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We have become Big Brother


Fidcal

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Well, if they are doing this behind the scenes currently, I imagine the biggest issue for them is digitizing the audio data... Its not like they have sound cards with millions of inputs, lol.

 

 

However, the PSTN will begin switching to digital soon, and when that happens, they would have a much easier time gathering all that audio data and feeding it into their clustered computers for compression and archival because it would already be digital when it reaches their facilities.

 

And when I say my machine is lowly, I mean lowly compared to what kinds of computers the agencies have.

Edited by lost_soul

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

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I expect future voice compression to be much higher because I have a theory that only voice characteristics will be stored and the actual words will be converted to compressed text. Text back to speech will be far better than now and will be used in all games to gives huge amounts and variations of stored speech. Game developers will likely just type the dialogue they want then choose voice types from a console.

 

What I mean is, that currently if you record say, an hour of President Obama, you are recording his voice over and over again when all you really want to capture is what he is saying.

 

I dunno though. Maybe current voice compression samples blocks of similar intonations anyway and only saves each one once?

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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.

 

When you consider that the GCHQ can already grab the complete data stream that's going through UK cables, which is an enormous amount of data (albeit store it only for three days, as even their capacity is limited), it is decidedly not out of the question that all our telephone calls are being recorded. After all, Snowden's papers prove that the NSA can grab 80 million telephone calls/day in Germany. Also, at least in Germany all telephone communication is digital, so grabbing it is dead simple. And: the bandwidth for telephone calls is absolutely minimal, so recording it required minimal amounts of data.

My Eigenvalue is bigger than your Eigenvalue.

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tumblr_inline_n2ovswc7F41rqjy66.png

 

And the Erich Honecker Memorial Prize goes to...

Edited by Melan

Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

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Polyester Erich: The Original Hipster.

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Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

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Wow... I predicted it...

 

I fucking predicted it!

 

"I wonder which country it is? Who's gonna get it next?"

 

More importantly, who is doing it to you? I've heard rumors that spy agencies cooperate to skirt the rules. For example, agency_a is not allowed to spy on nation_a, and agency_b is not allowed to spy on nation_b. So, agency_a spies on nation_b, and agency_b spies on nation_a! Then they can just compare notes at dinner time! :)

Edited by lost_soul

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

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  • 3 weeks later...

Now we have 6 TB hard drives. That's over 5500 GB of usable space, folks. As I figured out before, 520 GB can easily hold 10 years of speech-quality audio, which means ALL of the audio throughout your entire existence (every single minute of it) can be recorded onto just a single HDD!

 

Scared yet?

 

http://www.extremete...led-with-helium

 

What's even scarier is that some day, the price of this thing will be 1/100 of what it is today.

Edited by lost_soul

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

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It may sound funny, but that was exactly the reason why I didn't buy a TV with smart features. My TV just has no way to phone home.

My Eigenvalue is bigger than your Eigenvalue.

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Well, I'd never buy a Samsung smart tv again for sure. I've got one of the early ones - about 4 or 5 years ago I guess. I never plugged it into the net because I had no connection in this room at that time but now I have. If the newer ones won't work unless you connect (which I think is how the Xbox One (stupid name) is, then that gives me another reason never to get Samsung.

 

No, my contention is with the counter-intuitive sluggish 'smart' dumb menus. Even after years I still often click it wrongly because it works the opposite both to Windows standard menus and common sense. With Windows you select a menu and then you can select an option on the menu. Simple enough. With Samsung, it automatically shows you the menu contents so you instinctively try to scroll down - but then the menu disappears and you're moved to the next menu (which you also cannot yet access!) No, you have to remember a second click to select the menu that you already have!

 

GTA5 is the same - but don't get me started on that or I'll have to start a new thread.

 

My nightmare is that one day real life will be like that. You'll go into a restaurant. The waiter shows you a menu. You point to the roast beef. The waiter ignores you and shows you the dessert menu. You point to the chocolate pudding. It disappears and he shows you the dinners again.

 

"Sir is very silly, pointing to an unselected menu will get you nothing."

 

"But you are showing me the friggin' menu!"

 

"Ah yes, but I'm showing you it so you can decide if it's the menu you want. Then you select it. Sir is very silly."

 

"So how do I select the menu?"

 

"First you point to the menu itself of course! Sir is very silly."

 

"Wouldn't it be easier if I could just point to what I want on the menu you are already showing me?"

 

"Of course sir, but this is a Samsung restaurant."

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I really like my current TV. Its dumb, but big and it has nice black levels for TDM. It has no net connection.

 

My favorite feature is that you can turn the screen off and just keep the amplifier/speakers on, which is great because I use it at night to listen to things while I fall asleep. That's an example of an awesome feature that every TV needs to have.

 

Also, XBone doesn't require a net connection to play single player games. They dropped that requirement because people raged about it. I imagine MS and Sony are secretly planning behind closed doors to both implement that on next gen though, so people have "no choice". If I were them, that's what I would do... something like: "We both want to do this, but our users rebel against it. Let's both implement the feature so that the user has no option but to except it, or not play modern games."

 

Even if they could get in legal trouble for doing this, they would achieve their goals and any fines they receive would be both a decade late and a drop in the bucket.

Edited by lost_soul

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

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Ah, I already do. My 40" Samsung tv IS my pc monitor. I scarcely watch any tv anymore. I watched something about the space station last week - or maybe that was the week before? This week zero so far. Occasionally there's a movie but all the best movies are stolen by Sky and I refuse to pay a sub AND watch adverts AND suffer aggressive intrusive promos. I can get insulted anytime without having to pay for it.

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  • 1 month later...

http://www.theregist...marttv_bugging/

 

The part about an attacker having to set this up locally made me ROFL. All the government has to do is send the manufacturer a letter demanding a firmware be pushed out that lets them activate the mic/camera remotely upon request. The Gov can also demand that nobody is told about this, and shut the business down if they refuse to comply or disclose that this is happening.

 

I'm not saying the government is doing this, I'm saying they CAN do it and none of us would know about it.

Edited by lost_soul

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

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and so we enter the age of mutually assured voyeurism

It's why there's no need of BB.

 

No control can equal envy+voyeurism in influencing the human life :D

Edited by lowenz

Task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen but to think what nobody has yet thought about that which everybody see. - E.S.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Yeah, I saw that this weekend. It was really creepy. I thought it explained things very well, with the interviews and audio snippits from officials on all sides being presented.

Edited by lost_soul

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

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  • 2 weeks later...

This report says exactly what I've been saying for some time now, we identify each other by scores of small, anonymous pieces of information which like pieces of a jigsaw, fit together to make a picture of us. But whereas we humanly might spend hours solving a jigsaw, artificial intelligence software is becoming increasngly better at compiling anonymous pieces from many hundreds of sources and join the meaningless dots in a microsecond to form a picture of each one of us right down to your shoelaces and the name of your dog.

 

http://www.telegraph...-read-1984.html

 

I was speaking to my brother about this not long ago. I said, in what ways do I actually know you? I don't remember your phone number or even the street address offhand without looking in my address book. I don't know your credit card number or bank sort code. I don't know your national insurance number. No, I only know you from millions of tiny pieces of information each of which is anonymous but together in my mind I know exactly who you are. Soon, so will Google.

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  • 3 months later...

The following link doesn't say much more than we already know but the final few sentences agreed with what I have said here in this thread and elsewhere: we are defined - identified - not so much by credit card and phone numbers but by hundreds of anonymous pieces of information which are being hoovered up and these jigsaw pieces are being rapidly compared and assembled into profiles that tell exactly who we are.

 

...a long and very detailed account of a person – occupation, interests, culinary tastes, travel, family background, income, charitable donations, marital status, house-cleaning arrangements, etc. And then she writes: “This motley set of characteristics, thoughts and attitudes comes very close to defining me as a person...

 

Here's the link:

 

http://www.theguardi...ernet-anonymity

 

About all you can do for now is:

  • Delete all cookies by default and only enable trusted sites.
  • Ditto disable javascript.
  • Disable as much content as possible esp. Flash. Opera can be set so the plug in is disabled by default and only enabled by choice.
  • Log off/on to the internet at least once a day to get a new IP address.

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http://www.theregist...y_is_important/

 

Oh, look! The Americans are invading your privacy, again! Its not bad enough that they have the right to take things away from you after you pay for them, they need to monitor every single page you read, too!

 

And before any of you say "You do not HAVE to use this software" tell that to all the publishers who make content available exclusively in formats like this, and tell it to all the corrupt pieces of shit that crafted legislation banning people from writing alternative software that can read the files.

 

Disclaimer: I am an American, in the US. I believe that gives me a right to criticize what a corrupt piece of shit this place is. Its not as though I'm from Russia or something, just being a racist.

Edited by lost_soul

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

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Thanks for that. Yeah, that thing about the rootkit in the link from the link is a definite no-no and rightly stamped out.

 

The Adobe thing might be more acceptable if they limit the data to each specific user and then show up-front exactly what info they are phoning home. Unlike Amazon's exclusive use of the Kindle, the Adobe e-reader can be licenced to any publisher, each having different terms. But if I buy only from a publisher where I pay a set price for a book there is no need for them to watch how long or how much of a book I read. Having said that, if a customer openly agrees, 'hey, I don't mind if you send back anonymous info about how many chapters I've read' then that's okay. The problem is that Adobe are so stealthy about what they do and it leaves a bad taste in one's mind. Also, it's not anonymous of course to the original publisher who have all your details, maybe that's shared with Adobe, I don't know. Either way, since I can't trust any of them, I don't know what they are doing with the info or if they will extend it whenever they want. More terrifying is when all this data is merged with Google's and other company's until eventually there is a profile of me that knows more about me and what I do than I do myself! ("Hey, this guy's read Chapter 8 of 50 Shades of Grey ten times - make sure he sees plenty of adverts for garden hose!")

 

Some months ago my Amazon Kindle on PC software suddenly put up a message I had to update but there was no link nor any help how to do it. In addition, they deliberately disabled my Kindle so all the books I had already paid for, I could no longer read! The books were on my PC but I wasn't allowed to read them! I was annoyed that on principle I decided not to update and left. Over the months I looked at other e-readers but all had downsides. Adobe I refused point-blank on principle, knowing how they covertly steal info about the user with their Flash video so I'm not surprised to read here that they extract data from e-readers.

 

More recently I resigned myself to grovelling back to Amazon and searching how to update (which took me nearly twenty minutes to find) because there was a new book I wanted to buy. The other day I was reading a list in my newspaper of the top 20 least/most read books (read all the way through) compiled from the Kindle so clearly Amazon are also monitoring every chapter you read on a Kindle.

 

It's a hate-hate relationship. They are just arrogant. If only they made every type of data truly transparent at consent time and every time they transmit, it would be much more acceptable. As it is, my Kindle hangs every time I load it because it's secretly trying to access the net and it can't get through my firewall which I only enable when I buy a new book. It still gets the info in the end, I guess, but I object to software using my bandwidth without consent and no opt-out for irrelevant info that's none of their business.

 

Orwell never anticipated any of this from commerce - only from the government.

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Yeah, if it is concentual, and I mean not by having something inside of a massive EULA that people do not understand, nor agree with, I do not have a problem with it.... like if there's a feature to sync your position in books across devices that you actually have to manually enable.

 

But when somebody sells me something, the relationship ends there. They have no right "checking up on me". Just as I have no right selling you a TV and then piering in your windows or activating the mic to listen in on you in order to enforce some bogus license terms that I pulled out of my behind.

Edited by lost_soul

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

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I could no longer read! The books were on my PC but I wasn't allowed to read them, It's a hate-hate relationship.

Or do what I did, rip the ebooks right out of the kindle app. The end result being, I have a full backup, that I have control of, for the books I paid for. I did this for MoonBo's novella so I was able to read it on my android device via FBreader without having to install the hatefullt kindle app.

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