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"Government agencies around the world demanded access to the information of over 38,000 Facebook users in the first half of this year, and more than half the orders came from the United States, the company said on Tuesday."

"There it is. If you run a business, and the FBI or NSA want to turn it into a mass surveillance tool, they believe they can do so, solely on their own initiative. They can force you to modify your system. They can do it all in secret and then force your business to keep that secret. Once they do that, you no longer control that part of your business. You can't shut it down. You can't terminate part of your service. In a very real sense, it is not your business anymore. It is an arm of the vast U.S. surveillance apparatus, and if your interest conflicts with theirs then they win. Your business has been commandeered."

"In a discussion of how to secure the "critical infrastructure" of the United States he described the phenomenon of compromised computer hardware - namely, chips that have hidden "back doors" inserted into them at the design or manufacturing stage - as "the problem from hell". And, he went on, "frankly, it's not a problem that can be solved"."

"In Eric S. Raymond's seminal essay on open source, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, he defines Linus's Law (named for the father of the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds), which states that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." In other words. If enough users are looking at the code, bugs and problems will be found."

"This effectively ensured that all South Koreans are forced to use Internet Explorer. To this day, OS X and Linux hasn't seen the same degree of adoption in Korea as it has in Europe, China and the United States. It also means that 75% of South Korean netizens use some variety of IE because… Well? They have to. It also means that many South Korean websites are fundamentally less advanced, less user friendly and much less secure than their Western counterparts. The cruel irony is that this government intervention effectively hamstrung an entire industry"

"99 percent of the names submitted to the list are accepted; the court called this "wildly loose." The database has grown from 227,932 names in 2009 to its current stratospheric heights. There is no official, public procedure for having your name removed from the list. The US government is seeking to end the trial by invoking state secrecy."

"One of the biggest arguments against mandating backdoors in encryption is the fact that, even if you trust the United States government never to abuse that power (and who does?), other criminal hackers and foreign governments will be able to exploit the backdoor to use it themselves. A backdoor is an inherent vulnerability that other actors will attempt to find and try to use it for their own nefarious purposes as soon as they know it exists, putting all of our cybersecurity at risk. "

"If you're doing nothing wrong, and have nothing to hide from your government, then mass surveillance holds no fears for you. This argument might be the oldest straw man in the privacy debate, but it's also a decent reflection of the state of the argument. In the UK's first major election since the Snowden revelations, privacy is a nonissue. This is a shame, because when it comes down to it, many of us who are doing nothing wrong have plenty we would prefer to hide."

The case of Apple versus Gizmodo takes new twist as state lawyers consider the legality of the raid.

In the United States, a vicious battle has begun between the leading companies in the 3G market. Their vicious advertising campaigns have no sign of stopping. So what will this do to sales?

The war continues as AT&T has lost their first legal battle again Verison for their advertisements: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-10401094-266.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksArea.0

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"Just a few days after Turkey's scandal-rocked government banned Twitter by tweaking national DNS settings, the state has doubled down by ordering ISPs to block Twitter's IP addresses, in response to the widespread dissemination of alternative DNS servers, especially Google's 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 (these numbers were even graffitied on walls). "

"These appliances are gradually taking over the world's landfills, leading to a global environmental problem that has so far gone largely unnoticed. The United States is the the greatest perpetrator, generating 9.4 million metric tons of waste per year in 2012 - around 29.8 kilograms per person."

"In an act of cyber vandalism that appeared more embarrassing than destructive, the Twitter and YouTube accounts for US military forces in the Middle East and South Asia were hacked by supporters of Islamic State militants on Monday."

"The NSA uses laughably sloppy tools for deciding whether a target is a "US person" (a person in the USA, or an American citizen abroad). For example, people whose address books contain foreign persons are presumed by some analysts to be foreign. Likewise, people who post in "foreign" languages (the US has no official state language) are presumed by some analysts to be non-US persons."

""When the intelligence services are gathering data about every one of us but failing to act on intelligence about individuals, they need to get back to basics, and look at the way they conduct targeted investigations. "The committee is particularly misleading when it implies that US companies do not co-operate, and it is quite extraordinary to demand that companies pro-actively monitor email content for suspicious material. Internet companies cannot and must not become an arm of the surveillance state."

"Marlinspike's Textsecure has an impeccable reputation as a secure platform, and Whatsapp founder Jan Koum attributes his desire to add security to his users' conversations to his experiences with the surveillance state while growing up in Soviet Ukraine. However, without any independent security audit or (even better) source-code publication, we have to take the company's word that it has done the right thing and that it's done it correctly."

"Twitter has deleted more than 125,000 accounts linked to terrorists since mid-2015, the company announced, offering some of the most detailed insight yet of how Silicon Valley is collaborating with western governments in its fight against Islamic State."

"The bill will now allow police to access all web browsing records in specific crime investigations, beyond the illegal websites and communications services specified in the original draft bill. It will extend the use of state remote computer hacking from the security services to the police in cases involving a "threat to life" or missing persons. This can include cases involving "damage to somebody's mental health", but will be restricted to use by the National Crime Agency and a small number of major police forces."

"Google announced on its blog that it is expanding upon Safe Browsing to alert Gmail users about the possibility of suspicious government activity. Since 2012, Google has put a banner on top of users' Gmail pages that had a warning about state-sponsored attackers if Google believed they were in danger, but starting today people will get a full-page warning about it - very hard to miss."

Much of current science deals with even more complicated systems, and similarly lacks exact solutions. Such models have to be "computational" - describing how a system changes from one instant to the next. But there is no way to determine the exact state at some time in the future other than by "simulating" its evolution in this way. Weather forecasting is a familiar example; until the advent of computers in the 1950s, it was impossible to predict future weather faster than it actually happened.