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But what seems to be in question here is if WikiLeaks said "US officials speaking on condition of anonymity said that enhanced interrogation was vital to finding Osama Bin Laden," did WikiLeaks actually talk to those officials and did they really say that? Or are they promoting their brand as a marginalized alternative news source that the government is trying to fight?
I'm sure he would, that doesn't make it appropriate to use leaked information to carry out a vendetta.

edit: getting source

I misread the tweet, they said "black-rimmed glasses" rather than "sunglasses".

So it seems to boil down to, "It seems like most of our critics are those upwardly-mobile Jews." Another sad chapter in the descent of WikiLeaks from a journalistic organization that was a reason to hope for humanity into a the Daily Mail for the Kremlin instead of GCHQ.

Thanks, learned something new.
While I agree that Assange has been under an incomprehensible amount of stress for such a long time, he is getting increasingly radical and less journalistic, such as his (edit: alleged) vendetta against Clinton.
At the risk of sounding naive, what do the brackets and sunglassses (edit: they're just glasses) mean and how is it anti-semetic?
It isn't a real word I'm afraid, but an FBI invention.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Onymous

It is possible (if not the norm for branded accounts) for multiple people to use a single account.
This isn't a very interesting criticism. If WikiLeaks says an anonymous source told them something that is a.) completely believable and b.) isn't what a onymous source would be able to say, I see no reason to doubt them. I don't have an extraordinarily high confidence in a claim based on an anonymous witness alone, but journalists (lets squint hard enough to still call Assange a journalist for a moment) do this all the time.

Do you have other evidence to bring to the table? Do you have reason to doubt a.) or b.)?

Re:Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data on Tuesday October 18, 2016 @02:23AM (#12732520)
And presumably you have a record of those same chats revealing the content was, "I'm not interested in participating in your conspiracy to commit fraud, stop talking to me."

If you meant to imply they could abuse this capability to get a warrant, I'll be concerned about it when they have any trouble getting warrants.

Re:Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data on Tuesday October 18, 2016 @02:20AM (#12732507)
In all seriousness, and meaning no disrespect, have you researched the Kennedy assassination and come away with the impression there was no conspiracy?

Because I didn't even think it was particularly controversial that the official story is bunk. Making no more assumptions about the circumstances of his death (ie, who or how), a conspiracy would be required to produce an official explanation that was lean of some inconvenient facts. But I'm always in the market for convincing evidence that I'm wrong.

Re:Two years spent spamming spammers back on Tuesday October 18, 2016 @01:35AM (#12732362)
> Yeah, if something is hard we should just give up right away and save time.

You misunderstood me, and it is true that I did not speak plainly. The Internet is a global resource which we cannot legislate because it isn't something we have authority over. A counterargument might go, "so is the radio spectrum, and we regulate that," and that is so, but I don't think you'd like an Internet where it's illegal to send someone an email if there country hasn't signed a treaty with your country (as it can be, simplistically, with ham radio).

> All of them have in common that they make their living in ways that are mostly negative-sum interactions, ones that they make profitable.

Pickpockets and hitmen are a drain on society in every conceivable way, but to say you're being unfair to telemarketers is a bit of an understatement. When they call trying to get me to fill up empty spaces on cruises so they don't feel like ghost ships, they are offering me something that (if you squint and pinch your nose) has value, and Carnival certainly sees value in what they're doing. Who is getting fleeced here?

Are they in a line of work that I wouldn't be comfortable with? Yes they are, but that doesn't make them the same as thieves and murderers. I can understand not being interested in entertaining moral relativism, but a nuisance is just not the same thing as a threat, and treating them as similar leads to poor decisions.

> Junk mail has a much higher ratio of production/delivery cost to recipient cost. It's societally much less of a problem.

Which of these is an existential threat, receiving unsolicited sales pitches, or running out of fossil fuels?

> I said "most sales and advertising" for a reason.

I said you were being very general, presumably I had a reason too.

> ...see what gets salespeople paid. Is it when the value is delivered or when the sale is made?

Don't salespeople deliver value to their employer when they make a sale? Isn't it their job to make sales and engineer's (or whatever specialty's) job to create whatever valuable thing will be delivered to the customer? Do you get paid for things you don't do?

> You could also see how much ad agencies do to test the value of products before they hype them.

Is it the ad agency's job to make sure my Anker cable won't overvolt my battery? Or is that the role of Anker and relevant regulators?

> Or whether they go back and make sure that they aren't giving purchasers the wrong expectations.

We can agree this is definitely their responsibility, and to forgo it would be dishonest.

Re:Two years spent spamming spammers back on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @03:51AM (#12642177)
> You are welcome to disagree with the notion for your inbox.

And we did, by implementing Bayesian spam filters, not be making spam illegal. It's a bit rich to think we can legislate a global Internet.

> Telemarketers are just doing their job. Door-to-door salesmen are just doing their job. Pickpockets and hit men are just doing their job.

These are differences of kind, not degree.

> That people have found a way to make a living from being an asshole does not mean I have to support them in any way.

Feel free to spend your money how you please, but do we really have to write it into the law?

Why is junk mail legal but spam is not? It's because Congress could understand the mechanics of junk mail, not because junk mail has any sort of moral or societal value lacking in spam.

> In the end, the purpose of most advertising and sales activity is to manipulate people into buying something regardless of the purchaser's utility or need. This is a fundamentally disrespectful activity; the people they attempt to manipulate owe them no respect in return.

This is a pretty cynical view of marketing. Do you work somewhere with a marketing department? Is that what they do?

Re:Two years spent spamming spammers back on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @03:48AM (#12642166)
Junk mail wastes more resources in a day than spam ever will. Spam should be legal and junk mail should not be.
Re:Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @02:40AM (#12641945)
Moxie says this happened in the first half of 2016, but the censored month seems have eight characters, ruling out the first six months.

My bet is on December. My hedge is that I counted wrong.

Edit: I counted wrong. <digit><digit><space>[April,March] works just as well.

Re:House Passes Employee Stock Options Bill Aimed at Startups on Friday September 23, 2016 @08:59PM (#12568948)
My thought is that this would be problematic in markets with natural monopolies. There aren't a lot of mom-and-pop power companies. (There are plenty of moms and pops selling power, but as I understand they sell it to the power company who resells it to you by burning less coal.)
I feel like you're talking over me rather than trying to understand what I say.

But stay safe and have a good life anyway, traveler.

Collection by intelligence/LE agencies and by private companies are increasingly interrelated. These are not separate problems, but two sides of the same coin.

I'm afraid you've missed my point, because I don't use those services either. No man is an island. And very few of them are OpSec masters, either. For instance, consider how unique that precise set of tools is, how easy it is to fingerprint browser extensions, and how you've effectively announced your identity in a public forum.

(Edit: Though doing that without JavaScript would be a pretty neat trick. I'm pretty sure it'd be possible to do if you can convince tags to load sequentially, so you can send requests to your server interleaved with requests for add-on resources, and observe timing. I'm thinking many levels of nested iframes ought to do the trick. But I don't know that for a fact.)

What I am trying to say is that this is hard, and we cannot solve anything by oversimplifying or victim blaming.

There surely is, but the first step is to acknowledge that the world has come to a certain point where we've lost control of our data and intelligence agencies, and not to write off people who's privacy has been compromised as fools who should have known better.

Because we are all those fools. Do you use gmail? If you don't, do you email people who do? Do you use Facebook? Do people talk about you on Facebook, even if you don't have an account? Do you email people who give Facebook their contacts? Is that even something you can find out?

Trust is transitive. If someone close to you along your social graph is being observed, you are being observed indirectly. If many people around you are being observed, you are being observed rather closely.

Re:The Threat to Americas Electrical Grid Is Bigger Than Imagined on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @11:24PM (#12554096)
I have a hard time believing that people would sit and wait for death because the lights were out. If they had to walk 100 miles, till with their hands, garden with whatever fibrous, undomesticated vegetables the could find, and fertilize with night soil, they'd make it happen.
Re:How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @11:19PM (#12554081)
Something to consider when you're comparing products based on "trustworthiness."
Re:Two Israeli teens arrested for running major DDoS service on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @11:16PM (#12554070)
Granted. But the police shouldn't be written into TCP. That is a social solution, not a technical one.
Re:Google backtracks on privacy promise with messaging service Allo on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @11:15PM (#12554066)
I think we should attempt to address the ills we find in society, lest we see them expand rapidly without any counter force.
Re:Google backtracks on privacy promise with messaging service Allo on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @11:11PM (#12554055)
The rest of the world brought me here, and I was unwilling to let them pass me by and leave me alone but with perfect control of my data.

The world is rich in complexity and devoid of absolutes. I've yet to see someone build an ivory tower with the foundations to stand more than a small shove.

Re:How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac on Monday September 12, 2016 @03:55AM (#12477911)
>> how often do you audit source code?

> You would be surprised!

How often do you audit OwnCloud's source code? (I'd describe it as "naive.")

Re:Two Israeli teens arrested for running major DDoS service on Monday September 12, 2016 @02:48AM (#12477690)
Do we need to take measures against people shouting nonsense through megaphones, or can we just accept that they have this capability and pursue more interesting topics?
> I read the the US government estimates a 80% civilian mortality if the power grid is down for a year.

Our food production, waste and water treatment, hospitals, etc run on electricity, sure. But 80% doesn't seem anchored in reality.

I feel like this irrationality about the risks posed by a blackout is what the article is meant to address.

This is the ultimate sample bias. Organizations are perfectly capable of keeping secrets, even if they are composed of individuals evolved to communicate the truth. We don't know how much we'll never know.

If we find out about clandestine activities (by governments or by private citizens), it is often decades later. Given that the capabilities have existed and been widely discussed for some time, it doesn't seem any more speculative to assert that there have probably been assassinations as that there haven't been. Radio connections don't leave behind much evidence.

And why do you think we'd know?
If you don't keep your airgapped laptop on your person or in a tamper evident container at all times, it isn't an airgapped laptop. And if it isn't an airgapped laptop, it shouldn't know any secrets.

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