Ken's Weblog

People should not fear their governments; governments should fear their people.

Month: July 2013

  • Technical Recruiter Reply

    Dear Recruiter

    Hello, and thank you for sending me your job posting for a JAVA DEVELOPER in GODFORSAKEN GULCH, IA . I regret to inform you that this does not meet my needs for the following reasons:

    [Coyote Tracks]

    A “technical recruiter” is a type of spammer or telemarketer who specializes in annoying people in the computer field. I’m not sure why they’re called that, as it’s apparently a requirement of the job that they have no technical knowledge whatsoever. I frequently get the sort of idiotic emails and voice mails that the post makes fun of.

  • Evil Empires are not democratic

    Illegitimate. …a government that’s ridden with enormous secret agencies operating under secret law interpreted by secret courts is not, cannot be, and will never be, a democracy or a republic or whatever form you’ve been taught all these years to salute?

    This government is a foreign thing. And all those people you think you’re electing merely dance at the end of its strings. And it will never be “reformed” or “held accountable” because by its very nature it is totalitarian. It exists to rule you, period. And as long as your money and your belief feeds it, rule you it will. [Living Freedom]

  • Skype proves me right on security

    NSA taps Skype chats, newly published Snowden leaks confirm.

    Skype audio and video chats, widely regarded as resistant to interception thanks to encryption, can be wiretapped by American intelligence agencies, according to a new report in The Guardian. The report appears to contradict claims by Microsoft that they have not provided the contents of Skype communications to the government.

    In a story published Thursday, based on documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, The Guardian offers some detail about extensive cooperation between the FBI, the National Security Agency, and Microsoft to enable government access to user communications via the intelligence tool known as PRISM. That cooperation included, according to the leaked NSA documents, enabling access to Outlook.com e-mails and chats, the SkyDrive cloud storage service, and Skype audio and video calls.

    The Guardian hasn’t published the documents on which this story is based, but has instead quoted from them.

    [Ars Technica]

    This is completely unsurprising. I’ve been warning about Skype’s insecurity since 2005.

  • What government is all about

    I’ve come across a couple of good articles which clearly point out the reality of what politics are really all about–a reality which statists desperately try to hide from.

    The penalty is always death [nostate.com]

    The Gun in the Room [Freedomain: The Logic of Personal and Political Freedom]