swartkrans

> "Both agents declined to comment for this article, but according to two people briefed on the investigation..."

What are the odds the "two people" are "both agents"? That's like the lamest off the record attribution ever. Also amazing that some random agent using Google broke the case. Apparently anyone could have figured out who DPR was.

> As ever, responses to this news will largely fall into two categorizes: those who believe that the U.S. — and other governments — should do everything within its power to find and apprehend criminals; and those who feel that the government is again running roughshod over privacy rights.

This is a false dichotomy. If you care about apprehending criminals actually responsible for crimes you should care about this too. A reoccurring subtext is that law enforcement cares more about quantity than quality, but data quality is hugely important. These dragnets are the equivalent of a House TV Series body scan, and the arguments that characters in the show made apply here.

One of the consequences of a dragnet and too much low quality data is the risk of circumstantial evidence leading to the conviction of the wrong individual. The minds of investigators and district attorneys are susceptible to all the biases that plague any other field including confirmation bias. Project Innocence has revealed heaps of wrongful convictions based on low quality data, even when police corruption wasn't at fault. Dennis Fritz and Ron Williamson for example were convicted for murder based solely on bad circumstantial evidence while the real perpetrator remained unpunished for over a decade.

It's not just privacy advocates who should care about stopping these kinds of surveillance techniques. That is unless the dragnet apologists don't care about who is being punished for crimes just as long someone is punished whether or not they actually committed a crime.

> The aggregate pain and aggregate loss of using cash for transactions in a credit-card dominated world is much larger

I have not found this to be the case.

> Sign up for Mint

I don't intend to increase the available surface area for attacks by giving my credit information to a third party. Nor do I need this kind of a monthly or bi-monthly hassle.

I'm not a particular fan of pie charts or donut charts, but the visualization used in this tool is actually helpful at understanding and comparing nested amounts.

The reason I don't usually like pie charts or donut charts is because it is difficult to make comparisons between circular shapes. In most places people use a pie chart, I think a bar chart would be better. It's easier to compare different lengths of rectangles than guesstimate differences of pieces of pies or half circles.

Something about this type of visualization with nested depths seems to be an outlier. If this information was portrayed in rectangles I'm not sure it would be better.

Yeah there are laws, but you have to catch it, and you have to report it and sometimes you don't realize you've been defrauded until months later. Hackers in my experience don't empty your account out, they charge $30 here, $19.99 here, sign up for this thing for a monthly charge of $9 you didn't realize. My time and stress costs me. And you can lose money.

It's best to just not have to deal with it. My credit card number has been put up for sale twice now, twice. Because I used it at a Target and a Home Depot. Ok, I just don't want to go through that again. I don't care if there are laws, if I use cash, I'll be fine. It's no problem, cash is accepted everywhere. I'm not likely to be mugged where I live and I don't carry a lot of money.

> Unless they're going back to mechanical ones.

I've been going back to cash instead of using credit cards because I've been exposed twice now via Target and Home Depot. I want to even avoid using ATMs and go into the bank to get cash because you can't really even tell when an ATM has a malicious card scanner installed.

Once we have automated cars maybe we'll go be back to walking and riding bikes to avoid being victimized by remote car jacking.

Imagine the mess hijacked delivery drones might cause.

Your phone can be cloned remotely. You can't easily clone a rotary phone that plugs into the wall.

I'm definitely not looking to automate my home, especially after reading how Chinese hacker had installed back doors on wall mounted AC devices or whatever which had access to the internal network at the New York Times building to keep infiltrating and reinfecting all the machines on the network.

Maybe we jumped into the digital world a little bit too quickly.

NextStep was built with enterprise in mind but became wholly consumer in its next life as OS X and then iOS. The massive consumer success of the iPhone led to employers giving in to employees who wanted iOS devices instead of Blackberry devices, a phenomenon called BYOD, "bring your own device". BYOD has given rise to an entirely new Apple presence in enterprise which I think Apple is just getting started with. Prior to this Macs were used by designers and engineers, creators, but hardly the stuff of serious enterprise.

Right now the services Apple provides are all about fulfilling features that consumers want: email, cloud storage, being able to buy content, and apps. They're meant to augment and also perhaps cynically lock consumers into Apple's sphere. The hardware devices sold at high margins make the money. This may change, and we might also see a two Apples where apple starts selling its services with higher margins for enterprise.

Incidentally long ago Apple really dominated in education. Most of the 80's Apple IIes and macs were popular in K-12, but that went away in the later 90's. Now iOS, in the form of iPads, are making inroads in education once again, competing with Chromebooks. Education isn't enterprise, and I don't see any services Apple would offer schools, but it's related.

Almost every where you look though, Microsoft is under assault. I think the last remaining stronghold is the Windows PC workstation. I don't think Apple, Linux or Android have made any inroads here. I can see Chromebooks becoming more relevant in the future, but for now workstations are dominated by Windows and probably will be for the next decade. The enterprise level services Microsoft provides here with ActiveDirectory and sharepoint, and the sophisticated controls for deploying Windows workstations across big organizations is pretty unrivaled. Maybe RedHat is also in this space, but not at the level of Microsoft.

What's the benefit of using fastmail if you just forward to gmail?

I have been using fastmail for a month now after switching from gmail. I quite like it, but the two drawbacks are that it's just a little bit more likely to let spam in than gmail, even with aggressive spam options enabled, and with fastmail I'm missing out on the growing gmail ecosystem (Streak, Dropbox mailbox app, others).

It's fine though, I really am happy to be paying for an email service instead of depending on Google. I am quite happy with everything else. Really easy to set up and integrate. Works well with Android's email app and Mail.app. The webmail isn't terrible but I just use it to report spam. Having an Android app now is super exciting.

Well it's patched now, but it didn't affect you unless you were running a "Windows Server" although all recent operating systems were affected. If your Windows machine is behind your home router and you were not forwarding ports to it you're probably fine. I doubt this vulnerability was known well enough that enough people were scanning for vulnerable IPs to exploit them.