I saw several females, But I could not be very confident about whether they actually had two X chromosomes or not.  This being Bitcoin-land I would not want to make a bet on it.

The aB's question, the clientele struck me as:

 - VC types who were primarily interested in making bucks.

 - Techie-ish folks who took it as a given that taint was both the way to go and a good thing to eliminate 'crime'.

 - People showing of non-sense kludges and scams which one could tell would never go anywhere (primitive cobbled together ATM's with no solution the the big problem (licensing), sea-steading nonsense, hedge fund pools with no interest for any but the most tangential of risk considerations, etc.

 - Josh Zerlan

In fairness I saw some things which impressed me as well, but, just as the meetup I attended at my place of work, the event was largely underwhelming.  To me.  I'm sure a lot of others had a blast.  Actually the thing was not un-fun, but I did not really resonate with the crowd is all.

Wise words.

For my part I very deliberately routed things through one account and went out of my way to make sure I did some transactions exceeding $10k.  This was very much so I could not be accused of 'structuring' for the purposes of avoiding detection or whatever.

Any 'structuring' (deliberate or not) is likely to be trivially detected at this point such is the nature of the surveillance state.  This is particularly the case in the financial arena.  These are, of course, only my guesses, but they are vaguely educated guesses on my part.  So, primitive attempts at gaming are relatively pointless and usually counterproductive.  Long term poster 'proudhon' made a statement recently which I liked: "Don't try to beat them at their own game."

Now, for my troubles on being fully transparent I did have my accounts canceled.  But I am not in jail!  Not yet anyway, and I don't expect to be unless the simple act of making some money off Bitcoin is criminalized...and ex-post facto principles which are pretty basic in any semi-functional legal system are shit-canned.

 - edit: correction.

Could the story actually be so important that it was successfully quashed even though all the others to date have not?

  http://dailycaller.com/2014/07/02/greenwald-delays-biggest-snowden-story-yet-over-government-claims/

I hypothesized that that might end up being the case (which is why it showed up as an option for the vote.)  Greenwald was smart to break the story down to an individual level.  The government would have to argue that individuals who happen to be high-value NSA targets are threats on a case-by-case basis as well in order to make the theory that by releasing their target status Greenwald is endangering public welfare stick.  And has become a co-conspirator in their 'crimes' from a legal perspective.

Hopefully what will happen here is that Greenwald will take a little break and deal with whatever the last minute roadblock thrown down happened to be, then release the story as initially planned.  I've no doubt that the details they've been working on for this story will be released in some manner or another.  If nothing else, Greenwald-n-co have been visiting the targets to interview them and these people would be hard pressed not to be talking to their friends about it.  It would probably most effective if Greenwald could release the story more-or-less as he initially planned though, and I hoped it would be a years long trickle of water torture for the scum who've abused the nations intelligence apparatus for political and commercial purposes.

I figure if a guy is to fuckin lazy to even vote then they probably don't do much else but sit around pissing an moaning about whatever.  I sometimes vote and sometimes do not.  Usually I do, but when I don't I don't whine about whoever won.  I didn't like any of the presidential candidates that ran in the last election enough to warrant even a spot of graphite.  I wrote in someone I would like to see as pres.  Elizabeth Warren in that case.  Normally there are other races and ballot measures that I feel interested enough it to vote.  BTW, in my district a few cycles ago the votes were like two (2) in favor of one presidential candidate over the other and the winner takes all.  Sparse population.

It's worth note (and rarely mentioned in the Western media) that Crimea was effectively Russian until 1954 when Kruschev was on some vodka binge and sort of gave it over to Ukraine.  Of course it was a fairly meaningless handjob since Ukraine was part of the USSR.  But this kind of explains why a popular vote went easily to Russian Federation.  That's the direction where the native population's affiliations tend to lay.

The contrast between the post WW-II experiences of Crimea and of Palestine (and the people within) could not be more stark.

Israel has a government which is very independent of control from the U.S.  It is more than fair to question how independent our government is of the desires and aspirations of the government in Israel which has been led by right-wing and strongly Zionist factions for some time now.  There is very little that Israel wishes that we do not provide as far as I can tell, and we are very often their sole source of support and backing in the U.N. when they are called to task for one transgression or another.  Using our military power to crush some of their few remaining enemies is about the only thing we've not yet done for them, and the blowback from doing Iran (and public sentiment against doing Syria) are such that it would be nearly impossible for us to dance to their tunes here.

Israel obtains unfiltered intelligence feeds with data about U.S. citizens as we've learned from Snowden.  They even have explicit authorization to keep data on U.S. citizens for a period of time (minus U.S. lawmakers via a non-binding agreement) but what they do with the data is anyone's guess.

Israel can also execute U.S. citizens on humanitarian vessels in international waters and all of the leaderships of our government, and with almost no exceptions all of our mainstream media will studiously look the other way.  I'm talking about the 2010 'freedom flotilla' incident, not the 1967 USS Liberty incident.

Firstly, I would say that back in the 80's' and 90's left-wing negative feelings toward Israel and that countries actions were much stronger than they are now.  NPR (National Public Radio) is a huge source of influence on the more affluent on the left.  They did an abrupt about face on all things Israel in the early part of this century and it has had a very noticeable impact on many of my friends.  Or something has.

My personal beef is with Zionism both as a ideology and as a practice.  This is not the same thing as dislike of either Israel or Jews, but I can understand how it could be read that way.

There are ethnic Jews who share my feelings about Zionism.  Like the holocaust survivor who was part of the Free Gaza Movement flotilla and her family in pre-WWII times.  There are also a lot of Zionists who are not ethnic Jews.

That is an interesting observation.

Greenwald had the Snowden material for a long time and claims that it is the most important thing yet (at least to him) and that he is only releasing actual names of targets after discussing things with them.  If they do not wish their names released for whatever reason, he says he won't do it.  So, he's been making the rounds chatting with people and informing them of their status as special targets.

This makes me think back to a brief period of time when Feinstein stopped being a class-A totalitarian and seemed to suddenly have some concern for victims of surveillance.  I wonder if she had a little chat with Greenwald about that time.  Since her very unusual break from being the biggest supporter and proponent of the surveillance state apparatus she's gone back to her normal wicked ways, albeit perhaps without the same zeal.  It's hard to teach an old dog new tricks I suppose.

I found the SCOTUS decision about cell phones interesting.  One hypothesis that hit me is that they know they are going to have to rule on the NSA stuff at some point.  They loath the thought and have been punting on it as long as possible.  I am sure they are going to do what in effect will be to throw the 4th in the dumpster, at least when the central govt is commissioning the abuse.  There is no way the central govt is going to give up mass surveillance though they may pretend to make some movements in that direction for a bit.  Maybe with the cell phone ruling the SCOTUS is just trying to build up a little good will for when they have to swallow the nasty medicine (and their own pride and dignity a-la the Bush v. Gore decision.)

Bump.

Still a chance to get a fair vote in...much to my consternation.  I've been hammering on the re-load button over at theintercept.  So much for 'very very imminent'.

May or may not be the case.  Probably is to some extent, but that's hardly unusual in a population base.  These things are more analog than binary.

Josh got fucked over by someone on a Bitcoin deal back in the old days.  Some auction for a vacation rental or something.  The community basically liked the auction dude and didn't like Inaba who has always been identifiable as a general prick and everyone gave him grief about it.  I'm sure he was quite but-hurt and it was at that point that he probably said 'fuck em' and didn't have any more qualms about running scams with his foot to the floorboard.  Against the general Bitcoin community, that is, but newbies are much more conducive to being scammed so they take the brunt of his payback.

Inaba is undoubtedly much more intelligent than most people here.  He's not going to be shamed into stopping what he's doing.  Just the opposite because the more successful he is at it the more weight is added to the assertion that he's bright and the victims are stupid.

I will say that Inaba seems to try to use graphical images to paint himself as some sort of a healthy outdoorsman type when in reality his a skinny drugged-out looking guy.  Such self-consciousness is often associated with other psychological maladies.

LOL!  This is as amusing as when the velcro'd a phone onto a box of fans.

As usual, a lot of dopes will probably consider a pic or vid of a curses app provided by known scammers as some sort of a meaningful indication of anything.  Some people don't realize that it would take only rudimentary skills to make such an app produce any numbers desired.  And about a minute of time.

A good devout fundamentalist attitude.  It certainly shows since you forcibly reject any suggestion that there might be any risks whatsoever to the object of your zealotry.  In true form, you can look at literally anything and be so convinced that it demonstrates and reinforces your belief that you'll present it as such to the world.  Reminds me of how everything, no matter how awful, is proof of "God's will" to a certain large fraction of Christians.  To another faction of fruit-loops it is the work of the devil, and to a lot of people it is both simultaneously.

Several reasons I could think of off hand might include:

ARM is an especially active and interesting architecture due to widespread use.  Meaning that a lot of effort is going into compilers for it and porting of more common applications will be along for the ride.  Given that one of the focuses of the product is for desktop use under Linux, this is a significant factor.

Also since ARM is popular it has more resources for basic development.  We see this in the continuing improvements in die size and related efficiency for instance.

They seem to be expecting to employ many cores per chip.  I've long felt that this will be the most likely way forward for a whole range of hardware classes and have been surprised that it's taken as long as it has to come into the fold.  It complicates many things and is sub-optimal for certain kinds of problems,  but eventually it's probably going to end up eclipsing the limited core architectures on a lot of fronts.  Biting the bullet now will very possibly give one a leg-up on their competition in the future.  Of course SPARC, at least, is conducive to doing this as the higher end SUN gear has demonstrated for a long time, but I doubt that that architecture will ever be as competitive as ARM in the lower end power sensitive market segment.

Lastly, if they do actually intend to open-source some of this stuff it would be a complication if they start with a processor which is in widespread use in the military industry.

Shame on you for snipping my points about where your points were basically irrelevant to me AND THEN reiterating the appropriateness of your assertions.  And, of course, for trying to make points that don't really make any sense from a technical perspective.

I still don't understand what you are trying to say about 'not the current desktop class'.  The story indicates that they are targeting desktops.  If you are saying that they are not powerful enough, I would say that we don't know enough about that.  The architecture with many cores has the ability to excel in some areas with some OS's and software designs.  It probably never will with Windows-8, but the Russians threw that OS in the trash even before the Chinese did.  Linux and other OS's can be perfectly fine desktops on very limited hardware.  I doubt that a criteria for the Russians is that it is a killer gaming platform and I don't give two shits about that either.


I use firmware and microcode synonymously.  Accd to the story, the Russians are putting enough funding and tasking the right group to do this work that they will almost certainly be licencing access to the micocode, and very likely re-writing it as needed.  I probably should have said microcode since it is not re-writable on a per-unit basis but in this context it doesn't matter much.


All I said is that I hope that we can see this at some point.  I'm sure that your (and my) point about real security demanding an encompassing set of solutions is not lost on the Russians.  I'm less sure that they would supply the rest of the world with what I happen to want for my own personal reasons.

Sounds nice, but unfortunately you don't know what your are talking about.  If you license a core from ARM you have high visibility into the circuitry and firmware.  This differs significantly from buying a packaged unit from Intel or AMD.  You can take solace in the fact that a lot of others share your ignorance.

As for the deviance from x86 architecture and supposed 'class', I don't use an OS that makes it matter excessively.  And in the cases where it does, compiler improvements will happen rapidly with hardware availability.  Of course I'll keep a windows machine kicking around for non-important stuff which requires closed source pre-compiled stuff.  Mostly for viewing porn to say the truth.  Or using Multibit if I end up wanting to do that at some point.


That's what I was getting at when I mentioned 'suite'.  You may or may not be aware that almost everything (including a $2 memory chip) has a micro-controller and has the potential to have various kinds of backdoors or exploits hidden within them.  Ultimately I would like to use nothing that is not audited with high precision against such things.

As I mentioned before, I would much rather the Russian intelligence services be able to hack my shit than the U.S. intelligence services.  As an American the U.S. intelligence services are a vastly bigger threat to me.

Supposedly Greenwald has an imminent release of documents detailing the high priority targets of NSA surveillance.

I suppose that most people are like me and think that the NSA is out to get me mostly and less important people later.

If one feels inclined to vote, do it soon...or don't brag about being right after the fact.

Unknown...at this time.  Open them for a meaningful audit and we will know, or be able to invalidate the suggestion.  I'm all for letting the free market decide.  The only thing lacking at this point is a choice since no auditable full hardware suite is available (to my knowledge at least.)

I'd be delighted to buy from Intel or AMD if they could eliminate the security concerns that I have.  I hope that ultimately the pressure from the market will outweigh the theoretical disadvantages of open-source in their market segments.  In this case I would probably value an audit from a trusted organization which is demonstrably interested in privacy, technically competent,  and sufficiently uncorruptible as much as open-source.  Intel's and AMD's marketing department does not qualify.

This is awesome news to me for a variety of reasons.  My interest is mostly associated with security, but some of them simply technical in terms of architecture.

  http://www.techspot.com/news/57199-russia-plans-to-ditch-us-processors-inside-government-pcs-in-favor-of-local-chips.html

I'll certainly try to be one of the first customers and an active tester of secure OS's that might run under the architecture.  Russia is not saying specifically that they don't trust American made chips to be free of back-doors.  Nor have I heard any official statements that the effort is to be sufficiently open-source.  It could be that Russia simply wants their own back-doors.  Even in this case, as an American a Russian exploit is less threatening to me than an NSA one.

I hope that the Russians follow up with (supposedly) secure chipsets and other necessary developments.  Ideally we'll see a complete suite of hardware components that can be audited.  As a consumer I would pay at least double for a device which I could realistically and comprehensively verified to be secure, and probably more.

It is interesting to me that the Chinese have not made more of an issue of this.  A logical hypothesis is that they are at least as interested in and proficient at implementing backdoors as the Americans are.

How the fuck would you know where the support was supposed to go much less where it actually went?  Heard it on TeeVee?  Anyway neither Saudi Arabia nor Qatar would do a thing without at least asking for our permission, and probably mostly outsource all the strategic decisions to us anyway with unusual exceptions.

It is fairly clear that Mosul was abandoned and fell without a shot mainly because that's what we instructed.  Only a true simpleton would believe that 30k well armed and Iraqi military ran in terror from 1k ISIS leaving a damp yellow streak (and all of those yummy Western supplied weapons.)  I wonder if it might be a cover story for how it came to be that ISIS is driving around in U.S. made humvees.

You clearly don't spend enough time in the U.S. Army war college studying Col. Ralph Peters.  Nobody should be surprised by this, and everyone should consider Rand Paul's assertions that ISIS is armed by the U.S.

http://thehill.com/policy/international/210168-us-has-been-arming-isis-in-syria-sen-paul-claims