I’ve never gotten one as awful as this, though:

—–Original Message—–
From: ProZ.com [mailto:bounce-handler@proz.com]
Sent: Monday, June 07, 2010 9:22 PM
To: ProZ.com Member
Subject: [ProZ.com jobs] Wire Tap Monitors Needed in St. Paul (eng>eng, vie>eng, fra>eng, deu>eng)

New job posting on ProZ.com:

URL: http://www.proz.com/job/425410

————
English

Title: Wire Tap Monitors Needed in St. Paul
Delivery deadline: 2010-07-01 21:00:00
Quoting deadline: 2010-06-08 21:00:00
Subject field: General / Conversation / Greetings / Letters

Location:
United States Native language: Must be native in target language

The job description:

We recently won a project to provide live, wire tap monitors in the St. Paul, Minnesota area. To be chosen for this project, linguists must have experience with live wire taps and audio transcription. This is an English to English transcripton project. Previous experience with Voice Box or Red Wolf software is a plus. Timeline for project is the next 30 days, but could go up to 60 days. Two (2), 8-hour shifts daily, with up to 5 linguists per shift will be scheduled. Linguists will be paid on an hourly basis. Please send your resumes to [redacted] if interested.

So, if you’re planning a telephone conversation in English with someone in St. Paul in the next month or so, think twice about who might be listening.

A shortage of online sex looms

A six fold increase in employee misconduct investigations, particularly involving workers accessing pornography from their government computers, has been observed at the National Science Foundation (NSF), a taxpayer-funded foundation in the US that doles out billions of dollars of scientific research grants.

[...]

[R]ecords showed that one senior executive spent at least 331 days looking at pornography on his government computer and chatting online with nude or partially clad women without being detected.

This is terrible! It’s bad enough these tax-fattened bureaucrats act to politicize science, but now they’re stealing our net porn!

Most libertarian theories of justice stress restitution as opposed to punishment. In this case particularly, I agree. This “senior executive” should give back all of the online porn he took. It’s only fair.

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Can the military coexist with social networking sites?

Gosh, I sure hope not.

The idea that Twitter, MySpace and Facebook could simply crash the modern cyber-state’s ability to wage war — which is to oppress, occupy, conscript, tax, torture, rape, murder, rob, poison, dispossess, expel, infect, regulate, control, police, imprison, degrade, dehumanize and destroy human beings — simply tickles me.

And it just may be possible.

At different times and in different combinations, military service personnel communication with the outside world is and has always been banned, blocked, censored, controlled, forced, edited in transit, misdirected, intercepted, co-opted, manipulated and so on.

The technology to do that has typically relied on the application of policy and physical means to the hired thugs themselves and their communications channels. In the dead age of empires, that mostly meant controlling the mails, access to military sites, physical documents and the like.

The modern mercenary for Leviathan has all manner of fresh, cool, exciting, low-power and long-reach wireless communications tools available which can beam messages, documents, position information, local data feeds and so forth around the globe to millions — on or off the secret military networks — in seconds. Those tools, in combination with the existing social networking services, might well make it impossible for wealthier nations to maintain typical military discipline and operational security.

This is not to mention that the tools are sometimes used by accident, and that just like the number of intentional uses, the number of accidental uses in increasing in tandem with the tools’ growing reach, range, speed, popularity, ease of use, market penetration, protocol and network compatibility, interchangeability, user loyalty and the like, plus their shrinking costs, sizes, power profiles, new-user learning curves, and detectability by Powers That Be and Pointy-Haired Bosses.

Let’s hope that’s enough to make the modern makers of mass misery not just obsolete, but impossible.

But if it’s not enough, what’s coming is distributed, peer-to-peer, organic, cypherpunk- and crypto-anarchist-created Facebook- and Twitter-like social networking and communication services that support unbreakable hard encryption, market-produced unfalsifiable digital identity management, mathematically guaranteed transactional and locational anonymity by default or at will, untraceable anonymous digital bearer certificate trading networks and, of course, assassination markets.

And when those things launch, they’re going to launch on all channels. Linux clients? You betcha! MAC OS X? Yes we can! Windows Vista? ¡Viva Bill Gates! Official Apple iStore version for iPhone? Gosh yes! But it doesn’t stop there, of course — there will be interfaces and gateways springing up on everything from your old-school two-way pager to instant messaging services like ICQ, AIM, MSN, Google Talk, Skype, Gadu-gadu and all the rest. Plugins and widgets and gizmos and HUDs for Counterstrike and World of Warcraft and Second Life and Runescape. Classified ads in the local advertising circular. Newsletters and forms by post. Scratch-off cards in cereal boxes. And nice men and women at church or in cafes who field requests and handle messages into and out of the darknet for the benefit of those who can’t manage the tech themselves.

To troops everywhere: think about getting into a new line of work.

Stay safe, pplz…

From Cryptohippie, where a PDF report with rankings is available:

How's that security blanket working out for ya?

At the tender age of nine, I had handwriting. Woe, woe be unto ye who would use this as evidence of my onging consent to anything other than pride at my youthful penmanship.

In the course of the intervening years, numerous people asked to see this silly little piece of paper, and I showed it to them. Perhaps I did so out of pride, simply for having a little piece of paper of my own. Perhaps I did so out of fetishistic glee at feeling “a part of something”. Perhaps I did so because, otherwise, I couldn’t obtain a lawful salary.

Hell, I don’t even remember.

It had a number on it: 595-12-5274.

595-12-5274

595-12-5274

Why isn't "social security" capitalized? Is it because it's not A CORPORATION IN CAPITAL LETTERS? OMIGOSH!

Here, and now, I provide this number for the simple joy of numbers themselves… so that you, too, may feel silly… so that you, too, may enjoy the pride of being 595-12-5274, and so that you, too, might enjoy my former, fetishistic glee at being a “part”.

A part “of”.

A part of, “something”.

A part of “something”… numerical.

Something… numerological.

Something… magical.

A part of a something that will chew out your decayed, barren, poisoned soul, and then ask you if you’re satisfied — for customer assurance purposes, of course.

Of course.

Steal this number. Please — steal this fucking number.

Inspired, in part, by Billy Beck, by a liter of Smädný Mních (Vybrobené z prírodných slovenských surovín!), and by Robert Anton Wilson (may he rest without consciousness).

Interviewed was Nick Rosen, founder of Off-Grid.Net, talking about, of all things, how to more or less disappear officially while not having to become a Mountain Man (“…or Woman!” “Quiet, Stan!”).

I only caught the last couple minutes of the segment, which seemed to have been a good deal longer.

Captions on the screen at one point, with no apparent connection to what was being discussed, said something to the effect of, “Hushmail can be used to send encrypted email.”

So, how is Hushmail not a honeypot again? It was mentioned on-screen, for free on CNN, it’s gotta be a honeypot, right?

Did anyone DVR this? Giev youtubes, please!

Welcome, former masters!

And that’s Web 3.0. Papers, please.

From The Telegraph:

One in five teens engage in ‘tech sex’

One in five teenagers say they have sent naked or partially-clothed images of themselves to someone by email or mobile phone, according to a poll in America.

From The Inquirer:

French Government decides to censor the Internet

Keep your Égalité and Fraternité but shove your Liberté!

10 June 2008

THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT has apparently decided that it doesn’t much like being democratic, and that it would rather like to censor the Internet instead.

Not content with simply limiting itself to blocking despicable child sex abuse, a move three major ISPs in the US also agreed to today, the French government feels it necessary to go a radical step further and decide for its citizens whether or not they can view content it considers inappropriately racist and or linked to terrorism.

In fact, worse still is that any site is now game for a French blockade, as Sarkozy’s government is inviting people to send in huge long lists of sites which offend their delicate sensibilities. The French government, which will purportedly be able to receive complaints from Internet users in real time, will be able to add sites to a so called “black list”, which it will then force national ISPs to block.