Posts by Rich of Observationz
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Hard News: The United States of Surveillance?, in reply to Richard Aston,
I wouldn't worry too much. It's a bit like trying to determine what people bought at the supermarket by weighing their shopping and matching that up with the till rolls. (but much more - like they had a semi-trailer full of shopping from every shop in town).
One way to obfuscate this would be to watch a video while engaged in other activity across the proxy - most of your packets would be the video, making identification of which were going elsewhere very hard.
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Hard News: The United States of Surveillance?, in reply to Russell Brown,
Shifting poo is actually something I know about, having worked for an industrial automation firm in my first grad job.
What generally happens in a pumping station (unless they've changed vastly in thirty years, which I doubt) is that there is a computerised controller box that runs the pumps at an optimal rate. If this fails, then a float switch will turn all the pumps on when the level of brown stuff reaches a certain height. Failing that (in the case of a big storm or prolonged powercut) then it overflows into the nearest watercourse (or storm drain on a separated system like we mostly have in NZ).
So even if terrerists took total contol of the computers, the consequences aren't going to be anything more than a heavy rainstorm. Turning toilets into geysers of poo just isn't feasible, fortunately.
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Hard News: The United States of Surveillance?, in reply to Rich Lock,
It's nearly all thoughtcrime, though, like the case of the "Lyrical Terrorist". Very few people have actually been caught with explosives or guns. When wingnuts engage in similar fantasising, which they do all the time, the cops don't bother them at all.
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Hard News: The United States of Surveillance?, in reply to Angus Robertson,
That wouldn't let you see much Gmail, as Google defaults to https and Gmail-Gmail comms would be internal. Also, you'd need to recreate a lot from scratch, as opposed to having access to Google's own data structure.
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I wonder whether our rulers actually *wanted* to release this stuff. The rationale would be that by letting the fact of their access to corporate data into the public domain, a row will ensue, and unless legislators move to prevent this, that access will become the "new normal". In the same vein would be the NZ government's response to the Dotcom illegalities of substantially widening GCSBs powers.
Once the fact of the data collection's become accepted, it becomes a lot easier for government to apply: tracking down minor drug offenders by linkage to known dealers; providing traffic police with the information that the driver in front is a regular high-velocity cellphone caller; vetting job or visa applicants against their networks of friends.
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Hard News: The United States of Surveillance?, in reply to Bart Janssen,
There are architectural solutions (involving end-end encryption) that do avoid giving some or even all of the sysadmins the ability to read the CEOs email.
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Field Theory: What goes with beer and sports?, in reply to andin,
People die at gardening, DIY, participating in sport, shopping, going to church or just sitting at the computer until cancer or heart disease sets in. 70,000 of em every year in NZ alone. Unless you believe the Singularity people, that's just how it is.
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I don't think it would suit the Maori Party, especially if they lose badly in Ikaroa-Rawhiti. They'll be wanting to keep their bums in the limos for as long as possible, so will give National support on anything up to the Treaty of Waitangi (Mere Nullity) Reversion Bill.
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Legal Beagle: D-Day for Dunne (updated), in reply to BenWilson,
Or to ensure that politics gets even more bought out by the rich, for whom the MPs salary is but a down-payment on this years second Ferrari.
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Really, much as I dislike Dunne, if somebody is in parliament and wants to form a party of one, then they should be able to.
I reckon we should have a fixed allowance for all MPs of something like $200k to cover all personal and parliamentary expenses, with it left to the MP and their party (or their cat) as to how they apportion and spend that. (But they would have to produce accounts for the benefit of their electors).
What I do think is a problem is the way the "affiliate party" gerrymander has, in a small way, come into being. If Ohariu elected a National MP, that MP would count against National's list total. If it elects Dunne, he doesn't, so National get an extra MP. Same with ACT (and with Anderton for Labour, back then). What I don't know is whether, should Dunne successfully run as an independent next year, his seat would be an overhang? (The Electoral Commission calculator doesn't allow for this).