[Take note: this is The Guardian, not some fringe left- or right-wing source. -egg]

Let’s repeat that last part: “no digital communication is secure”, by which he means not that any communication is susceptible to government interception as it happens (although that is true), but far beyond that: all digital communications – meaning telephone calls, emails, online chats and the like – are automatically recorded and stored and accessible to the government after the fact. To describe that is to define what a ubiquitous, limitless Surveillance State is.

There have been some previous indications that this is true. Former AT&T engineer Mark Klein revealed that AT&T and other telecoms had built a special network that allowed the National Security Agency full and unfettered access to data about the telephone calls and the content of email communications for all of their customers. Specifically, Klein explained “that the NSA set up a system that vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T” and that “contrary to the government’s depiction of its surveillance program as aimed at overseas terrorists . . . much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely domestic.” But his amazing revelations were mostly ignored and, when Congress retroactively immunized the nation’s telecom giants for their participation in the illegal Bush spying programs, Klein’s claims (by design) were prevented from being adjudicated in court.

That every single telephone call is recorded and stored would also explain this extraordinary revelation by the Washington Post in 2010:

Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications.

It would also help explain the revelations of former NSA official William Binney, who resigned from the agency in protest over its systemic spying on the domestic communications of US citizens, that the US government has “assembled on the order of 20 trillion transactions about US citizens with other US citizens” (which counts only communications transactions and not financial and other transactions), and that “the data that’s being assembled is about everybody. And from that data, then they can target anyone they want.”

via Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government? | Glenn Greenwald | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

For confirmation we need only look at the Google Play store, where the Facebook Home app, which can be installed on select Android phones, has now fallen to the No. 338 ranking in the category of free apps. That’s 200 spots lower than it ranked just two weeks ago.

Even worse: More than half of Facebook Home’s 15,000 user reviews give the app just one star. A typical review:

Uninstalled after 1 min

Just takes a nice phone and ruins the interface. Waste of time.

The numbers represent a remarkable rejection of an initiative that Facebook pushed with a high-profile national advertising campaign and a dog-and-pony rollout at its Menlo Park headquarters. Smartphone users are announcing, loud and clear, that they do not want Facebook in charge of their interface with the mobile universe.

via The Facebook Home disaster – Salon.com.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO) have introduced a landmark technology bill called The Unlocking Technology Act of 2013 [PDF] that reforms the way our devices our regulated. It fixes a glaring hole in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), changing the rules so that you are allowed to remove restrictions and locks from your devices provided that you don’t violate other laws (as it stands, removing a lock, even to do something legal, like installing unapproved software on your iPhone or change carriers, is banned by the DMCA). The bill clarifies that security researchers don’t violate the law by publishing information about flaws in the devices we trust and depend upon, and makes it legal to break “lock-out codes” that stop mechanics from fixing cars.

This is a watershed moment in 21st century technology law, and it’s desperately needed. Every day that goes by sees us more dependent on devices that are increasingly designed to be as opaque as possible — devices made by companies whose business-model treats customers as adversaries who undermine profits when they turn to third parties for software, repairs and services. It is only the presence of the terrible rules in the DMCA that makes this business attractive — without these rules, technology locks would be quickly broken in the marketplace and competition — as well as transparency — would thrive. If you want to be sure that the devices that fill your rooms, your pockets — and increasingly, your body — are well-behaved and trustworthy, please support this bill.

via New law will fix the DMCA, make jailbreaking, unlocking and interoperability legal – your help needed! – Boing Boing.

Wondermark » Archive » #936; The Too Explicit Date.

…As Stoltz writes, Prenda is just the beginning. The US copyright system is an attractive nuisance, a moral hazard on steroids, and the entertainment industry’s own much-publicized efforts are the tip of the iceberg. Prenda’s masterminds weren’t all that clever — there are smarter con artists out there who’ve learned a lot from Prenda’s efforts, and they’re licking their chops and getting ready to prey on you and your neighbors. And as with Prenda, we’ll all foot the bill for their cons, thanks to Big Content’s depraved indifference to the fallout from its legal projects.

via Welcome to the century of the copyright troll: Prenda Law was just the beginning – Boing Boing.

Historical Figures for the 21st Century – Telegraph.

“There is an aesthetic crisis in writing, which is this: how do we write emotionally of scenes involving computers? How do we make concrete, or at least reconstructable in the minds of our readers, the terrible, true passions that cross telephony lines? Right now my field must tackle describing a world where falling in love, going to war and filling out tax forms looks the same; it looks like typing.”

The New Aesthetic — There is an aesthetic crisis in writing, which is….

[Sometimes I think people view skepticism as some sort of of sour small-mindedness. This is a good reminder that claims to psychic powers can cause a whole lot of harm. -egg]

It is Tuesday evening and I am on a luxury Mediterranean cruise ship called the Westerdam. I’m in the audience in the Vista lounge. A grouchy woman is sitting on a beige and golden throne on the stage. She’s complaining about builders and dispensing dietary advice. Her name is Sylvia Browne and for years I’ve wanted to interview her. She’s America’s most controversial psychic. She’s become famous for telling the parents of missing children what happened to their kids. Distraught parents go to her during her weekly appearance on The Montel Williams Show on CBS television. Montel is like Oprah. Sylvia tells them, “Your child is dead” or “Your child was sold into slavery in Japan.”

She really did once say that, in 1999. A six-year-old, Opal Jo Jennings, had a month earlier been snatched from her grandparents’ front yard in Texas while playing with her cousin. A man pulled up, grabbed her, threw her into his truck, hit her when she screamed and drove off. Her distraught grandmother went on Montel’s show and said, “This is too much for my family and me to handle. We want her back. I need to know where Opal is. I can’t stand this. I need your help, Sylvia. Where is Opal? Where is she?”

Sylvia said, “She’s not dead. But what bothers me – now I’ve never heard of this before – but she was taken and put into some kind of a slavery thing and taken into Japan. The place is Kukouro.”

“Kukouro?” Montel Williams asked, after a moment’s stunned silence.

via Jon Ronson on America’s most controversial psychic Sylvia Browne.

Our great, collective, ongoing realization that wiping out all the bacteria in our bodies may not actually be a great idea marches on. At Scientific American, Deborah Franklin writes about chronic halitosis — the sort of bad breath that doesn’t go away with a simple brushing — and scientists’ efforts to cure it by encouraging the growth of some mouth bacteria, instead of pouring Listerine on everything and letting God sort it out.

via Working with your microbiome to produce better-scented breath – Boing Boing.

[This is a really odd one. Mathematical statements that are almost but not quite true make me itch. -egg]

The Perrin numbers have a definition analogous to Fibonacci numbers. Define P0 = 3, P1 = 0, and P2 = 2. Then for n > 2, define

Pn+3 = Pn+1 + Pn+0.

The Concrete Tetrahedron says

It appears that n is prime “almost if and only if” Pn mod n = 0.

The “only if” condition is true without qualification: if n is prime, Pn mod n = 0. It’s the “if” part that’s almost true. When Pn mod n = 0, n is usually prime. Composite numbers that satisfy the Perrin condition Pn mod n = 0 are called Perrin pseudoprimes. The smallest Perrin pseudoprime is 271,441. The next is 904,631.

There are only 17 Perrin pseudoprimes less than a billion. By comparison, there are 50,847,534 primes less than a billion.

So if you used the Perrin condition to test whether numbers less than a billion are prime, you would correctly identify all 50,847,534 primes as primes. But out of the 949,152,466 composite numbers, you would falsely report 17 of these as prime.  In other words, you would be 100% accurate in identifying primes as primes, but only 99.999998% accurate in identifying composite numbers as composite.

via Almost if and only if | The Endeavour.