fl3tch

True. We'll have to wait and see, but I imagine that price and integration with other Google services will be the main benefits.

Moving your data is much easier than moving your entire social network. It could be a matter of installing the GDrive sync client and pointing it at the same folders you're already syncing.

Like the politicians who kept the Vietnam War going long after victory was impossible, they don't understand sunk costs. They are all in at this point. No prosecutor of a case this big will accept the embarrassment of merely dropping the charges. They have to win, so this will go to court.

> It is a fact of reality that it is morally right to give people ownership rights

> precisely, like physics.

There is no place in the universe where the laws of physics do not apply, however there were and are societies without a notion of property, much less the moral right to property, thus property rights are nothing like the laws of physics. They are a product of your provincial worldview. Of course, property is a useful human invention, but it's nothing more than that.

Well, they're not really creating a distro from scratch in the way that Debian maintainers pull source code from various upstream projects and spend weeks to months doing bug testing. The RHEL sources that the SL folks pull have already been bug tested and verified to work very well. The SL folks are compiling those sources (with their own modifications). Of course, you could do this with the Debian or Ubuntu source code, but I guess they figure if you're going to get source code from somewhere, it might as well be a well-known enterprise distro.

> the hospital he works at still has Internet Explorer 6 installed on all computers there and they refuse to upgrade it for fear it might break compatibility with some ancient software program

Meanwhile your ability to do everything else breaks through shear attrition.

That is what Steve Jobs saw on acid.

I get what you're saying, but imagine that someone stole your TV, and the police found the guy, but they didn't get your TV back because the courts hadn't convicted the perpetrator yet. They should at least hold the assets in escrow until a resolution is reached, otherwise people could just spend / destroy the assets. Many courts will require a perpetrator to pay restitution in cases where a victim is financially harmed, but in this case there's nobody to pay back, just millions of dollars to blow before an inevitable conviction.

Quite right. Aside from backports, you can get things like the latest Firefox and LibreOffice on Ubuntu 10.04 thanks to PPAs. To those complaining that the 6 month update cycle is a turn off to "normal" users: put an Ubuntu LTS on their computer with a few PPAs to keep specific packages up to date.

One advantage of the distro model over the Windows model: you've never had a toolbar installed in your browser or your homepage changed because of a package you installed from a repo, have you? I find the Windows software ecosystem (at least the freeware portion of it) far more annoying than anything package managers do. Talk about unwanted changes to the user's computer.

> are there 20 of those 60,000 who should perhaps not go to college

And he presumes he and his staff are uniquely qualified in identifying those 20 out of 60,000?

But did give him a chance, in person and directly.

> Thiel did not respond to requests for comment.

Which is a bit better that quoting other comments that might be construed as out of context.

Even has dynamic DNS. Looks interesting. Does it work with ddclient?

It's funny how the author uses published studies to support his claim that science is broken. What's statistically more likely, that 80% of articles conflate "statistical significance" with colloquial "significance", or that one study misinterpreted many of the others. That requires bias on the part of only one team of authors. Nah, the studies that support my thesis must be true.

But if those studies (which reviewed other studies) are true, it's a nice example of the self-correcting nature of science. We've gotten this far. To say that science is fundamentally broken is a bit of an exaggeration.

I wholeheartedly agree. I've seen a few talks created with that tool and the "flying around the screen" gets old pretty fast.

It's interesting because the FBI was in a perfect position to perform the most well-known attack on Tor: a correlation / timing attack. "If your adversary can watch both ends of the connection, you lose." They could watch his end and probably knew where the chat server was located. If it was located in the US, it would have been pretty straightforward to send an agent / install a device at the data center and watch the traffic on both ends. Even if the server was in another country, it would be slightly more complicated to set up, but I'm sure local law enforcement would cooperate.

Despite all that, their "correlation attack" was distinctly low-tech. They watched the traffic leaving his residence and confirmed with a confidential informant logged into the chat server that he was online. It just shows that despite all the paranoia of the crypto-nerd crowd, even the second most sophisticated government agency in the world (perhaps after the NSA), pursuing a high value target, still can't or doesn't want to perform those kinds of attacks (maybe because they aren't reliable enough to hold up in a court of law).

And the CCC was claiming that they could fingerprint encrypted connections with 40% reliability. That's so far from being an effective real-world attack by even the most sophisticated organizations, that you'd be wasting your time ever worrying about it.

No, actually ZDI was right, because VUPEN broke out of Chrome's sandbox in the Pwn2Own contest (not Google's contest) and refused to explain the vulnerability, because it's far more valuable to sell to their customers:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/pwnium-and-pwn2own/

"A Google engineer offered Bekrar $60,000 on top of the $60,000 he stands to earn in the Pwn2Own contest if he handed over the sandbox exploit and details. But Bekrar declined and joked that he might consider the offer if Google bumped it up to $1 million. After the Google engineer left the conversation, Bekrar told Wired that money wasn’t the main enticement for him and he had no plans to hand over the exploit to Google.

"The Google security team member expressed frustration at Bekrar’s reluctance to provide information about the vulnerability so that it could be fixed."

The savvier kids have been maintaining multiple Facebook accounts for years: one where they friend their parents, family, church pastor, etc., and the other (under a pseudonym) where they have fun. It's like the social equivalent of a TrueCrypt hidden volume. Plausible deniability is the name of the game.

That problem is not specific to SSL client certs. It potentially affects every authentication mechanism (on the same computer). Typing in your passwords? Keylogger. Using a password manager? Stolen passwords. The password database is encrypted and you have to type in a password to decrypt it? Keylogger.

If your system is rooted / infected with malware, you lost. The only solution is to format the drive and start over.

The alternative is to use a 2 factor authentication mechanism that uses a separate device, like your phone receiving a text message. That's a pain for the average user, and certainly not "simpler".

> they should clearly separate tablet and desktop interfaces... like what Canonical is planning to do with their "Ubuntu for Android"

What? The whole point of Unity is to have a single interface. Canonical is making the exact same mistake as Microsoft.

Apparently, yes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark#Trademark_er...

Kind of limited with VPNs too. It would be great if you could simply import an OpenVPN configuration file, but in some cases the only solution is to skip Network Manager and start/stop the service from the command line.

> I just don't really put a high value on anything he has to say

Isaac Newton wasted the last decade of his life trying to turn stuff into gold, but his physical model of the universe was still quite correct, at least as a first approximation at the meso-scale (the best you could do at the time). You may find that one statement to be crazy, but I think the author still makes some important points about the flippant attitude toward privacy in the tech industry, which is supported by a thousand data points across dozens, perhaps hundreds of companies.

Good news. It should be noted that Ubuntu has included this fix since their distro version 3.0.0-13, and other distros may have backported the fix, too. But now it's in mainline.

It's already Constitutionally protected as speech. That's why it's not illegal anywhere in America, even though other "vices" like alcohol are.

> Google India meanwhile has removed web pages deemed offensive to Indian political... leaders

That's the most dangerous part.

I'm a graduate student in the sciences and every biology, chemistry and physics class that I took had a lab, except the evolution class. You could put the lectures online, but universities will never be completely replaced, as long as people want to learn science or do research.

> you just replaced one roadblock with another. One is technical and the other is financial (buying a Mac)

I think you hit on an important point. Most people seem to be approaching this from an adult / professional perspective. I'm thinking of the bright 14-year-old kid who wants to learn about computers. He (or his parents) may not be able to afford a $2000 Macbook, but he could build his own box relatively cheaply and put a free operating system on it. Linux is democratizing that way. And he can download the source code to virtually everything running on that box. That has undoubtedly inspired a few programmers.

torproject.org isn't blocked, is it?

> Full Screen APIs allow you to build a web application that runs full screen

Finally YouTube HTML5 videos can play full screen and not just full browser window.

Encryption is not so foolproof. A judge in Colorado has ordered a women to decrypt her laptop. The authorities will find ways to plug the loopholes that technology creates. If they can't break mathematics, they can break your will.