Joe's Random Ramblings

This whole NSA spying thing is of course inherently wrong.
The Daily Show has put it very distinctly: "Good News - You're not paranoid."
This whole thing is worthy of a banana republic, not of the US. Heck, China's human rights violations look harmless compared to this abuse of basic rights.
This NSA spying is worse than what the Soviet Union did!
Mozilla and other companies have started a new website Stopwatching.Us to help get the full information on this dangerous spying activity.
Several senators have re-introduced a bill to end this abuse of power.

PS. And apparently, the NSA also doesn't care about copyrights. They stole the PRISM logo.

Google has started offering the white Nexus 4 today.
I ordered one, scheduled to arrive next week.

I just came across this piece by a UCLA professor.
This is a brilliant way to teach the subject matter, in this case game theory.
It would be a good idea to expand this to other subject matters.
In computer science education, there often are project classes, where small teams work together on projects during the course of the quarter/semester. In these project teams, there is some of the social interaction described in this piece, although on a smaller scale.
Here, having the whole class involved, the interaction is much more intense. And of course, this better reflects real life.

Symantec and Microsoft killed another spam Botnet.
That explains why my weekly received spam count went from over 600 to 100 in the last 2 weeks...
I suspected a shutdown of some botnet. This is the confirmation.
I have seen more blog spam recently, though, that's why I set this blog to require approval of comments.

Update: Unfortunately, my weekly spam count is slowly creeping back up, now at 250.

I've written before about the idiots from Brazil who used my domain in their email addresses in their Facebook profiles.
It looks as if my aggressive fight of this stuff was a success. Changing the passwords on these fake accounts and then deactivating them seems to have stopped this stuff. Apparently, word has gotten around in Brazil...
I still don't know what initiated this crap, but a guess is that I must have pissed off a spammer...
Brazil is a known spammer hotspot. Of course, pissing off spammers is a good thing, and I will gladly continue that.