YOU’LL BELIEVE A MAN CAN FLY

Flight seven oh four three two one, red four.
 Green expanding to one.
 Moving levers up at seven decimal eight.
 Moving two point liters down.
 All systems go, red lights are off.
 Greens are showing.




[Via Sloth Unleashed]

Cleared for takeoff,

This is dF

ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY MY ONLY POST ABOUT THE NEW STAR TREK FILM

Star Trek: Into Darkness

In which JJ Abrams squanders all the goodwill generated from the reboot film and basically pisses off the entire Trekkie fanbase. 

At least if you go by my Facebook newsfeed. Or half the posts at io9.

( WARNING: spoilers from this point on )

I’m not saying ST fans are wrong to hate ST:ID. I do understand how they feel. I imagine it’s the same way I felt when George Lucas started monkeying around with Star Wars Episodes 4-6, trying to convince us that Greedo shot first, etc. 

All I’m saying is that ST:ID is probably a much better film if you have no emotional investment in the canon (like me) and don’t take it too seriously.

Beam me up,

This is dF

WE’RE THE NSA: ALL YR PHONES ARE BELONG TO US

Yr National Security lede of the day: 



With jokes!





Unsurprisingly, this has not gone down well with a lot of people. Even the New York Times is pissed off. (Well, kind of.)

Long-time readers of this blog probably have a pretty good idea of how I feel about it, but here’s a few bullet points I’d add: 

1. What the NSA is collecting is phone records, not actual conversations. That means phone numbers of both parties involved in the calls, the International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number for mobile callers, calling card numbers used, and the time and duration of the calls. The data also does not include the name or address of the subscriber or other account information.

2. However, science has already demonstrated that there is enough corresponding data out there to figure out a person’s name and address just from the above data. In fact, you can probably ID up to 95% of callers.

3. According to Diane Feinstein and Saxy Chambliss, the Verizon order has been going on since 2006, and is 100% legal under the Patriot Act. The problem, because all of this is done secretly via a secret court with a secret legal interpretation of the Patriot Act, there’s no way to know for sure if they mean legal in a sensible way that would hold up in a real court or legal in a “we can legally torture people” way or “we can legally assassinate US citizens we say are guilty of terrorism or whatever” way. 

4. Context: It’s also fairly normal in terms of data mining and tracking. Google, Facebook, your mobile phone company, et al are sitting on tons and tons of personal data about you. They do this so they can sell it to advertisers, but the govt also wants access to it. And reportedly the NSA already has access via something called PRISM. (No, really.) That’s why the govt also backs legislation like CISPA that would prevent you from suing, say, Verizon for sharing yr personal data with the FBI or NSA without yr permission. 

5. Additional context: the NSA is doing this at a time when the Obama admin has taken the civil liberties situation it inherited from Bush and in many ways made it even worse. (And that link doesn't include more recent things like what General Holder has been doing to Associated Press and Fox News.)

6. The FBI sure picked a bad time to press Congress to pass new legislation that gives it the ability to monitor communications on the internet, to include requiring internet phone service providers install a backdoor to user software so the Feds can listen in on yr Skype calls.

CONCLUSION: This is nothing new. This is business as usual. And that’s just sad, because civil libertarians have been pointing this stuff out for over a decade now. No one wanted to hear it back then. And too many people naively believed that the problem was the Bush/Cheney axis, and that Presidente Obama would fix it just because he promised he would in his campaign.

Now look where we are.

Call me,

This is dF