Email providers Silent Circle and Lavabit are proposing a new email standard that would make it harder for governments to snoop. Strictly speaking, Darkmail, as the proposed standard is called, would keep individuals and governments from spying on email metadata. Traditional email can never be fully secured, as the standard requires some metadata to be unencrypted. The Darkmail Alliance, which right now consists only of Lavabit and Silent Circle, aims to get Darkmail off the ground, according to the Guardian:
The Darkmail Alliance aims to fix many of the problems affecting the old standard. "The existing email architecture is 40 years old, and it's what allows the world's surveillance community, hackers and other data mining companies, to get [users'] data," Janke told the Guardian.
Darkmail would be as compatible with the current email standard as possible. Unencrypted messages could be sent and received between a Darkmail user and, for instance, a Gmail user. When two Darkmail users are sending messages back and forth, however, the email is encrypted, then routed between the two accounts without passing through a central server.
Both Lavabit and Silent Circle shut down their services rather than in the face of government intrusion earlier this year.
Would you use Darkmail to keep governments out of your email?
The HealthCare.gov launch did not go so well. Some people paid the website a visit only to be greeted by a blank screen. Others found error messages or talked to misleading call center reps or had their personal information compromised. The whole thing is borked, and everybody knows it.
While we're on the subject - here's a video of UFC veteran David Loiseau being allowed to knock out his opponent from a fight this past weekend not once, not twice but three separate apparent times in just fifteen seconds by an overwhelmed referee. Loiseau last fought an lost in the UFC back in 2010 but has rattled off four straight wins since that time.
His most recent came last Friday against Mike Kent at the Extreme Cage Combat 18 card in Canada. A left hook from "The Crow" just seconds into the bout put Kent out and flat on his back for the first time.
Instead of rushing in to stop the contest, however, the referee watched on as Loiseau followed up with strikes on the ground. His head hitting the ground opened Kent's eyes back up.
A right punch to the head moments later appeared to knock Kent out for the second time, however. Unbelievably, the referee missed that as well and didn't step in until Loiseau's punches had woken up Kent and put him back to sleep for a third time a few seconds later.
Refereeing is an very difficult job and most will never have the combat understanding, vision and reaction time to do it well. Those that can't really should be trained more before fighters' lives are placed in their hands or should not do it at all.
In the Dos Santos and Sexton fights, we worried about refs, corners and doctors allowing game fighters to take damage for too long while not mounting their own effective offense. In Loiseau and Kent's bout, the decision to stop the fight should have been much easier because Kent was out cold. The referee clearly had difficulty recognizing when Kent was unconscious on two separate occasions, before finally picking up on it when it happened for a third time.
Congratulations to Loiseau, who simply followed the rules and kept fighting until the ref stepped in. We wish Kent a speedy and as close to full recovery as he can have.
Texting has become such a normal way to communicate that it's hard to imagine that we ever used our voices to tell our better halves, "Hey, I got the milk."
But when it comes to a committed relationship, researchers say it's better not to lean too heavily on the texts for the tough stuff. Stick to "I <3 U" rather than "I M sooo disappointed in you!!"
Texting terms of endearment really seems to help. Affirmations like that are associated not just with a more stable and satisfying relationship, but with mitigating hurts and frustrations.
But texting more isn't always better. Women who texted their partner a lot considered the relationship more stable, while men who received those texts or texted a lot themselves said they were less satisfied with the relationship.
"That surprised us," says Lori Schade, a marriage and family therapist at Brigham Young University, who led the study. Sending more texts may be a sign of a failing relationship. That might sound counterintuitive, she says, but it may be a way for men to back out of the relationship, or at least stay out of the line of fire. "Maybe it was a way for then to check out or not have to show up, by using their cellphone instead."
Schade and her colleagues surveyed 276 young adults from 2009 to 2011. All were in committed relationships; more than half were either engaged or married. Almost all texted their partner multiple times a day.
That didn't surprise Schade. She sees couples in therapy, and has gotten used to having one person whip out their phone to prove their partner's awfulness. "They'll come in and want to show me the hurtful messages."
A lot of time those nasty texts are sent to get the partner's attention, Schade thinks. But it can backfire. "Face to face you can raise your voice," she tells Shots. "The way to do that with texting is to be more aggressive in the language. They do it quickly without a lot of thought. But there may be unintended consequences."
Indeed, real life has a lot going for it when it comes to negotiating the intricacies of a long-term relationship. In texting, people "tend to keep responding," Schade says. "They have time to think about it and stew about it and then respond again. It's almost harder to disconnect."
And texts don't fade with time. It's easy to create an archive of slights and scroll through them, reviving the hurt.
So moving the discussion offline can be a good strategy, Schade says, especially when tackling tough issues. "Just slowing down is good," she says. "You may need ways to say, 'This is getting too heated for me. I need to talk with you later about this in person.' "
Women were more likely than men to use texting to try to manage the relationship, whether to apologize, work out differences or make decisions, the study found. But that approach was associated with poorer relationship quality, too. Schade says that's probably another example of work best left done face to face.
The results, which were published online Wednesday in the Journal of Couple and Relationship Therapy, are exploratory. They don't prove that the texting behavior caused relationship issues, but give a first glimpse. One other interesting finding: Couples almost never communicate with each other on Facebook.
Sending lots of love or lighthearted comments tended to buffer the negatives, the researchers found. That warm fuzzy glow can spread far beyond the tiny screen, too.
So for connubial bliss, go for an electronic update of an old saw: If you can't think of something nice to say, don't text it at all.
Watch the first trailer of Jason Reitman’s ‘Labor Day,’ a drama starring Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin as characters who find themselves in an intriguing and seemingly improbable love relationship. ‘Labor Day’ was written and directed by Jason Reitman (‘Thank You for Smoking,’ Up in the Air’). It is a screen adaptation of the critically acclaimed literary novel of the same title by Joyce Maynard, who is also the author of the memoir, ‘At Home in the World,’ which revealed her relationship with the late J.D. Salinger. As with the novel, the movie begins in the year 1987 on Labor Day weekend. Notably deglamorized, the Oscar-winning actress Kate Winslet portrays Adele Wheeler, a depressed and reclusive divorced single mother of a 13-year-old son, Henry, who is portrayed by Gattlin Griffith. Per chance while out on a rare shopping trip, Adele and Henry meet up with a stranger, Frank Chanbers, who is portrayed by Josh Brolin. With more than a bit of hesitation, she gives the man, who is ragged looking and bleeding from his forehead, a ride home. After she has taken him in to stay in the house, he reveals that he is both a convicted murderer and a [...]Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/RightCelebrity/~3/MVvK2coZrAQ/ Related Topics: BBMApple.com
Bond v. United States is testing whether Congress can use treaty laws to punish domestic criminal behavior.
Photo by NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images
It’s the Supreme Court case that sounds like a Lifetime movie: When Carol Bond found out that her husband was having an affair with her best friend, Myrlinda Haynes—and that Haynes was pregnant—Bond, a microbiologist who lived in the Philadelphia suburbs, put toxic chemicals on Haynes’ mailbox and her car. She got caught—and was indicted under a federal statute that makes it illegal to use toxic chemicals to harm other people. Congress had passed that statute to implement the U.S. government’s obligations under the Chemical Weapons Convention, the same treaty that Syria was recently forced to sign.
Next Tuesday, Bond’s lawyers will try to persuade the Supreme Court that Congress can’t use the chemical weapons treaty as an excuse for punishing run-of-the-mill criminal behavior. This superficially appealing argument is beloved by libertarians, who have dashed to Bond’s aid, but it depends on a bizarre and tendentious reading of the Constitution that honors neither the founders’ intentions nor the practicalities of governance.
The Constitution gives Congress limited (“enumerated”) powers, which are thought mostly to exclude the ordinary stuff of criminal law like the dispute Bond was involved in. Normally, we think that if we need a law that prohibits people from attacking each other with toxic chemicals, the states, not the national government, should pass it.
And it’s true that the law that nailed Bond derives its authority circuitously. Congress enjoys the power under the Constitution’s catchall Necessary and Proper Clause to enact laws that are needed to advance other powers in the Constitution. One of those other powers is the president’s power to enter treaties with the consent of two-thirds of the Senate. Thus, the government argues, the federal law that criminalizes the harmful use of chemical weapons, privately as well as by governments and terrorists, was necessary and proper to implement the Chemical Weapons Convention.
Bond’s argument is that the president and the Senate cannot, by entering a treaty, give Congress a power that it otherwise does not have. Such a reading of the Constitution crowds out the states’ police powers and gives too much sway to Congress.
This case is a strange vehicle for examining this constitutional question. True, the feds took over the case from state authorities, but that was because Constable Dogberry of the local police thought that the toxic chemical Bond smeared on Haynes’ car was cocaine and advised her to get it washed, not because Pennsylvania law allows people to assault each other with toxic chemicals. The federal law enabled the federal government to step in—the U.S. Postal Service did surveillance and caught Bond—and to punish Bond for acts that were illegal under Pennsylvania law as well.
But libertarian critics of national government power, like the Cato Institute, which submitted an amicus brief, worry that if Bond loses this case, the United States could enter a treaty with Suriname or Lesotho to abolish the death penalty or home schooling. Then Congress could pass an implementing statute that shreds state laws on the death penalty and home schooling, which (according to the libertarians) Congress is otherwise not allowed to do.
You might wonder why Suriname or Lesotho, or the United States, would enter such a treaty. And it is most doubtful that they would. Bond v. United States has become an ideological dispute, based, as such disputes so often are, on the merely theoretical possibility that the government will abuse its powers.
Cato’s brief is rooted in a literal-minded reading of the text of the Constitution. The Treaty Clause says that the president has the power to make treaties with the consent of the Senate. The necessary and proper clause says that Congress has the power to pass laws that are necessary and proper to the exercise of other powers in the Constitution. Cato concludes that therefore Congress has the power to pass laws that are necessary and proper to the making of treaties. But it doesn’t have the power to pass laws that are necessary and proper to the implementing of the treaties, because there is no separately enumerated constitutional power for implementing. And so, according to Cato, Congress can pass laws to implement treaties only if it can rely on a source of power rooted elsewhere in the Constitution. It has no such power to criminalize the domestic use of chemicals as weapons.
One can respond to this argument by observing that Congress can rely on its old broadly interpreted friend, the power to regulate interstate commerce. But libertarians object to the broad interpretation of Congress’ powers here as well. And in the Bond case, the government didn’t make this argument in the lower courts. One can also respond by arguing that “make” has a broader meaning than Cato claims, as another amicus brief gamely does.
If you've been having trouble upgrading from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1, and are encountering Blue Screens marked 0xc1900101 - 0x40017 or 0xC1900101-0x20017, 0xC1900101-0x40019 or 0xc1900101 - 0x30018, there may be a fix for your problems. But if none of the remedies offered here get you upgraded, please head to the Microsoft Answers forum and post details about your configuration. Because after two weeks of trying, Microsoft still hasn't figured out what's causing the problem, and your input may help.
On Oct. 18 I wrote about the show-stopper bug for many people upgrading from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1. Martin Dixon posted the original description on the Microsoft Answers forum, shortly after the Windows 8.1 upgrade rolled out:
I have downloaded the Windows 8.1 update from the store but cannot get it to install. Each time I try, I get to the point where it is "getting my devices ready", then the PC restarts to a blue screen with error message. It then tries to recover the installation, fails, then restores Windows 8. When the system boots up after this, I get a message saying:
"Couldn't update to Windows 8.1
Sorry, we couldn't complete the update to Windows 8.1. We've restored your previous version of Windows to this PC.
0xC1900101 - 0x40017"
There is no explanation as to why the update couldn't be completed. Any ideas how to resolve this?
To date, almost 400 posts on that thread -- plus hundreds more on severaladditional, similarthreads -- have led to a small handful of customer-discovered solutions, but no definitive workaround that everyone can apply.
Here are the approaches that seem to work for some people:
If you have SteelSeries peripherals, running the SteelSeries Engine driver, uninstall it before re-trying the upgrade.
If you have an Asus N53 dual-band PCI-e wireless adapter, pull it. If necessary, find another way to download the upgrade.
Pink Note 3 arriving from Nov. 1 exclusively at Phones 4u
UK retailer Phones 4u has announced that it'll soon be offering the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 in its "blush pink" color option. The pink Note 3, which we saw at IFA 2013 in Berlin a couple of months back, swaps out the handset's monochrome front and back panels in favor of a more colorful tone. It's even bundled with a stylish pink S Pen, too.
To sweeten the deal, Phones 4u will throw in a free wireless speaker, valued at £120, to those buying the Note 3 in any color. Phones 4u will begin carrying the pink Galaxy Note 3 from Nov. 1 from all of its brick-and-mortar stores. On-contract prices start at £47 per month for a free Note 3.
For a closer look at the "blush pink" Galaxy Note, check out our photo gallery from IFA 2013.
A lot's changed in the world of audio over the last 170 years. Gone are the days of cranking a handle to make noise, replaced instead by silicon and circuity to pump out digital tunes. This beautiful illustration walks you through how and when those changes happened.
