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I'd say obviously that was satire, but terrifyingly at least one of these terms has been used (albeit wildly wrongly.)

You know why you hate TMRepo, which BTW you should be fucking ASHAMED of comparing a JOKE SITE to Stromfront you douchebag, but you know why you hate it? Because like all good jokes its FUNNY BECAUSE ITS TRUE.

I can answer ALL of your arguments with the top 20 TMRepos, you know why? Its the SAME FUCKING EXCUSES the FOSSies have been using for a fricking decade, that's why! How do you think TMRepo came to be? a guy got tired of hearing the same old FOSSie bullshit and decided to just start listing them and tada! TMRepo.

So go back to your circle of loon, go back to pretending that the OEMs haven't all walked away from your broken mess because they got tired of the broken shit which even ESR can't make work while claiming that android is Linux.

Know what the definition of insanity is? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result and that is Linux in a nutshell which is why me and every other B&M retailer and OEM have run away screaming from your mess, why even Dell hides it on a back page and gives you multiple warning before they will even sell it to you and just FYI unlike the Windows versions NO SUPPORT because even they know that shit is gonna break. I mean for the love of God fricking God Windows 8, the most hated windows since MSBob, got more users by its second month than Linux has in its entire history, what more proof do you fucking need that your current bullshit direction ain't working?

BTW know why I can produce so many citations and all you can produce is insults? because just like TMRepo I've heard the same excuses from FOSSies for so damned long i know EXACTLY what to type into a search engine to cut through your lies, but you hang onto your bullshit but if you have the balls take the Hairyfeet challenge, I dare you, double dare you to film it and upload it, you'll find that even giving Linux just HALF the support cycle of Linux it WILL fail, know why? Because the "let the devs do it" driver horseshit is just that,total fucking horseshit and IT DOES NOT WORK, it will NEVER work, and THAT is why even the other free OSes refuse to use his fucked up driver model!

I'll get hate but screw it, the reason linux goes nowhere is the same reason you name the distro and it won't pass the "Hairyfeet Challenge" which is already tilted badly in Linux' favor, and that is Linus Torvalds gives more care about religious dogma than designing an OS that works and since the vast majority of the public are NOT what I call "FOSSies" and do not give a rat turd about GPL purity Linux goes nowhere. I mean for God's sake guys, there is several orders of magnitude more people willing to risk tens of thousands in fines and possible jail time to steal the other guy's product than take yours for free, doesn't that set off a lightbulb above your head?

The simple fact of the matter is that NOBODY uses Torvalds fucked up "Let the devs do it" driver model, not even the other free as in freedom OSes like BSD and Solaris and the reason why is it DOES NOT WORK, hell you can use basic math to show why it'll never work, ready? You have MAYBE 400 guys working with Torvalds and qualified to write and debug low level systems drivers, following so far? Now add in the fact that there is probably a good 10,000 new devices coming out per quarter MINIMUM and a good 100,000+ drivers that are ALREADY in the tree....see the problem yet? if you mainlined those devs on Bolivian Marching Powder so they NEVER slept and ONLY worked on drivers you'd have each driver getting around 20 minutes worth of time every 3 years or so, which is why you end up with drivers like these that were half assed and piss poor to begin with, only having half the hardware functional, and are poorly supported on top of that.

But what do we get when we point this out, and what I'm sure to hear here? We don't need no steekin ABI and then you expect, with a straight face and without a trace of irony, for Joe and jane Average to do forum hunts, google for fixes, and be able to tweak piles of CLI crapola because thanks to Torvalds fucked up way of dealing with drivers, which worked in 93 when you had a couple of hundred drivers but just can't scale to the number we have today, leaves even Eric Raymond unable to get a printer to work over the network, a feature that the other guy has been doing since WinXP in 01 trivially. In fact the ONLY response you can show from the kernel devs is a RELIGIOUS argument, in fact the dev even wrote "and I hope we break none free drivers often!" which if that doesn't show you its about the GPL religion over having a functional OS then I don't know what will.

At the end of the day you have to be either the most arrogant prick on the planet or fucking deluded to look and see that EVERY SINGLE OTHER OS does it one way, BSD, Solaris, Windows, OSX, iOS, fuck even OS/2 and your "dear leader" goes for the exact opposite approach, one that NOBODY other than him uses, and then to believe he is actually right and they are wrong, that he is fucking smarter than ALL those OS devs put together? I'm sorry but that is bullshit and ironically the community knows it too even if they won't say it out loud. after all what does everybody on the forums tell you to buy from graphics? Nvidia a NON FREE DRIVER because what do you know, the driver actually WORKS. sadly Nvidia is the only company it seems willing to blow that much money supporting Linux, the rest aren't gonna pay an entire dev team to fix what Torvalds and Co. break and Joe and jane sure as fuck ain't gonna put with updates shitting all over drivers and forum hunts for fixes.

Phase seven is going back to software again. i.e. the Wheel of Reincarnation.

Remember DSPs, memory, onboard in sound cards? LISP Machines? Ageia PhysX cards? etc, etc.

The majority of individuals here whom speak against Dropbox or other cloud providers are seemingly speaking as individuals. Now, going with the assumption that these are individuals, how many of us would actually detect an active, ongoing exploit on our own workstations? How many of us would actually detect that it's a zero-day and, on top of that, the precise mechanism being exploited, during the exploit window?

Truth be told, I don't think that any of us would notice someone breaking into our PCs. An exploit of NSA sophistication wouldn't have X11 sessions crashing, wouldn't have xterms closing or freezing up, and wouldn't be doing much more that's visible to the end user aside from a few mystery entries in 'ps' and maybe an increase in disk I/O. And how many of us truly worry about exactly what processes are running at all times? I don't, because I'd like to do something other than stare at 'top' 24/7/365.2425. Maybe I want to go do a spreadsheet of my finances. Maybe I want to jerk it to some porn. Maybe I want to make insanely retarded machinima in Garry's Mod, or be the capitalist of Karl Marx's nightmares in OpenTTD. And when I'm doing these things, I don't reserve any of my screenspace to 'top' or any other detailed load monitor. I don't want some crap distracting me from the productive or entertaining task at hand, which generally leads to the dismal lossage of state (sense 2). If, for whatever reason, you do, maybe you should actually consider going pencil-and-paper and skip the computer altogether, or maybe even as far as considering seeing a mental health specialist. The average person, hell, even the average intelligent person's psychology doesn't tend itself to such levels of paranoia. Even in the appearance of total surveillance, after the initial shock of the realization of your current predicament, most of us eventually realize there's fuck-all to be done about it, and resume our lives as normal. And going about a generally mundane life and routine typically doesn't lend itself to the extreme levels of situational awareness needed to be aware of an intrusive surveillance attack.

After all, if we're to talk about the "real world" capability of the NSA, which is to say that it's well overstated, how does the "real world" person mix up with the "potential" NSA? Food for thought, people, food for thought. Simply my understanding of how some 99% or so of Americans behave in regards to the situation considered.

Of course, then the question of "why would the NSA come after me?" has been asked. This is a real simple one. We're all well aware of just how much of a colossal clusterfuck the US Government is. It's not a far stretch to think that in their infinite stupidity, they fungle some intelligence report or even the carrying out of an intelligence operation, and get back erroneous or even just incompetently gathered or generated data that indicates that you are an active threat of some kind.

Yeah, because knowing there's a project called "DISHFIRE" is so utterly helpful to figuring out what they're doing. Because we all live in conspiracy theorist wish fulfillment movies where this one grizzled screwball is screaming about how he knew there was something called "DISHFIRE", and why didn't we believe him before, and now we can stop it... somehow... whatever it is.

The names are mostly random because they don't necessarily bear any resemblance to the projects.

But having a publicly-trawlable bunch of data that links real-world humans, their real-world qualifications, and the projects that they've been read in on, however, is precisely the sort of social graph that an adversary could use to figure out what the codenamed projects are actually all about.

If there are dozens of cunning linguists and digital signal processing experts working on DEATHSTAR, and all the people who list MSPACMAN happen to have oceanography backgrounds or prior experience at companies that make precision optics, it doesn't take a genius to see that despite their names, DEATHSTAR is the project that's more likely to be NSA Line Eater, and MSPACMAN the project that involves sharks with frickin' lasers on their heads.

The real conspirator. The other clue that Snowden is innocent is that he only has a goatee.

How could I be specific if all I can see, as an average office worker, that whenever I try to print to PDF, Word pops up the red X and spits out 123 screens of code on the level of the Voynich Manuscript, completely unreadable to the uninitiated.

You could copy at least the first few lines of it. See (and I hate to break it to you like this) just because you don't understand it doesn't mean nobody does. You could give some details of what you were trying to print, especially if it's out of the ordinary in some way (has 47,023 pages with embedded animated 3D gif watermarks or whatever). At least get a screenshot.

Any one of those would be a zillion times better than "OMG CAN'T PRINT FOM WOARD AGAIN."

Haven't seen a mention of this yet: http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.htmlâZ

Actually... http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/sextips/

Plus ESR's Sex tips are not bad either.

It is a Macintrash, after all.

Compare social engineering , brute force.

How about "socio-electrical engineering"?

Compare social engineering , brute force.

How about "socio-electrical engineering"?

Oblig answer

Similarly, from the Jargon File:

rubber-hose cryptanalysis : n.

[sci.crypt newsgroup] The technique of breaking a code or cipher by
      finding someone who has the key and applying a rubber hose vigorously and
      repeatedly to the soles of that luckless person's feet until the key is
      discovered. Shorthand for any method of coercion: the originator of the
      term drily noted that it can take a surprisingly short time and is
      quite computationally inexpensive relative to other cryptanalysis
      methods. Compare social engineering ,
      brute force.

Wikipedia also has it the term Thermorectal cryptanalysis for it, which brings disturbing images to mind. The comments on Schneier on Security suggest that hot soldering irons are involved. :-S

Oblig answer

Similarly, from the Jargon File:

rubber-hose cryptanalysis : n.

[sci.crypt newsgroup] The technique of breaking a code or cipher by
      finding someone who has the key and applying a rubber hose vigorously and
      repeatedly to the soles of that luckless person's feet until the key is
      discovered. Shorthand for any method of coercion: the originator of the
      term drily noted that it can take a surprisingly short time and is
      quite computationally inexpensive relative to other cryptanalysis
      methods. Compare social engineering ,
      brute force.

Wikipedia also has it the term Thermorectal cryptanalysis for it, which brings disturbing images to mind. The comments on Schneier on Security suggest that hot soldering irons are involved. :-S

Oblig answer

Similarly, from the Jargon File:

rubber-hose cryptanalysis : n.

[sci.crypt newsgroup] The technique of breaking a code or cipher by
      finding someone who has the key and applying a rubber hose vigorously and
      repeatedly to the soles of that luckless person's feet until the key is
      discovered. Shorthand for any method of coercion: the originator of the
      term drily noted that it can take a surprisingly short time and is
      quite computationally inexpensive relative to other cryptanalysis
      methods. Compare social engineering ,
      brute force.

Wikipedia also has it the term Thermorectal cryptanalysis for it, which brings disturbing images to mind. The comments on Schneier on Security suggest that hot soldering irons are involved. :-S

Oblig answer

Similarly, from the Jargon File:

rubber-hose cryptanalysis : n.

[sci.crypt newsgroup] The technique of breaking a code or cipher by
      finding someone who has the key and applying a rubber hose vigorously and
      repeatedly to the soles of that luckless person's feet until the key is
      discovered. Shorthand for any method of coercion: the originator of the
      term drily noted that it can take a surprisingly short time and is
      quite computationally inexpensive relative to other cryptanalysis
      methods. Compare social engineering ,
      brute force.

Wikipedia also has it the term Thermorectal cryptanalysis for it, which brings disturbing images to mind. The comments on Schneier on Security suggest that hot soldering irons are involved. :-S

Telling people to "do your utmost to avoid asking questions that you can find the answers to" is really bad advice. I've seen this sentiment a lot and Eric Raymond wrote an entire article (How To Ask Questions The Smart Way) that boils down to RTFM and is outright contemptuous of newbies.

Asking questions is a fast way to get a problem resolved and people should not be intimidated from doing that. On the mailing lists I frequent, newbie questions are asked all the time and answered fairly quickly. A nice side effect is that you learn something new by skimming posts that aren't relevant to you. So asking questions has a benefit to persons other than the one who's asking. Other mediums, like IRC channels, exist to get problems resolved quickly and how can you do that if you do not ask?

Now, I agree that you should do some research before asking, simply because it might be quicker to find an answer that way. But if after a bit of research you can't figure it out then go ask a question!

I'm going to guess he's going to look back on his life and realize that he was dumb to think he'd seen it all at age 24. He talks as though the Third Age of Middle Earth is ending

In some important ways, it is. The process isn't complete, but there is a fundamental change happening, and it will discomfit some of us.

The days of 'Homesteading the Noosphere' (as ESR put it), are coming to a close. Scale, network topologies, business models and legal encroachment on the principles of individual online freedom are all conspiring to make the technological world we live in substantially more constrained than it's been since the internet became part of our lives.

The land rush is over, the cowboys are gone (either buried or rich) and the homesteaders are being bought out by the speculators and tycoons. Community-based governance is under siege by national and international interests.

And this is being reflected in the tech world. The craftsman's approach to software (always greater in repute than in reality) is decidedly more difficult to practice as a trade than it was. Toolkits are giving way to frameworks and apps replace applications. Backyard-mechanic roadsters and dirt-track races are swallowed up by Nascar - VCs get us excited by the prospect of building only big enough to sell out to someone bigger.

The physical networks themselves are being taken back by the telcos and proffered to governments for surveillance in exchange for ever more egregious rent-seeking behaviour. What we used to call sharing is now piracy. The word 'copyright' now means 'don't copy at all, ever.'

And in the midst of it all, we're grateful to lockin-vendors who make Free software difficult, if not impossible, to use. We rent what we used to own. Even our identities are no longer our own.

I grieve to say it, but unless there's a sudden and immense resurgence of the DIY spirit, especially in peer networking and distributed data, we're going to fall back into the bad old days of the dumb terminal and the smart network. And that network's smarts will not exist for our benefit.

I'm pushing 50 now, and do I fear change? Not really. I just regret the lost freedom, the creative anarchy of the '90s, the ability to hack something cool and new, the chance to achieve things never before possible. It's not gone yet. We could still turn things around. But every day we don't brings us a day closer to the day when we can't any longer.

Here's another:

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/index.html

It's a thing with a huge amount of content, in a pleasant, elegant, and readable form. Yes, it's mostly just plaintext. So?

The modern equivalent I think is reddit, which is similarly barebones -- just a bunch of text, and people writing text in response to text -- but it clearly works.

Or maybe he's a 3+-armed alien, you insensitive clod. :)

(It is clear that he's not familiar with the common geek saying, "on the gripping hand", though.)

NOW THEY'RE SCARED. NERDS WITH GUNS!!!!

Nerds with guns? What an idea.

Some Techies Hear Call of the Shooting Range

Eric S. Raymond's Home Page - Eric's Gun Nut Page

I have to[sic] words for you moron: PROVE IT

I can't prove it just as you can't disprove it. All I can do is provide research and evidence.

http://www.catb.org/esr/guns/point-blank-summary.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kleck#References

PS - You do sound like a whiny jackass.

The problem is with the increasing fascination by GUI developers with new features and technologies and an "experience" over usable tools. See the old "Luxury of Ignorance" essay by Eric Raymond about *exactly* what is wrong with a lot of open source interfaces, specially the recent Gnome abuse of the user's eyes and brains. The essay was written in 2004: and some things just don't change. (The CUPS management tool, used as an example, has not fixed a single problem described in the essay.)

          http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cups-horror.html

Now THAT is hilarious. Complaining that malloc is non-deterministic and then alluding to dependence upon garbage collection. I get the distinct impression you've never written anything requiring high performance memory allocation/deallocation.

I am pretty sure, what you have encountered is a real (as in not like in Trollface comic) instance of trolling. Therefore:

YHBT.
YHL.
HAND.

Sorry, no, that's an old IBM patent from 1975. Of course, Microsoft was able to use it under the business relationship they had with IBM. It seems to have been the main reason for the IBM-Microsoft alliance, since Microsoft ended the relationship when the patent expired in 1992, allowing them to use it freely.

Yes, I agree with you. Eric S. Raymond (of The Cathedral and the Bazaar fame) has written a post titled “Michael Meets Mozart" about this on his Armed and Dangerous blog. He was saying that while classical music was engaging the audience back at those days, times have moved on and now most Classical music is just museum pieces. To play classical and neo-classical music properly, it should be spiced up with more modern elements like various crossover classical artists such as the aforementioned The Piano Guys, as well as Vanessa-Mae, Bond, Coolio's rap/pop adaptation of Pachelbel's Canon as "I C U when you get there", the Hooked on Classics series, etc. There is no reason that in these times, with all the great and lively music, that classical music should stay boring.

That's what I see too. Pretty sure that's working as designed.

Do tell, what's the theme of a hacker convention? Note that CCC is not "technical conference" or "information security conference" or "technology expo". It's hacker conference with same notions of "hacker" as, for example, here.

"This is offtopic for a tech conference!" is just an excuse relying on listeners not being familiar with CCC and hacker culture. "This was just organizer decision!" seems to be an excuse too, if you believe Violet Blue's post (quote: “No, they’re here and they’re not leaving. They told me they’ll make it into a bigger problem if you do your talk.”)

No, but unless you're a 14 year old bedroom coder , programming is almost always a team activity.

"Programming is a team activity" is a mantra espoused by managers who think good code can arise from uncreative grunt-work performed by interchangeable code monkeys operating under regimented conditions. No. The development of any serious software involves creative acts of problem-solving, of the sort that can't be done when a manager or fellow coders are constantly interrupting your deep hack mode.

Yes, developing code requires coordination, since it's divided into pieces that have to interoperate; but it ultimately comes down to individual acts of creation. And that coordination should, as much as possible, be done in written form, through forums and documentation that can be reviewed years later; rather than through informal desk-walking.

yeah.. asking for help AFTER showing evidence of trying yourself is one thing. We aren't paid, so the pay off is in personal reward for helping someone who has shown interest and a desire to learn on his own. This article reads like a half assed forum post by someone who wants it fed through a needle and didn't bother reading "How to ask questions the smart way" by ESR. Lazy, lazy, lazy..especially in this era of easy to use search.

http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

It isn't the fact that the screen is vertical that would prevent people from getting a touch screen.

Yes, yes it is. The industry learned that lesson in the 80s. Of course, we like to repeat our mistakes every 20-30 years in this industry, so who knows.

For the longest time people believed that the UI seen in minority report would be an awesome thing to have, only now that touch devices are widespread, we're seeing just how bad touchscreens are ergonomically and how little demand there is for large touchscreen displays.

We have known UI's like that suck since the 80's.

http://catb.org/jargon/html/G/gorilla-arm.html

Well... the battery bit is a bit over the top, but the jargon file has this to say about a 'hacker': [originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe].

Studies on the other hand (one highlighted here: http://www.catb.org/esr/guns/gun-control.html) show that it is better to resist a violent crime with a gun:

12-17% of gun-armed resisters were injured. Those who offered no resistance were twice as likely to be injured (gratuitously) and those who resisted without a gun were three times as likely to be injured.

The base source for the numbers comes from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics and Criminal Victimization surveys.

I agree with everything that you have to say except the part about the Wii Gamepad Pro. Either you are referring to the Wii Classic Controller (Pro) or the Wii U Pro Controller.

The issue with both of these is that games have to support them in order for you to use them. The same can be said of touch screens where if the software doesn't allow some other form of control then you are going to end up with gorilla arm.

This reminded me of the latest project of ESR: a system to replace the CIA IRC bot that sends messages to IRC channel when people commits things to repositories. http://www.catb.org/esr/irker/
He chose to implement it in Python, probably because of distaste for C++.

After several days of trying to use it and running into severe bugs (random crashes, often locks up, doesn't deal well with unstable connections, excessive memory and CPU consumption, data races and general unreliability -- and of course it required latest python and some very svn version of some library dependency, no fun otherwise) I gave up on trying to fix it and rewrote it from scratch in C++ instead.
In two hours I had a working lightweight and extremely robust implementation of the protocol he defined. I followed the project for a while and it seems it kept having major usability issues for weeks, to the point where many people were reporting bugs and contributing hacks to fix them.

All because it was poorly designed and overengineered. The guy actually made the whole thing multi-threaded (with no knowledge of how to synchronize things properly) even though it wasn't needed.
I think one of the bad aspects of that old generation of notorious hackers is that they're not that good, but their name pulls people in.

It means public information, don't pretend you didn't know.

I didn't, because I've only heard it refered to as public information before. I've heard the term sources refering to where you get your sources from, but not open-source information. It turns out Bruce Perens acknowledged this special use of the term open source in the intelligence community when he announced open source software: http://www.catb.org/~esr/open-source.html

The intelligence community probably hates it when this happens. *rolls eyes*

> It's easy to blame Microsoft for this, but isn't this really an issue that is intrinsic to all installed applications?

No one read John Carmack's "don't let the client control anything" screed several years back, about how gaming systems cannot let the client code *know* or *control* things, because then it could be replaced with something that would cheat on the user's behalf, by looking around corners for bad guys and such?

This is the same exact thing, as far as I can see...

http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/quake-cheats.html

As much as I enjoy a good old apple bashing,

A fritterware that just (as in "barely") works - and it seems not to be the first either.

anyone who trust their gps without checking the plausibility of the route is an utter fool

I know it is possible, I was there about 4 years ago, with a proper GPS. The roads (when you can call them as such) are "washboard" - something very much like this.

As much as I enjoy a good old apple bashing,

A fritterware that just (as in "barely") works - and it seems not to be the first either.

anyone who trust their gps without checking the plausibility of the route is an utter fool

I know it is possible, I was there about 4 years ago, with a proper GPS. The roads (when you can call them as such) are "washboard" - something very much like this.

Formosa's Law applies.

I wouldn't want my cell phone calls routed to a cow worker either. They don't know squat about OT!

It's a cow orker and it's a technical term.

Microsoft requires OEMs shipping Windows 8 to provide both options for the user to turn secure boot off completly AND for the user to install new keys of their choice.

The other half of the truth is that on ARM devices, Secure Boot is ABSOLUTELY REQUIRED

And the gripping half is that the operating system for devices with an ARM CPU is not called Windows 8. It is called Windows RT (for 10" screens) or Windows Phone 8 (for 4" screens).

I do not think that word (infinite) means what you think it means. Either of you.

From here::

Usage Note: ... In nontechnical usage, of course, infinite is often used to refer to an unimaginably large degree or amount,...

Also, here:

infinite: adj. [common] Consisting of a large number of objects; extreme. Used very loosely as in: "This program produces infinite garbage." "He is an infinite loser." The word most likely to follow infinite, though, is hair. (It has been pointed out that fractals are an excellent example of infinite hair.) These uses are abuses of the word's mathematical meaning.

I'm sorry if I confused you into thinking I meant that the nearly infinite universe was, truly, really mathematically infinite in scope.

Anthropologists have studied subcultures for decades.

Exactly, so what's your point?

Yeah that word implies pretty much means what it means.

Yes, so "if p, then q". And you helpfully doubled down on your "p":

Meanwhile, back in reality the OP did in fact CONFIDENTLY ASSERT that his "little classroom experiment" disproved AGW.

...therefore "q" (the NPD).

Allow me to put it another way: if your physician called you up and said, "your lab results came back and imply you have cancer" would you seriously believe this *wasn't* a diagnosis?

Ouch. It has to hurt.

Perhaps you were referring to yourself?

I said literally said "it's likely that...'

...you were saying? No such thing.

Yep , that's pretty much an inflated sense of your own worth with an expectation that you'll be given what others have earned, and it's pretty much staring everyone in the face.

Persisting in your diagnostic pronunciations, eh? For the record, I wanted to point out that you have engaged in yet another fallacy: the false dilemma.

The truth is far more likely that you, just like the OP, are merely incompetent rather than malicious. You incompetently diagnose people with "disorders" via an internet post, despite experts knowing this is untenable. The OP incompetently believes that the results of a elementary/obvious chemical reaction equation are a possible effect that hasn't already been considered by the experts.

That is to say, you both exhibit the Dunning-Kruger Effect—narcissism not required.

OK, dear troll, I'll feed you.

The long answer: read the "Cathedral and the Bazaar" book by Eric Raymond.
The short answer: you don't see the whole picture. Linux involves people too - the whole model is focused on service provision, just that nobody gets to own the code so it can be recycled and benefit more people. If you're so against Linux I would recommend you stop using Google and Amazon as well.. As an aside, the German government has quite a record of sponsoring the public good via Open Source, for instance GPG (a PGP derivative) was sponsored by them, and (AFAIK) the Kolab Groupware was. The result was that many more people benefitted from that public spend than just shareholders - the way gov spending *should* happen but rarely does.

Bonus point answer: if you follow the history of Microsoft and the crap they got up to from monopolistic behaviour to flat out theft (see the Stacker case as an example), that company should have never been allowed to supply any government. What they did to the ISO institute to get MS OOXML "approved" as a standard is a quality example of what an organisation can do when it has the power to buy itself past the rules.

Google and Facebook are getting that way as well with respect to privacy laws.

Expect to see Laptops with multi-touch screens to be common, then windows 8 will be more liked.

Good luck holding your hand up to keep touching a screen at the typical height of a laptop or desktop monitor for eight hours.

So, if you were reviewing the code for an app and found some sneaky logic, you'd just remove it and proceed to use the app anyway?

Yes. We wouldn't have had Unix without its C compiler...

FTJF

Historically, back doors have often lurked in systems longer than anyone expected or planned, and a few have become widely known. Ken Thompson's 1983 Turing Award lecture to the ACM admitted the existence of a back door in early Unix versions that may have qualified as the most fiendishly clever security hack of all time. In this scheme, the C compiler contained code that would recognize when the login command was being recompiled and insert some code recognizing a password chosen by Thompson, giving him entry to the system whether or not an account had been created for him.

Normally such a back door could be removed by removing it from the source code for the compiler and recompiling the compiler. But to recompile the compiler, you have to use the compiler — so Thompson also arranged that the compiler would recognize when it was compiling a version of itself, and insert into the recompiled compiler the code to insert into the recompiled login the code to allow Thompson entry — and, of course, the code to recognize itself and do the whole thing again the next time around! And having done this once, he was then able to recompile the compiler from the original sources; the hack perpetuated itself invisibly, leaving the back door in place and active but with no trace in the sources.

The Turing lecture that reported this truly moby hack was later published as “Reflections on Trusting Trust”, Communications of the ACM 27, 8 (August 1984), pp. 761--763 (text available at http://www.acm.org/classics/).

You see, the behavior of which you speak is in the very definition of "back door". With the source code available, it's actually possible to compare the expected compiled binary to the resulting binary. If you're talking about some cleverly hidden in plain sight vulnerability we just call those "bugs", and carry on. Deliberate bug infested additions rarely persist beyond refactoring and further contributions. Eg: Only about 2% of Linus' original code remains in the Linux kernel due to code churn. Not that I suspect such foul play, but it would be pretty hard to coordinate a persistent threat in open source code unless the code rarely changes.