Call Encryp­tion App Costs More Than Your iPhone. If you really had rea­son to encrypt your phone calls — or were on the pay­roll of the MI6 –  per­haps a $1,600 yearly sub­scrip­tion to a cell phone call encryp­tion app ser­vice would make sense.

[…]

While the app is free to down­load, both the caller and the receiver have to join the ser­vice that costs sev­eral times more than their phones. [Cult of Mac]

Alter­nately, you could buy Ground­wire for $9.99, and then spend another $24.99 on “ZRTP For Out­go­ing Calls” as an in-app pur­chase if you want to make out­go­ing encrypted calls. Sup­port for incom­ing calls is included in the basic app, and no yearly sub­scrip­tion is required. The price dif­fer­ence is so enor­mous that I can’t imag­ine any legit­i­mate rea­son why any­one would pay for the over­priced option. I there­fore must con­clude that it really is intended only for gov­ern­ment employees.

China rul­ing party ‘exceeds 80m’. China’s gov­ern­ing Com­mu­nist Party, the world’s largest polit­i­cal party, says its mem­ber­ship has now passed 80 mil­lion. [BBC News]

Accord­ing to Wikipedia, the Evil Empire’s rul­ing Boot On Your Neck Party had 127 mil­lion mem­bers split between its “Demo­c­rat” and “Repub­li­can” fronts as of 2004. While that num­ber is seven years old, I cer­tainly haven’t seen any­thing to sug­gest that it’s any smaller today.

While try­ing to get my cable modem speed upgraded, the cable com­pany sales­man tried to pitch me their home phone ser­vice for $30/month. When I pointed out that I’m cur­rently pay­ing $5/month for Skype, he said that their home phone ser­vice wasn’t VoIP, so it would work when the Inter­net con­nec­tion was out. In other words, I should pay six times as much for their ser­vice because the other ser­vice they’re already pro­vid­ing is so unre­li­able. I guess cable ser­vice sales­man is one job that requires a good sense of humor.

Hack­ers ‘steal entire 2011 cen­sus’ [The Tele­graph]

Most of the arti­cle is a slightly con­fused report on whether or not LulzSec actu­ally claimed to have got­ten the UK cen­sus data­base. How­ever, I think the real story is this bit here:

“The 2011 Cen­sus places the high­est pri­or­ity on main­tain­ing the secu­rity of per­sonal data. At this stage we have no evi­dence to sug­gest that any such com­pro­mise has occurred.”

The US defence con­trac­tor Lock­heed Mar­tin, which col­lected the 2011 cen­sus data, was also prepar­ing a state­ment. The com­pul­sory national sur­vey was car­ried out in march and gath­ered data includ­ing full names, dates of birth and addresses for every­one in the UK.

So the oh-so-secure per­sonal data for every­one in the UK was gath­ered by a US defense con­trac­tor? Not just an appendage of the Evil Empire, but a tightly inte­grated part of the Impe­r­ial Mil­i­tary? In what uni­verse is that secure? There’s the evi­dence of your com­pro­mise right there!

Skype fires sev­eral man­agers after Microsoft deal clears. Although Microsoft has made Skype a sep­a­rate divi­sion within its orga­ni­za­tion and has promised con­tin­ued sup­port for its exist­ing struc­ture, the cuts are unlikely to assuage fears that Microsoft may reshape Skype in a way that hurts non-Windows plat­forms or Skype itself. [Elec­tro­n­ista]

They cer­tainly aren’t assuag­ing my fears any. I jet­ti­soned my over­priced PSTN ser­vice in favor of Skype six years ago and have gen­er­ally been happy with it, but even before the Microsoft pur­chase their sup­port for OS X was indif­fer­ent and for iOS down­right bad. I wouldn’t be ter­ri­bly sur­prised to see Skype become Windows-only in the future. Not only that, Microsoft has a his­tory of buy­ing per­fectly good prod­ucts and wreck­ing them.

Appar­ently it’s big news on tech web­sites that the Pres­i­dent is going to start using Twit­ter. My take on it is, “Why did it take him so long?” With its 140 char­ac­ter limit, Twit­ter is the per­fect sound-bite deliv­ery sys­tem. It gives politi­cians a way to deliver mean­ing­less plat­i­tudes about hope and change directly to the suck­ers vot­ers with­out hav­ing to deal with the inef­fi­cien­cies of going through main­stream media stenog­ra­phers reporters.

Seen in an application’s pref­er­ences dialog.

A New West­ern Theoc­racy? There seems to be lit­tle place for facts in west­ern democ­ra­cies these days. Sam­ple some news from a major main­stream news source (in the for­mat of your choice), and you’ll doubt­less hear of some new law, or a law­maker mak­ing a ‘state­ment’ of a posi­tion that needs to be taken. If you poke a bit deeper, you’ll tend to find that there are usu­ally few facts sup­port­ing the posi­tion or law – in many cases the facts flat-out oppose the law.

[…]

Facts can be chal­lenged, their basis ques­tions, the val­ues dis­puted. There’s no chal­leng­ing beliefs, because they are a belief, and their only basis is that some­one feels that way. Any fantasy-land belief can be turned into a real-world law, through the appli­ca­tion of spin-doctors and lies. When the beliefs lack of real­is­tic basis shows up in its con­se­quences, do we get some humil­ity, a ‘hey I was wrong, let’s fix this’? No. It’s more beliefs. [Falkvinge on Infopol­icy]

The ridicu­lous light­bulb ban I men­tioned just a few days ago is an excel­lent exam­ple of this.

Comic for June 14, 2011.

[Dil­bert Daily Strip]

This reminds me of some meet­ings I’ve had.

Postrel: Need a Light Bulb? Uncle Sam Chooses. in Cal­i­for­nia, where I live, this plen­i­tude no longer includes what most shop­pers want: an inex­pen­sive, plain-vanilla 100-watt incan­des­cent bulb. Sell­ing them is now ille­gal here. The rest of the coun­try has until the end of the year to stock up before a fed­eral ban kicks in. (I have a stash in stor­age.) Over the next two years, most lower-wattage incan­des­cents will also disappear.

[…]

The bulb ban makes sense only one of two ways: either as an expres­sion of cul­tural sanc­ti­mony, with a lit­tle technophilia thrown in for added glam­our, or as a round­about way to trans­fer wealth from the gen­eral pub­lic to the few busi­nesses with the know-how to pro­duce the light bulbs con­sumers don’t really want to buy.

Or, of course, as both. [Bloomberg]

Not con­tent with ban­ning cap­i­tal­ism, agri­cul­ture, and chem­istry (aka “the War on Drugs”), the Evil Empire is now ban­ning light bulbs. Of course, this is the same coun­try that pre­vi­ously banned toilets–there’s really noth­ing so minor or silly that the gov­ern­ment won’t threaten to mur­der peo­ple over it.