Edward Snowden - modern day hero

I'd brush it off if it was not for the fact that i know well the mentality of government employees and contractors - we all would like the security of permanent access to a free-flowing and limitless supply of nutritious blood provided by the nipple of taxation. For such security almost all will turn a blind eye to ethical considerations.

Almost all - but not all - Snowden, Assange, and others, for all their own human foibles, at least they try to show us ourselves at our worst.



i got this from here (with this interesting follow up, and this cool vid)

there are other places this story will play out

it's pretty disturbing but i guess that very very few people actually care

as long as they get to drink on Friday and watch the footie and have that BBQ on Sunday

really who cares?

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see also

Revealed: “Boundless Informant,” NSA’s powerful datamining tool,
It Seems A Bit Early To Call Edward Snowden A ‘Hero’,
If you know nothing about whistle-blowers, don’t cover them,
Thomas Drake: The NSA will come after him with everything they’ve got,
Will China give up Snowden?,
European leaders express outrage, but are they really OK with letting the NSA “do their dirty work”?,
PRISM whistleblower Edward Snowden sacked from Booz Allen; hiding in unknown location,
U.S. tech firms push for government transparency on security,
China To Weigh Snowden’s Fate,
Encrypt your emails, evade the NSA,
10 dumbest reactions to the NSA scandal,
Snowden Shows South China Morning Post Details of NSA Hacking in China,
Hong Kong protesters rally in support of US spy whistleblower Edward Snowden,
PRISM part of a much larger government surveillance program,
Are Google, Facebook lying about the spying?,
Privacy versus security: Does the NSA’s surveillance program work?,
PORTRAIT OF THE LEAKER AS A YOUNG MAN: Edward Snowden Has Always Been A Privacy Fanatic,
Facebook And Microsoft Finally Allowed To Disprove ‘Hyperbolic And False’ Initial Spying Reports,
PRISM software works just like Facebook ads,
Is Alex Gibney’s WikiLeaks film “state agitprop”?,
The dangerous ethics behind Google’s transparency claims,
Why Google, Facebook must nip spy tag,
FBI says U.S. will hold Snowden responsible for NSA leaks,
NSA surveillance didn’t lead to capture of deadly terrorist,
No one understands what treason is,
What Are You Doing to Protect Yourself From NSA? #SafeData,
Web companies begin releasing surveillance information after U.S. deal,
Microsoft got more than 6,000 U.S. data requests in second half 2012,
Web giants get broader surveillance revelations,
Facebook, Microsoft reveal surveillance request data after US deal,
Facebook got 9,000-10,000 government data requests in second half 2012,
About half the Senate skipped classified NSA briefing,
Officials: NSA surveillance blocked terror plots,
Dick Cheney praises NSA surveillance program,
Intelligence Officials Claim That NSA Surveillance Foiled Terrorist Plots In Over 20 Nations,
Why I Am Not Impressed with the Edward Snowden NSA Leaks, So Far,
Dick Cheney Laughs Off Privacy Concerns Over Government Surveillance,
One lesson from the NSA scandal: Find out where your cloud provider's data centers are located,
Apple got up to 5,000 data requests in six months,
This Big Business of Big Brother,
How Britain spies on friends and rivals alike,
Snowden: Facebook, Google can resist NSA,
How Edward Snowden’s New Leaks Are Distracting From The Conversation He Wanted,
US whistleblower Edward Snowden says more leaks to come as father pleads with him to stay quiet,
Five major takeaways from Edward Snowden Q&A,
Why the US government Spies on its own Citizens,
Yahoo says it had as many as 13,000 data requests,
Facebook seen most vulnerable in spy scandal,
Yahoo discloses number of US govt data requests,
The Private-Intelligence Boom, by the Numbers,
House hearing in celebration of NSA spying,
Google cites 1st Amendment in transparency push,
NSA spying kills my faith in America,
The NSA Hearing, by the Numbers,
NSA Disruption of Stock Exchange Bomb Plot Disputed
Justice Department Fought to Conceal NSA’s Role in Terror Case From Defense Lawyers
Google Challenges FISA Gag Orders on Free Speech Grounds
Brand Damage Through Information Access
What Bothers me About NSA Data Collection: A Reply to Thomas Friedman

welcome to 1984

p

rescuing people and causes

i've come to the realization that i've become like many people i used to feel critical of

i don't want to rescue anyone anymore

i really feel like it's such a huge expense of spirit

over and over it is overwhelmed by simpler human needs: avarice, desperation, fear

legion

oh well, maybe my energy will rekindle

i'll find the next in need

Quixote?

p

Christchurch Airport and Fairy Down sleeping bag

Seems that Christchurch Airport has either some financial problems or maybe they are freakin out about their insurance

mind you there was a rumor that an MP had reacted to the sight of so many backpacking young people sleeping in the arrival lounge prior to very early morning departures

anyway we were all told we would be kicked out at midnight

check-in to my flight was supposed to start at 3:45am

as soon as i heard it i left and found the best shelter i could find outside

happened to be one of two the "designated smoking areas"

i moved the ash-trays outside, set my pack as a pillow and climbed into my aging Fairy Down minus 15 degree sleeping bag which is little more than a down cocoon hardly big enough for you to cross your arms on your chest

but it actually can be stuffed into a pocket - it's pretty useful

by midnight it had got down to about zero - i don't know how well i might have fared had the temperature dropped another five degrees

but i was comfortable and slept until after 4 - still time enough to check in

i did wake at about 2am

there were two young men from Holland sitting and freezing to death and later i heard from one of the airport staff that some had also tried to escape the cold in outside stairwells

well done Christchurch Airport you dolts

these tourists will forget all the great stuff they experienced in NZ and will instead report the terrible treatment at the airport

me, i'm used to both the cold and to idiotic Kiwi shortsightedness

but those poor tourists really suffered

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some refs:

No Sleeping Overnight at Christchurch International Airport

Travellers kicked out of Christchurch Airport overnight

Travellers kicked out of Christchurch Airport overnight

Tourists land to rude Kiwi awakening

Early flyers can kip at airport

Definition of Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy

"promoted beyond your good points"

politics?

"promoted despite your bad points"

Corporate?

"who gives a shit if you own it"

Economics

Pick a direction that the powerful really wants to go and prove mathematically that that is the bestest direction


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Jeffrey Sachs on the banking system

via JESSE'S CAFÉ AMÉRICAIN



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maybe one day soon...

we’re predators i must admit
it’s human nature too
to seek a better living for
our wives and children too

but animals we’re not you see
it not just fine detail
we keep the law, control ourselves
and the bankers go to jail

p

Population pressure and model aircraft

When i was about 9 years old i developed a keen interest in aircraft. I guess i was no different to many boys. I wanted to grow up to be a pilot - i guess that's because growing up to be an astronaut was away in the future.

I would devour anything i could find about aircraft and i could rattle off all the specifications of any aircraft from the earliest days of flight right through to the early 50's.

I loved airplanes.

In those days you could buy model airplanes - Airfix, Revelle and the like. But i was not rich and the models were not cheap.

I needed an income that would allow me the freedom to buy and build whatever i wanted.

My mum and dad were animal freaks - we had every animal you could imagine to be had in Australia in the 60's - Birds of every species, dogs, cats, rats, mice, fish, kangaroos...

One day i was in a pet shop and i saw that they were selling mice and after inquiring about them i decided i would breed mice.

My dad got me a tea chest (a plywood box about half a cubic meter used to transport tea from India - these being the days long before tea-bags etc).

I set it up with a wire door and filled it full of shredded newspaper and food and water

and mice.

Pretty soon i had a lot of mice.

I was getting 20 cents for each mouse from the pet shops in Liverpool (Sydney). That money was enough for me to buy my model aircraft and the paints and glues i needed to construct what ended up being a really cool set of planes.

There was not much work to it - all i had to do was, every day or so, clean out all the filth and replace it with clean shredded newspaper and keep them fed and watered.

Money for nothing.

The thing was that i was breeding piebald and grey mice because those were the ones that the pet shop said they wanted.

One day i turned up at the pet shop with my box of mice and they told me "sorry son but we only want white mice now".

Bummer. That was a really big let-down i can tell you because i had already, as usual  planned exactly which model i was going to buy.

No sale, no money, no model.

I took my mice home and released them back into the tea chest.

Now, you have to understand that my parents were animal nuts - they had a big thing about kindness to animals and the idea of cruelty to animals in any way was abhorrent.

I grew up with that so i had no concept whatsoever of cruelty other than it was something that you just did not do.

I had spent my whole life with dogs and cats sleeping in my bed and animals gathering around me whenever i was in the back yard.

Here was i with a tea-chest full of continuously breeding mice and no way to deal with it.

Now, i can tell you i knew mice pretty well as a 9 year old (or maybe i was ten by then i really can't recall). I knew their behavior because i was looking at them every day. I even named most of them.


So, what happened when i could not remove mice from the tea-chest?

They just kept breeding and breeding and breeding.

And then i began to see things that were really quite disturbing.

Remember - i was like 9 or 10 - i did not really understand "sex" except as i was perceiving it in my mice.

So what did i witness?

Abandonment of baby mice - mothers just leaving them to starve.

Adult mice viciously attacking and devouring or partially devouring baby mice.

Homosexuality - now don't get me wrong - i had seen plenty of male mice attempting to mount other male mice but that had always been infrequent and met with aggression.

Now i was seeing homosexuality in all forms and all responses - as if it had suddenly become normal.

Violence, aberration and death.

That is what i witnessed.

It was many years later that i read studies along similar lines so i had to live with these revelations for a long time before i could come to terms with them.

At the time it freaked me out so much that i talked my dad into helping me take them out to the bush and releasing them into the wild.

Washing my hands of it all.

But i never forgot - ever.

I saw first hand what a population will do when everything is available except one thing.

Space.

Since then i have watched so may discussions about aspects of what i saw.

I have come to understand there are different levels of "illness".

One of them i call "sociological illness" - those expressions of behavior you only see when a population is under stress.

These days we can see every one of these aberrations occur, almost daily, in our world - from men raping and murdering 6 year old girls to women abandoning their children to men buggering men and worse.

These were all the things i saw in those mice when i was 10 years old.

How do we deal with these expressions today?

We either look on with abhorrence or we rationalize towards acceptance.

Wherever we fit in the scheme of things is no real escape form the consequences of our predicament - we are not so different to those mice and peer reviewed experiments have shown that what i witnessed as an innocent child are the real deal.

People get caught up in the right or wrong of how people think about how people behave relative to whatever "norm" is currently acceptable

But i know the truth.

Population pressure leads to every possible expression of behavior - acceptable or otherwise

How we accept it will vary with time and where we sit in it.

The real issue should not be "are sexually 'deviant' people bad".

the real issue should be how do we deal with population?

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An Internet voting system based on bitcoin

Internet voting systems have both strong support (from vendors and committed users of e-voting systems) and what appears to be equally strong opposition (from the technical community).

There appears to be two aspects to internet voting:

1. Ensuring that only those authorised to vote are the only people who do vote.
2. Ensuring that there is no tampering with the votes between point of voting and point of counting.

The first of these will always carry some level of risk and that risk is no different from that with traditional paper based voting systems where the identification of the voter is required. How are we to be absolutely sure that the voter is in fact the voter we have on our list of authorised voters? What is proposed here is that solutions to the problem be allowed to evolve with time and advancing technology. Initially we could start with distribution of a "vote authorisation token" to authorised voters via the postal services. Though this is not perfect it appears to carry fewer risks than what might be achieved currently with electronic distribution. Also, the basis for most voter eligibility is residence. Eligible non-resident voters also have some physical connection that authorises them to vote such as being stationed somewhere or having equity in a property located within the electoral area.

Assuming that the distribution of a "vote authorisation token" is viable the next question then is how might we ensure that a cast vote progresses to the counting process without intervention?

The proposal is that the same principles used by bitcoin can be used to both transmit votes (transactions) and count them (account balances).

We propose that the distribution of "vote authorisation tokens" be nothing other than a bitcoin-like transaction of a vote from an electoral commission to the voter. This exactly parallels the payment of an amount of bitcoin money to a voter. The voter's balance then represents the number of votes he or she is authorised to cast. The voter in casting a vote is in effect making a payment-like transaction from his/her vote "wallet" to the "wallet" designated to  be the wallet of the vote counting point for a candidate - in other words the candidate's "account" held on a publicly visible "wallet".

The handling of the vote "transaction" is then exactly the same as that for monetary transactions in bitcoin. The "miners" would then be those organisations and individuals who have the most interest in the outcome of the election or contest. Major political parties would invest the most to ensure their rivals do not have dominance over transaction validation.

Every voter would be able to trace his or her vote through the transaction history giving full transparency.

The results would be available in real time - even where complex distribution of preferences are utilised. In such cases the false "random" nature of distributions would also be eradicated - leaving one and only one path through the distribution.

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see also "what is a bitcoin"

i discover i was not the first person to think of this

p

gosh, Jeff Buckley - so so beautiful

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What is A BitCoin?

What is "A bitcoin"?

Seems to me to be the biggest confusion i run across when trying to explain bitcoin to people.

Sites in plenty explain what "bitcoin" is but that leaves some people still confused.

Some of the confusion comes from thinking there are "coins".

There aren't any really - there are no "coins" in bitcoin.

I explain it like this

"A bitcoin is (at the time of writing) 1/25th the reward paid for confirming the validity of a block of bitcoin transactions"

Not so long ago it was 1/50th the reward.

In the not too distant future it will be 10/1250th the reward. It will get smaller until there are only rewards from transaction fees.

At any point in time there is also an exchange rate such that you could say:

"1 bitcoin is USD$150"

but there are still no bitcoins so to speak.

The decimal point in a bitcoin balance is in a way quite arbitrary. It set a starting point for an exchange rate.


bitcoin - whoever Satoshi Nakamoto is he/she/them and Adam Black should get a Nobel Prize for something absolutely stunning in it's brilliance - but otherwise i'm sure he/she/they are entitled to The Well Deserved Fortune of Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin creator, Visionary and Genius.

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ps

Buy with bitcoin? Sure you can!

Donate to us with Bitcoin

17yULYgiBZmnahTwVayfxgmeuafCB9xyF2

DropBox - slimy, insidious bastards who own a cool app

So ok i finally gave in and bought a smartphone.

It's not that i gave in really. It's because soon i will have a valid reason to own one - that i will be relocating to another country and i'll not have a job.

It's a South East Asian country and one thing they do have is cellphone coverage.

So anyway a smartphone looks like a sensible investment - GPS, translator, access to my data no matter where i am. Well, that's the theory.

I've been migrating into the cloud for about 3 years. Maybe "migration" isn't the best term - let's think of it more as setting up residence there - i'll pretty much never really trust any of them - so as well as having everything in the cloud i still have multiply backed up originals in 2TB disks located in two countries. If i could mount those safely somewhere it would be even better.

Back to my new smartphone. I detest Apple as a company (even more than i detest Microsoft and way more than i detest google) so i went with a Samsung.

The new Galaxy S4 is about to be released so i figured that S3s would be in that sweet spot of being still very useful but not so expensive - i got one for just over AUD$400.

The only hiccup was that my SIM card was too big but a quick trip to a local chinese phone shop soon trimmed it down to size.

I spent the weekend setting it up and playing with it.

Because i have already established myself in the cloud (google, Microsoft, Amazon, skype, VOIP, yahoo - you name it) and all my contacts, feeds, docs and all my thousands of photos are already on line, i was very quickly up and running with full access to everything i have access to on my desk and lap tops.

You could say that i'm way ahead of most people - in fact i am pretty sure i am (if you allow for the fact that 90% of the crap available as "apps" is games and low-brow "entertainment" and i don't have any of that).

So, pre-installed on my shiny new S3 is DropBox.

I'd tried DropBox on my desktop - sharing between work and home but i was not very impressed - in fact i thought it was rubbish compared to what i have with skydrive and google drive so i'd uninstalled it.

But i thought i'd give it another try on the smartphone. Ah slick - very slick - very well integrated into the phone.

And then i got an email saying i could have 48GB of free storage if i carried out 5 of 7 steps....

Of course no matter how you cut it one of those steps is to rat on a friend by coughing up their email address - a hot lead so to speak.

Of course i just used one of my many email addresses (i literally have an infinite number of them as i made the good investment of a low cost domain presence through goDaddy - as well as all the others - gmail, outlook, yahoo and lots of others all managed through my gmail account)

So now i'm being bombarded by very clever marketing spam from dopbox - both sides.

And get this - that so-called "free"48GB is only free for 24 months.

Talk about an insidious bunch of slimy crooked scum - they lure you into using as much on line space as they can possibly get you to use - and then they'll drop a big rental fee on you - when you're committed.

Well DropBox let me tell you that your business model might work with dumb people who have more money than sense - but anyone with any skill whatsoever (or the right app which will indeed soon appear) - will use the free 2GB as a staging location for their camera managed through their other systems.

I've shared my DropBox with my other more powerful and more generous systems - and now it's just a folder.

DropBox reminds me of Excite - was my absolutely favourite search engine and way better than google at the time but they rushed to monetize it. The rest is history.

If you want to dominate the market you have to have deep pockets and a long term strategy. Only once you have killed off all the real competition should you think about how to make money from things.

DropBox - cool and nicely integrated app owned by a bunch of impatient marketing clowns.


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