Chris Hallquist’s debunking of the stories of the resurrection of Jesus is now online. It’s a good read. It’s mostly a response to popular apologetics on the subject (Habermas, Craig, McDowell and so on) and an argument that the evidence is worse than that for more modern paranormal events which we justly reject (the ghosts and UFOs of the title). (tags: historywilliam-lane-craigchristianityjesusresurrectionapologeticsscepticismufoparanormalchris-hallquist)
"Our #FiftyShadesofRed campaign is designed to remind people we should be attending fires, not tambourines on heads or yet another handcuff incident." (tags: fire-brigadebdsmsexfunny)
"The fact is that Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft are all integral components of the US cyber-surveillance system. Nothing, but nothing, that is stored in their "cloud" services can be guaranteed to be safe from surveillance or from illicit downloading by employees of the consultancies employed by the NSA. That means that if you’re thinking of outsourcing your troublesome IT operations to, say, Google or Microsoft, then think again." (tags: nsagooglexkeyscorecloudedward-snowdensecurityinternetchina)
2 Comments on "Link blog: google, nsa, paranormal, jesus"
William
Snowden/NSA: itsn’t that “nothing but nothing” quote just bullshit? What would you propose as something, available to the general public, that *is* “guaranteed to be safe from surveillance” from security agencies?
The quote’s about outsourced IT and its vulnerability to industrial espionage, presumably the usual “We’ll tell you what your competitors have bid for that contract” sort of thing. So I take it that the proposed solution is to keep stuff in house, or at least, not to outsource to companies who have to co-operate with the NSA.
Presumably there isn’t anywhere which is actually safe from Them if you pique Their interest: if you’re running your own company servers and people on the road use a VPN to get back to the office, you have to worry about the strong hint in the XKeyScore presentation that They have Their ways around that too. But you might hope that your own admins were less keen to respond to a tasking order from the NSA than Google etc. apparently are (assuming the “there are no direct taps at Google” stuff means some human intervention by Google is needed).
Snowden/NSA: itsn’t that “nothing but nothing” quote just bullshit? What would you propose as something, available to the general public, that *is* “guaranteed to be safe from surveillance” from security agencies?
The quote’s about outsourced IT and its vulnerability to industrial espionage, presumably the usual “We’ll tell you what your competitors have bid for that contract” sort of thing. So I take it that the proposed solution is to keep stuff in house, or at least, not to outsource to companies who have to co-operate with the NSA.
Presumably there isn’t anywhere which is actually safe from Them if you pique Their interest: if you’re running your own company servers and people on the road use a VPN to get back to the office, you have to worry about the strong hint in the XKeyScore presentation that They have Their ways around that too. But you might hope that your own admins were less keen to respond to a tasking order from the NSA than Google etc. apparently are (assuming the “there are no direct taps at Google” stuff means some human intervention by Google is needed).