The Current Events Thread

[SaintCrazy]

Cab driver in Springfield, Missouri puts two rapists behind bars

[Exeres]

That guy's a hero and all, but I can't help but think he looks like Chumlee.

[Doormaster]

people think an atmosphere research machine caused the tornadoes in Oklahoma

I can't

[Mete]

Everybody knows it was moral backruptcy that caused them.

[Lambeth]

I blame obama

[Syobon]

I'm not going to link a source because there a bunch of different articles and there is still a lot of things unclear, you should be able to find stuff yourself. But I wanted to talk about the recent fuzz about the allegations that the NSA and FBI coöperate with Google, Facebook and other big internet corporations to datamine and surveil hundreds of millions of people across the world. This sounds like some paranoid conspiracy scheme, but the allegations seem to be quite serious as Germany and the EU seem to be pretty rustled off about it.

[Brekkjern]

I thought I should link this because the inevitable "why should I care" post should be coming soon.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/w ... ta-matters

[Syobon]

That "metadata" is also used to construct networks of people. They keep track of who you know.

[Madican]

May or may not be related to the issue, but I recall a supercomputer called Nautilus that is pretty much fed information to find patterns. Before being given the information for the following, but after the events, it predicted where Osama Bin Laden was located and the riots in Egypt and Syria.

The government wouldn't need to look at our metadata themselves if something like this was to be used. They'd just give it a constant feed of information and let it do its thing. A huge problem with this though is it borders on the fallacy Minority Report illustrated, namely, predicting crimes and events before they happen and acting on it.

I don't like this surge of privacy invasion. September 11 was more than a decade ago and terrorist attacks have not gotten worse, but more and more of our rights are being stripped away in the name of "security."

[Syobon]

Well yes, a large process of datamining is automated, we're talking about enormous of data here. The FBI was already rumoured (proven?) to monitor web searches and text posts for certain keywords.

Following your point about 9/11, the increase in security apparently wasn't able to prevent the Boston bombings either. Of course it's purely theorycrafting whether or not the situation would be worse without additional security measures and to what extent, but it should be readily apparent that it is unfortunately impossible to prevent things like that happening completely.

[Madican]

And that's the part politicians don't get. They cannot ever fully stop these sorts of things from happening. All the security additions are doing is punishing normal people and honestly allowing the government to gain more power that we can't oppose.

I really hope there's not some sort of watch list for searches, otherwise a ton of writers, including me, are going to be on it. I always joke about that sort of thing but the reality would not be good.

[Mete]

They cannot ever fully stop these sorts of things from happening. All the security additions are doing is punishing normal people

So all these security measures are DRM and normal people are paying customers and terrorists are pirates.

[Madican]

Sounds like a fairly apt analogy.

In marine news, Monterey Bay Aquarium is putting a mantis shrimp on display for the first time in twelve years. It will be isolated from everything else. Mostly because twelve years ago the last one decimated the tank it was in and scoured it of all life.

http://www.grindtv.com/outdoor/nature/p ... ing-punch/

[Reyo]

Got a text message from my Dad yesterday.

"Are you near Santa Monica College???"

Wat?

I google "Santa Monica College" and sure enough...another fucking school shooting.

What the hell society? Seriously, what the hell?

[TheStranger]

This has not been a fun year