psychology dector

Due to the NSA spying program PRISM [1] , we are again discussing the importance of privacy. People who don’t mind its current erosion have one compelling argument on their side: If spying – by whatever means – can prevent just a single terrorist attack then isn’t it worth it? This blog post mentions some of the risks of widespread spying. A tremendous amount of power Surveillance data gives people with access to it a tremendous amount of power. Quoting “ You commit three felonies a day ” by Jason Kottke for kottke.org: The average professional in this country wakes up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep, unaware that he or she has likely committed several federal crimes that day. Thus, if the state wants to put you in jail, it can. Too many people have access to the information collected by the NSA Quoting “ If the NSA Trusted Edward Snowden With Our Data, Why Should We Trust the NSA? ” by Farhad Manjoo for Slate: Let’s note what Snowd...

I’m really not much of a conspiracy theorist, but “ Triangulating on truth – the totalitarian state ” (by Michael Arrington for Uncrunched) presents a good one: On the Washington Post story [about the NSA spy program PRISM], that means one of these things must be true [emphasis is mine]: The NSA presentation is fake and the Washington Post got duped, or Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Apple, etc. are lying, or The presentation is real, and the companies are carefully drafting responses so that they aren’t technically lying. I believe the third option above is truth. The denials The following subsections contain the official denials by Facebook , Google and Apple . Read them and judge for yourselves. I’ve typeset words in bold that I found interesting and/or passages that are similar between documents. I’ve also numbered paragraphs that are similar. Mark Zuckerberg’s post on Facebook I want to respond personally to t...

A few days ago, daylight savings time (DST) ended again in Germany (we call it Sommerzeit, literally “summer time”). Changing the time twice a year is a silly thing to do – it brings few savings and quite a bit of cost and inconvenience. The Pirate Party has now started a European initiative (page in German) for abolishing DST. The complicated thing in Europe is that all states have to participate, otherwise changing regulations does not make sense. Dirk Haage pointed me to a nice visualization of daylight savings time. The visualization makes it obvious how we should change time – we should always have DST. I’d rather have slightly longer afternoons than early mornings. As a complementary measure, schools could start later. There is even evidence (page in German) that starting at 8 o’clock is too early for children (it certainly is for parents).