All that code is is a recipe for what to look at. In code there are things like “regular expressions” which are just fancy wildcard matches. Like if you had asdfh asdfj asdfk, use an expression to match all the occurrences of “sdf” because regular people use a and some other letter as a suffix, but only TERRORISTS ever say sdf. Now apply the concept to the entire web, and individuals looking for software, services, specific websites, specific individuals can be targeted by these “fingerprints” that use expressions to search for suspicious stuff that they have deemed suspicious. By writing up a bunch of these fingerprints for various stuff, they can collect a wide range of whatever they want.
In Cowicide’s example: are the 54, the “Igor sad” in Russian, and the 10-4 all wildcards? Or just the concerned statement about that damn raccoon again?
A bag of candy can be made into a barometric fuze. Notice how the somewhat limp bags go all inflated and taut with altitude. Same with those single-dose little pots of coffee cream; the foil on top bulges out as the outside pressure drops. Just add wires.
Happens to ice cream, too. Ice cream shipped to higher altitudes has to be under packed because it expands in the lower pressure. But it is sold by volume rather than by weight, so even though the consumer gets less product they are still being sold the amount listed on the label.
This is a total ass-pull, but… assume the “six degrees” business works as a heuristic, and that your targets are a random subset of the population, no more likely than anyone else to have overlapping social networks (untrue, since they are targeting based on certain interests, but a simplifying assumption). I.e. assume that the size of a social network graph increases exponentially in the number of degrees of separation until you hit everybody. Then if you allow 2 degrees of separation I’d guess you need something like the 4/6 power of the population, or a little under 4 million people for the current world population.
Note that there are at least 36 million Tor users worldwide, according to Wikipedia.
There are a lot of Tor users, but many of them know each other; it’s got much denser sets of subgraphs than a random sample of the population would. On the other hand, they’re also more likely to know Usual Suspects than a random sample would.
Like any self-respecting citizen, I adopted a VPN to disguise my own porn-viewing habits from my employer; I therefore object to being targeted by the NSA for this on two grounds:
The NSA is piggy-backing the porn sites that I’ve paid good money for, without contributing anything. If they want to watch porn they should pay for their own, or at least split the cost with me - do you think there’s a special section of the NSA I can apply to for a re-fund?;
Similarly, since I’ve been taking up my employer’s bandwidth with my own sexual predilections, the NSA is piggybacking directly onto this cost to my employer - as a semi-responsible employee, I object to this in the strongest possible terms and, if it weren’t for the fact that it would lead to my own termination, I would in all probability report it to the police…
Well, I’m a Canadian, a half-hearted member of what passes for a ‘democratic-socialist’ political party, well educated non-profit healthcare worker. Also my long-dead grandfather was in the IRA, so even though I hardly knew him I am already a rich target. Nevermind that I have not and will never be a threat to anyone that does not threaten my kids.
Of course, we here in the rest of the world were always considered legitimate targets. No hops needed, because we have no rights in the world of the US citizenry. So to hell with the NSA, CIA and the rest of the bullshit alphabet soup you guys all pay for every day.
I had an experience recently that upped my paranoia level considerable. My wife and I took a vacation to Costa Rica in May. I brought my Samsung Galaxy 4 phone along for the sole purpose of making a call to the cab company on our return to Chicago. As such I shut the phone off as soon as we boarded our plane in Chicago. That is the way things stayed for 4 days. We were in the middle of the cloud forest in central Costa Rica when, around 10pm, the phone turned itself on. I immediately tried to turn it off and discovered that I couldn’t. Powering it off simply rebooted it and brought it back on line. I tried 5 or 6 times before giving up and going back to sleep (for those who don’t have one, the Galaxy 4 has a sealed case so removing the battery is not an option). The next morning, when I woke up, the phone was still on and I again tried to turn it off. This time it turned off as it would normally.
A one other thing that also increased my paranoia. On the way down, both my wife and I got pre-screened boarding passes, meaning we didn’t have to take off our shoes or remove our laptops. On the way back, only my wife got that type of pass.
I have since looked up the phone issue on various web sites and found that I am not the only one this has happened to. But nobody has gotten an answer from either Samsung or any carrier as to why this happened.
If anybody has any insight on this, I would be glad to hear it.
Samsung is rumoured (friend said, I don’t have a better source on-hand now) to use poor material for the circuitboards, that is not humidity-friendly. It is possible that the absorbed humidity caused a leak, a partially conductive path, somewhere in the power-on logic. So you power the thing off, the CPU goes to sleep and lots of things go high-impedance. A small leak that was kept in check by low-impedance wiring around it suddenly gains significance. The moment the CPU or other related logics goes to its periodic wakeups to check if the power button was pressed, the leak simulates pressed button and the phone decides to wake up.
Was there period of much higher humidity before the phone malbehavior? Also consider the time the water needs to migrate through the board, which adds delays to the weather change response.
[quote=“bzishi, post:47, topic:36256, full:true”]Agreed. If you have been reading this site and haven’t done a search for at least Tor then you are a fool.[/quote]Well, they do publish some of my favorite science fiction books.
