Kim Zetter:
> Earlier this year, researchers say, someone mysteriously hijacked internet traffic headed to government agencies, corporate offices and other recipients in the U.S. and elsewhere and redirected it to Belarus and Iceland, before sending it on its way to its legitimate destinations. They did so repeatedly over several months. But luckily someone did notice.
James Bessen:
> But this ignores a peculiar feature of U.S. patent law: The Patent Office cannot actually reject any patent application. Oh, a patent examiner can issue a “rejection” letter, but the applicant can keep an application alive simply by filing a response. In turn, the patent examiner can then issue a “final rejection.” But this, too, is doublespeak: All the patent applicant has to do is file a “continuation” under one of several possible procedures in order to keep the patent application pending for as long as 20 years.
No way we could have foreseen that being a problem later on. *No way* I say.
A sharp-eyed reader reminded me that I have gotten lazy about adding photos to my post. I just updated the Field Pocket post with some photos.
Apologies.
Thank God for baseball season again. Dave Cameron:
> It could also be a total disaster, though. If the other moves don’t come together, or simply aren’t enough to turn a bad team into a good team, the Mariners could easily have the best second baseman in baseball surrounded by a supporting cast that still doesn’t leave them with a better than .500 club. And this team is very vulnerable to injuries, especially to either Cano or Hernandez, who represent a huge chunk of the team’s chances of contention. A prolonged DL stint by either one probably sinks their season.
I hate long contracts. Five years seems like far too long for baseball. (But salary and contract lengths have gotten crazy.) I hope this works out, but then again, Mariners.
Go Ms?
Eric Klinker on the BitTorrent Sync blog:
> Today, Sync is moving over 20 gigabytes per person. And that’s a pretty powerful thing. Dropbox’s cloud-based platform stores less than 0.42 gigabytes per user.
Wow. It really is a fantastic service. I’d love to see more iOS developer support though.
Simply fantastic post from Andy Beaumont:
> The web has seemingly evolved into something that actively antagonises people — why would anyone in their right mind hide the content that visitors are there to see?
Lives up to the title.
Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani:
> The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals — and map their relationships — in ways that would have been previously unimaginable.
Here’s the fun part:
> NSA Director Keith Alexander disclosed in Senate testimony in October that the NSA had run a pilot project in 2010 and 2011 to collect “samples” of U.S. cellphone location data. The data collected were never available for intelligence analysis purposes, and the project was discontinued because it had no “operational value,” he said.
Jon Brodkin:
> Newly anointed Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler said this week that it would be OK for Internet service providers to charge Netflix and other companies for a faster lane to consumers.
[If only we could have seen that coming](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/04/new-fcc-chairman-is-former-lobbyist-for-cable-and-wireless-industries/).
$39 a month, or $399 a year.
*Good luck with that.*
Dan Goodin:
> The proof-of-concept software—or malicious trojans that adopt the same high-frequency communication methods—could prove especially adept in penetrating highly sensitive environments that routinely place an “air gap” between computers and the outside world. Using nothing more than the built-in microphones and speakers of standard computers, the researchers were able to transmit passwords and other small amounts of data from distances of almost 65 feet.
Ewen MacAskill, James Ball and Katharine Murphy:
> Australia’s surveillance agency offered to share information collected about ordinary Australian citizens with its major intelligence partners, according to a secret 2008 document leaked by the US whistleblower Edward Snowden.
> The document shows the partners discussing whether or not to share “medical, legal or religious information”, and increases concern that the agency could be operating outside its legal mandate, according to the human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC.
*See*, it’s not *just* the United States acting all shady.
Angelica Leicht:
> What Linda is doing here is infuriating. There are people donating to her that don’t realize she’s full of shit. People who have good intentions and big hearts and are attempting to make a difference in the life of a person who, by the sound of it, is living in some pretty dire surroundings. But folks, these are made-up dire surroundings. Stop giving her money.
Martha Mendoza:
> Encryption isn’t meant to keep hackers out, but when it’s designed and implemented correctly, it alters the way messages look. Intruders who don’t have a decryption key see only gobbledygook.
Good overview of the often misunderstood encryption arms race.
Charles Arthur:
> But many geeks who do change defaults forget that the majority of people don’t. Those people assume – reasonably – that the device they bought for umpty hundred pounds should already have the ideal setup. Changing defaults isn’t unreasonable. But nor should it be necessary.
Shane Cole:
> For every $1.00 in app download revenue earned by iOS developers, their Android counterparts earn just $0.19, according to data compiled by Business Insider. The gap for up-front and in-app purchases is slightly narrower, with Android bringing in $0.43 for every $1.00 on iOS, while advertising revenue is the closest at $0.77 on the dollar.
The source is, erm, *questionable* — but that’s a huge disparity even if the data is only close.
Some solid plugins here, recommended by David Sparks no less. Just started using these and now I’m happy to snag them in a bundle.
Eric Jaffe:
> In the iPad condition, the endowment effect thrived. On average, test participants using the tablet wanted to sell their item for significantly more than those using the laptop (roughly $213 to $154). Pressing a finger against a digital image on a fake website in a laboratory–that’s all it took to make people feel like they owned an item, and to value it more as a result.
So, perhaps, the smartest way to save money this “Black Friday” is to *not* use an iPad. I’m screwed.
Greg Sterling:
> Unless the sample of impressions that Adfonic is seeing globally is somehow distorted or not reflective of the broader market, it’s very hard to explain why Apple is so dominant. I’d love to hear any theories.
It seems rather obvious to me: iOS users *use* their devices [more](http://tech-thoughts.net/2012/11/ios-android-usage-engagement-patterns.html).