Definitely - and they're not turnout out to be so successful at dodging the legislation after all. There are other companies that do "real" carpooling though, such as e.g. Avego. They've been getting a lot of attention during the BART strike now, with them offering to actually fly commuters to work by helicopter ( http://bartstrike.com/?page_id=1073 ).

Yeah, absolutely. Lyft, Sidecar, Uber - they're all really taxi companies in disguise, trying to pretend being carpooling services.
An example of a real carpooling service is Avego, which connects drivers and riders with each other. The big difference to e.g. Lyft is that the prices are much lower, so the drivers only offset part of their cost rather than making a profit. That way, the service is really for regular commuters rather than for taxis. Drivers save a bit of money (and get to drive in the faster HOV lanes), riders get cheap and easy transportation, congestion levels are reduced, and there are less pollution from cars. Boomberg did an interview with them recently where they explained (among other things) the difference to e.g. Lyft at http://www.bloomberg.com/video/beat-the-bart-strike-with-avego-s-ridesharing-app-sxMdKCAbTbWzaiWyJwBP6w.html .

> The last copy of Windows I ran on a personal computer of mine that I owned was Windows ME. I don't guess I'm ever switching back.

Ooh, yes. Good old Windows ME. It did wonders in convincing people to ditch Windows!

> So far Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, FB et al had been identified by the Prism disclosure > They are indentified because they are in the big data business No. We could identify them because they were mentioned in the powerpoint slides... It doesn't get any more obvious than that.

> How do we get around this issue? There is a huge MitM operating here and that is scary. How do we get around a man in the middle? SSL. Most of these companies do use proper encryption for their network traffic. That is why NSA needs connections on the inside.

Using the Netflix example, wouldn't some packets going over 3G and others going over wired broadband cause massive problems with packets arriving out of order? There are methods for handling that in TCP of course, but I wonder how effective they would be in as exterme circumstances as we'd be talking about here.

Now I know to stay well clear of anything that has to do with Ciphercloud. I certainly wouldn't have seen the Stack exchange discussion (much less the fact that Ciphercloud feels that cryptanalysis is bad for them) if they didn't do what they did, though. Thanks, Ciphercloud!

You might want to have a look at Duplicati - that's what I ended up using after I spent a while looking into how to do backup securely. It'll handle scheduling, partials (i.e. diffs, if you want), compression, encryption of the result, and finally upload to a whole range of different cloud providers (or a local directory, of course). It's free, and available for Windows, OSX, and Linux.

ASIO would come in the same way that normal cybercriminals would, so it's a matter of standard common-sense security precautions.

If you're using Windows, keep it up-to-date and use a decent antivirus program - Microsoft's security essentials works fine. Don't click links in emails from strange people. Don't open email attachments from strange people. In terms of software, a good rule, originally by Brian Krebs I believe, is not to install software if you didn't search for that software in the first place (with other words, don't install if it comes to you by email, or if it pops up when you're browsing around generally, etc etc).

In addition to the operating system, a few other pieces of software are fairly important to keep up-to-date: Your internet browser. Adobe flash and reader, if you use those. Java (or better yet, disable Java in the browser completely).

I know that it's customary on slashdot not to read the linked articles but you didn't even read the summary, did you? They got four students. Four.

... of http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/13/01/07/2056219/german-laser-destroys-targets-more-than-1km-away

"... which is much smaller than the output of the heart itself."

Kind of like a UPS and an electric power plant then, yes?

... isn't just a matter of hacking a random IT firm as the summary may lead one to believe. The firm in question was a contractor for the government, and was handling a number of important census databases, including personal details about people with "protected identity" (people that live under threat of violence, and the like). Through the hacking, this data was released.

Considering that he was already wanted for his involvement in the pirate bay, the hacking was an incredibly stupid thing to do.

... is a good offense.

While I'm sure there are some here that are into sailing, this question should really be placed at a sailing forum instead. There are plenty of those - I'd suggest that you become a member there, and ask the question there instead. It also seems to me that a round-the-world trip may be a bit ambitious if you don't even know about the gear (or have tested the boat) yet. Something more limited may be suitable initially.