wnight

A good job of controlling something they incited? They didn't need to use violence on non-violent protestors.

At this point they're lawless thugs with guns.

> "caused muslims to hate us"

Well, that's a few simultaneous fallacies.

But, yes, your policies led to the 9/11 attackers deciding to attack you. Is this not blisteringly obvious?

> and that therefor we should change them???????????

Oh gosh no, change? Not mid-stream.

Even in Canadian protests the police have been caught sneaking in trouble-makers with rocks and black ski-masks. If they didn't create the panic they wouldn't get paid for solving it.

Considering that the Turkish government is trying to make the protestors look bad so they have justification for going overboard in their earlier treatment of them, it's more likely that plain-clothes police officers looted those stores and overturned the cars.

When something violent and destructive happens, look at who did the last such thing.

I helped a client write their own HN hiring letter.

They'd originally had corp-speak in there like "5y PHP Developer". "Must have BS in ..." and we rewrote their requirements to things developers would have to know how to use (PHP OO, SQL with X, Able to do Y in Z, etc) and a description of the challenges you'd have.

Despite having chopped out the arbitrary restrictions, we made the posting much tougher. Which is good, it was for essentially engineer #1 and they needed someone who'd let the founder be able to delegate.

Yeah, many of the posts here are much more exacting than "regular" job boards. They're written by the people doing the work rather than via an HR filter.

Especially with mobile, where the government parcels out the ability to play (spectrum) to the companies that cooperate with it.

At least in areas without natural monopolies you can shop around.

It's too bad they can choose to stop once they've started. Like the patent trolls new-egg is fighting.

New-egg should essentially be able to take the trolls to court and part them out for sale, down to their CEO's organs, for trying this in the first place.

> denying you access to the firmware was never their intent.

Unlikely. With a new person or company it's sporting to give them the benefit of the doubt. With Microsoft if you're still ignoring everything illegal and anti-competitive they do you're on the payroll.

Microsoft specifically modified its products to sabotage a competitor, and lied about it. Microsoft faked evidence to use in Federal court and Bill presented that evidence though it was clearly wrong to anyone who'd used windows.

Why on Earth would anyone give them the benefit of the doubt?

The BSA, which they support, wouldn't give you the benefit of the doubt.

DMCA takedown. Expulsion. Streissand effect. Hilarity.

They couldn't keep it online, but couldn't be seriously censured for trying, and they wouldn't be alone.

Actually, software licenses aren't required to simply use a program - though you can certainly obtain a copy by licensing it.

Essentially, copies made that are inherently required for the expected function of the work (to the HD if required, to RAM, to screen, etc) aren't copyright violations. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/117

> People accuse NATO soldiers of war crimes everyday without even realizing the legitimate war crimes we prevented every single place we went.

Had we gone into Afghanistan in the 90s when various groups of locals were asking us to we might have fought about as much, in the end, but we'd have been there at the request of the people, actually building relationships, instead of continually rebuilding a failed-by-design state for some bullshit 9/11 excuse.

Bin Laden might still have happened because he wasn't depending on Afghanistan, or he might not have, because the allies could have had a better (good) reputation in the area negating much of the terrorist fervor.

But, I (one who criticizes our soldiers for war crimes) do recognize that we often, ultimately, bring some good to the survivors - hospitals, clean water, etc, and often stop many ongoing killings and other horrible practices. But never for the reasons we say we're there and only in doing things that perpetuate the cycle of war such as setting up dictators and selling critical resources and infrastructure.

Even if in their specific case any given soldier may save more lives than they cost, our war overall and our continued ability to wage it via the complicity of our soldiers, will cost far more lives in the end.

Refusing to fight for an unjust cause, or hurt without need, is a duty of all soldiers of modern civilized militaries. Sure, it realistically means jail for those who refuse - but it means death for their victims if they don't.

Afghanistan and Iraq were clearly not justified by 9/11 or implicated by any related evidence. By fighting for the USA and allies despite these lies, without the mandate of the people, soldiers are essentially pissing on the rule of law.

We're showing - through action not words - that no matter what they do we'll just make shit up and bomb them. Why do we expect them to expect anything else?

If our governments couldn't field the army unjustly, our peacekeeping might not only be welcome but might finally work.

Maybe it says that Afghanistan's border is a pile of western-motivated political crap and the country shouldn't be.

Hell, Quebec wants out of Canada and we generally all get along fairly well. Imagine how we'd feel if all the provinces felt the same and were actively and brutally fighting. Why are we trying to hold this mess together?

We've got this manifest destiny thing like we've got to make 1946's border permanent.

You mean you can send someone to "the hole" for sending them a questionable book? And Amazon will fulfill this for order for any prepaid credit card?

Am I the only one seeing a problem?

Not that a book on covert CIA tactics is really related to his sentence, but let's pretend.

Meh. Keep sending books to weev. If this gets him in trouble, not that I'm hoping it does though I wouldn't doubt it would, anonymously send books on prison breaks to tens of thousands of prisoners and overwhelm the system and give their lawyers, and his, ways to challenge the madness.

Sitting quietly and accepting the crap just because they'll make it hurt more otherwise is still the losing option.

A couple thoughts, some more depressing than others.

You could probably get three to six months off pretty easily. If just asking wouldn't work, you could hint a relative is on their last legs and make a firmer request? A few months would probably clarify the issue in a way we can't for you.

Consider looking for a new job. Partly to judge the market, and the market's take on you, and partly to actually look for something much better. You could negotiate a six-month late start and have a vacation while you decided if the job really was for you.

Maybe you could already afford to retire - in Costa-Rica or Thailand for random example - and could buy and rent property there as a fallback nest egg in case this really was your retirement, but otherwise not costing so much as to hurt your savings assuming you'll want to try to retire here.

And lastly, what's the chance that retirement savings is going to be here when you want to retire? Are you paying attention to where it is enough to avoid the next bubble? Land would still be valuable to live on, rent, while currency-denominated assets could easily hyper-inflate. Some assets can be seized, or lost in war, others - or remotely stored ones - perhaps less.

All that said, do it! Don't make any commitments, just start by taking vacation, ask for leave when that's out, and quit when that's done if you still want to stay away.

It should be, but is not illegal for the government to ask for private data, or lean on companies to provide it, (see the NSA Warrantless Wiretapping affair, specifically Qwest - the only telco that refused the illegal orders.)

You can be essentially compelled to break the law - and you gain no immunity for being forced. Damned if you don't, convicted if you do.

Go out in the desert with one captive and torture them and we'd try to stop you.

Enslave a few million and successfully arm yourself against potential rescuers and you meet all the accepted standards of a sovereign nation.

You're pretty technically astute which leaves me thinking you're being obtuse for effect.

> Nope. It is because he stole tons of private info from AT&T and then boasted about it and then said he would totally do it again and with worse consequences to the victim.

Wrong. It wasn't private info, it was email addresses. They aren't treated as private and no harm comes from someone else knowing them. These were on unpassworded, public-facing URLs because nobody cared.

Another way to tell you're just manufacturing outrage here is that you pretend to care about sensitive data but don't give a shit that without the leak the hole would have remained indefinitely. If it really was sensitive, it could have been exploited.

Repeatedly your main complaint about weev has been his disrespect for authority, and your hastily-formed notions about his personality. Nothing about actual harm, because you know there was none - or if there was it was because of AT&T's dereliction of duty.

To the degree that there were victims, they were the customers who were implicitly lied to. Without this security audit they'd still be in the dark.

>>> Someone who didn't want to go to jail would say "... >> Someone who didn't want to get unfairly arrested would say "... > Very nice, now do you have anything to say that is not wildly offtopic?

Sorry, but it's not off-topic, it just shows your point is full of holes the size of a truck. You brought up "what someone who didn't want to go to jail" would say, but upon examination it fails to help your case and now you don't like that tangent.

You're more concerned with jailing those who disrespect your surrogate authority than in patching whatever hole there is.

> There's a bunch of douchebags on the internet that could think of nothing better to do that cause mayhem and suffering to those around them.

God, I know. Don't you just hate idiot politicians who try to control things they don't understand with the same blunt-object laws they fail to fix anything else with.

> Those despicable and miserable creatures

You're conflating what they thought would be funny with what they actually did.

> they are not honey-bees.

Really? They look like it from my point of view. They're useful if farmed with care but harmful if mistreated.

> My main reason to thing he's a douchebag because I've read about him and his actions.

Well, your interpretations of things are pretty weak - that doesn't mean much. Was this before you were told what to think? Because following links from an echo chamber is just going to reinforce your preconceived notions.

You seem easily led by anyone who says something catchy - you're using a juvenile phrase implying weev resembles a menstrual pad. It's like the rash of ideological clones saying "mansion arrest" in any discussion of Wikileaks, indicating not a single one of them had ever had an original thought.

> Law enforcement usually doesn't like people that say "I'll do it again and worse" too much.

It's pretty obvious you're upset because you're an authoritarian and you see someone flouting the rules. You're fixated on it.

> But, Afghanistan was the base of the 9/11 attack on the US that killed 3000 innocent US civilians.

No, it bloody was not. Many of those people hadn't even been in Afghanistan. The ones who were, and who "received training" had mostly received that in the context of fighting Russia. The myth of the 9/11 training camp in Afghanistan is entirely made up. Terrorist camps themselves are a myth. Militias train in the hills with weapons, terrorists don't execute those attacks and don't need/get that training.

Further, you've killed over 200 people, almost every one civilian, for every person killed in the 9/11 attacks. In retribution, against people who weren't involved.

> No, you still know whom you are killing, because of the human INTEL and not because they are carrying knives.

The same HUMINT you pick and choose to justify invading Iraq? The same HUMINT that says "bomb that wedding"?

Because your intel is notoriously bad, especially in that area of the world - even now, and there's such a conflict of interest at all levels.

No, it's just straight-up murder when you drone-bomb someone without on-screen visible reasons (driving a tank) because you have such a low standard of proof - it wouldn't qualify to get a warrant to search the person back home.

But even if your intel was perfect, your leaders ignore anything that doesn't let them proceed with the already-planned mobilization. Iraq wasn't a mistake, Iraq was one of the largest cases of mass murder on the planet - second only barely to monsters from our past. And it was planned before 9/11, and before the cooked-up WMD scare, etc.

> Really, radical Islam is based on a simple, old dynamic: Some people want more power.

No, really? Because that's only exactly like every other group on the planet.

> In Egypt, the Islamists didn't like the secular dictator [that we installed] and got rid of him

Funny that. And funny how you make a big deal about secular when it's the fact that he had people abducted for secrets trials and executions, and that the USA backed him, than his religious status, that bothered the Egyptians.

Oh, and that he was a dictator, and felt he had the right to rule for life.

But yeah, just radical Islamists...

> There's a lot of pushing and shoving, heavily enabled by oil money:

Yes. Texas oil money. And other.

> But no way is much of that pushing and shoving due to anything the US did or did wrong.

You're probably wrong, but it's a tellingly pathetic defense for a pathetic position regardless.

> Our entire society seems premised on both population and economic growth. What exactly do we do when the population starts shrinking?

Our population is shrinking because it's what happens when the education level (specifically of women) gets high enough. So we use those smart people and build high-tech manufacturing facilities, etc.

Low-tech is fleeing our shores because nobody wants to do it and it doesn't pay well. If you want it to stay here, import foreigners from poor countries but instead of keeping them foreign, make them citizens and keep their wages here.

This stuff is trivial. It's only made hard because we don't want to share. If we try for a team victory it's almost inevitable.

> I believe one of the largest fallacies of the Twentieth Century was that the idea set in that everything was going to keep growing

Yes. Not that we shouldn't expect progress, which comes from increased understanding, but expecting unlimited growth is crazy.

> [The idea that the] institutions you grew up with would last a life time. [...] Cities come. Cities go. Nations come. Nations go. To think that the USA or Europe will exist as they do today a thousand years from now is the height of hubris and/or naivete.

Can you imagine thinking, after a thousand years(!!) of history and conquest, that Rome would fall? Madness!

> You seem to have confused Afghanistan with Iraq. Afghanistan is not a major oil producer.

It's about keeping oil flowing - at least being extracted if not sold. But yes in Afghanistan that is currently more pipelines than oil-wells. The TAPI pipeline for instance is proposed to move huge amount of Turkmeni oil through Afghanistan.

> indeed the main contract to develop fields there was signed by the Chinese.

Sure. Why not? The goal is to keep oil flowing now, not (rationally) hoarded. Anything other than leaving it in the ground is fine,

But anyways - the point wasn't that 100% of the reason was oil, because the ability to use their airspace, have lasting bases, etc, is also of huge value. My point was that the official reasons were specifically untrue - almost zero utility came pursing from the stated reasons for the invasions - Bin Laden and WMDs (in Iraq). Mainly, of course, because both reasons were essentially fictions.

> ... and the people from the oil reserves (shut the taps off, see the price skyrocket ...

I think ultimately they had roughly the same desires for Iraqi oil: get it the hell out of Iraqi/neighboring soil as quickly as possible before the inconvenient locals have anything to say about it. Even if they have to "share" with them

And then, yes some people want to play it smart and hoard to watch the prices rise. But none of them wanted an economic meltdown so their policy isn't going to be to stop selling oil, but to stop selling their oil and make the other guy sell his. Having the USA (and select allies) being the last ones with oil is the winning position for both factions (as you describe it) of the Bush government - they merely differed on mid-game strategy.

You can't make the difficulty scale more than linearly by number of passwords. If you could you'd drop back to tackling the problem in pieces and be back to linear scaling with the number of pieces.

What's making it hard for you to analyze this is that you're using the wrong terms. The secret stuff is password - the non-secret stuff is salt. If you want two secret bits, you want two passwords, or to break the password into two pieces for separate storage.

But after all that, you still want a salt, because you're not using it for secrecy but for ambiguation of identical plaintexts.

But splitting the password hash is a bad, or at best neutral, idea because passwords are likely to be semi-human readable and thus a guessable password that matches hash1 is likely the actual password, and will match hash2. This wouldn't be true if we used random passwords, but we don't. So splitting the hash is mostly totally ineffectual, as is having two separate hashes of the same string - the attacker usually doesn't need to examine both.

Not even, it makes it easy for warlords to train militias, not for terrorists.

Terrorists rarely need combat skills as we think about them. Terrorist training is more about pushing the button - which is all religious, or maybe playing flight-sims and practicing with a knife. They do this in living rooms and garages.

Local warlords though, need places to train troops live ammo, firing RPGs and mortars, practicing attacking and defending against other large local foes.

Not that they shouldn't be stopped - that's a valid question - but we went in after international terrorists, shot local warlords, and claimed victory.

(In the process, killing enough people unjustly to cause much of a generation to have real reason to hate us.)

> The reason it's taken so long to produce results is optimism on the part of western politicians.

No. The reason it hasn't worked is because it's a total lie.

Afghanistan wasn't invaded to help it, or to stop terrorists, it was invaded for oil, handy bases near countries we need to remain "allies", etc.

> [The US response to the taliban was to send] marines to provide protection for poor villages and actively hunt the taliban.

Roughly, yes. And had this been done for the reasons stated, at any of the times various segments of the population and world-wide humanitarian groups had asked for it, you'd have been saviors.

But that wasn't the goal or you'd have done it that way - not in freak-out mode.

The "failed state" in Afghanistan is the one you're building. Unwanted, known criminals, ruling over a set of borders nobody feels attached to.

No, I meant you can't spot small knives from the air so you have no way of really knowing who you're killing - unlike bombing a missile convoy or a tank, obvious weapons. Your INTEL, that from the ground, is often - maybe usually - wrong, and without a visible clear and present danger you shouldn't be killing people.

But way to go in responding to the tiniest part of the post and ignoring the rest.

> Then, facing that reality, we can look for how to get what we need, e.g., US national security, that is, to keep Afghanistan from being the base of operations of another 9/11 attack on the US.

This is just vapid bullshit. 9/11 was guys with knives. They had very little specialized training and needed less. You can't spot that from the air with drones, and it didn't need fields of poppies to fund.

There's one simple reason the USA is in the middle east - oil. Making sure it keeps flowing.

> Yes, we can be sure that the Muslim clerics will get their people up on their hind legs shouting "Death to America". Sounds like a declaration of war to me for which some USAF guy in a container room in Nevada should push a button on a drone control and stop that stuff. But if all they do is shout, then we don't always have to push the button.

So does some war-hawk talking about how we should push a button and end the outrage that we created with yet another bomb.

Maybe we should trade, the militant cleric for you, as some sort of reverse prisoner-of-war deal, to help keep the peace.

> The US needs to quit being so darned simplistic, wise up, [...], use our drones, INTEL, etc., do the smart things,

Or, you know, you could try for a foreign policy that didn't involve holding a gun to everyone's head.

Especially since you got too big for anyone to fight, and started picking on smaller enemies with less resources - meaning that everything is going to turn into guerrilla strikes against civilians, on both sides.

No, this is the reasoning behind thinking someone is full of shit if they're pushing you to do something, supposedly for your sake.

Let's let this proceed, then take anyone who supported it or voted for it and send them to the listed countries.

When do we treat this sort of nonsense as a threat, ala the Boston rapper. If I announced a business model of selling something for $0.99, but claiming its real value was $150K and then using the millions of dollars of "damages" to justify rooting through your computer, I'd have the police called on me. So why doesn't this extend to the real criminals in our society?

I doubt they'll get this, but they need to be kicked for even asking.

That's actually the fundamental problem in democracy - the assumption that everything is up for grabs if you win some popularity contest, and that there are no limits on how often you can ask. If I asked if I could do something horrible to you, you'd say no and move on. If I ask your government I just keep doing it until fatigue or human error on your part lets me win.

Lobbyists are a rootkit against democracy.

We don't. That's just more crazy rhetoric. It's almost as if he doesn't actually have anything compelling to say and has to try to misrepresent what everyone else is saying.

It goes to show who we're talking to, and the level of discussion we can have with those who wish to control us.

> Weev didn't try to responsibly/ethically disclose his findings.

Going to a journalist is the ethical answer.

Sending phishing emails or extorting people would be the unethical answer.

> Bugs happen all the time, and no one wants to be on the receiving end of some kid who finds ones and takes rubbing it in your face as his divine mandate.

Did the customers want their email addresses leaked?

> Dumping all the info you pull from a hack is neither responsible nor ethical.

Bullshit. Depends on the hack. Dump Scientology docs pertaining to harassment of critics, awesome. Dumping private medical records of random people, pretty nasty.

You may notice that email addresses are not considered sensitive information. In fact, I'm sure Apple and AT&T reserve the right to share customer information with "select partners". Leaking customer email addresses doesn't actually hurt the customers, but does hurt the company's reputation for providing a secure service - which is exactly what should happen. Anything less and there's no motivation to change.

> Doing so dons you with the blackest of hats and destroys your reputation to all except like-minded sociopaths.

Oh yeah, the blackest. My kitten-eating hat. The one I wear when I trick people into slavery or prostitution, when I plot to exterminate entire subraces of humanity because of their lack of rhythm. That hat.

Yeah, right. Because only sociopaths think major corporations should have their feet held to the fire and that it's best it happens on a zero-value attack like email addresses rather than anything important.

Is a hammer a weapon or a tool?

Is a military mortar a tool when ski patrols use it to save lives by safely triggering avalanches?