Big Brother is watching.....and waiting for you to invite him into your home.

So here is your horrifying thought for today: Your own government could very quickly have a video and audio surveillance device put in your house. But that isn't the scariest part. You ready for it? YOU will be the one PAYING to put it there, by your own choice.

Don't believe me? Let's consider some things that have been happening recently:

1. The NSA's massive Utah Data mining center - a 1 million square foot facility, capable of storing yottabytes of data, gleaned from every type of communication device we use. Also consider the fact that every piece of communication passes through a wire at some point, even your cell phone, so literally EVERYTHING is accessible at some junction point. Even if you encrypt your transmission with the highest level of encryption available today, that doesn't matter in the long run. If they can't crack it now, they will store it and crack it when they have the ability to in the near future.

2. PRISM - Since 2007 (but more realistically since the Patriot act was first passed in 2001), the NSA has been using your own internet providers, popular sites, and makers of the worlds most used devices to provide direct access of all their products and services to the government. Since the news broke recently, all the companies on the list of PRISM partners have come out stating, in some form or another, that they are not giving direct or backdoor access to the government, and that they are only responding to court orders as required by law. I call bullshit, for a couple basic reasons:
A. We've already been lied to, and then when they were caught in the lie, they tried to assure us that it wasn't as bad as we are making it out to be, specifically with federal wiretapping. We were all told that it was ONLY calls originating from foreign countries or placed to foreign countries, and that the surveillance was extremely limited in nature. Fast forward to this week, and we find out that was complete bullshit, and that they have been monitoring ALL calls, including ones that are ENTIRELY domestic, for years. Verizon has been handing over data for years already: "While the order itself does not include either the contents of messages or the personal information of the subscriber of any particular cell number, its collection would allow the NSA to build easily a comprehensive picture of who any individual contacted, how and when, and possibly from where, retrospectively." This program has been going on since as far back as October of 2001, in some form or another.
B. All the companies on the PRISM list don't want a mass exodus from their services. Why wouldn't they lie, to retain users? And furthermore, even if they aren't just lying to retain users, it doesn't matter, as they are under a federal gag order from FISA anyway, so even if the wanted to talk about it, the can't!

3. The Ace in the Hole: The Xbox One - A few things on this to get started; To operate, the device must call home once every 24 hours (NOTE: this is to be able to play games. MS has stated that you will not need to connect to watch live TV or DVD's. Who cares, I can already do that without an Xbox). The Kinect MUST be connected for the system to operate. Unless you unplug the entire thing, the Xbox One is always on in a low power state.



So let's put all this nifty information together into one cohesive thought: The NSA is building a massive data retention center using, at least in part, the information it is gathering from it's partners listed in the PRISM project. The very first company to sign on to the PRISM project was Microsoft. The NSA data center will be completed in October, roughly around the same time that the new Xbox One will be hitting stores. Do you honestly believe that if they are already tapping your phone, email, web searches, Facebook, and all your other internet communications, that the NSA won't want to get their greedy little claws where they couldn't go before? Inside your house, directly into your living room? Into the Xbox One and Kinect, that can record a live video and audio stream? Talk about fleshing out the whole picture....


And the best part is, you are going to pay THEM for the privilege.

The State of Linux (Hint: Still Not Good)

I try to avoid talking tech on here. I get most of that out of my system during my day job. Yet, my recent foray into running Linux again has me needing to vent. Roughly a year ago, I switched over to Windows 7 for the sake of "it just works". Now, a strong desire to continue on some of my hobby projects, as well as web and server-side scripting development has led me to reinstalling Linux. I tried the "linux in a vm" for a bit. Sadly, the performance just kinda sucked. A second linux partition is a lot cheaper than a kvm switch and new computer.

Who the hell took over development in the Linux world? When I left Gnome, KDE and friends were getting more usable and awesome by the day. Now, it's like someone took a look at the user interface hall of shame, noted all the worst ideas, and puked them out onto a desktop. One would think with all the backing and developer support, the basic menu items would all be tested and work relatively well. Nope, I see random apps with text overflowing (leaving critical portions unaccessible in non-resizable windows), random installation failures when installing "gold" packages, and what appears to be a 5th rewrite of device management where I _STILL_ can't easily browse detected hardware. Somehow, developers have managed to wade 10 years in the same shallow waters while Microsoft and Apple got their shit together and made some decent stuff.

Myopic developers and "UI designers" continue to piss all over the basic idioms "lusers" know, and ignore power users that want things simple. I'd be better with /etc being a mass of binary blobs with FUNCTIONING UIs, as opposed to randomly generated shell fragments with half-assed GUIs attempting to gather the pieces, happily trouncing changes I'd like to make in a sea of "GENERATED FILE DO NOT EDIT" comments. Then, we have the fun of a default theme that leaves me simultaneously straining my eyes to read anything at all and finding random windows with obnoxious huge text overflowing their overly tight boundaries.

Given the number of developers being paid to develop this shit, it's shocking the complete advancement from high school and college students doing all the real work in the mid to late 90s. After being paid to do linux kernel development work for the day job, I know there's some advancement going on under the hood. I also know that when writing a driver, 95% of your time is spent tracking random "fixes" in a source control system that makes IRS tax forms look user friendly.

So far, Linux Mint is proving at least moderately usable compared to the travesty that is Ubuntu and Unity. I'm looking for an alternative to Gnome3 currently - waiting for KDE and XFCE to install. If neither of those don't work out - I've got some old backups of a fvwm95 configuration and a Debian stable download going.

Linux needs FUNCTION, not wiggly windows with drop shadows and a full OpenGL rendered spinning cube for a mouse cursor. I use my computer for work, not masturbating to graphics algorithms.

-- Fate