Posts by David Hood
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OnPoint: Ich bin ein Cyberpunk, in reply to Keith Ng,
a) I don’t think this is true yet
My impression is that, at the moment, intelligence agencies are more likely to take an interest in you if you are using encryption (because it is seen as suspicious) but can't read the contents (so will be concentrating on who you send it to and get stuff from). That said, they are also more likely to store a copy of your encrypted messages.
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Though it got not much coverage, I see that National support was down to 44% (from 51% in the poll before) in the latest Roy Morgan. The polling period (until August 11th) missed New Zealand's big interest in the GCSB (where google searches peaked the following week).
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And in the latest from the U.K., Glenn Greenwald's partner detained for 9 hours for questioning under anti-terrorism laws.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/18/david-miranda-detained-uk-nsa -
So, according to leaked internal reports, in America (70 times the Polaroid and spend a lot more on intelligence) the NSA in internal audits count around around 1000 privacy breaches of U.S. citizens a year.
And they not reporting things like getting a phone digit wrong and accidentally spying on U.S. area code 202 (Washington DC) rather than international 20 (Eygpt) -
This just crossed my reading list
Research: Intelligence Agents mak more irrational decisions than college students -
Just on the comments on protective gear making things more extreme. I read a good article a while back (can't find it now) focused on the north face of the Eiger. Back in the 40s it was death trap that took three days to climb. It is now a two and a bit hour climb (at best). While a lot of that is equipment, there is (as the article pointed out) also a component of knowing what is possible- in as much as the Eiger has also been free climbed, which cannot have been done with better equipment.
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Up Front: Everyone is Wrong. And Right. Whatever., in reply to Emma Hart,
Yes, it does. However. I raise my eyebrow very high indeed at Twitter's assertion that they can't see a deleted tweet.
Twitter seems to be very, very heavily optimized at the distribution of tweets (and deletions are a tweet saying "delete this tweet" to the various tweet servers) I could believe they have no easy, reliable way of bringing back tweets as the emphasis is not on archiving, though I suppose they could ask the NSA.
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Always pays to check the surrounding issues in cases like this (which I don't know about in this case). In the sale the other day of of the Boston Globe by the New York Times for $70 million, the Times keep the Globe's pension obligations (effectively making it a sale for -$40 million, or so I've read).
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Hard News: It's worse than you think, in reply to nzlemming,
Those polls are taken of ~1000 people who use landlines (as they are only conducted on landlines). They generally have a margin of error of 3%-ish.
New Zealand polls within a few days of each other often show a difference of support for National outside the combined margin of errors for both polls. So I would never read to much into individual polls. I tend to think of it as a long term trend, then mentally adjust the result by how much the polls were overestimating National support at the last election.
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On boycotting, the Latvian gay community (and Latvian vodka makers) has been pointing out that Stolichnaya vodka is made in Latvia not Russia, so boycotting it is not going to change Russia's mind. That said, the parent company, SPI, is Russian.
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2013/08/gay-latvians-want-gay-people-stop-boycotting-stoli/67905/