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An Ohio mother is trying to take on the NSA right now... http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

Powerful, highly stealthy Linux trojan may have infected victims for years

Backdoor tied to espionage campaign that has targeted governments in 45 countries.

http://arstechnica.com/securit...

http://www.arstechnica.com/gam...

What fascinates me about Mr. Bear is that he wasn't a "one-hit-wonder". He continued to innovate. He was also the inventor of Simon, and created the first light gun. Ars has an artical that's a good read about him.

this is the first time i've heard this claim. reference? i know of the hand wringing about if we can trust the h/w, but i didn't see any evidence that it was broken.

Ars Technica
New York Times
rt.com

Real music installs its own music service between iTunes and the iPod, falsify identifying itself as FairPlay and hacking Apples DRM. When Apple pushed out an update to remove "Harmony", it may have accidentally deleted some third party tunes. link

COPPA - Children's Online Privacy Protection Act is the law they are attempting to skirt through directed effort, which defines a child for the sake of all its protection as an individual under 13.

(1) IN GENERAL.â"It is unlawful for an operator of a website or online service directed to children, or any operator that has actual knowledge that it is collecting personal information from a child, to collect personal information from a child in a manner that violates the regulations prescribed under subsection (b). ... and it continues.

I wonder how they expect to monetize or indoctrinate this audience. As long as they don't violate the terms of the privacy law (which got iOS contact-stealing app company Path fined $800,000, in part for collecting on children) they can run a kid's site. This means that as long as they aren't wantonly scarfing details, they can still pitch sugar cereals.

The FBI's DaLAS System has been doing this for several years now, but with things in addition to child abuse imagery. Since we shared the system with the UK they presumably just copied the relevant parts/ideas.

Google and Apple can help them by making the encryption breakable.

Nope, that battle has already been fought. That would constitute compelled speech.

They can compel the company to provide information (such as source code) for their current data. Subpoenas have been doing that for decades.

They can compel the company to help them perform certain research.

They can even use NSLs to compel the company to intercept certain communications.

But at least so far, they cannot compel the company to modify their product to become defective.They still need to do that themselves, commonly by intercepting shipments or less commonly modifying chips inside the supply chain. Note that both routes are considered clandestine, they don't compel the business to intentionally release a faulty product, instead they just sabotage the results.

I'm more interested in how the crackers collected the passwords for the INTERNAL email systems at these companies.

You would be surprised at how many terribly important people use passwords like "p4ssword" or "abcdefg" because they just can't be bothered with anything else. You might even be more surprised at how long some people continue to have access to company systems even after they have been fired.

All it takes is a single mailbox and you can spread through the rest of the company and any company that it has contact with.

Because the crackers would have to, repeatedly, craft emails that were convincing enough to persuade their victims to submit their INTERNAL email passwords to an EXTERNAL site. Without anyone becoming suspicious enough to look into it.

You could always read a better article on the subject, or the original paper it was based on. Most big companies still use a horrible little mailbox program called "Outlook", which frequently loses its connection to the "Exchange" server and then pops up a dialog asking the user to enter their username and password again. I know, it seems crazy, but software like this is still in use today. The target receives an email promising terribly important information either in an attached spreadsheet or at the end of an obfuscated web redirection, opens a document associated with the swiss cheese like office suite which was installed on their computer when they bought it, and because they bypassed the annoying "I can't let you use this file because it came from the Internet" warning long ago, it immediately executes a bit of VB script to pop up a surprisingly familiar window asking for their password. They trust it, like they have been trained to do, and then it's all over.

The story at Ars has a video of an candid interview Kim Dotcom did with the press a couple of days ago... http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

I listened to the whole thing, and found it very interesting. Kim Dotcom gave fairly straight forward responses, and came off for me as an intelligent, not so bad guy. For sure it would be easy for us to envy his wealth, but IMHO he came about it by exploiting loopholes in the law, not by breaking the law.

Instead of pursuing Kim Dotcom to the ends of the earth (Sorry, NZers), why doesn't the US DOJ expend their effort prosecuting the crooks on Wall Street whole defrauded the whole world of a trillion dollars selling those bogus Credit Default Swaps that led up to the crash of 2008? Not one has been prosecuted, nor will they ever be.

The legal definition of Common Carrier is A carrier who accepts to transport goods or passengers indiscriminately.

They just don't want to be subject to the rules, but the times, they are a'changin'.

Regardless, the hardware throttles aggressively and there’s little one could do about that. For instance, when trying to play games, both the CPU and the GPU drop to very low frequencies. In fact, I wasn’t able to run properly any of the titles I’ve tried on this laptop, not even older ones like Dirt3 on HD resolution with very low details. I did got somewhat better results when playing the game in Window mode, as you can see from the pictures below (look for Average CPU and GPU frequencies), but switching to Fullscreen resulted in an average of 6-8 fps. The same happend when trying Metro Last Light and I just gave up after that.

My point here is that at this rate, Apple will be putting out a fanless device that is faster, uses less power, has less thermal throttling (so wins both sprints and marathons). As of now, they have a device that uses less power and is faster at certain operations and will win most marathons.

The good news for you is that at the bottom of the profession is enough money to feed a family and pay off what you fear is a worthless degree.

The problem is that the poster isn't even at the bottom of the ladder. He hasn't stepped on even the first rung. And pay at the bottom won't pay your bills. Not when you're competing with everyone else who finds themselves in the same situation - new to the field, no practical experience, etc. And even when he gets to the point where he can make an app, the numbers are awful:

Accounting for 47% of app developers, the “have nothings” include the 24% of app developers – who are interested in making money, it should be noted – who make nothing at all.

Meanwhile, 23% make something, but it’s under $100 per month

and this

How Do You Make Money When Less Than 1% Of Apps Are 'Financially Successful'

and this

There is no shortage of stories about lone developers who made an app for the iPhone or iPad and had runaway success. But in the real world, the majority of app makers struggle to break even, according to a recent survey by marketing firm App Promo. Though the survey's methodology is a bit on the light side, numerous developers that we spoke to agree that the results -- 59 percent of apps don't break even, and 80 percent of developers can't sustain a business on their apps alone -- are close to accurate.

I'd be shouting "It's a trap!" but I think with these numbers, I don't have to. And the numbers are only going to get worse over time.

Their product was only "better" because their competitors at the time only had crap products.

That's kind of how it works in general. Some products are superior to other, inferior, products.

Why not just say "they wouldn't have had a product that was 'better' than the competition if the competition had a superior product". So silly...

The global sales of smartphones during that time was about 1/20th of what they are now. It's easy to be the biggest fish when the pond is small.

Good effort. Now, ask yourself: 'why did the market grow?' Because the smartphone market expanded in to the consumer space. Companies started to offer their inferior products (read: ill-suited to the enterprise) with features attractive to consumers. BlackBerry faltered in the consumer market because consumers aren't interested in the features that enterprise users demanded. As the market grew, it was no surprise to see their market-share fall -- they weren't competing in the same space. (Ignoring their less-than-successful entries in to the consumer market, that is.)

Anyhow, now that the smartphone hype as all died down, I don't see any reason that BlackBerry couldn't make a strong come-back, at least in the enterprise. Someone else linked to this review which indicates that BB can still build a workhorse for the serious business user. (I'll even offer the same quote: " It was unexpectedly the best smartphone we've ever used from the perspective of taking care of business.")

Time will tell, but they've clearly started to play to their strengths. The new BlackBerry Classic has caught my eye. My battered old 8820 never let me down. A 2014 version of that just might cure my mobile woes. I doubt that I'm the only one who feels that way.

http://www.arstechnica.com/gad...

@benjymouse: "Any particular reason you chose to call it a worm, despite that it was described as a trojan in the summary as well as in TFA?"

"Backdoor Regin .. bears some resemblance to .. the computer worm and trojan that was programmed to disrupt Iran's nuclear program"

The only trick is getting local state and city officials to upgrade for 4G LTE without paperwork showing to local media or a FIOA request.
Cities scramble to upgrade “stingray” tracking as end of 2G network looms (Sept 2 2014)
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

Stingray, the fake cell phone tower cops and carriers use to ...

This is the 8th hit on a Google lookup on the word "stingray". This is (in theory, at least), a tech site. You're telling us it didn't occur to you to look for something having to do with "stingray" and tech of some sort?

In addition, the linked Ars Technica article has this:

According to the Observer, which did not publish the records in full, but summarized some of them, the “CMPD sought permission to use cellphone surveillance more than 500 times since 2010, or about twice a weekDocuments and interviews suggest judges rarely, if ever, denied authorization requested by CMPD to use equipment that can intercept cellphone information from criminal suspects and innocent people alike.

In any case, now you know: Americans call mobile phones "cell phones".

Go forth now, my son! And spread your hard-won knowledge amongst those less fortunate and diligent than thou. :)

Re Need to keep things secret?
Thats what the release of the records will show. Legal teams can go over past cases and talk about what was done to the press.
Issues of parallel construction, what legal teams saw or where not allowed to see and when can be talked about to the press.
Legal teams can then talk to the press about the use of a IMSI catcher, IMSI catcher like devices with denial-of-service attack options, location monitoring, transceiver amplifiers.
Meet the machines that steal your phone’s data (Sept 26 2013)
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
If the US wants a secret court it can talk to all the legal teams and find cleared legal staff and experts depending on the case.

Stop whining. You can buy a Dell Ultrasharp U2311H monitor and run it in portrait mode today.

And I can't get up.

From the Ars article: Coming soon: Slow, heavy, shrieking, autonomous robot rent-a-cops

Should anybody choose to attack the K5, as opposed to walking briskly away, the unit can react with a shrieking alarm that Stephens described as like "a car alarm but much more intense." That will probably happen shortly after the K5 falls to the ground, unable to right itself, which actually happened during Knightscope's MIT robot demo.

"Ben Franklin and others who owned printers realized that copyright didn't apply to them, so they promptly began making copies of everything - books, sheet music, etc."

I had know that for much of US history there was no respect for foreign copyrights (from other countries). I never saw anyone connect this to Ben Franklin's success before. Interesting!

Now that I look:
"Benjamin Franklin, Copyright Pirate"
http://www.tuxdeluxe.org/node/...

And:
"Benjamin Franklin, the first IP pirate?"
http://arstechnica.com/informa...

They don't explicitly say, but it looks very much like they're using a Moorefield system, like the Nokia N1. The PowerVR graphics in the Moorefield benchmark well on Android, but it's no good.

The PowerVR drivers are closed-source, the company is hostile to open source, and even on Android the performance is inconsistent. See page 2 of Ars Technica's review of the Nexus Player. And in Jolla, the device driver is not native to the operating system, but goes through libhybris.

I refuse to support PowerVR outside of iOS, so I'm going to sit this one out.

And you know.. the hardware. Seeing as their CPUs continually run circles around everyone and are even giving Intel a run for their money. The nvidia K1 in the Nexus9 (dual core 64bit version) looks promising but they had to clock it at 2.3Ghz and still lost to Apple at 1.5ghz.

Not really. Apple hardware isn't all that impressive - single core specs show the A8 isn't as fast as say a 2.5GHz Snapdragon (32-bit mode).

However, the secret sauce of iOS IS what is important as it's more efficient, letting a relatively puny 1.5GHz A8 run circles around Androids that run far faster 2.5GHz CPUs.

Nevermind said Androids have easily a 1.5-3x memory bump (1 or 2GB vs. 3GB in the newest Android phones).

Spec-sheet wise, the only thing Apple really has over everyone else is 64-bit (which admittedly isn't about memory, it's about speed - AArch64 runs code much faster because a lot of AArch32 features were stripped to be more compatible with a superscalar core).

Of course, a big part of it is Apple is able to tweak the software to their needs and spend time doing so. Samsung doesn't have that luxury when they release more than 1 new smartphone a week (56 so far in 2014 alone!) and 1 new tablet every two weeks. Or LG, which released 41 since the start of the year. Versus Apple's 6 or so (4 of which were just minor tweaks of the base model)..

(And given Apple actually does design and development in the US, I find it hard for them to "just be a brand". Here, Nokia basically farmed it all out to Foxconn, including support. Apple still does in-house support (not even an Indian call centre - in Texas), in-house industrial design, in-house SoC design, etc. Sure, they work with Foxconn, but that's more in talks with Foxconn on how to make the products. In Nokia's case, Foxconn is an ODM (original design manufacturer - basically they design and support the product), while Apple use Foxconn as a CM (contract manufacturer - they just take the parts given and assemble/test/ship))

"Lawful intercept" has entered the business models of Verisign and CISCO. I would not trust CISCO... http://www.forbes.com/2010/02/...

Not even an inch... http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

Proper security on a network is properly done at the endpoints. Its doesn't belong anywhere else.

What is Mozilla thinking?? They could help fund Convergence.io. They could implement clever ways to get it to ride on existing social networks. They could look at network privacy layers that use public keys as addresses. There are options for improving privacy that don't involve elevating the PKi clusterf*ck any further.

it does seem like Foxconn have ripped off the iPad mini design

actually it says this is a Nokia design:
Nokia is responsible for the industrial design

and are using the "Nokia" (Microsoft) brand

wrong, from the summary:
This story has a twist, though: the N1 is not a Nokia device. Nokia doesn't have a device unit anymore: it sold its Devices and Services business to Microsoft in 2013.

given that Microsoft have a cross-licensing deal with Apple that lets Microsoft and Apple rip each other off as much as they like.

but Microsoft has nothing to do with this, Nokia is not owned by Microsoft, they just sold one of their divisions (one that is not involved with this device at all) to Microsoft.

how is parent modded "informative" it is completely wrong in every aspect except pointing out the similarity to the ipad. in fact it is plainly clear the commenter did not even read the summary much less the article and just started commenting based on what he thought the story might be about and then drawing conclusions. should be modded "misinformative".

For more info UK regulators officially mock US over ISP âoecompetitionâ

ArsTechnica article, with cool buggy zombie pic... http://arstechnica.com/gaming/...

The llink changed, pic in this ArsTechnica article.... http://arstechnica.com/gaming/...

And don't forget the alternate risks of mugging you're subjecting children to by having them carry around a $600 thief-magnet

While I don't disagree with your general point, theft rates started dropping as soon as Apple added Activation Lock to iOS 7. There's not a lot of street value in a device that can't be used, and they're not the thief magnet they were even a year ago.

All, except the nice bits...

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets...

If I were a Mayor of a city that AT&T serves; I would respond by saying that this will mean the city will need to start rolling out it's own gigabit network now.

AT&T can't complain that the city is competing with them, if AT&T isn't providing the service in the first place.

Of course. Which is why they (among others) support blocking municipal broadband networks.

Oh please, how batshit can you get FOSSie? Oh nice M$ BTW, you deserve a Linux Party!. Are you SERIOUSLY soooo fucking delusional that you think MSFT is gonna jump through all those hoops and go through all that bullshit for....what exactly? To attack your "precious" which is all but dead in the consumer space with the exception of the Google "Watch us pull a EEE on them dumb FOSSies" Android?

News Flash the NEW CEO IS NOT STEVE BALMER and therefor doesn't do things the old way. he sees no point in worrying about the copyrights and patents on a programming framework because hey! The value of a programming language is WHAT YOU BUILD WITH IT not what patents and copyrights you have on it! To everybody who isn't a batshit crazy FOSSie its obvious what he's doing, the more platforms a .NET application runs on the better and since Nadella seems to be heading into a more services and support direction this makes damned good business sense.

So you go back to living like its 1998 and its Billy Gates versus RMS and the rest of us will live in the 2010s,mmmkay?

Let's say you really wanted to buy drugs on-line because you thought it was a good idea for whatever reason. Do you trust your own ability not to be traced (which is paramount), in addition to the quality of encryption and other feats provided by your dealer. That's a real risk. Plus, how many of these sites are honeypots, (and when/if they get busted, and their encryption isn't up to snuff they might as well be honeypots for purposes of this discussion)? Buyer beware.

Evolution in this case means not only good customer service, but quality encryption as well. Beware of dependencies, no pun intended.

From the Gnome bug report:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/sho...

Some key dates for the use of the word "activities":

14 April 2008: "Add Activity" button implemented in KDE Plasma
http://websvn.kde.org/?view=re...

29 April 2008: KDE 4.1 Alpha 1 released
http://www.kde.org/announcemen...

29 May 2008: First detailed press reports on KDE's activity concept
http://arstechnica.com/open-so...

29 July 2008: KDE 4.1.0 released
http://www.kde.org/announcemen...

11 October 2008: "Activities menu" concept added to GNOME wiki during the
Boston GNOME Hackfest
http://live.gnome.org/action/d...

The FCC is not Congress. It's an executive department under the aegis of the President, who is the chief of the Executive Branch. The courts already basically said the FCC is free to categorize ISPs as common carriers unless Congress passes a law to stop it. Read the Ars article about it.

If they declare ISPs to be common carriers, then they can apply common carrier regulations on them. The problem with parts of the Open Internet Order was that they were applying common carrier regulations to ISPs without classifying them as common carriers beforehand. The FCC is free to do so under current laws. They just haven't done it.
 

Amen. Politicians don't get it period. Example: Democrats in Cali "solve" wireless problems: http://arstechnica.com/uncateg...

Why don't other countries have a net neutrality problem? Because they have competition among their ISPs. If an ISP tries to deliberately slow down a popular website to extort the site for extra payments, it doesn't put pressure on the website to pay. Instead it puts pressure on the ISP's customers to switch to another ISP. In most of the rest of the world, any ISP trying to pull this stunt puts itself out of business.

It only works in the U.S. because these ISPs have government-granted monopolies over the local customer base. The customer can't flee to a different ISP because there is none - the local government has made it illegal for there to be a competitor. Essentially, net neutrality is more government regulation to solve a problem caused by government regulation.

According to Ars Techinca (and many others) UK regulators officially mock US over ISP "competition":

Here's how US regulators do a broadband plan: talk about competition even while admitting there isn't enough, then tinker around the edges with running fiber to "anchor institutions" and start collecting real data on US broadband use.

Here's how they do it in the UK: order incumbent telco BT to share its fiber lines with any ISP who is willing to pay. In places where BT hasn't yet run fiber, order the company to share its ducts and poles with anyone who wants to run said fiber. In the 14 percent of the UK without meaningful broadband competition, slap price controls on Internet access to keep people from getting gouged. [...]

"Aside from small urban countries with highly concentrated populations, like Singapore, the main countries which are currently leading in the rollout and take-up of super-fast broadband are those which have had significant government intervention to support deployment, such as Japan and South Korea."

I've Googled around and I can't find any evidence that backs up your implication that consumers benefit from less government regulation of ISPs. Everything I've seen says the benefits in non-US countries stem from greater government intervention.

The nuanced Republican stance you refer to seems to be a code-phrase for BS. IMO the core of the problem is there is a lot of BS flying around because our corporate controlled "fair and balanced" media (including the NYT) refuse to call out politicians on outright lies. This gives a decided advantage to those who lie more. With no checks and balances from the media, public debate is mired in giant echo chambers filled with BS.

You mean, after AT&T was regulated by being broken up and by being forced to allow third-party devices (e.g. modems), major innovation was able to start.

Umm, no. On a couple counts:

• Divestiture didn't have anything to do with attaching 3rd party devices to the phone network; you're thinking of the Carterfone decision from 1968, which was a full 16 years before AT&T was split up.
• AT&T was actually more heavily regulated before its divestiture, as a nationwide telecommunications monopoly. It was prevented from getting into whole lines of business (hence why it gave away UNIX because it couldn't sell it). The divestiture was pursued specifically to strip away the heavily regulated parts (the local telcos) from the largely unregulated parts (long distance, cable, etc.) See this book for more details. Under that regulation, think about the degree of innovation you got out of the Baby Bells... who were still pushing ISDN as "broadband" in the late '90s.
• The one piece of regulation that did actually manage to spur consumer-friendly innovation in telecom in recent memory was the 1996 Telecom Act, which actually reduced regulation in many areas (the "carrot" for telcos) while simultaneously increasing competition in others (the "stick"), such as forcing the Baby Bells to allow competitive access to their DSLAMs to provide DSL service, etc.

Regulation is very important in many industries, including telecommunications. But it is almost never synonymous with innovation.

Yes, they have... And don't worry about Udall's loss. He wasn't stopping anything. There are two independents in all of congress, nothing will be done about the NSA. Forget about it. It's over. This is what people want, and there's no arguing with it.

When you talk about Firefox being "properly multi-core ready", are you referring to the Electrolysis project? The one that still hasn't produced anything usable by the masses since work started on it back in the summer of 2009?

Come on. This isn't even about "rationalizing why you're using Chrome". A lot of former Firefox users have moved on to Safari, or even back to Internet Explorer. This is just about Firefox lacking, technologically, compared to its competitors. People are moving away from it because it's just plain bad compared to the alternatives these days. It isn't just worse than Chrome; it's worse than Safari and IE, even!

Here's the reality of trying to watch police officers:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

They're used to being above the law - not following rules.

"It's a stupid way to get to space. We're going to look back 100 years from now and think 'what a stupid thing.'"

- Cmdr Chris Hadfield (on using rockets to get into space) http://arstechnica.com/science...

AFAIK, today, even the US is back to the pre-1970 era. IIRC, NASA has lost knowledge about the Saturn's engine.

You mean the F-1? The funny thing is, NASA never had a lot of knowledge about the engine in the first place: the computers of the time were not powerful enough to allow them to simulate a lot of stuff, so a lot of the design decisions were simple guesswork. (The same actually goes for the Russians, too.) Here's a great article on a recent piece of "industrial archeology".

I wonder if the Unity + (JavaScript | Boo | C#) combination would produce better results and in less time. The nice thing about using Unity is that you will eventually be able to run the apps in a browser without a plugin. http://arstechnica.com/gadgets...

Why do you think climate science is so heavily influenced by politics? I'd say the influence is no greater than in the pharmaceutical or food industries. It's there, but it's always possible to pick out the bullshit because influencing the peer review process with money would be incredibly difficult, and to my knowledge has never been successfully done before. This is where the International Conspiracy of Scientists would be required. Every scientist on the planet would have to be paid off to keep their mouth shut, and not blow the lid on the biggest conspiracy in history and receive Nobels and become as revered as Einstein. See also:

http://arstechnica.com/science...

Lets say some scientist came out and said there was no AGW and it the world was fine. What would you immediately say about that person? You'd say they were wrong, bought off, crazy, etc. Never mind you've never read their research and don't actually know why they said that. You would assume they were wrong out of hand. And you would immediately take steps to destroy their career, shut them out of the process, etc.

That person would seem pretty crazy just on the gist of their argument which flies directly in the face of decades of established science, but that's not the end of it. I would indeed assume that they're wrong up front, until proven otherwise - then I'd proceed to look at their research and see why they're wrong. Any scientist would do the same. It's not a conspiracy or groupthink. This is just how science works. A strange new idea has to be good enough to stand up to scrutiny and overturn established theories - whether it's right like tectonic plates or heliocentrism were, or wrong like the vast majority of radically different new theories that are largely incompatible with established ones have been.

Now does that mean AGW isn't real and isn't a threat? Absolutely not. It could be every bit as bad as you claim. However, you don't know that and neither does anyone but a few scientists that have studied it deeply. But what they say can't be trusted because you have a knife to their throat.

Nobody has a knife to anyone's throat. A scientist won't get their reputation ruined for publishing results that go against AGW theory. They'd get their reputation ruined for publishing bullshit science, regardless of the field in question. It just so happens that there are a lot of kooks spewing garbage claiming that AGW is fake.

There have been a few upsets in the last few years and nobody was ruined. For example if you were correct, "the pause" would have been plastered over with a thick layer of bullshit after the scientists who found it were ridiculed to death. But instead we find that the heat has gone into the ocean instead of the atmosphere, and denialists are all over it like a puppy with a new toy because the destination of the heat wasn't predicted corrrectly.

Scientists are not stupid. They know what you'll do. They've seen it happen. So IF/WHEN they found such evidence, what makes you think they'd sacrifice everything to tell you something that you wouldn't listen to in the first place?

Because that is what you'd call a scientific breakthrough. Nobel prizes, historical immortality, all that good stuff, and good news for mankind in this case. That is science gold. Why the hell would they put that gold back in the mine?

That's nonsense. Go look at what eventually happened to HB Gary Federal and how all that started, (by using a custom CMS).

Your best bet is to pay close attention to security releases, and be thankful the for the Drupal Security Team which is on top of these issues. For more clarity, read these:

https://www.previousnext.com.au/blog/drupal-732-critical-update-our-response

https://www.acquia.com/blog/learning-hackers-week-after-drupal-sql-injection-announcement

Seriously, compared to the Drupal Security Team which I know about, what other CMS' have such thorough teams and processes? Use Drupal and the same folks that look after the websites for the US Congress, the White House, and many other government websites become your Security Team, for free. Just learn to do your part properly.

They are not the same thing. While similar and while both use NFC that's about where the similarities stop: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets...

And if you want to enlighten people about their misunderstandings of your religion, it's probably wise to know the difference between a "statement" and a "question," and, at a bare minimum, decency requires not conflating ignorance of internal concepts like "ex cathedra" to stupidity.

Otherwise, you come across as just another thumpin' asshole.

It's complicated. Many old religions have two components: the popular beliefs and the philosophical part of them. This is true of Catholicism (do not confuse with Christianism), Buddhism, etc.

The philosophical part is complicated. It's not something that you just explain in a couple of sentences on Slashdot, it will take some studying to get the meaning right of many concepts, such as "ex cathedra" or "metaphysical causality".

Going back on the topic of the article, you could read a great comment at the bottom of this story: http://arstechnica.com/science... that gives (IMHO) a great summary of on what the Catholic Church believes regarding evolution and big bang.