anonemouse

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• Commented on Dear Google, am I pregnant?
  Intuition sez it depends on the badness; while Facebook happily hands over way too much data to anyone, the NHS data is very bad news for already vulnerable people. (Are you Trans? Or a functioning opiates addict? Or...) I also...
• Commented on The latest Hugo awards storm
  "If you CONTINUE to do wrong in privilege, you're an awful person" seems to be the aimed-for stance - of course, sometimes there are misses. Being insulted doesn't help, of course, but there's a constant drumbeat towards more marginalized communities...
• Commented on Dear Google, am I pregnant?
  "Fed into Google" is accurate; if it's been put in a Google service we have no way of ever removing it, and Google behaves as if all information is theirs by right. You could almost segment information into three domains;...
• Commented on Dear Google, am I pregnant?
  What Sean meant was a password is necessary but not sufficient for encryption - if there's no password it's definitely not encrypted, but it having a password tells you nothing about its encryption status. Sean mentioned SSL encrypting the connection...
• Commented on Dear Google, am I pregnant?
  No, the US doesn't have the equivalent of a D-notice, though the government sure wishes they did Yes you do. A D-Notice is an advisory; legally unenforceable. It's "please don't," exactly what the NYT got, just more formal. This is...
• Commented on Dear Google, am I pregnant?
  Or unless they're walking around Stansted Airport putting the wind up students from other unarmed-police states. (There's something about seeing a pair of cops - in *almost* the same uniform as the police you're used to - carrying submachine guns...
• Commented on Rule 34, meet Kafka
  A webcam's field of view is mostly full of the user's face, which means a large proportion of the pixels of the image are flesh-tones; naive porn detection algorithms apparently assumes this means "naked person over here," which must have...
• Commented on Schadenfreude
  (If anyone knows of an cynicism antidote, I'd appreciate hearing about it.) Type "kittens" into Google Image Search. Only works while looking at it, though....
• Commented on Miscellanea
  It didn't eat their sun. It ate their universe, in ~60 years....
• Commented on Miscellanea
  I know; I also remember when it was a bar on Capel St. I was merely appreciating the sly nod. ",)...
• Commented on Miscellanea
  the Irish have the Garda Unit for the Bizarre and Unprecedented (GUBU) Whoever came up with that deserves a small prize....
• Commented on Miscellanea
  Kinda done by David Brin here....
• Commented on Miscellanea
  Laundry agents, given cause, can compel obedience from any signatory of Section Three. At any point they want to they own important chunks of the civil service, the police, the army... The Laundry doesn't need to acquire power, it's set...
• Commented on Schadenfreude
  Bitcoin will falter in the short term, but the fundamentals are sound Oh, that's all right then....
• Commented on Schadenfreude
  Bitcoiners are goldbugs for a resource without gold's inherent value as a metal (NASA need it for spacesuit visor covers, if nothing else), presumably because that's cheating....
• Commented on What's The Future For Virtual Reality Movies?
  Filmmakers might be learning the shaky-cam lesson - Pacific Rim's giant robot cinematography is so much better than Michael Bay's Transformers in part because Guillermo del Toro stands his camera far enough back to let you see his creations in...
• Commented on Sitrep
  Rockall is undesirable because Denmark, Iceland, and Ireland also claim it, and getting rid of Parliament isn't worth the international incident and/or littering charges....
• Commented on Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire
  Fair enough. :-) Thanks!...
• Commented on Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire
  Please read the "2.2 With bitcoin, reserve banking is impossible" section of the paper I linked to - you, I, or the author has misunderstood something, and I'm not sure which of us it is....
• Commented on Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire
  More specifically, with Bitcoin banks can't create money; a deposited Bitcoin can only be lent once. To express it differently, in a Bitcoin economy there's no such thing as "commercial bank money."...
• Commented on Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire
  People want their savings to appreciate, or at least outpace the rate of inflation. Which is why the idea of saving in Bitcoin is irretrievably dumb. It's impossible to conduct reserve banking in Bitcoin due to it solving the double-spend...
• Commented on Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire
  I think in an ideal world western nuclear powers would have offered assistance in building the power plants and Iran would have accepted. But the real regime is too paranoid for that. Russia's offered a "fuel and waste collection" deal...
• Commented on Trust Me (I'm a kettle)
  No need to worry! The standard being lined up as the next USB, Thunderbolt, doesn't appear able to do "power only" - it doesn't have any dedicated power lines, for a start - so obviously your concern is unnecessary. /sarcasm,...
• Commented on Trust Me (I'm a kettle)
  a) Persona management is added work. Lots of work, to do it properly. b) Most "software-generated chaff" falls between "pointless" (machine-generated Google searches; to accomplish what, exactly?) and "easily filtered noise" (do the numbers obey Benford's Law? Is it random...
• Commented on Trust Me (I'm a kettle)
  Here's a Schneier blog post on research done to defeat "trusting trust" attacks, so we're not completely screwed by them. But you can have verified code back to the MBR and still be bugged at the hardware level....
• Commented on Trust Me (I'm a kettle)
  It's not that the power is the main cost, it's that Bitcoin mining malware means you can externalize (almost) all the cost of earning money. All you have to do is write a miner into your virus, video game, or...
• Commented on PSA: Why there won't be a third book in the Halting State trilogy
  Hell, if Scotland joined Schengen we might then see Ireland join in the fun Ireland isn't joining Schengen until Northern Ireland does as well; it is way too squirrelly a border to try policing. Scotland joining Schengen makes it way...
• Commented on Trust Me (I'm a kettle)
  It's already being done - you're just discussing it being done officially, automatedly, and being able to get into bank accounts....
• Commented on Trust Me (I'm a kettle)
  Universal law enforcement may not happen, but the police don't need to log everything and retroactively charge the "target crime" committers to be scary; if you become a "person of interest" to the police (married the wrong person, went on...
• Commented on PSA: Why there won't be a third book in the Halting State trilogy
  Want to emulate Iceland - ooops. Want to join the Euro - oops. Alternatively "we'll keep the Pound" - oops. A politician who changes his mind as the situation changes? Can't be having that, can we!...