AWKWARD ZOMBIE

Oregon Militia members arrested. They were arrested because they are dumbasses, which really goes without saying.

Also the one that was killed was the one who went on record saying he would rather die than be arrested and would fight to the death if anyone came to arrest him.

so good job, guys

you failed to grasp the concept of an occupation
you failed to achieve anything
you failed to inspire anyone

You made yourselves laughing stocks of the entire country.
rip Y'all Qaeda/VanillaISIS/Talibanjo/Yokel Haram/Yeehawdists.

Now we can go back to focusing on how Donald Trump is actually the worst.

I have to say, as an outsider, watching Ben Carson stumble his way through the political process is an endless form of entertainment. He's giving The Daily Show a lot of material to work with.

Israeli war veteran and Marvel Entertainment CEO Isaac Perlmutter gave US$1,000,000 to Donald Trump's non-profit foundation which Forbes reported last month only donated $57,000 dollars to veterans between 2009 and 2013. Donating that cheddar to a man like Trump (Which he should be allowed to do no matter how vile Trump is; America, free speech and all that) runs in direct opposition to the comics wing of Marvel pushing for increased diversity in race and gender of the characters in their series. I stopped reading Marvel after they canceled a ton of comics for Secret Wars, another one of their obnoxious "Everything Changes!!" reboot events, so watching the Comics staff scramble to do damage control over their absolutely detached CEO is hilarious to me.

Twitter forms Ministry of Truth Censorship Council, includes professional controversy-farmer Anita Sarkeesian's Feminist Frequency as one of its partner organizations. I love how Twitter is slowly rotting from the inside. This is especially interesting since their second-biggest shareholder is not-too-keen-on-human-rights Saudi Arabia.

Edit: Twitter's stock has actually gone down after a brief, couple-hour rally in the afternoon. This service really is doing its best to destroy itself.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was found dead of natural causes today.

Not saying it was a gay hit, but not saying it wasn't, either.

Also I got Facebook lectured for not being saddened by his death.

He was a garbage bag in a robe, okay? I'm not bothered by him dying. If anything, it may have brightened the place up a bit.

The power vacuum and the way this is going to affect the election doesn't look pretty. There was already enough insanity surrounding the Presidential race; the Republicans are only going to exacerbate this if they stand by what they said today, bodaciously hours after the Scalia's death, in that they would wait until after the election to appoint somebody. However, Obama has said that he plans to do his duty and appoint someone for the Senate to confirm (or most likely reject in this case) as soon as possible. Scalia was a blatant partisan puppet, as are the rest of the 8 currently-living Justices. It'd be nice to have a Justice whose interpretations of the Constitution don't always fall under straight Conservative-Liberal lines depending on the President that appointed them.

Heard some people wonder if the Republican Senate will try to stall until next president is elected. They might. Might get a more moderate judge from this.

Oh, they are. They were pulling that crap before the guy's body was cold.

Alright so here's the deal:
-The FBI wants into the work phone of Syed Farook, one of the terrorists that was part of the San Bernardino attacks.
-They can't get into the phone because it's got a passcode and could very well wipe all data after 10 failed attempts, which is a setting you can turn on in iOS. The FBI doesn't want to take that risk.
-They went to the court and got a magistrate to basically use the All Writs Act on Apple in an attempt to compel them to create an entirely new version of iOS that they could then use to have an unlimited number of passcode attempts which they could run through a computer to unlock the phone in short order.
-Apple CEO Tim Cook refused, publishing a letter on the Apple website talking about the dire implications if Apple gave in to this order. They most likely plan to appeal.
-Privacy advocates and tech companies alike are standing with Apple on this. The courts forcing Apple to do this could set a precedent that the government could compel any tech company to essentially code malware that bypasses their own security software. The potential consequences of that software leaking to the public (as lots of tech stuff is wont to do) would be dire.

I understand Apple is definitely doing this to protect their bottom line as well, because if their products are insecure then fewer people will buy them. But this is one of those cases where good business sense and doing good are actually one and the same.

This is the first, and probably also the last, time I side with Apple on anything. Their argument is the only argument in this case. Undermining the security of the operating system undermines the entire concept of you being a private entity.

I own an Android device. I have it encrypted, but I don't trust it further than I can throw it as I am fairly certain that Google have a few backdoors into the device. I hope they don't, but if the FBI gets what they want then you can't trust your information on any software created in the US.

Given that Apple wants to monitor how everyone uses their products and enforce that they're being used the way Apple intends regardless of the consumer's right to the product for buying it, this has less to do with them trying to protect the privacy of their consumers and more to do with protecting their shitty way of doing things from being broken into and altered once a means of getting through their system has been created (creating a hack is bad for business, but especially for business focused on putting everything you can do with a product in strict parameters).

Along with the fact that such a breach could likely reveal some things that Apple has been doing that isn't necessarily ideal, assuming they have anything to hide that isn't already buried in their terms and conditions.

No encryption is perfect, the FBI will eventually find a way in its just that this would speed up the process and save the FBI dosh and resources doing it. Apple already proved their system isn't flawless after the Fappening debacle, but with the way encryption works its just gonna be a major pain in the booty for the federal gov', let alone hackers. That said, if someone REALLY REALLY wanted to get into something, they probably could.