Liberties

Time for more encrypted VOIP

From the NY Times: Taking Spying to Higher Level, Agencies Look for More Ways to Mine Data:

Mr. Arquilla, who was a consultant on Admiral Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness project, said that the $40 billion spent each year by intelligence agencies had failed to exploit the power of data mining in correlating information readily available from public sources, like monitoring Internet chat rooms used by Al Qaeda. Instead, he said, the government has been investing huge sums in surveillance of phone calls of American citizens.

“Checking every phone call ever made is an example of old think,” he said.

He was alluding to databases maintained at an AT&T data center in Kansas, which now contain electronic records of 1.92 trillion telephone calls, going back decades. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights advocacy group, has asserted in a lawsuit that the AT&T Daytona system, a giant storehouse of calling records and Internet message routing information, was the foundation of the N.S.A.’s effort to mine telephone records without a warrant.


More google.cn

The image search for “tiananmen square” on the left is from Google.cn, the image search on the right is from Google.com.

Google censorship

It’s almost so bad, it’s funny.


A new interpretation of pr0n regulations

Via metafilter, the Department of Justice is changing how it enforces laws governing adult material on the web. From Wired, “Under penalty of federal prison terms, new interpretations of existing regulations would require sites that feature photographs or videos of sexual activity to keep records confirming that performers are of legal age.” I guess this means that anyone who has a website featuring adult material must keep complete records of any person depicted. I’m curious how this will effect the adult industry as adult media is treated essentially as a commodity.

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Why is Homeland Security involved in shutting down bittorrent sites?

Can someone explain why the Department for Homeland Security is getting involved in busting “piracy” sites like the bittorrent site “elite torrents”? I can understand why the Justice Department is the enforcement body for copyright, but isn’t Homeland Security supposed to fight terrorism? I don’t understand why this hasn’t been a bigger issue. What does bittorrent have to do with terrorism? Did they need some positive news coverage of a big bust? Is it that difficult for Homeland Security to find terrorists in this country? Pirates need a lobby. That’s all there is to it. Let’s put all the money we saved from buying CD’s and create a Pro-Piracy Lobby. How much would it take? 25 million dollars? Bill Gates needs to get behind this. These types of busts represent one more ridiculous layer of bureaucratic police-state ballyhoo. I’m very appreciative of the libertarian point of view of small government since if you found some way to drain all the money away from government they’d be less likely to engage in unpopular and short-sighted enforcement regimes.

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  1. How to Remove Internet Explorer via BB
  2. RFID Hack Could Allow Retail Fraud: “As a proof of concept, Grunwald also added a “cookie” function to RFDump that allows a store to track the number of times a shopper enters or picks up an item. An audience member pointed out that that had serious implications for personal privacy. “You are exactly correct,” Grunwald said. “It is a very scary thing.”
  3. Guerrilla Drive-in Theatres. Awesome.

In an interesting story the

In an interesting story the secret-service raids an online gold exchange company, E-gold. Seems that the Federal government doesn’t like the unregulated flow and exchange of large amounts of money. Have you ever heard of the raid on Steve Jackson games?