Snapchat now has the rights to store and share selfies taken via the app

If you still believe your snaps will self-destruct, you might want to review Snapchat’s newest policy changes as the company can now potentially keep your photos forever and share them. Oh, and by using the app, you grant Snapchat the rights to your photos.Users who update their Snapchat app must tap “Accept” to signify agreeing with the app’s newly updated Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. “Scary stuff,” is what actor Kal Penn, the former White House Associate Director of Public Engagement, called Snapchat’s new privacy and legal policies. Kal Penn Snapchat, which became popular because messages were supposed to go poof after 10 seconds, gave rise to other third-party apps meant to capture and keep the messages. If you recall “The Snappening” in Oct. 2014, the third party app Snapsaved was hacked and selfies that were supposed to self-destruct were instead leaked. But it couldn't be considered a “leak” if users agree to Snapchat’s newly revised privacy policy and terms of service that take the company on a radical shift away from the idea upon which it was founded.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Prez: Rick Perry selling his mailing list

I created separate email accounts to receive email from each of the 25 presidential candidates (and donated money to all them). This allows me to track their behavior -- or misbehavior.

Rick Perry exited the race 50 days ago. Today, I got two emails to my special Perry address. One email was from Ted Cruz, another presidential candidate. The other was from Paul Ryan, the new Speaker of the House.

Here's Ted Cruz's email, sent to my Perry account. It's actually identical to one I received on my Cruz account. (I've hidden the To: address, except for the 'rick' part).


The email headers look like:

Received: from mail3.postup.targetedvictory.com (mail3.postup.targetedvictory.com [69.56.54.35])
 by projectp (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1266C26041B
 for ; Fri, 30 Oct 2015 16:28:59 +0000 (UTC)

Rick Perry uses the company "TargetedVictory" for his mass emailings, where Ted Cruz uses another company. This shows that Perry didn't give his address list to Cruz, but instead let Cruz use the address list.

I saved a copy of Perry's privacy policy when I made the donation. It implies that he won't give out my private information to somebody else, but nothing in the Continue reading

Prez: donation numbers

I've given $10 to every candidate to monitor what they do. As I blogged before, just before the quarterly filing deadline, I got emails from all the candidates begging for money, to impress people how much money they've gathered. Well, here are amount each candidate received last quarter:

Hillary29,921,653.91
Bernie26,216,430.38
Carson20,767,266.51
Jeb!13,384,832.06
Cruz12,218,137.71
Walker7,379,170.56
Carly6,791,308.76
Rubio5,724,784.46
Kasisch4,376,787.95
Christie4,208,984.49
Trump3,926,511.65
Rand2,509,251.63
O'Malley1,282,820.92
Huckabee1,241,737.51
Graham1,052,657.62
Lessig1,016,189.22
Webb696,972.18
Jindal579,438.39
Santorum387,985.42
Perry287,199.29
Pataki153,513.89

Of course Hillary and Bernie are at the top, since they are the only two major contenders on the Democrat side, so split the pool between them.

What's interesting is that how Scott Walker exited the race, and Jeb! scaled back his spending, because their donations dropped precipitously. Even though they got huge donations last quarter, they spent the money as fast as they could. Presidential campaigns are like venture capital that way: you spend money aggressively in order to make more money. If you are right, this Continue reading

Tor Messenger: Anonymous instant messaging beta released

Anyone who values their privacy will be aware of Tor, the distributed “onion routing” network that makes it possible to avoid surveillance (though it is thought that even the sophistication of the Tor system may not be enough to avoid NSA scrutiny if they really want to get the login for your Ashley Madison account). While Tor is great for hiding your browsing until now, it hasn’t been able to anonymize instant messaging. That changed yesterday with the beta release of the open source Tor Messenger. Available for Windows, Linux, and OS X the Tor Messenger:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Yes, the CNBC moderation was biased

In anger over CNBC's left-wing bias, the Republican party has suspended them from moderating future debates. Is there something to this?

Yes and no. CNBC, like most of the media, has a strong left-wing bias. On the other hand, the Republicans are quick to label legitimate criticism as examples of bias.


There is an easy way to detect improper bias. The principle of journalism is that there are two reasonable sides to any debate. One side may be wrong, of course, but both sides are reasonable. Partisan bias, however, involves arguing that one side in the debate is unreasonable. When the press calls somebody a "comic book clown", then it's bias. Merely saying they are "wrong" is not bias.

That's what happened many times during the CNBC moderated debate of Republican candidates, most egregiously when they called Trump a "comic book" version of a candidate. We all know that Trump is a demagogue, that he appeals to the ignorant masses more than intelligent people. But when you drill down on Trumps ideas, what you'll find is that he's usually merely wrong rather than irrational. For example, a couple months ago, Trump was attacked in the press for saying "the constitution Continue reading

10 use cases where NoSQL will outperform SQL

This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.

Once only used by the likes of Google, Amazon and Facebook, many industries are now adopting NoSQL database technology for crucial business applications, replacing their relational database deployments to gain flexibility and scalability. Here are 10 enterprise use cases best addressed by NoSQL:

* Personalization. A personalized experience requires data, and lots of it – demographic, contextual, behavioral and more. The more data available, the more personalized the experience. However, relational databases are overwhelmed by the volume of data required for personalization. In contrast, a distributed NoSQL database can scale elastically to meet the most demanding workloads and build and update visitor profiles on the fly, delivering the low latency required for real-time engagement with your customers.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Good news for hackers: People still plug found USB sticks into their computers

Of 200 USB sticks distributed at public places in Chicago, Cleveland, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., earlier this year, 17 percent wound up plugged into computers – some of them by IT pros - where they could have done all sorts of damage had they been loaded with malware.Not only were they plugged in, the finders followed instructions on them to email a specified address and include what they did for a living, according to a study by the IT industry association CompTIA.MORE: Sorriest network companies of 2015To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

PlexxiPulse—Don’t Let Scalability Spook You

Last week, our director of product marketing, Bob Noel, penned a blog post that identified the five new networking requirements being driven by IoT and Big Data. This week, we are shining the spotlight on one of the third era of IT requirements Bob highlighted – scalability. In today’s dynamic application environments, the ability to scale gracefully to be able to handle distributed applications is critical. The network must be scaled to match demand, but the challenge (and a pain point for many) is how. Traditional “scale up” techniques were about replacing outgrown processing and storage capacity with bigger boxes and migrating data onto the new platform. Now, as the environment grows, more physical devices will be connected to the network. Providers need to think beyond adding capacity through bigger pipes and consider how to support a rapidly growing number of storage and compute nodes. It can be spooky thing to consider, but at Plexxi we make scaling your network to meet Third Era demands a treat, not a trick.

Below please find a few of our top picks for our favorite news articles of the week. Happy Halloween!

Enterprise Networking Planet: Better Networking Through the API
By Arthur Cole
Continue reading

Black Friday, er, Black November tech deals include cheap iPads, free shipping

Online tech retailer Newegg isn’t messing around with just Black Friday anymore. It’s calling all of next month Black November as it gears up for holiday sales in what’s looking to be another all-out battle for techies’ wallets.Newegg hasn’t released specific sale information yet, but has outlined plans to kick off deals on more than 900 products Nov. 1-3, gaming bargains Nov. 4-9, a Black Friday preview sale Nov. 10-26, big savings on Black Friday (Nov. 27) itself, and then of course some more deals on Cyber Monday. More and more, we’re seeing retailers describing their holiday sales plans, in a less than detailed manner, with promises of specifics on dates to come.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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