Whistleblower Explains How the NSA Wiretapped Ma Bell (And All Of Us)

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Courtesy of Techdirt:

Back in January, the story came out that the EFF was suing AT&T, claiming that the company gave illegal access to the NSA of its network. Of course, plenty of people already believed that the NSA had pretty good access to the internet from a variety of places -- so the interesting thing here was both the specifics of how they did so, and the question of whether or not AT&T was violating customer rights in giving this free access. Earlier this week, the Justice Department tried to block evidence from being filed in the case -- even under seal. However, it seems like some of that information is coming out anyway, in large part thanks to a whistleblower who is explaining exactly how AT&T opened up its systems for the NSA to have pretty much unfettered access to the type of stuff you're normally supposed to get warrants to view -- and then in a much more limited manner. It's interesting to note, by the way, that the data mining technology that AT&T hooked up for the NSA came from Narus, the very same company that just sold VoIP blocking technology to the Chinese. Either way, this lawsuit is shaping up to be quite interesting, and it's likely that a lot more of this kind of information will be coming out over the course of the case -- even as the government tries to keep it quiet.

Why was Colbert press corps video removed from YouTube?

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Truthiness to Power

This is courtesy of BoingBoing:
Following Cory's posts about Stephen Colbert's amazing performance Saturday at a White House dinner, many BoingBoing readers wrote in to ask:

"YouTube has taken down the videos [of Colbert's performance], citing copyright infringement. Since those videos were taken from C-SPAN, which I thought was owned by the public, who owns the copyright and could have asked for the videos to be taken down?"

(thanks, Parker, and many others). YouTube customarily removes copyrighted content at the request of rightsholders, but some troubled readers wrote in asking whether censorship or alien conspiracy theories were to blame in this case. I asked YouTube spokesperson Julie Supan, and she replied:

The Colbert videos were removed at the request of CSPAN, the copyright owner. Many of our users have inquired about whether or not the speech was considered 'public domain' and therefore exempt from copyright protection. Unfortunately, the video footage uploaded was broadcasted and owned by CSPAN.

I might recommend contacting CSPAN to better understand the situation from their perspective.


Geeks + Too Much Time == ?

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This is what happens when you make computers powerful and ubiquitous enough that anyone can do video capture, editing and distribution. The video is long, but try to sit all the way through it. The second half, where clips of your favorite Star Wars and Lord of the Rings characters are edited to make them appear as if they are dancing to a campy disco song is probably not something you'll see repeated. What Star Lords here.

Seagate to launch new 750 gigabyte harddrive

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By MAY WONG SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) - Seagate Technology LLC is beefing up the capacity of its hard disk drives to a whopping 750 gigabytes, offering consumers of digital media more storage for their computers than ever before.

The drive Seagate will introduce Wednesday, the Barracuda 7200.10, is the first computer desktop disk drive to hit the 750-gigabyte mark and represents a 50 percent increase from the previous industry maximum of 500 gigabytes.

Scotts Valley-based Seagate, the world's largest disk-drive maker, is first releasing the product as an internal drive for PC makers. Next week, it plans to introduce external hard drives - add-ons that consumers can use to supplement their existing computer setups - with a suggested retail price of $559.


Read entire article.