devx

If this is indeed the work of Flexycore, there are some explanations here, although they don't go into a lot of details either:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEAz9fRoDmA&list=UUowARqiVYk...

The description about Feinstein is wrong. She didn't backtrack about anything. She's only pretending to do it, while passing Newspeak bills with backdoors that codify and legalize NSA's mass spying.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/10/sen-feinsteins-nsa-bil...

Feinstein has done nothing but help the NSA so far. She's not going to just stop because she suddenly developed a conscience. I wish Californians would just recall her, because otherwise we're stuck with her and her pro-surveillance state bias until 2018. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad, if she wasn't also the head of the Intelligence Committee, and having tremendous power in the Senate to continue things as they are.

The problem is even chip makers don't support their own devices that long. For example Qualcomm only supported their own chip the Snapdragon S3 only for 18 months, which is why when HTC used it in the HTC One S in 2012, it was already on its last legs for support, and then HTC couldn't update it anymore in 2013 because they said Qualcomm wouldn't update the drivers for it anymore.

So it seems it may not be just OEM's fault, if their component suppliers won't support their components for longer either, although I guess you could make an argument for OEM's making their own drivers for everything, or Google trying to introduce another layer of abstraction for hardware, and upgrade everything themselves.

With people like the POTUS, the Chief of the Intelligence Committee, and half of Congress backing them, not to mention most of the military industrial complex, who needs "supporters"?

No, the JDK.

The Linux kernel 3.10 in Android 4.4 should support "device tree". I wonder if that will make it easier for OEM's to make "master images", at least for their own devices, which should make upgrading their own devices easier. But even if that happens, it will happen only from now on, and not with past phones.

Hacker News 2 is virtually perfect.

Some new design stuff, too:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RomanNurik/posts/EURexV9yF32

http://phandroid.com/2013/10/31/android-kit-kat-videos/

Someone you should tell them about the mother of all security bugs: NSA has full access to their datacenters.

They might want to fix that one first, before caring about the tiny little ones. It doesn't look like they are in a hurry to fix that one yet, though:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/10/30...

Will they use EME/DRM to make them undeleteable, too?

http://blog.notevencode.com/posts/html5-eme-is-not-a-drm-sta...

Good. So what are they going to do about it?

1) join StopWatching.us and start lobbying Congress for real anti-NSA reforms, while creating big public campaigns about it, like they did for SOPA and the ITU reunion

2) start adopting ultra-secure and privacy-oriented end-to-end encryption protocols, while creating and supporting others: DarkMail, OTR, ZRTP, CurveCP, etc

3) Start finding ways in which their business doesn't depend so much on user tracking, because, ultimately, as long as that's their main business model, they'll never truly be a user's friend, when it comes to security, and all of their permanent data collection just makes them huge targets for spying agencies.

So they really need to think long and hard about this, and rethink the whole thing. Because even if we have some reforms now, NSA or others like them will never stop trying to hack them, and get the data from them. Make that their next big "moonshot" project.

So will Google do any of these, or will they just remain at the "outraged" stage?

I would even let them get away with that argument, but if they do use that argument, that means they should also be pissed off about these revelations, and realize that NSA has gone fully rogue, and they need to drastically rein in on it. At least that's the logical conclusion from their argument.

The problem is they want their cake and eat it, too. They want to get away with it themselves, but also protect NSA and their powers. We should call them out on their hypocrisy, and ask them to restrain NSA's powers if it's really a surprise for them, too.

I'm sure their intention was not to be used for nefarious purposes, but that doesn't mean NSA/FBI/Congress won't try to portray it as such.

But anyway, I'm starting to get the feeling this issue is taking too much attention from the protocol itself, which is the big news here. If they want to change it, great, if not that's fine, too. They just need to make sure the protocol is great, and can get other big e-mail providers to support it, or at least a ton of smaller ones.

On Chrome you can use an extension like iReader to format it nicely:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ireader/ppelffpjgk...

Yours does look a little nicer, though. You should make it an extension.

They mentioned having a "web of trust" to help fight spam. But if you use that, doesn't it mean someone like NSA, who can get everyone's public keys (which I assume is what they're going to use for this, just like for PGP), could then identify who are the people talking to each other, and essentially invalidate all their metadata gather protections? Or would that key be ephemeral, too?

Unfortunately, not only do a lot of US citizens still support such practices (I think around 40 percent - as long as they mention "to protect you from terrorists"), but most of the rest who don't agree with the practices, can't be bothered to do much about it, like even calling their representative, let alone going out and protesting.

I do believe this is very true:

> All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing - Burke, Edmund

So, yes, I'd say most Americans are responsible for this yes, by doing nothing to stop it. So don't blame the rest of the world if they start "hating Americans" or "hating America". You are part of it, you are responsible to change the America you want the world to love, too.

Blaming only the government, that you probably voted in, too, does not cut it.

Also agreed. It's for the same reason I don't like the name darknet. The FBI was already lobbying Congress and saying the Internet is "going dark", implying that they thought that will scare congress into acting, and giving them more powers.

It should be named the Private Mail Protocol, or something. If it stands up to scrutiny, as soon as there is a nice looking e-mail client for it, I'll start using it, and try to use Gmail as little as possible, or not at all. I know Google won't adopt it, so I won't even bother to ask them to adopt it. I'll just switch.

Here, Google - show us how much you care about user privacy and security, and join Lavabit and Silent Circle's alliance for the "Dark Mail" protocol:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/10/30/lavabit-a...

Meanwhile I'll be waiting impatiently.

I'm hoping Google ends up buying the ECC patents from Blackberry and then make them public domain or at least say they will allow everyone to use them for free and with no consequences. I know they want to buy some stuff from Blackberry right now, but not sure if they are considering buying the ECC patents, too, or not.

I'd feel a lot better if Google bought them than say Microsoft or some other company, who'd just try to collect royalties from anyone using them, and I feel that will make things a lot worse for security on the web in the future, especially with Microsoft's long-standing relationship with the NSA.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-c...

That being said, I'm very disappointed in Larry Page's statement about encryption and quantum computers:

> Lloyd made his pitch, proposing a quantum version of Google’s search engine whereby users could make queries and receive results without Google knowing which questions were asked. The men were intrigued. But after conferring with their business manager the next day, Brin and Page informed Lloyd that his scheme went against their business plan. “They want to know everything about everybody who uses their products and services,” he joked.

It bothers me a lot that the leaders of Google would think like that, even though I knew they would because of the incentives in their business. But I just wish they found way for their business to work, so they do not have to think like that, and be more on the side of users on this issue, than they are right now.

Unless their thinking about user-privacy and security changes, we should never fully trust Google (even if they are better than the rest right now). That sort of thinking means they will never go the all the way to protect their users, which probably why you will never see OTR or ZRTP in Google's chat services. All the data collection they do will also become increasingly more irresistible to governments, especially if they keep it forever.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/10/computers-big-data...

Which is exactly why I don't understand why Mozilla would support this, instead of backing VP8? They just end up making MPEG-LA stronger, which is bad news for Daala, too, for whenever it will arrive. For Daala to succeed, MPEG-LA better not have a 99 percent monopoly by then.

Wow, this seems like a very backwards move. Just when the truly open source VP8 was set to go in WebRTC, we're opening the discussion about putting h.264 in there again? Why?!

This seems like a very short sighted move.

Wouldn't that happen anyway if they do that next year?

> USA is neither for or against something , USA has interests

Sure, but his point and the point of the author was that they have been hypocritical about it, and making people believe that they are for certain things, such as democracy, and so on. They were very convenient excuses to start attacking other countries.

Now they say they are "against terror", while causing themselves terror to many others in Middle East, and creating situations that instead of making US safe, they put it in more danger with their actions.

So their points are that the leaking age, is the age where such hypocrisy will have very short lifespan.

Doesn't let NSA spy on it anymore? That should save some bandwidth.

Yeah, unreachable without FTL travel.

So maybe Obama needs to stop protecting them, as a first step, and allow real panel reviews and Congress to rein in on them, instead of opposing it as much as possible, and asking politicians like Dianne Feinstein to fighting against limiting NSA's powers.

But of course he won't do that, because all he does now is lie about everything NSA-related.

Yes it does, and PG is allowing everyone to have basically an infinite amount of flagging now. It used to be that if you used it more than 10-20 times (maybe in a period of time), you would have the ability removed.

If you've read Clayton Christensen's books, you know that after "integration" comes "disintegration"/modularization when the market becomes mature enough, just like it did in the PC world many years ago.

This might be what disintegration looks like for smartphones. Maybe our devices won't be just black boxes we can't get into in the future.

From Geoffrey Moore's books (Crossing the Chasm, etc) we also know that when a market becomes "mature"/saturated, the companies start to "mass customize" their products. We can already see the beginning of that trend with multiple colors for devices, multiple backs, etc, instead of the previous just black, or black and white.

> "Unless the United States is engaged in hostilities against a country or there is an emergency need for this type of surveillance, I do not believe the United States should be collecting phone calls or emails of friendly presidents and prime ministers,"

Hang on a minute! Knowing Feinstein, she's trying to build a loophole here where the NSA can still spy on everyone in those countries except their executive government, while appearing to be serious about reining it on "spying on allies".

So far Feinstein hasn't done anything that wasn't to support the NSA in one way or another. I wouldn't trust her with this.

Windows 8 is still very schizophrenic. Pick one, either the tablet optimized one, or the desktop. You're going to do a lot of back and forth stuff if you have both on the same device, like devices like Surface Pro are trying to do.

Also, on a non-tablet device, Windows 8 actually feels like a downgrade because of the many annoying UI quirks it's throwing at you. You're better off sticking with Windows 7.

> Full disclosure MS did give me this Surface Pro 2 since I was so vocal about my love of the first one.

So the lesson here is that if you like/pretend to like Microsoft's products in your reviews, they will give you free stuff?

That's not an attack on the author here, but on Microsoft. They find out which reviewers praised their devices most, and then send them free stuff, so they're more likely to review positively their future products, too, knowing that they will probably be "rewarded" afterwards, again.