion of the beta test. It's one of several features we simply haven't had time to implement yet.
Also, the way in which comments are displayed is still a work-in-progress as well. There will be improvements.
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So, you lied. That's an ALPHA, you fool.
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Please be nice VortexCortex. I for one thank Soulskill for that response. And I thank you VortexCortex for a comment you made long ago about how we may possibly once again in the future be able to trust our computers (open source hardware designs shipped with the hardware, allowing users to do things such as compare power draw under simulation and reality to ensure extra hardware/software isn't running alongside the published design). And Soulskill, I'll take your word and start playing a little nicer.
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> A UI replacement just isn't ready for beta testing before it has feature parity with what it's replacing.
--Please call up the Yahoo developers and shout this at them, they freaking ruined Yahoo email a few months ago. Kthxbai
Help me out (Score:2)
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In pre-internet society, those things were curtailed very efficiently by peer pressure.
Your case is actually one that is being argued against internet anonymity.
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In pre-internet society, those things were curtailed very efficiently by peer pressure.
Your case is actually one that is being argued against internet anonymity.
I think you mean acrimony. That and you may have had entirely different peers than some of us :) Sorry about your lunch money...
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I just didn't grow up a "US nerd", but a "Nordic nerd" (no lunch money needed - school lunches are free for all students up until university level) and I was also a guy who never scored less than 9 (4-10 scoring system) in PE. So I didn't have any of the problems most of you US nerds seem to have grown with, and I also seem to lack most of the insecurities which have their roots in that. I do get what you are saying though, and I still disagree. I think most people have strong destructive impulses, and inte
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Dear NSA (Score:2, Interesting)
Nothing happened today to me personally, just for your records.
Signed someone not important at all.
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You miss the point. It does not MATTER if you are "important" or not. Seriously consider the implications of a total surveillance state.
Re:Dear NSA (Score:5, Funny)
Finally, we'll all be safe. Finally.
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Hooray for the Morlocks!
Re:Dear NSA (Score:5, Insightful)
Very true, but we can try to make the best of it (Score:5)
As I suggest here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-d... [pdfernhout.net] :-) :-) :-) :-) ... ...
"Our biggest advantage is that no one takes us seriously.
And our second biggest advantage is that our communications are monitored, which provides a channel by which we can turn enemies into friends.
And our third biggest advantage is we have no assets, and so are not a profitable target and have nothing serious to fight over amongst ourselves.
Let's hope those advantages all hold true for a long time.
As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for things like a basic income, all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM computers in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete.
As with that notion of "mutual security", the US intelligence community needs to look beyond seeing an intelligence tool as just something proprietary that gives a "friendly" analyst some advantage over an "unfriendly" analyst. Instead, the intelligence community could begin to see the potential for a free and open source intelligence tool as a way to promote "friendship" across the planet by dispelling some of the gloom of "want and ignorance" (see the scene in "A Christmas Carol" with Scrooge and a Christmas Spirit) that we still have all too much of around the planet. So, beyond supporting legitimate US intelligence needs (useful with their own closed sources of data), supporting a free and open source intelligence tool (and related open datasets) could become a strategic part of US (or other nation's) "diplomacy" and constructive outreach."
Re:Dear NSA (Score:5, Insightful)
You miss the point. It does not MATTER if you are "important" or not.
Seriously consider the implications of a total surveillance state.
As someone that grew under a totalitarian regime in Eastern Europe, I can tell you it's ugly like hell.
It doesn't matter that:
* then, you wouldn't know if the other person would snitch on you; and...
* now you wouldn't know if the computer/phone of the other's person or the ones you own/use would snitch on you (might as well add the nowadays almost ubiquitous CCTV-es to equations, possibly all equipped tomorrow with microphones);
in time - quite quickly - the entire fabric of society evolves to "by default, don't trust anyone".
Can you imagine a life where, no matter what you do, you need to use "steganography" (even when talking face-to-face)? Well, this is how it is in a total surveillance state.
What are the consequences, you ask? The most immediate and with the highest impact:
* one is likely to spend enormous amount of effort in balancing between "getting a message across" and "flying under the radar" (expressing the message in an innocuous way).
* the sense of community is broken down (can't build meaningful relations while in a permanent "don't trust" state of mind)
Even letting aside the economy mismanagement, the two above alone would be just enough to explain why the former "communist" regimes failed: too much effort wasted in "being paranoid" by everybody and too less "organic social efficiency".
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Consider "managed democracy" [wikipedia.org] and... maybe, why not?... inverted totalitarism [wikipedia.org]
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I get the idea that Linux advocates and NSA aren't exactly the best of friends. I would think the NSA would support a controllable business model, one that can be controlled with regulation and rewards, which will be a team player and work with them in producing consumer products for the masses.
My fear is one day running an unlicensed OS will be as illegal as growing your own pot, making moonshine, growing food from unlicensed seed,
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Now lets pretend its 30 years later and you want to run for office, well guess what the other party, or people who want to run against you in your own part will have access to that information to use against you.
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Re:Dear NSA (Score:5, Interesting)
If you're unashamed of your past (harmless) behaviour it's harder for people to "use it against you".
This is not how it works. Not even close.
Political operatives dig something up - often something entirely harmless, something that neither you nor any of normal people would even consider to be shameful - and they blow it up until it crushes you. Take, for example, "Dean Scream," or Swiftboating of Kerry, among many other. The defining characteristic of such attacks is that they are, generally, dishonest, and influence the uneducated audience, forcing the candidate to take defensive posture - which never helps. The attack itself may be an outright lie, or a lie constructed upon some foundation of a real event, or a real event that is completely misrepresented.
Besides, a person who has nothing to be ashamed of in his past is either a saint or a narcissist. I am not aware of *anyone* who'd manage to live from cradle to grave without making an unfortunate mistake somewhere.
You haven't been paying attention (Score:2)
It's not what happened to you that matters. It matters who you know, how often you talk to them, and who they talk to. Someone else will decide what that leads them to believe about you.
Fuck Beta (Score:2, Interesting)
The Slashdot content/comment quality is dropping fast.
Also, Fuck Beta.
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FuckBeta. LongLiveAlpha.
BOYCOTT STARTS NOW (Score:2, Informative)
Join the Slashcott --- 10 February through 17 February GMT, 2014
Fuck Beta!
Re:BOYCOTT STARTS NOW (Score:5, Insightful)
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Whatever will we do without your whining? The place just won't be the same without a dozen off-topic childish posts on every topic!
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Re:BOYCOTT STARTS NOW (Score:4, Informative)
THE AUDIENCE HAS SPOKEN!
A Perfect Defense (Score:5, Insightful)
Most likely they are pwned by NSA (Score:2)
Kaspersky is a horrid software. Hard to uninstall, lots of problems in a domain environment. We thankfull ditched it this year after multiple screwups last year including when client updates caused a significant precentange of machines to slow down or not talk to the network. Took them two months to fix that.
So I am not surprised if he is admitting in a round-a-bout way, that they are hacked by the NSA. You load spyware into products, it causes problems - more bugs. I wouldn't be surprised.
Re:Most likely they are pwned by NSA (Score:5, Insightful)
Anecdotal evidence is usually not all that useful. Real statistics are more reliable: http://chart.av-comparatives.o... [av-comparatives.org]
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Where's ClamAV?
just use public wifi (Score:2)
and people who own the join offering it are the ones on the hook.
Don't miss the point of this please. (Score:5, Interesting)
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those with access to the NSA cloud can decide who is in and who is out in terms of eligibility for admission to the public sphere
Welcome to reality, please take your voting ballot and move to the second door on the right.
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They weren't forwarded, they were supplied as per subpoena requests.
Still, point stands. Wasn't NSA.
Re:Don't miss the point of this please. (Score:4, Interesting)
Yet nothing.
The truly infuriating thing about the NSA is how inconsequential they have been. Don't get me wrong, the spying is horrifying and anger making...
But we aren't even getting security theater out of it. They're doing things just to do them. Cases aren't being solved by PRISM or any of the other creepy programs.
It's not just that they're violating our rights, they're also doing their jobs really badly.
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I think you have a very valid point which is why this such a scary issue. However, the emails were obtained through a court ordered subpoena during an investigation and retrieved through back ups the government is required to keep.
It's much scarier than that.
The NSA has all the official certs, the exploits, and the technical ability (along with the ability to coerce/force ISPs, phone carriers, etc to help) to forge and place an email or any other digital evidence on pretty much anyone's system that they wish to, and have it appear forensically to have been created/saved/received on any past time/date they wish.
Throw in a little "parallel construction" and you're suddenly a convicted felon on the way to a new, very "friendly" cell-mat
Civil disobedience (Score:2)
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No surprise for anyone with a clue.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I've always treated 'online' the same as postcards.
Anything else was/is naive, and this was apparent to anyone that actually understood networks, and 'online'.
Where the problem stems from, is 'security solutions' being added in after the fact. It(the internet) was touted as 'the Information Highway' for a reason...it was.
It was never touted as 'the Secure Information Highway', and when commercialization hit the 'Information Highway', that did not change.
This subject(internet security) is the poster child of unintended consequences.
There are ways of doing business/secure transactions with networks, but it seems no one wants to spend the effort or $$ required to do so.
Until that attitude changes, this kind of 'news' will be a regular, ongoing event. Convenience will trump security anytime money is involved...look at history for supporting evidence.
FUCK BETA (Score:2, Funny)
not even reading this article anymore jesus christ
Please Read Before Modding Down (Score:4, Insightful)
What company directs 25% of its users to a partially-working, not-ready-for-production website? Please realize that Beta will not have the features that we want, because they interfere with Dice's plans for Slashdot. Dice presents Slashdot to their advertisers as a "Social Media for B2B Technology" [slashdotmedia.com] platform. B2B - that's the reason Beta looks like a generic wordpress-based news site. To be sure, a large precentage of Slashdotters work in IT, but Slashdot is most certainly not a B2B site.
Nevertheless, Dice is desperate to make money off of Slashdot, even at the cost of losing much of its current userbase. Turning Slashdot into a social platform for IT "decision makers" is a Haily Mary attempt to recoup the failed investment Dice made in buying Slashdot. As they have revealed in a press release [diceholdingsinc.com] detailing their performance in 2013, this acquisition has not lived up to their financial expectations:
Slashdot Media was acquired to provide content and services that are important to technology professionals in their everyday work lives and to leverage that reach into the global technology community benefiting user engagement on the Dice.com site. The expected benefits have started to be realized at Dice.com. However, advertising revenue has declined over the past year and there is no improvement expected in the future financial performance of Slashdot Media's underlying advertising business. Therefore, $7.2 million of intangible assets and $6.3 million of goodwill related to Slashdot Media were reduced to zero.
The new Beta interface is not the result of a superficial makeover. Keeping in mind that Dice felt confident enough to present it as the new face of Slashdot to 25% of its visitors, it is safe to say that the new commenting and moderation system is exactly how they intended it to be. It is a new design that deliberately cripples the one thing that makes Slashdot what it is today, viz. thebest commenting and moderation system online today. From the users' perspective, there is nothing wrong with Slashdot that demands gutting its foundations and dumping the one part of Slashdot we exactly like. As others have commented, this is an attempt to monetize
This is why they ignore the detailed feedback we have given them in the months since Beta was first revealed. This is also why they now disregard our grievances and complaints. Their claims of hearing us are a deliberate snow job. It is only pretense, since at the same time they openly admit that Classic will be cancelled soon [slashdot.org]:
"Most importantly, we want
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If they don't want us, then they know how to lose us.
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in the meantime, please don't be the reason people stop posting and turn this into nothing but beta whining.
Speaking of stopping posting, it's time for US Slashdot users to start logging out. The boycott lasts from February 10 through February 17. Let's make it hurt. More specifically, let's make sure DICE hurts -- we're not really hurting /. because /. is US.
They want you to think you're watched and give up (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a standard trope in every epic novel from middle-earth to outer space: the bad guys want you to hunker down. To hell with that!
Smiert Spionam!
A possible solution (Score:3)
The article reports that Raiu conducts his online activities under the assumption that his movements are being monitored by government hackers.
I recommend you begin to conduct all your online activities in such an empty, sugary sweet, and flavorless way that who have regularly surveilled you for years completely lose all interest in you and instead begin focusing their attention on other online targets. Let's call this strategy...I dunno..."Security by New Coke".
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What you have said is interesting, however I am not yet convinced. I urge people to stay reasonable, and respect and honor their authorities.
I think I've said this a thousand times, but it bears repeating; Moderation. Humility. Perseverance. Work hard and of course opportunity will come to you, sometime before you are 95 years old.
Security is necessary, because those bad guys out there might not show us the respect and decency that our Security people do by treating us all like criminals. And no, I don't f
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Darn, it looks like my circuitous slam on beta was a bit too subtle. I've been trying the artistic approach [slashdot.org] rather than the much more popular explicit/profane approach, which now seems a bit...shall we say..."overdone".
That said, I think the New Coke analogy is apt. I remember when New Coke was first foisted on us. I felt that something which was "mine" (old Coke) had been stolen from me, even though it legally belonged to someone else, who had every right to withdraw their highly popular product from th
VPN services (Score:2, Offtopic)
Here's how I'd react to this if it were 100% true: (Score:5, Insightful)
That was 2004; Welcome to 2014: (Score:2)
1. Computer has glued-in battery, can decide when it turns on or off with no obvious signs (other than generating heat, but full power isn't needed to spy)
2. WWAN/cellular built into motherboard, doesn't need a paid account to spy on you
Wait.. (Score:2)
But All the local bookstores are now closed because of Amazon, that means I'll have to go to the public library and buy my books there. Wait, that means I'm using the Internet and I can't do that. I mean the UPS man will know what I've received packages, so he may be tracking me as well. Oh I can't check out books either because the Library is tracking me as well!
The end of knowledge is upon us!
How about this? (Score:2)
I don't give a damn (Score:2)
I'll do what I do and say what I say because I am who I am.
And I don't give a rat's shiny fat ass whether the NSA or anyone else likes it or not. The NSA is just another potential hater. No big deal.
Sad but true (Score:2)
Which is exactly what governments want (Score:3)
A scared society is easy to control. If you are feeling constantly watched, you are less likely to start democratic processes.
This change of behaviour is what governments want as it secures their place.
Additionally it's not hackers who spy on people. They wouldn't do this as it conflicts with their moral beliefs. It's companies helping governments, and companies like Kaspersky.
The statements of this company's CEO kinda sound like the wishlists of many governments.
End to online anonymity, so political protest can be surveiled much more easily. (as was done with mobile phone users recently in the Ukraine)
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/... [slashdot.org]
Digital voting which is much easier to fake in a large scale way than democratic ways like pen and paper and impossible to check by the layperson.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/... [slashdot.org]
And here he even advocates for "cyberwar", claiming that cyber weapons are somehow cleaner than traditional ones, completely ignoring the fact that such weapons mostly good against civilians as governments can easily have their own secure IT.
http://it.slashdot.org/story/1... [slashdot.org]
Parents (Score:2)
Those of us raised by good parents have always felt that way. It's never been a problem.
Take them appart (Score:2)
This is far far beyond what we should just bear. Take the fucking government apart until they stop this behavior. Enough is enough.
Act accordingly? (Score:2)
Either hide everything or overload the systems by acting extremely suspiciously in everything you do?
I wonder (Score:2)
lurk moar (Score:2, Insightful)
fuck beta
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I'm sick of seeing posts about the beta.
Well, then, it's your lucky day! Starting in 4 hours and change, a lot of us from the USA will be leaving /. and making no more anti-beta posts for a week! (The Europeans and UTC hardliners everywhere have already left.) Enjoy your week...
--------------------
Please post this to new articles if it hasn't been posted yet. (Copy-paste the html from here [pastebin.com] so links don't get mangled!)
On February 5, 2014, Slashdot announced through a javascript popup that they are starting to "move in to" the new Slashdot Beta des
Re:Lurker Here (Score:4, Funny)
A whole week without a bunch of whiny Americans? Bliss! :-)
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Big talk from an AC.
tl;dr FUCK BETA
Not a Lurker Here (Score:2)
I'm sick of seeing posts about the beta.
I'm sick of seeing posts about the posts about beta.
But don't dismay, after tonight, you will get a break, as most of us(complaining about the beta) will be gone for a week....some for good.
Maybe you AC's can compare recordings of crickets chirping when we are gone. Maybe you will celebrate...who knows?(better yet, who cares?)
I normally do not reply to AC's, but this was too good of an opportunity to bash the beta! :-)
So, AC, thank you for that convenient opening!
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I'm not a fan of beta either, but the amount of entitlement coming from the regs here is ridiculous. This is a free (as in beer) service and nobody volunteers to do any of the coding or back end site maintenance either. Businesses, non-profits, and projects change direction all the time; if they don't they're basically admitting that nobody much cares about what they do. Occasionally there are some posts with thoughtful criticism but for the most part it's fuck this, boycott that, I'm gone etc. etc. It'
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This is a free (as in beer) service
Well when you go pissing in the free beer, what the fuck do you expect to happen?
The 'Oh but it's free!" bullshit excuse for fucking up something that's perfectly fine if left alone is way over-used, and elicits no sympathy from me.
Fuck Beta.
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Entitlement? phooie. Free? Undoubtedly, we ARE the product then. As such, we want them to pay us the right way. With a site that works the way we want it to work.
We are doing DICE a kindness by letting them know in no uncertain terms that they will lose us.
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Re:some security expert... (Score:4, Insightful)
Any security expert will tell you to assume that any system you are using, even your own, is compromised, whether it is or not and regardless of whatever steps have been taken to secure it.
Source: I get paid tons of money to provide security consulting.
Re:Ohhh, Slashdot beta makes sense now (Score:5, Interesting)
"They set out to build something even the government wouldn't want to watch! Mission accomplished."
I think this is accomplished already. They could not possibly want to "watch" everybody. You'd have more watchers than watched.
I think OP erred in saying everyone is "watched". That's simply not so. Their data may be collected, and it may be looked at later, but that's not QUITE the same thing as "being watched".
Having said that: I still despise the current situation and it does need to change.
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In a court, or a kangaroo court, the two are the same for all intents and purposes. If anything, the archives are worse, because they can be manipulated at will.
Re:Ohhh, Slashdot beta makes sense now (Score:5, Insightful)
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is there a significant difference?
Yes. The difference is in actually having the government's attention.
I did not say that anything about it was good. Just that they're not the same things.
Re:Ohhh, Slashdot beta makes sense now (Score:4, Interesting)
How do you know WHY they have the data, WHAT their intentions are, or WHAT their capabilities are?
Grabbing everything is absolutely useless to going after an enemy. Real bad guys aren't going to be linking to FaceBook when they search for bomb materials, and they aren't going to use their own credit cards.
But it's great if you want to create profiles on people and control movements. If you want to build consensus and monitor people who are not convinced by propaganda -- absolutely awesome.
Re:Ohhh, Slashdot beta makes sense now (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not so much "WHY" they have the information or even "WHAT" their intentions are. It's tremendously unlikely that the government has raw computer capabilities even as high as an order of magnitude more than what's currently available on the market. They simply don't have the expertise and such huge amounts of private money are going into the same kind of R&D they'd be doing. I suppose it's possible that all the cost overruns in every government IT project and every recent military project have been going into some sort of super secret project to build high capacity storage and really fast processors, but I think it far more likely that that money has gone to making immensely powerful planes that are useless in modern warfare and paying for 50 levels of contracting.
The most recent [wikipedia.org] data I can find indicates that in 2012 just under 28 exabytes of data per month was flowing through the internet and it was increasing at about 7 exabytes year on year, so a relatively safe assumption is that internet traffice for 2013 was probably about 35 exabytes a month. Based on an old whatif" [xkcd.com] from xkcd, the highest density storage we have microsd cards is about 160 terabytes per kilogram. Let's assume for the sake of insanity that the government can store 10 times that in a manner which is actually practical to process, so we'll give them a data density of 1.6 petabytes per kilogram. This is obviously insane, but let's do it anyway. By that math storing all internet traffic everywhere will mean 35 tons of storage every single month. Note this is ridiculously low and the actual figure is likely substantially higher not counting the mechanisms to actually process and archive all that information.
None of that even comes close to all the data that isn't on the intranet that they're supposedly trying to siphon down, which probably easily doubles or trebles this figure. This is how we know they aren't storing everyone's information indefinitely, or even temporarily, they can't.
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I think OP erred in saying everyone is "watched". That's simply not so. Their data may be collected, and it may be looked at later,
You're being watched, but you haven't attracted their attention yet.
If you or anyone associated with you does anything that they feel the need to respond to, they will have your entire online life and a good proportion of your offline activities available to "encourage" you to work with them to solve their problem.
Even knowing this is happening will change how many people behave. Warnings like this are part of the problem, real security experts will be working to block the watching, not adding to the c
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You're being watched, but you haven't attracted their attention yet.
Semantics. It's arguably so but I would say that in the commonly-accepted meaning of the word "watched", it isn't. It's the difference between sending your tax records to the IRS, and actually being audited.
In order to be "watched", you'd have to have already drawn their attention.
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Strongly disagree. If they're spying on you, then you're being watched. That's what it means. The NSA might hope to dilute the perception of this being a violation, but you're still being watched. That they haven't singled you out for special treatment is a different matter.
Example: The NSA aren't watching innocent people is false.
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I'd like to quote from Michel Foucault's essay "Panopticon" from his book _Discipline and Punish_. Here's a link to the a pdf of the text:
http://dm.ncl.ac.uk/courseblog... [ncl.ac.uk]
But first an explanation of the term is in order. In the late 18th century Bentham designed a prison where all the cells pointed to a
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You don't need to punish every infraction - in fact doing so is counterproductive. Humans (and most other animals) respond far more strongly to semi-random reinforcement (negative or positive) than to consistent responses.
Also, consider this: In the last month you *have* broken numerous laws, with combined fines in the hundreds or thousands of dollars and potentially even jail time. In fact you probably can't even walk around the block without breaking at least one or two again. And now the government k
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They could not possibly want to "watch" everybody. You'd have more watchers than watched.
You are presuming that the watcher is a human. This does not need to be so today. Even existing, crude algorithms are capable of analyzing your writing, determining what languages you are familiar with, what level of education you likely have, and other things. The software can watch for certain key words and alert humans. The software can compare the manner of writing that you use to post on different web sites and
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They set out to build something even the government wouldn't want to watch! Mission accomplished.
Just came for a quick last post... I was skeptical about the guy a few stories down who said he was IP banned and account locked after complaining about beta, but the same just happened to me, too. I made a few posts which I thought were constructive criticism of the beta... I will admit that I also made a few "fuck beta" posts, too, but not to an extreme.
It's been a fun 10+ years, folks. Last post... I'm moving on to ars and other tech sites now.
Re:Ohhh, Slashdot beta makes sense now (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, I like Beta.
In all fairness, there are some things I like about beta, and some things I don't. I think the animosity is stemming from the apparent inflexibility on the idea of maintaining classic as an alternative indefinitely for those who prefer it. And perhaps for not fixing some things (aforementioned via direct linked historical comment) that could use fixing before deploying it on all (or even 25% of) users.
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This may be a generational thing (you must be new here). With the assumption that your UID implies that you are not yet a candidate for a nursing home or AARP membership and thus you started your foray into the Internet well after Eternal September, it may be that you LIKE the current crop of web sites with inflexible single columns, large, pointless graphics and very limited functionality.
You must realize that us geezers are still getting over 80 column screens and those fancy modems that don't need to ha
Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)
Sorry ColdWetDog, you took your half court 3 pointer and air-balled. deconfliction is not my first account. In fact, if you imagined that anyone else _could have had_ that username with a lower UID, you would then have to presume that I was actually working for the NSA (which I'm not). My original account- jdogalt, has a UID about the same as yours. And if I'd gotten an account when I first read slashdot 5 days out of a week, I'd probably have a 4 digit UID or lower. In fact, I was posting to usenet (c
Re: (Score:2)
The animosity is the usual Slashdot hatred for JavaScript. It was just as bad when they moved to what people are now calling "classic" from the previous version.
It's probably also not so much a matter of flexibility as a matter of cost. Maintaining two UI's has a cost associated with it and that cost is probably 90% of why they're moving to the new UI in the first place(to make it more like the mobile version), given that they're building the new UI to avoid having to support two UI's I doubt they'd ever co
I like Beta also (Score:2, Troll)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
How are they supposed to let the folk who run the site know how upset they are? At least it was under the first post, which is pretty much always a throw-away.
P.S.: I may not be as upset as he is, but I'm not fan of Beta, either. I *am* currently testing it, and it's not really terrible, but that's all I can say in its favor.
P.P.S.: This is just to test how it reacts to unicode:
OK, it looks good before I post it, but it didn't show up in the preview...so now I'll post. (It was largely Greek letters.)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
And fuck beta.
Re: (Score:2)
Is that a process used by the aliens who carry the anal probes?
You're late to the party (Score:2)
If you live in the US it's already spelled out for you. [eff.org] Using a website or service on the Internet is trusting information to a third party and you have no reasonable expectation of privacy under the 4th Amendment.