'the ever-bigger brother' Archive
Why I’m Really Not That Bugged About PRISM
16 June 2013, 5:59 am
subtitle (or excerpt)
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and the conclusion I eventually came to really startled me.
TLDR: The more communications data is recorded, the less scrutiny any of it gets.
Disclaimer: I have a longstanding amateur interest in cryptography and cryptanalysis; I’ve read a few books. I’ve never held a security clearance nor worked in intelligence. […]
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Posted in geekery, politics, the ever-bigger brother, security
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why I don’t trust your privacy policy
2 February 2008, 8:12 am
subtitle (or excerpt)
First there was Flickr. I liked Flickr a lot; it was a very convenient way to share photos with my friends and family. I didn’t know anybody on the Flickr team personally or anything, but it was clearly a small, bright outfit. The vibe of the site made me feel comfortable letting them keep track […]
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Posted in why we hate Ballmer, jeers, the ever-bigger brother, security, business
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after everything, i still hate myspace
28 July 2006, 2:09 pm
subtitle (or excerpt)
For my taste, this does not compensate for
the leading edge of intrusive/obnoxious web ad delivery/click tracking tech
(sometimes including spyware)
the general level of inanity
the most obnoxious music player since the glory days of shockwave
funnelling more dollars into Murdoch’s multi-media empire
But Billy Bragg’s efforts to alter MySpace’s TOS (warning: tracking cookies and other nasties) is […]
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Posted in geekery, let's hear it for..., intellectual property rights, jeers, the ever-bigger brother
6 comments
please fit me now for my tin foil hat
25 September 2005, 1:49 pm
subtitle (or excerpt)
Hey, yeah, so, Granite Shadow.
Arkin sounds comparatively rational (in his inaugural entry, he says his “basic philosophy is that government is more incompetent than diabolical”), but many of the comments on Arkin’s post bear the hallmarks of paranoid schizophrenic delusions.
The bane of conspiracies is that people just aren’t very good at keeping secrets. (This is […]
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Posted in politics, the ever-bigger brother
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paging the anti-Tom Clancy
10 September 2005, 9:37 am
subtitle (or excerpt)
I never made it through a whole Clancy novel, but I think I grasp the basic formula anyway: a bunch of factual background + some more-or-less plausible speculation + a chain of innocent-seeming coincidences = a thriller. Clancy, obviously, is hawkish, implicitly conservative, explicitly technophilic.
This is an idea for a techno/political thriller rooted in somewhat […]
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Posted in politics, the ever-bigger brother
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i [heart] massachusetts
6 September 2005, 7:02 pm
subtitle (or excerpt)
Huzzah to Boston Globe for daring to print author Ross Gelbspan’s op-ed piece, the first (to the best of my knowledge) in a major mainstream US media outlet to connect the dots. The severity of the damage done by Katrina is related to the storm’s total energy, which is related to the temperature of […]
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Posted in why we hate Ballmer, let's hear it for..., politics, the ever-bigger brother
4 comments
calling a cancer a cancer
5 August 2005, 8:18 am
subtitle (or excerpt)
don’t worry, i’m not gonna make a habit of rehashing posts from slashdot. but this interested me because while it’s not unusual to hear gadflies like me shrilling about how the damage MS’s hegemony wreaks; it’s more noteworthy to hear the same sentiment coming from comparatively sober industry publication (not a clean link; ‘ware tracking […]
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Posted in why we hate Ballmer, jeers, the ever-bigger brother
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my predictive prowess
23 July 2005, 2:32 pm
subtitle (or excerpt)
cleaning up the ‘net?
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Posted in politics, the ever-bigger brother
4 comments