rolux

"UTF-32 (or UCS-4) is a protocol to encode Unicode characters that uses exactly 32 bits per Unicode code point. All other Unicode transformation formats use variable-length encodings. The UTF-32 form of a character is a direct representation of its codepoint." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-32)

Of course, the problem of combining marks and CJK ideographs remains.

Reference: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0393/

In German, 'ß' is definitely not just a ligature of 'ss'.

Consider 'Masse' (mass) vs. 'Maße' (dimensions).

Uppercasing these words will necessarily produce ambiguity.

It would be equally tempting -- and wrong -- to treat the German characters 'ä', 'ö' and 'ü' as ligatures of 'ae', 'oe' and 'ue'. They're pronounced the same, and the latter forms commonly occur as substitutions in informal writing, but they also occur in proper names, where it would be incorrect to substitute them with the former. However, if you want to sort German strings, 'ä', 'ö' and 'ü' sort as 'ae', 'oe' and 'ue'.

The next Silk Road owner will call himself the "CEO" of his operation and won't do an interview with Forbes, but an AMA on Reddit. Strange times.

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1fwi48/im_the_ceo_of_a...

Minus the GUI though, you can build something that's functionally equivalent to Time Machine, and it shouldn't take much more time than it takes to read `man rsync`.

> If someone releases a huge dump of classified files, without any possible war crimes, would we still defend them?

Politics that do not have immediate personal consequences (or politics too hopeless to engage in) can easily become a spectator sport.

On that level, when an instance of "uh, all my private communication just leaked to the NSA" is followed by a case of "oh, tons of classified documents just leaked to the general public", then it's likely that this will be understood as a quid pro quo, i.e. appreciated by a large number of spectators.

Please read the paragraph on Judith Miller. You must be kidding.

> Blatant Intimidation and Control is not what the US Government does. If you want proof, compare the US handling of the Washington Post to the British handling of The Guardian. The Washington Post and New York times have been free to publish everything.

Ahem... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plame_affair

While I see the potential for "Zersetzung", it just doesn't scale as well as mass surveillance.

If your communication (and location) data is stored by US companies complicit with programs like PRISM, and there is no hope that this data will ever be destroyed, then that's enough to make you communicate (and move) a lot more cautiously.

My hope would be that at least corporations are not lemmings.

For a non-US company that does anything remotely sensitive or competitive on an international level, it's simply insane to use, say, Google's cloud services.

I don't know to what extent Google depends on foreign corporate clients -- but I'd be surprised if this wasn't something they were very seriously concerned about.

(And the recent revelations about the NSA are really just the icing on the cake. If there is high demand for some confidential data, it's likely that there will be supply.)

Which is precisely what I was hinting at. The idea that the NSA would be capable of keeping this data absolutely confidential is ludicrous. And that's why in the future (most likely already today) it will be relatively safe to assume that there are other parties, be it individuals or organizations, that have access to some aspect of your private communication.

I was using the term "blueprints" colloquially, meaning "plans" or "details". Quite a few of the leaked slides are exactly the type of material that one would expect the government to have "tighter controls on", compared to petabytes of mostly useless data.

> I suspect that US tech companies who are complicit in dragnet surveillance - and PRISM specifically - are already understanding this.

Absolutely. Just as 2013 is the year where "ordinary people" have begun to understand that "the cloud" is a scam.

(And that is doesn't make that much of a difference if they store their data with Google, Apple, or directly with the NSA. If the blueprints of PRISM can't be kept from leaking, then subsets of the actual data will leak as well. Five or ten years from know, you'll have a huge grey market of -- medium to low quality, outdated, etc. -- surveillance data.)

No, I'm just saying that working technology (like general purpose computers as affordable consumer goods) may be harder to ignore than "the voice of the people".

(In Philosophy, you'd call this position "materialist", I assume.)

Just two points:

- That's why I prefer to think about protocols, as opposed to a system (i.e. global implementation of one or more generalized protocols)

- You don't always have to solve the problem theoretically; solving it practically may be good enough. A system can be usable for a long time, before it collapses under abuse.

No, I mean protocols.

While elsewhere in the comments, there is the sentiment that "you can't code yourself out of this", my hopes of voting myself out of it (or otherwise "fixing" a system, as if it was just accidentally "broken") are much lower.

(But note that "protocols" may also have non-technological components.)

> While I understand his personal reasons

pj = Pamela Jones

But yeah, it's devastating -- especially when it comes just one day after a editor of the Guardian states that they can no longer report on certain topics from London.

It seems like we need entirely new communication protocols.

I'd guess that the gain for Mr. Rusbridger is that he retains his privilege to be able to quote from similarly absurd conversations with government officials in the future.

Agree. But, FWIW, Alan Rusbridger, the author of the article, explains in the comments that in this case, this would not be legal, as the conversations he is quoting from took place after he had agreed to keep names off the record.

> I mean some of these people are really smart and understand how this spying can be abused. There must be something they know that makes them build or support these programs.

Governments and security agencies want the Social Graph -- in detail, and, if possible, in real-time. This has become one of their top strategic priorities.

There is no legitimate "use" of these programs that would stand in contrast to what you call their "abuse".

Keep in mind though that if part of your loading time is parsing large amounts of JSON returned from your backend, this blocks the main thread and your loading bar will be stuck for that time.

Trust me, I know such places, and I have no romantic notion of the Mafia. But I think there's a way to compare things that doesn't equate them. Same for the Greenwald quote in the grand-grand-grand-...-parent.

While obviously, mafias and governments work on the same problem: How to govern, how to stay in power.

Of course, a government has the power to brand a mafia as a criminal organization, but the line between legal and criminal can be very blurry, and often quite arbitrary.

If you just go, historically, by the score of committed crimes, then whatever metric you choose, governments and their agencies will beat criminal organizations by a huge margin.

> It exists on both the right and left ends of the political spectrum.

Even though those are relatively exotic forms, compared to the one that exists in the middle of the political spectrum.

Adam Curtis just 10 days ago published a good piece on bureaucratic competence within the UK intelligence community:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/BUGGER

I don't think the UK government is just a US puppet here. A lot of materials that Snowden released are directly related to UK interests -- part of which is to at least be perceived as an autonomous entity that can make autonomous decisions.

People don't care. Never did, never will. Yet, things do change, from time to time. One way out of this deadlock of apathy and perception of apathy would be to study -- in depth, historically -- what has made power erode, often in very short periods of time, sometimes even single events. Maybe you'll come to the conclusion that just "raising awareness" is not what gets you there, and that there may be situations where people who, essentially, don't care are much more likely to bring down a regime than people who do.

I'd rather see these powers as an institutionalized state of emergency. They're permanent -- there's no concept of "taking them away".

And I'm not so sure about the role of the population either. It's not exactly them who can either accept or not accept the call for such laws.

If you had someone, on a national ticket, who would openly call for their abolishment, matters would be different, of course.

But then -- how do you get onto a national ticket? A hysterical, broken democracy is a hard thing to fix from inside.

My hope is that Greenwald is not that easily provoked into making this a personal affair between himself and some government. That's part of what weakened Julian Assange's position, and I'm pretty sure Greenwald is aware of that.

> Would Greenwald have done a better service if he hadn't told the world what happened to his partner? I don't know--but maybe.

Definitely not. And in the end, nothing happened to his partner. His rights were violated, for sure -- but then ask other Brazilians for their experiences in the transit zone of London Heathrow. It's a pretty much lawless zone if you happen to hold the wrong passport.

So, no. More people than you think will be able to relate to this.