Loblaws and the Data Pad

article = none, personal experience.

Went to the Loblaws yesterday (at Elmvale Shopping Center , here in Ottawa), they had a Black Friday Special , an android data pad , 4 gigabytes. Only 39.95 . It was in their flyer and everything.

Lined up for 7am this morning , before they even openned.

The things were gone. The manager admitted that one had been sold to a staff member ,and simply shrugged indifferently that the others were missing (there had been a pile of 4).

Hmm...show up and they're all sold out BEFORE the doors even open ? Thats gotta be some kind of illegal. False advertising or something.

Is the NSA Evil ?

Wow , I've really been picking on the NSA lately , havn't I ? Just looked down the list of previous blog posts and you'd almost thing I had a fetish over them or something ?

I can't decide if it's because I'm bored , or because there's nothing else going on. I mean , there is that war against ISIS , but I found a TV show (in english) being aired in Iraq where they catch a few suicide bombers and take them back to the places they struck , and then the regular (muslim) citizens come out and start screaming at them about how they have very little and you burned it all down you (swear word, swear word sweear word) how could you do this ?

The only relevant answer any of them gave was " to degrade iraqi security".

Huh ? You're degrading security so you can invade a muslim country ... to conquer it for who ? They're already muslims. You're already muslims ...

Yeah. This ISIS thing isn't a religious war, it's just gangsters running around in a place with no cops.

Any ways, back to the NSA.

Lets pretend you live in a western nation , and the police , an actual agency of the government it doesn't matter which one , decide they need your bank records.  Sounds ok so far , right ?

So they go to the bank on a sunday , when no one is around  and they pick the lock. But they're not very good lock picks so they break the lock , and they go in and disable the alarms, and they're not very good at it , so they leave the alarms disabled. They look up your bank records, print out a couple of copies, and they're pretty happy and they walk away.

Leaving the alarms to the bank off , and the door still unlocked.

Oh , and one police officers took a copy home with him , and his kid got a hold of it , and made paper air planes out of it, and sent them flying off out the window to god only knows where.

You'd be pretty ticked, wouldn't you ?

The NSA broke standard encryption.
That is to say , they sabataged encryption standards so that it was easy to break encryption , and then they pushed these broken standards on everyone in the world.
This is the equivilant of pushing faulty locks on everyone in the world. You think your door is locked, but hte first time a criminal takes a run at it , he's going to find it dang easy to open.

And that is the problem here. NSA didn't just insert a back door for their own use to get at peoples records. They left the door wide open , flapping in the wind, for everyone , every hacker in the world , to come in and help themselves. And so the Russian Hackers did. And so the Chinese hackers did.  And all those terrorists that the NSA claims they're fighting ? Yeah , they took a run at the (broken) encryption as well.

If you were a tax payer, and you had a government organization that professed loud and long that it's job was to fight terrorism , but it went and made it easy for the terrorists to hack into ... well...everything. AND , to this day , they still object if anyone tries to harden their encryption , they loudly proclaim YOU are assisting terrorists by defending yourself from every hacker in the world .... what would you think ?

Think about it.