Gryzemuis on 12/1/2021 at 17:00

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I'll give you an example.

Somewhere around 2000, a colleague/friend/boss of me told me he believed that the NSA was eavesdropping on *all* Internet-traffic in the US. That would have been a huge endeavor. How do you sniff that many packets? How do you install that much sniffing-equipment? How do you transport all the result back to your headquarters?

His indication was this: all (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelength-division_multiplexing#Dense_WDM) DWDM companies are in/around Washington DC. DWDM allows you to transport multiple signals in parallel through one pair of fiber optical cables. The easiest way to think of this is: you send multiple signals, but each one in a different color light. At the end you attach a prism, and split the signals into multiple cables. Simple idea, very effective. You can run 20, 40, or nowadays 160 signals in parallel. DWDM became deployed in the Internet in the late nineties.

The guy said: DWDM technology was available to the NSA before the first commercial deployments by commercial vendors. He thought the NSA was using it to transport all traffic on the Internet via other wavelengths back to Washington, where they could filter and analyze traffic at leisure. That's why those DWDM companies were in DC, because the NSA developed it first, and they are in the Washington/DC/Virginia area. They commercialized it later.

I don't know if that was true. At the time I thought the guy was a little paranoid. But he's one of the smartest people I know. I'm talking technical smart. He's done some unbelievable social/political/office stuff. He has a PhD, he was one of the most influential engineers in Internet routing protocols in the nineties, he's co-authored 35 RFCs, he started his own startup (software is now in Nexus-OS), etc, etc. But later on, I wondered if it might be true what he said.

I don't know. But I think it's very possible that governments/intelligence/military have access to new technology one or two decades before everybody else has.

SubJeff on 12/1/2021 at 17:32

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It's certainly more advanced, and more expensive, than stuff available to consumers.

But the tech we are talking about is on a whole different level. It's like assuming the military have fully working power armour and battlefield weaponry like from Edge of Tomorrow.

faetal on 12/1/2021 at 17:47

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Not sure how your example relates to molecular biology.
It's entirely possible to hide a software / networking system that you created. Molecular biology exists for anyone to find. You can't keep a mechanism driven by physics & chemistry under wraps.

EDIT: To clarify - totally possible that someone discovers a way to manipulate genes without leaving a trace (assuming that such a thing is ever possible), but not possible to prevent other people from stumbling on the exact same mechanism. Also no reason to believe that any particular government has the reseources to outfox gene engineering corporations on that level. Having worked in gene engineering, I can tell you that it is a huge pain in the ass hoping that the elements you insert isn't going to intefere with gene transcription due to some yet to be discovered micro RNA binding region or something. So I can't see the likes of Monsanto foregoing cutting edge tech because the Chinese government said they have dibs.

Cipheron on 12/1/2021 at 23:34

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I was wondering whether 'protester' was a typo, but this really was a one person protest.

Colbert report video today, ~13 minutes:
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bds-DQlZvVs)

One bit I liked was a video from Donald Trump Jr (about 10:30 in the video) was trying tp claim about the timing of the de-platforming of Parler was "not a coincidence", since it happened 1 day after Trump was banned from Twitter. i.e. he's saying there are two possible interpretations: coincidence or conspiracy, and that the MSM is trying to tell you it's a coincidence. This is clearly aimed at delusional people.

As Colbert points out, nobody is claiming it's a "coincidence", it's called a "consequence" - a direct consequence of the violent mob that stormed congress and was chanting "hang mike pence", along with all the other shit that went down. Parler was shut the fuck down as a direct consequence of the site's complicity in the violent unrest.

BTW for all Parler user's apparent mistrust of authority, the site apparently requires a scan of you driver's license, and your social security number if you want that coveted verified tag. The whole thing smacks of a huge phishing scam against the intellectually vulnerable types prone to believing that bullshit.

Also, making it easy for the snoops, someone managed to scrape 70TB worth of data from Parler before it went down. due to their basically non-existent security. They didn't even have email address verification set up right, so if you knew what you were doing with web browser shenanigans, you could do a password reset for ANY account
(https://cybernews.com/news/70tb-of-parler-users-messages-videos-and-posts-leaked-by-security-researchers/)



They were meant to have a third-party service for verifying emails, that company denied service to them, so they merely disabled email authentication on the server. Huge level of incompetence here, especially since all Verified Citizen users had their driver's licenses uploaded as images. The guys who did the 70TB dump say they didn't dump those, but anyone else could have.

Starker on 13/1/2021 at 00:03

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For all the clowns who milled about aimlessly, there were people there who knew exactly what they were doing. People at the front lines rotated the attackers to tire out the police. Others had radios to keep in contact and coordinate. And some knew exactly where to go and where the relevant people's offices were. Apparently, plans of the Capitol had been circulated around beforehand.

This was an insurrection, plain and simple, and it failed more so because the military didn't go along with it than for any other reason. And if their absence didn't make things clear (I've seen some of the more devout followers still holding out hope for a last minute miracle), the top brass has now come right out and said it: