TechCrunch – In July, [TechCrunch] about an ongoing case wherein a woman accused of fraud was being asked by the prosecution to provide the password to access her computer’s data, which otherwise would remain encrypted and unreadable, weakening their case. They got permission to compel her to reveal the password, but the defense said that it was unconstitutional to do so, as providing that information was essentially self-incriminating testimony.

So, doing what Judges are made to do, Judge Robert Blackburn made a decision: “the Fifth Amendment is not implicated by requiring production of the unencrypted contents of the Toshiba Satellite M305 laptop computer.”

This is a joke. You know how many times in college and they seized my computer because  of “suspicious network activity, botnets and viruses?” (all false accusations, mind you).  Like three times. They’d shut off my internet, send me a letter from the dean and be like “wah wah wah, we suspect you of X, Y and Z. Give us your computer so we can scan it for viruses and crap and then we’ll reactivate you.” So I did. You know what they found after searching it? Jack shit. Know why? 1) I didn’t do any of the ridiculous shit they were accusing me of and 2) who the hell do they think they are? FBI forensics dudes? Absolutely no way you’re getting my data! If you know what you’re doing, you can get around these things

Judge asshole over here is going to set a precedent that goes something like this: “Well, you don’t have to give us your password, but if you don’t you’re automatically guilty…”

If you know what you’re doing, you can give the password. And it will decrypt the computer. And you will not get caught. It’s called Plausible Deniability. Learn about it: http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/?s=plausible-deniability (for the record, I don’t have this set up because I have nothing to hide, but I am aware of it)

The people running the site did not admit, why but it is very clear: The MegaUpload raid/ legal action. The FileSonic admins shit their pants and were like “What do we do – we don’t want to get arrested, fined $10 million and put in jail for 5 years. Oh, let’s just not let anyone share files anymore and make it a storage only service for individual users.”

This is what I am calling indirect censorship. The establishment is inciting fear by making examples of other sites with harsh punishment, lawsuits and jail time. This effectively trickles down and scares other startups and people running similar sites. Ultimately, big business and lobbyists win. This is exactly what they are trying to do. It’s only a matter of time before other services like this will be voluntarily shut down by site owners who do not want to get into any trouble.

The same way MegaUpload was shut down, what about Amazon Cloud (cloudfront and s3)? Thousands of startups rely on these services to inexpensively host user uploaded content. Suppose the users upload pirated material? Does that mean we seize the website of the startup? Does that mean we

You don’t need legislation like SOPA and PIPA to hinder creativity. The US already has that ability. Tech startups are booming again. It will not last forever, since economies and industries all boom and bust. History WILL repeat itself and there WILL be another dot com bust – I don’t know when. No one wants to admit that, because things are looking great right now. With all this censorship and the fact that the government can just shut down any site for any nonsensical reason – mark  my words “the internet as we know it now will be destroyed.”

Edit: Like 8 more sites shut down: http://torrentfreak.com/cyberlocker-ecosystem-shocked-as-big-players-take-drastic-action-120123/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Torrentfreak+%28Torrentfreak%29&utm_content=Google+Reader See!

Side note: Hey look. A blog post that intelligently discusses an issue and isn’t vulgar smut… I’m trying to tone it down a notch. I’ve been a little too aggressive. Batstool was rubbing off on me.

Is this gentleman fucking serious? DUDE. You’re a fucking IT guy. You should know about security. Keeping computers free of viruses is amateur hour. It’s like the first thing you learn when you’re 13 years old. I’ve been cleaning viruses off my family members’ computers since like 6th grade. You have to be a fucking idiot to get a virus, and you have to be a double fucking idiot to be an IT guy and get a virus – especially viruses that spam out to your client list.

But being a nice guy, rather than tearing this guy apart, I played devil’s advocate and tried to defend him for a bit. My conclusion? There is absolutely no possible defense. He’s 100% negligent on the grounds that he should know better and is a fake IT guy who doesn’t even know the difference between a CPU and computer.

Possibility 1: Maybe his teenage son or someone went to a bunch of porn sites and downloaded some crap.
Answer 1:  Nope. Don’t share a computer with anyone, imbecile. My computer is for ME. No one else. Separate the accounts, or better yet, get separate computers. Get a password. Keep people the fuck out.

Possibility 2: Maybe he downloaded cracked software, and the crack was infected.
Answer 2:  Use a sandbox, buffoon. Or test it on some other machine where your work email is not accessible, check for viruses and if it’s any good, then. No excuses.

Possibility 3: Maybe he typed a website wrong and it installed because of a buffer overflow exploit
Answer 3: This actually happened to me because Firefox and Win XP are shitty. 1) Get windows 7 and it won’t happen. 2) Use Google Chrome, because it’s sandboxed and even if something does exploit it, it cannot access the system. 3) if those two fail and it happened anyway, reformat immediately and change your passwords. I did and you didn’t see me get hacked.

Conclusion: He’s a clueless moron who is a sorry excuse for an IT guy, because any normal IT guy knows basic security. I’m not even talking about like assed linux security permissions, intrusion detection, cryptology and shit they use on banking websites. Just the basics. Like how to not run ActiveX controls in IE6. Shit like that. Like keeping your shit patched and updated. Things any 16 year old IT guy would know in his sleep.

So will this ever happen to me? Not a chance. There’s a better chance that Alex Morgan will show up at my doorstep ready to bang my dick off, than me getting a computer virus that compromises my account.  Not only do I not get viruses, my Google Account has 2-step authentication. I will get a text message any time someone attempts to try to log into my account. I also need to generate one time use passwords for any OAuth connections. There is no fucking way this account can get compromised.

You’re fired, bro.

So anyway, being a tech dude and critical about everything, here are a list of cons. Note that these are the only flaws I can find, and everything else is pretty much perfect (for me at least). They might seem annoying, but I would recommend this over any other Android phone out there.

Keyboard Lag - When I type really quickly on the keyboard, it takes a while for the text to appear. When I say a while, I mean about .25 to .5 seconds. Very minor, but noticeable. Not bad at all. Despite the lag, it is extremely easy to type on due to the big screen. Maybe in the 4.0.3 update, they will improve the lag issue, but it’s no big deal.

Screen Orientation lag – It literally takes about 2 seconds from the time you turn your phone until the time the screen rotates. Grr

Volume Keys Stick Out and Press Too Easily- The volume keys are on the left side of the phone and stick out too much. Maybe it’s the way I hold it, but I’m always pushing them by accident.

Status Light is barely a status light – It’s this big white circle that fades on and off about once every 8 seconds. A status light should be a quick, frequent blink. Props to Morotola for getting the blinking green status light right on the original Droid.

The Camera – Yes, the camera is grainy in low light. Yes, it doesn’t have an 8MP sensor (who cares – it’s all about the quality of the sensor). But with a flash and steady hand or in daylight, it is much better than your average phone camera.

The Battery Life – This is Verizon’s fault. 4G LTE is a battery hog. From when I unplugged it at 8am to 10AM when I walked into my office, it was at 80% battery, and this was with moderate use of 4g for about 5 minutes reading my news feed, and standard twitter checks. It’s not like i was streaming video or I had the screen on for 2 hours straight.

People say it feels like cheap plastic? I don’t have that issue.

Congratulations, Verizon Wireless dickheads! I hope you enjoyed the most botched phone release in the history of mankind. This is taken straight from the page of how to NOT release a smartphone.

This fucking thing was supposed to be out before Black Friday. Then there were about 80 different rumors about other release dates, all of which have come and gone. PR stayed silent and rumors were going crazy. Then the phone gets shipped out to the Samsung Experience in NYC, and was forced to be removed. After that, it’s shipped to Best Buy and Radio Shack, but it’s ordered to be locked up.

Here’s an idea. Release a phone before Black Friday and push it throughout the holidays. Sales on this thing are going to SUCK because you don’t release something 10 days before Christmas.

So what’s the holdup? They were probably holding this phone back due to the following

• Promoting shittier phones instead (Droid Razr). Why? It’s Droid branded and that’s Verizon’s baby. They put all their shitware on it.
• LTE outage - 4G was out for a bit
• Fighting with Google over Google Wallet – Verizon is like fuck off and we don’t want this shit on here because we want to develop our own inferior version of it. I respect Google for being more like Apple and being like “no bitches, this is a Google phone, stop fucking with it.”
• I guarantee you Verizon will never EVER release another pure Google phone again.  Too much hassle. Why do that when they can just roll out inferior Droid branded Motorolas. They want the utmost control over everything. Only Apple can tell Big Red what to do. Everyone else – they don’t care about.

Overall, it only hurts consumers. So fuck all these big businesses.

Lifehacker - A new Google-funded study of browser security by security research firm Accuvant Labs crowned Chrome the champion of security features, and ranked Firefox below Internet Explorer in terms of protection available from web-borne threats.

Welp, there you have it folks. Mozilla has gone the way of the shitter. I told you they were losing it over the years. Ever since that there Chrome came around, they were basically like “fuck it, we give up. Let’s just rapidly release like 6 versions in a row that have like 4 improvements each”

Chrome is the only browser that has a true sandbox, meaning that even if malicious code gets exploited, it has 0 access to your real computer. It’s good because it was built from scratch. Not built on top of Netscape from like 1997

Granted, this study is probably biased because Google paid for it. Microsoft paid for another one and said IE was more secure. Either way, I can attest to the fact that Firefox is a real insecure shitpile. One day on Windows XP a few months ago, I typed in youtube wrong and went to some rogue website and bam. Virus. Didn’t even install anything. It just buffer overflowed, executed remote code and that was it. I had to format. Another website I went to threw memory corruption errors in Chinese! What the f mang? How’d that happen? Obviously there’s some JS executing going on over there.

Ever since then, I have nothing to do with Windows XP and Chrome is my main browser.

I’m telling you. It’s not that I suck at this game. It uses unrealistic physics.

Anyway, these biddies should listen to me because I obviously know it all. Months ago I blogged about how shitty that black navigation bar is. Welp, today they announced that they’re getting rid of it. No shit? Since when did an ugly black eyesore of a toolbar become part of Googles UI?

Portfolioso: 1
Google: 0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSIMpFfNLEA

Gigaom – While I most often use an iPhone as my primary mobile device, I’m not an Android-hater by any means.

tl;dr [...]

But in terms of the average smartphone user’s priorities right now, I still believe the iPhone 4S is the superior device. The iOS web browsing experience is still better (text rendering is better, the interface is more usable, and double-tap zooming is a necessity for one-hand browsing), text looks better all around, it has a much better camera for capturing mobile memories, and with iOS 5, notifications provide exactly the right kind of information exactly where you want it.

Jerks off to Apple Products

Fuck this guy Darrell Etherington. This is your typical fucking hipster piece of shit Apple fanboy. How did I ever guess that the Galaxy Nexus is perceived to be a complete shitpile in the eyes of an Apple fanboy. Is there anything Android can do to impress these people? Nope.

Guess what dumbshit – Android does have double tap zooming. I can argue this guy point by point, but it’s a waste of my time because 85% of people who read my blog honestly don’t know anything about technology.

My point is that I haven’t even seen the Galaxy Necus in person and I guarantee you that the hardware is better than the iPhone 4s. I guarantee you Android 4.0 is as polished as iOS. I’m not saying the 4S is bad – just that once you’re an Apple fanboy, you’re too arrogant to admit that anything else is better,

I bet if Apple boxed up a pile of horse shit and called it the iPhone 5, fanboys would still say it was better than the Galaxy Nexus. Give me a break!

Anyway… 96% of people are saying this is the most wonderful device in existence and Android 4.0 is amazing and all that shit. But these are the complaints I’m reading about:

It Only has a 5MP Camera, not 8, 16, 32 etc…
Who cares. It’s about the sensor, not the megapixels. It takes pics in low light and takes them without shutter lag. Enjoy.

It has Pentile Pixels or some shit and the screen sucks
Get your fucking eyes examined. Can you really tell the difference, you Apple fanboy piece of shit.

But it Doesn’t Have Adobe Flash
Fuck flash. No one wants this shit slowing down my phone, killing my battery and displaying ads all in my grillmix. Adobe Flash is a piece of shit, and it’s rightfully dying and being replaced with HTML5. Occupy Flash!

There’s a Volume Bug
Shut up. Pretty sure some asshole at Google/Samsung/Verizon will fix this before it’s out, because I’ll be 37 by that time.

Face Unlock Sucks and Never Works
No one cares.

It doesn’t have Siri
I don’t have conversations with fucking machines. I talk to people. So suck it.

No SD card?
Neither does an iPhone. No one cares. SD cards are slow.

In Conclusion
Shut the fuck up. All tech bloggers are assholes.  Remember how Apple release the iPhone 4 that dropped calls just because you held your phone in your hand. Exactly. Shit happens. No go to bed.

PS – I’m going to run a naked lap around my block with this fucking phone when it comes out. Why? Because it won’t come out. And if if it ever does, chances are it won’t.

PS Again – I’m taking a shower. My feet smell.