FBI’s “Suicide Letter” to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Dangers of Unchecked Surveillance
The entire letter could have been taken from a page of GCHQ’s Joint Threat Research and Intelligence Group (JTRIG)—though perhaps as an email or series of tweets. The British spying agency GCHQ is one of the NSA’s closest partners. The mission of JTRIG, a unit within GCHQ, is to “destroy, deny, degrade [and] disrupt enemies by discrediting them.” And there’s little reason to believe the NSA and FBI aren’t using such tactics. The implications of these types of strategies in the digital age are chilling. Imagine Facebook chats, porn viewing history, emails, and more made public to discredit a leader who threatens the status quo, or used to blackmail a reluctant target into becoming an FBI informant. These are not far-fetched ideas. They are the reality of what happens when the surveillance state is allowed to grow out of control, and the full King letter, as well as current intelligence community practices illustrate that reality richly.
(tags: fbi surveillance mlk history blackmail snooping gchq nsa)
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A nice new concurrency primitive from Gil Tene:
Have you ever had a need for logging or analyzing data that is actively being updated? Have you ever wanted to do that without stalling the writers (recorders) in any way? If so, then WriterReaderPhaser is for you. I’m not talking about logging messages or text lines here. I’m talking about data. Data larger than one word of memory. Data that holds actual interesting state. Data that keeps being updated, but needs to be viewed in a stable and coherent way for analysis or logging. Data like frame buffers. Data like histograms. Data like usage counts. Data that changes.
see also Left-Right: http://concurrencyfreaks.blogspot.ie/2013/12/left-right-concurrency-control.html(tags: phasers data-structures concurrency primitives algorithms performance wait-free)
3D Secure and Verified By Visa to be canned
Yay.
Mastercard and Visa are removing the need for users to enter their passwords for identity confirmation as part of a revamp of the existing (oft-criticised) 3-D Secure scheme. The arrival of 3D Secure 2.0 next year will see the credit card giants moving away from the existing system of secondary static passwords to authorise online purchases, as applied by Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode, towards a next-gen system based on more secure biometric and token-based prompts.
(via Gordon)(tags: via:gsyme verified-by-visa 3d-secure mastercard visa credit-cards authentication authorization win passwords)
Aeron: Do we really need another messaging system? – High Scalability
excellent writeup on Aeron
(tags: aeron messing libraries java martin-thompson performance mechanical-sympathy queueing ipc tcp)