Thank you, Rand

"Does anybody remember Charlie Sheen when he was kind of going crazy... And he was going around, jumping around saying 'Winning, winning, we're winning!' Well I kind of feel like that, we are winning. And I'm not on any drugs."
—Sen. Rand Paul

Sorry, Rand baby. The things that the RNC is doing is they very definition of insanity as stated by the common phrase, "Doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results." The House, under RNC leadership, have voted 41 times thus far to defund Obamacare. Nothing has happened. You aren't winning and you might as well be on drugs.

This is not to say that the DNC is winning because the only thing certain right now is that the American people are losing.

The NSA doesn't care much about hacking your PC, they hack routers

Basically, the NSA doesn't want to watch communications on a computer-by-computer basis. They tap backbones, the connections where huge amounts of information flows between internet servers. They tap major ISPs. Your computer? Chump change. If they know what you're saying to other people, they don't really need to tap your computer. And the thing that makes this possible?

Weak routers.

A router takes the packets generated from all of the computers on your network, wired or wireless, aggregates them, and sends them upstream across your connection to another router at your ISP that has a faster connection, which sends them upstream to another router with a faster connection, etc. Eventually your traffic gets to your destination and information comes back, and the routers (also known as hops) between your PC and the server/site that you wanted to access, can deconstruct the information and get it back to its origin. The problem is that routers are not easy to configure, it takes some specialized information, and that if you need to patch it, you risk breaking the configuration. And a broken configuration means down-time, a bad thing.

So most of the time, once a router is working well and the configuration is backed up, it's pretty rare that they're upgraded. The upgrades are risky because a vast majority of businesses don't have a duplicate network set up so that router patches can be tested.

And a router that is not upgraded, just like your computer, is vulnerable to being compromised and exploited.

So the NSA's money is best spent compromising and monitoring the routers upstream of your connection, because there is a lot more information present at that point, so it's more efficient.

Which is not to say that they can't compromise your computer and get in and look at things directly.

There is an old maxim about what defines a secure computer: it's not connected to any communication device, it's turned off, buried in 10' of concrete, and in a locked room with an armed guard. It's highly unlikely that a computer thus secure can be compromised.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/09/nsa-router-hacking/

Amazon announces $3 ebooks: if you bought the dead tree edition from them

About bloody time. I hope Barnes & Noble follows suite. I prefer, for a variety of reasons, B&N ebooks and their Nook over Amazon's format and the Kindles. My problem is that I have an old Nook tablet, theoretically I can root it and it will run a version of Android, but I don't know if it'll be a late enough version to access Google's Play store and the Kindle app. B&N is going to be announcing two new Nooks soon, so I may need to buy a new tablet in the not distant future.

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/383932/amazon-kindle-matchbook-bundles-ebooks-with-print-purchases