Links 6/12/2013: NSA News
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2013-12-06 15:30:07 UTC
- Modified: 2013-12-06 15:30:07 UTC
-
Recently, I committed support for a new authenticated encryption cipher for OpenSSH, chacha20-poly1305@openssh.com.
-
The 5€½ minute video was made by Brian Knappenberger. Knappenberger is no stranger to tackling controversial internet subjects related to security and privacy, having previously made the documentary “We are Legion”, about Anonymous.
He is currently making another documentary about internet activist Aaron Swartz, who killed himself in January 2013 after he was charged with using MIT’s network to grab millions of articles from the non-for-profit academic journal archive JSTOR, with the aim of republishing them without restriction.
-
The video, which is part of the newspaper’s Made Simple series, uses fairly simple animation and a jazzy soundtrack to make a fairly complex topic accessible. By avoiding jargon, the video also does a pretty good job of explaining what implications this kind of surveillance has for every day web users.
-
MuckRock has been filing dozens of FOIA requests in hopes of freeing up info on the many contractors employed by the NSA. Unsurprisingly, this has met with little success. While it did manage to secure 16 pages on French security firm Vupen, its other requests have been met with claims that no responsive documents have been found. This is hard to believe considering some of the requests are about known NSA contractors.
-
Yesterday the 2014-2019 defense bill passed first reading in the French National Assembly. It marks a strong shift towards total online surveillance. If passed, the bill will not only allow live monitoring of everyone's personal and private data but also do so without judicial oversight, as the surveillance will be enabled through administrative request. The bill also turns permanent measures that were only temporary.
-
Some German politicians and lobbyists have been pushing for some of Europe's technology companies to group together and create separate IT infrastructure from US-based or US-controlled systems. These calls have come in light of concerns about US intelligence agencies' surveillance of data held by US technology companies.
-
Uppdrag granskning (Mission Investigation) and SVT is the first Swedish news outlet to get access to documents concerning Sweden leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden, who left the American organization for surveillance, NSA (National Security Agency) in May this year.
-
Corporate spies for Dow, Kraft and others have tried to discredit, shame and infiltrate civic groups using an array of dirty tricks.
-
When Edward Snowden unleashed the flood of classified documents and surveillance data secreted from U.S. spy agencies earlier this year, it is unclear if he anticipated the high-level damage it would do to U.S. international relations.
Headlines have focused on irate calls by heads of state to President Barack Obama and parliamentary moves to restore privacy. Diplomats have been summoned to repair fractured relationships.
-
US President Barack Obama, a well-known BlackBerry fan, has said that he’s not allowed to have an iPhone for “security reasons”.
In a speech at the White House promoting his healthcare changes to a youth audience, Obama said that he couldn’t use an iPhone, though he joked that his daughters seemed to spend a lot of time on theirs.
-
While the facility will feature state of the art technology and security measures, at the end of the day, like any other building, the data center will rely on local utilities, and local opponents want to cut it off from the grid. Advocacy groups, which have formed the OffNow coalition, are pushing for state legislation that would cut off utilities to the NSA’s new data center being built in Bluffdale, Utah. The argues that the NSA’s electronic snooping violates the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unwarranted searches and seizures, and proposed state legislation known as the 4th Amendment Protection Act would prevent the local government from supporting the building with local utilities.
-
If the National Security Agency says that it is not “intentionally” doing something—say, collecting records of the locations of Americans’ cell phones—then it is almost certainly taking that very action.
If it says it is doing so “incidentally,” it’s probably doing so on a large scale. If it adds that said effort does not “target” Americans or isn’t “directed” at them, that means it doesn’t believe those Americans—or Congress, or the courts—should mind, because the N.S.A. analyst who entered a search term or tapped into a mobile-network cable had first closed his eyes and thought about terrorists.
-
The website of the National Security Agency (NSA) went down on Thursday in what is at least the second instance of such an outage since former government contractor Edward Snowden began releasing classified documents about the agency's surveillance activities earlier this year.
-
NSA surveillance allegations have led to countries questioning the country's commitment to Internet freedom, a former Obama official says
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Destruction and Distortion of Information, Including Facts About Linux (Bonus: This is Destroying the Planet)
- All that LLMs have going for them is hype, and moreover media that intentionally misrepresents them and their supposed capabilities
- Google Seems to Have Just Killed All Instances of Invidious
- YouTube is rapidly becoming just "another Neflix"
-
- Italian Media Covers Richard Stallman's English Talk Ahead of Tonight's Public Appearance
- article in La Stampa
- Microsoft Skype in a Freefall: About 20% Decrease in Site Traffic in 3 Months (Amid Microsoft Phasing Out Credits)
- Microsoft axing more services/features may mean that now they scrape the bottom of the barrel and Skype will simply die, discontinuing service (like ICQ) in a matter of years
- Gemini Links 12/02/2025: Depression, Gabbro, WikiTok, and More
- Links for the day
- Links 12/02/2025: Health, Security, and Monopolies
- Links for the day
- Gemini Protocol is Increasingly Important to the Net
- Gemini Protocol will turn 6 this summer
- Former EPO Manager Warns That the Illegal 'Court' for "Unitary Patents" Enables “Law Shopping”
- Daniel X. Thomas opposed the very existence of the UPC, which any honest person could recognise was both illegal and unconstitutional
- Like GAFAM, the EPO is Passing the Financial Pains to Staff
- the EPO is operating illegally at this point
- Morale at Microsoft Ruined by the Company Labelling Thousands of Workers 'Low Performers', Sacking Them on the Spot and Denying Them Basic Benefits
- people laid off as "low performers" go to social control media to bemoan the label
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, February 11, 2025
- IRC logs for Tuesday, February 11, 2025
- Links 11/02/2025: Current state of the Internet and Smallnet Information Services (SIS)
- Links for the day
- Conservative Estimate: Over 10,000 IBM Workers to Be Laid Off in the Next Two Waves
- The morale is low and layoffs are expected soon, with mass layoffs likely happening next month and then again later
- Links 11/02/2025: Trade Wars and "Crisis for American Universities"
- Links for the day
- Parasitic LLM Slop Sites Destroy the Ability to Find "Linux" News in Google News
- Remember that Google News laid off lots of its workers
- Richard Stallman's English Talk in Italy Less Than 24 Hours Away (Torino) and Then Another Talk in Italy Scheduled (University of Bozen-Bolzano)
- He's active and he travels a lot in spite of his medical condition
- IBM Layoff Rumours, Large-Scale Implementations Weeks Ahead (in March 2025)
- There are some people corroborating
- Links 11/02/2025: Nutritional Poverty, Closure of USAID, More Fictional 'Valuations' Around Buzzwords
- Links for the day
- Perl Programming Leftovers
- recently in perl.org
- Microsoft in Africa: From 98% to Less Than 10% in Just 16 Years
- Microsoft being on less than 1 in 10 Web-connected devices in Africa is a very big deal
- Almost as If MElon Reads Techrights
- The joke we started appears to be spreading
- Microsoft Blasted for Adding Insult to Injury: Workers Laid Off Without Prior Notice, Without Severance Payment and Basic Coverage (Like Health), Then Stigmatised as Bad Performers So They Cannot Find a Job Elsewhere
- Such stereotypes end entire careers
- Gemini Links 11/02/2025: NeoVim and Deploying Other People's Code
- Links for the day
- BetaNews is Still Publishing LLM Slop/SPAM About "Linux"
- Assuming it is indeed LLM slop, it seems clear BetaNews has no intention of improving or is simply unable/unwilling to improve
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, February 10, 2025
- IRC logs for Monday, February 10, 2025
- Scheduled Maintenance Tomorrow and on Valentines
- If the site (or Gemini capsule) is offline for a bit, the maintenance windows are likely the root cause
- If Matthias Kirschner Loves Free Software, He'll Change the Name of the Microsoft-Sponsored Organisation He Governs (in Order to Avoid Confusion)
- The FSF-EEE does not really like Software Freedom, it just loves money (including Microsoft's)
- Soylent News Lessens the Scope of Discussion Due to Persistent Trolling and Online Abuse
- if they make it a lot harder for new people to participate, then they limit the "general appeal" and reach
- EPO's Local Occupational Health, Safety and Ergonomics Committee (LOHSEC) in The Hague: Workers Are Getting Sicker, Conditions in Which to Assess Patent Applications Deteriorate
- "According to the Office statistics the total number of days of absence has gone up from 12.4 to 13.1 total number of sick days per Full Time Equivalent (FTE) from 2023 to 2024."
- The Standard Needs to Improve Its Standards for Fact-Checking, Aaron Swartz Had Nothing to Do With Reddit and He Detested the Company That Created It
- The Web is already bad enough as it is
- When the Livestream of Richard Stallman is Apparently Bury-Brigaded Offline You Finally Learn to Avoid Google/YouTube for Streaming
- Please, people, stop uploading to Google/YouTube
- New Paper From the EPO Highlights Large-Scale Discrimination at the Office, Where People Are Rewarded for Granting More and More Illegal Patents
- Even the Kremlin is probably more competent than this
- Links 10/02/2025: Ban on D.E.I. Language, Listeria Risk/Outbreak
- Links for the day
- Links 10/02/2025: Announcing "Stringless" and Mental Health Improvement
- Links for the day
- Links 10/02/2025: Facebook Mass Layoffs, "Meta" Did What Aaron Swartz Had Done But to the Tune of 81.7 Terabytes
- Links for the day
- Microsoft Tarnishing the Brand of Arch
- Of course Arch can do whatever it wants, but being associated with Microsoft is a badge of shame
- The Ultimate and Inevitable Fall of OpenAI (Even Brave is 'Bigger' Now)
- "When you advertise at the Super Bowl, you’ve reached just about every consumer in America. It’s the last stop. If you’re not profitable yet, you never will be."
- Adding Slop to Your Blog Only Makes One Assume All the Text is LLM Slop
- Simon Coter from Oracle has turned to slop
- Macao is Leaving Microsoft Behind
- Windows is falling to new all-time lows
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, February 09, 2025
- IRC logs for Sunday, February 09, 2025
- Microsoft's WSL (LSW) Shows That It Can Never Love Linux, Only Windows
- that's just how Microsoft rolls
- Activism in Times of War and a Coup
- 'Linux' Foundation works for fascism
- What the Silencing of Neatnik Tells Us About Linus Torvalds Inside a Microsoft-Dominated 'Linux' Foundation
- Is Linus Torvalds free to express his mind as he wishes about every topic, even just any technical topic?
- Windows Down to 11.35% in Senegal, as Measured by statCounter
- Another all-time low (Windows was at 99% in 2009)
- "Latest Technology News" in BetaNews is LLM Slop Promoting OOXML and Proprietary Software at the Expense of LibreOffice and OpenDocument Format (ODF)
- Remember that "open-source" and Open Source aren't the same; the former is fake