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We have become Big Brother


Fidcal

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What worries me is that I don't think you're crazy, Jinix.

 

A gadget has been developed that can be plugged into a car, it overrides the encryption and takes control of brakes, airbag, anything that is under the direction of the onboard computer.

 

There has been discussion that future legislation will force all new cars to include a police override 'to bring joyriders to a safe halt' but we can expect it to be abused.

 

Driverless cars are being trialled but the first few generations can be overridden by a human. Once the software can be shown to be safer than a human then that human link into the loop will probably be removed (to reduce traffic accidents which cost the economy money.) From there it's a simple step to take over any car anytime and drive it anywhere.

 

Mobile phones: I don't even want to talk about how everyone is tracked by them.

 

Net tracking by Google etc will become more sophisticated. Data sharing will occur. If you know 20 or 30 anonymous things about someone you pretty well know exactly who they are: Accesses from UK; accesses male-oriented sites such as clicking on garments and footwear for middle-aged men so most likely that's what he is; entered post code into a broadband inquiry; bought a dog collar with the name Bozo on it; bought some green paint from Amazon, oh, there's a house with that Ipswitch postcode that's painted the same shade of green. Guess it's Mr Johnson then, I think he wears grey shoes and has a dog called Bozo. It takes a bit of detective work comparing data but that's what AI software does well and does very fast and it will have far more than 20 or 30 'anonymous' bits of data to compare. It's a matter of time until everyone's details will be available on DVD.

 

You can let the cat out of the bag but it's not so easy to put it back in. It'll be too late then.

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In the early nineties I remember telling a class that Pandora's Box has been opened and no-one will never be able to close it... some of the youngsters asked what I meant and I told them that 'all hell was about to break loose' and their futures were set in stone and that they was no way out.

It prompted a lively discussion about the future of computers and being on line (BBSing).

 

An old man once came into my "school of computers' and offered to pay me if I would "hurt' someone in a another city for him, using the computer. I wrote him off as crazy - like how? I thought, drop one on his head?

Now someone can and they are, being 'hurt' by computers all the time by ruining their lives digitally.

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Now, private UK health records are to be handed over to third parties.

 

"The data will be stored anonymously, but a patient’s NHS number, postcode, family history, referrals, alcohol consumption and so on will be included." which means it's not anonymous.

 

 

http://www.telegraph...ig-Brother.html

 

Of course, there will be an 'opt-out' but likely it will be made vague and difficult. The infamous 'opt-out' instead of 'opt-in' gives abusers great power over us. Google and Adobe, for instance, provide an opt-out but it's kept quiet, is awkward to find and manage even if you know about it, and demands in effect that you opt in to a cookie which declares you have opted-out!..

 

Personally, I log off the internet every morning and log in again to get a new IP address. I've disable cookies and javascript on Google but I also use Duck Duck and other safer search engines. I avoid Flash.

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I would like to promote a Firefox add-on here called RequestPolicy. When you go to a site, it has a red flag at the bottom of your screen which you can click on. If you do, it shows you all of the third-party sites which the main site you are visiting tried to contact/load content from.

 

I read tech news online a lot, and I have a slow connection because I live in the US where overpriced monopolies control everything. As such, when I go to a news site, it can take a long time for the plain text that I am interested in reading to load while the main site contacts half of the Internet, loading random shit like social buttons and tracking scripts that I didn't want in the first place.

 

As a result, pages like this load much faster for me.

Edited by lost_soul

--- War does not decide who is right, war decides who is left.

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Yeah, it's a fight everyday against those who try to control us. Some news sites refresh their front page every 5 minutes. It is my habit to scan down the page and open interesting stories in a new tab. Unfortunately, when I'm 3/4 way down, the page refreshes and I'm dumped back at the top thus losing my place. Sometime the subheading I was reading is no longer even there! Fortunately, Opera provides source edit so every day to read the news I remove the refresh line so I can read in peace. It's a sad joke but has to be done........

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This sort of thing makes me consider SELinux. It restricts what programs can do based on what groups they are in. For example, your X server can be running as root, but it can STILL be prevented from accessing sensitive parts of the OS, even if it gets hijacked. I was watching a talk about SE Linux last night from a guy at Red Hat.

 

Even if an attacker hijacks a process that is running as root on your machine, he will still be unable to exceed the clearance level of whatever group that program was confined to. This is starting to sound like more of a good idea for general use.

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--- War does not decide who is right, war decides who is left.

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Rather than making snide remarks, I'll just leave this here... http://www.reddit.co...u_have_visited/

 

*silently motions to his license agreement below as he leaves the room*

 

That was just confirmed to be mostly B.S. by Gabe himself.

 

http://www.pcgamesn....istory-valve-no

 

The actual post:

 

http://www.reddit.co..._vac_and_trust/

 

You shouldn't believe every rumor that pops up from a bowl mixed with lies and truths all in one bowl, and this kind of is an example of that IMO. I can understand being afraid of things related to the NSA but this really wasn't a big problem anyhow, and people just sort of got worked up over something that really wasn't much at all in this case.

 

EDIT: Looking back at this post, I feel as if I was being a bit abrasive here. I apologize if I did come off as being that here to anyone else.

Edited by MacD11
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Not a problem. Its just that after all the crap that has been exposed, we are more paranoid about privacy than ever.

 

I find it amusing that our reputation as a nation has been damaged in the eyes of others. They don't trust us now, and for good reason. (Our hands have been caught in the cookie jar and now everybody else knows it.)

Edited by lost_soul

--- War does not decide who is right, war decides who is left.

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Lots of people are concerned about their privacy these days. And rightfully so. However what should be of the highest concern is not the fact that they collect all sort of data about you. But that all sort of data is being put inside your mind without you even realizing it. I'm talking about 'mass mind control' here.

 

The physical 'big brother' enslavement is only the logical next step that follows the mental enslavement. While you worry about them tracking your cookies... they have already programmed you to accept more and more chains. More burdens in the way of taxes and permits and laws to bring on more control mechanisms... less freedom. All the while you are addicted to their media that tells you how to think or to keep you from thinking at all. Combined with the programming that goes on in the public fool system... well, lets just say that we live in very exciting times if you look beyond what they want you to see.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Avast has a browser plugin now that blocks sites trying to get ad info and others linked to the current page you're on.

 

There was also a firefox plugin....can't recall the name, started with a "Con..." something.. confluence or congregate.. not sure but it drew a flow chart of all the sites the site you're connected to, is connected to.

 

EDIT: Collusion I'm sure some of you are familiar with it.

Edited by Lux
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So what, Ghostery does the same, but without the ancy flow chart. It shows a list of all cookies, trackers and widgets and whatnot that load with the web page. You can block them all or one by one, or even white-list the whole website. Ghostery is available for Opera, Firefox and Chrome.

My Eigenvalue is bigger than your Eigenvalue.

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ghostery / adblock / noscript = holy trinity of internet browsering. i still might take a look at collusion, might help to pin down some stuff as malicious or at least douchebaggerous that was only questionable or suspicious before.

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[irony] Does anyone know a good plugin to block echelon so the nsa won't track what i'm posting on the nets? Oh and perhaps something that makes my isp not keep my digital record for years for when my government might decide to check up on me. If no plugin is availible, no big deal, i hear they only do it so keep me safe anyways. We all have to sacrifice our privacy for freedoms. And it's not like i got anything to hide, so i have nothing to fear. [/irony]

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There is NO such thing as privacy anymore.

It's an illusion that we wish for but cannot attain. It's over! A belief of the past. like keyholes.

 

Software can bring together every known thing about you that has ever been recorded from birth records, school and police records,

licenses, banks, creditcards, medical records, cellphones, travel etc.

And now every interest you have ever expressed on the Internet is also part of those records... including any comments you have ever made in any forum or comments on a news site and, of course, your social profile from information you submitted about yourself on various sites.

PLUS all the information OTHER people/friends/relatives have posted on line about you.

 

A background check now is done for even the lowliest of jobs.

Depending on the (percieved) requirements of the job your personal profile is available to buy/use at will.

 

The only thing you can do is to accept that there is no privacy --- and anyway who needs privacy?

People adapt very quickly - my parents were horrified when I bought a guitar in 1956 on PAYments. Not because it was a guitar and rock and roll was evil, but because I did not save up first to buy it.

Instead using the 'vulgar' Buy Now Pay Later concept of payments over time. .. and now there is not a person on Earth the does not depend on credit - their's or their government's.

We are indebted to those who 'own' us namely bigbrotherbiz. In 'their' eyes we can have no secrets/privacy.

 

Big Brother has always been there and easily acceptable if you have a faith that believes in an all seeing god-eye.

Once they figured out that we don't really believe that god is watching us 24/7 and would punish us for our sins (against 'them'). Then 'they' came up with the NSA+ to really watch us 24/7.

 

So if you are not in the drivers seat... then just enjoy the ride, because there is nothing you can do to stop it.

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So if you are not in the drivers seat... then just enjoy the ride, because there is nothing you can do to stop it.

 

Guess i'm the thought criminal then, cause i think it can and will be stopped. Start by saying: no! To hell with your system, your politics, your closed source software, your facebooksocialmediacrap, your 'smart' phones, your bs gadgets i don't need that want to track my every move. Your bs tv, movies and games. There's a few good men left. Even some that still have guns and won't go down easily. Put that on the digital record as well, you bastards! No fear! No surrender [/rant]

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IMHO, the first step is NOT saying: "I don't have anything to hide." You get to hear that so often these days, and it's really the biggest nail in the coffin of democracy. The moment people stop caring for their democratic rights, people like the ones we have in our governments right now can do as they please. This doesn't stop with ACTA, it starts with it.

My Eigenvalue is bigger than your Eigenvalue.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Did you know you can record over 10 years of voice-quality audio on a single terabyte hard drive? If you don't believe me, let's do some calculations.

 

I compressed over 18 and a half hours of voice data (from The Nameless Mod) into about 85 MB using the Opus codec. Reason being, I wanted to see what this thing was capable of. Now, let's multiply that by 10. So, we have 850 megabytes, and over a week of voice recordings. Multiply this by 52 to get a year, and its a tiny 52 gigabytes holding a year of audio!

 

Of course, if we multiply our 52 GB = 1 year of audio by 10, we get 520 GB for 10 years of audio.

 

So, now you can see that you can fit 10 years of speech on a single hard drive with LOTS of room to spare. It doesn't sound great, and it aint "HD", but that doesn't matter. Its just a single channel at 16 KHz.

 

 

Now, look at me with a straight face and tell me that they aren't secretly recording all of us, all of the time. Whether it is legally or morally permitted doesn't matter. All they have to do is say it is for our protection and most people will be too busy hugging their slightly shinier smartphone this year to care.

 

Oh yeah, and for those who think they would need super computers to do the above in real-time on a massive scale:

 

A: They *have* super computers!

B: My lowly six-core machine encoded the TNM audio at 60x the speed of real-time, using a single CPU core. This means that, in theory, my machine would be able to handle a few hundred streams simultaneously.

Edited by lost_soul

--- War does not decide who is right, war decides who is left.

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I wonder what the network throughput would have to be to push all these "recorded conversations" to a datacenter ?_?

 

On top of our current, already saturated, trunks.

 

IMO, maybe this will happen sometime in the future when doped fiber is ubiquitous but it definitely isn't happening now.

 

Also, lost_soul, how can you use the words "lowly" and "six-core machine" in the same sentence?

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