Report on NSA released

President Obama’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies tasked to review NSA procedures has released its report and I must say that I was pleasantly surprised. Given that the committee was stacked with intelligence services insiders, I had expected it to offer merely superficial changes but that was not the case. While it did not go as far as I would have liked, it was not a rubber stamp for existing programs either. This may be because there has been so much publicly expressed skepticism about this committee that it made it hard for them to appear to confirm those suspicions. [Read more…]

UNICEF is a major terrorist threat?

Another day, another blockbuster Snowden-based revelation.

From previous revelations, we knew that the NSA and Britain’s GCHQ have been vacuuming up and storing people’s information pretty indiscriminately. But today brings new revelations from the Edward Snowden documents reveal the stunning extent of targeted spying on people and organizations., including such organizations as the well-known United Nations children’s charity. [Read more…]

Trial run with non-nested comments

In the recent post on how best to discourage monomaniacs, without banning them, from derailing discussions by posting about their pet peeves that have barely any connection with the original topic, it was suggested that one improvement might be to eliminate nested comments that group sidebar conversations together, so that when one scrolls down, comments do not appear in chronological order. Up to now, this blog has had five levels of nesting.. [Read more…]

Why I love librarians

One group of people whose struggle against the intrusions of the government into our privacy should be recognized a lot more than they are currently are, are our librarians. For centuries, libraries have been the gateway to the world of knowledge for people and since librarians are the ones who assist us and are aware of our reading habits, it should not be surprising that governments have targeted them when they want to get information about what we are seeking knowledge about. [Read more…]

The weirdest laws about sex in the US

America has a well-deserved reputation for prudishness. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the various laws around the nation that concern sex, though many of them are relics that no one has got around to expunging and are usually not enforced. But their existence has led to a lot of wags making up laws that are ridiculous but seem plausible, given the way that people seem to get unhinged when it comes to sex. [Read more…]

The most influential tech products of the past two decades

Walt Mossberg has written the personal technology column at the Wall Street Journal for 22 years. In his final column, he lists the top 12 new items that he feels changed the industry. It is interesting to see that it was not that long ago that the things that are all around us and seem to have been around forever were invented, and how quickly those that were similarly ubiquitous before but did not last (Netscape, Palm Pilot) disappeared from our memories.

Should there be a statute of limitations on revealing film endings?

I enjoy watching and talking about films but have learned never to discuss them with one person because when you mention one, she will say something like “You mean the one where X happens at the end?”, completely spoiling the film. As readers may notice, when writing about films, I try to give notice as to whether there will be a spoiler or not, because part of the enjoyment of a film is not knowing how it will end. [Read more…]