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What advancement? The typo keyboard is virtually a 1 for 1 copy of the Q10 keyboard. They didn't even bother changing the colour of the frets.

Just a illustrate how blatant a knock-off it is, here's the Typo keyboard from the linked news story, and here's what Typo copied to create it.

Someone mentioned it above. There is software called Windows Steadystate that keeps the base file system unwritable to regular users and instead lets them write changes to a journaled file system that can be selectively restored from the base.

Windows SteadyState from Microsoft is available for Windows XP.

SteadyState virtualizes the OS directories transparently on the disk. File writes/updates are directed to a secluded area. You can set it to simply delete those journaled updates upon restart/signoff. Any malware will be effectively gone. Windows Update would still be possible when signing in as the SteadyState administrator (creating an updated image), but that's kind of moot at this point.

Gonna be a long while till robots will be able to do all the shitty things nomadic, entry-level employees do.

It will be a while before robots can do all of those jobs, but many of them will soon be automated. If you go into a McDonald's, half the employees are taking orders, and the other half are fulfilling them. The people taking the orders could easily be replaced: Just turn the touchscreens around so that customers can enter their own orders, and then swipe a card to pay. Grocery stores have already done this, and so have banks. Fast food is next.

The only reason robots are not in the fields now is that farmers are ill-prepared to understand the shifts they'll need to operate under. Picking robots already exist on the indiviidual plant levels and are cheaper than human labor.

Berry nice: The robot can harvest strawberries every 8 seconds and works while farmers sleep.

COBOL. On a mainframe.

I read about this several years ago - still was able to find this post from 2007. I would assume they made some progress since then but surely not that much (if I recall there was some noise last year about fraud with IRS contract to buy new mainframe but I am too lazy to find link).

Why would they need to "progress" from a working system? COBOL works and mainframes works. The most used mainframe series are still developed and are in most cases more cost efficient than porting or emulating.

So again why the need to "progress"? Try to answer that without any technical prejudices please.

COBOL. On a mainframe.

I read about this several years ago - still was able to find this post from 2007. I would assume they made some progress since then but surely not that much (if I recall there was some noise last year about fraud with IRS contract to buy new mainframe but I am too lazy to find link).

This is a stupid race for the higher number.

This is a $599 phone with a titanium frame and generally good specs, not some crazy-expensive hipster toy. And there's a version of it with standard HD for $100 less if you're desperate for something more mundane...

http://reviews.cnet.com/smartp...

Apple, in constrast, makes sure any competitive app never sees the light of day:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1384...

Even if that's what he meant, at the end of the day it gets us to exactly the same place -- he's effectively ordering Apple to assign an arbitrary value to its patent portfolio that may not reflect its actual value, apparently based on a distorted understanding of how patent valuation and licensing actually works.

Here's a little thought experiment. For the sake of the hypothetical, please assume all patents are in the same or similar technology space:

Scenario 1: I'm a company with 5 patents. I approach Samsung and say "hey -- I've seen all those 'small price + cross licensing agreement' deals you've done with other companies.* I want the same deal. Here's my 5 patents and a "small price" -- cough up your 100,000 patents." Proper result?

Scenario 2: I'm a company with 1,000,000 patents, including a broad, pioneering patent on logic circuits made from room-temperature superconductors. Samsung approaches me and offers its 100,000 patents and a "small price," and demands a cross-license to my 1,000,000 patents, including the superconductor patent. Proper result?

Big companies have disagreements about the actual value of their patents all the time. Companies decide to cross-license -- or not -- with other companies all the time. The OP presented no evidence that Apple is doing anything fundamentally different.

* Which I probably haven't, because many companies tend to be highly secretive of the exact terms of these agreements -- for obvious reasons.

My tablet, when I add a bluetooth keyboard and mouse to it, becomes a full Windows desktop machine if I wish. I even have Minecraft installed on it now. Installing the JVM and the Minecraft program was as easy as it was on every other Windows machine I've had. I also added emu8086 which is one of my favorite toys. Any Win32 binary will do (if it runs on Windows 7 or later)

Monitor you connections to Slashdot to supplement hosts using NIRSOFT's Network Latency Viewer -> (essentially a timer driven gui based netstat -ano++) http://download.cnet.com/Netwo... for FIREWALL LEVEL RULESETS (vs. you wouldn't BELIEVE how much there is that you DON'T SEE like ads, by the hundreds)... for more speed, & my guess is FAR less tracking/webbeacons-webbugs, etc. - et al actually.

* Adding them to a NEW custom firewall rule (by IP or ranges)? Cake in Windows 7...

APK

P.S.=> I tell you: It even made surfing using IE 11 fast, WITH scripts on here (but yes, faster than when not as you said too also) - all that & hosts before it in the IP stack + FAST kernelmode ops + caching in kernelmode too (vs. usermode services)? Flies...

... apk

SSL/TLS communications are just as secure as they always were.

No, it is not.

CA model is much more important than the public CA "trust". There is nothing stopping an application designer from using private CAs for their application. This bug breaks the trust to any CAs, including the private ones.

Let's think about it (as a thought experiment) what is required for this to be an effective attack.

SSL spoofing is already a common attack. Not just France and the NSA but also regular old password-sniffers. This vulnerability falls under the same class of attack as SSL spoofing; a trusted certificate is secretly replaced by an untrusted certificate.

There were some common examples right after unicode was allowed in domain names and people came up with similar-looking links for major companies with unicode symbols that look identical to the ascii glyphs. That will be one comparison. The other comparison will be for a government-style ssl spoof attack.

First, the attacker must redirect you from the legitimate site to their illegitimate site. This is equally difficult with or without the TLS attack. The government-style attack could intercept the traffic over the wire and redirect you to the bad MitM manually. The fake link version could use bad links in phishing emails or spamming the internet with the fake link to the MitM server. Other options include host entries and software secretly installed on the machine. In any event, the bug does not affect this most difficult step.

Second, they need to appear as a valid connection. For the TLS bug, the attacker must create a false certificate that will test as valid. With the bug being known, that is pretty easy. Then they must use this when the certificate is requested during TLS handshaking. Now contrast this with a traditional attacker who must get their certificate signed by a CA for the fake domain; this is also fairly easy to do in practice. Many fake-name certs have been issued over the years and successfully used in news-reported attacks. Sometimes certificates have been forged in other ways, such as the Flame virus. Similarly the spy agencies have no difficulty getting their fake certificates signed by a CA.

Finally, the attacker needs to make a connection with the legitimate host. This is the same in all conditions, and has been successfully been used in SSL spoof attacks for years. When there is secondary authentication required the MitM just requests the data from the client. Complex attacks can sometimes permit a second connection directly to the victim where two-factor authentication across servers is required in such a way that the authentication passes. Nothing new here.

So really, the only thing the bug makes easier is the task of getting a fake certificate. Since this was arguably the EASIEST step in SSL Spoofing to begin with, and because SSL Spoofing is long-established as an easy attack that is difficult for lay people to detect, it means the attack really is a relatively small issue.

First off... Windows 7 is the only way to go. It is stable, and you get to access all those sweet videogames. But before all that, the standard software. Your specific hardware drivers. The latest ones. set the schedule now. Defrag should run once a week, I run mine in the night on Wednesday. if you shut the PC down after every use though. get AUSLogics Defrag. It will run if the computer is idle for 15 mins. Google Chrome - https://www.google.com/intl/en... Google Picasa - https://www.google.com/picasa/ Ccleaner - http://download.cnet.com/CClea... Try and find a version of Office that does not require a monthly bill. Office 365 is a very horrible idea and I have no idea why someone would pay for it monthly. then again there is open office which is free.

That's not how it works.

Good. Please explain how it does work.

Per this old article:
http://asia.cnet.com/faq-whats...

It seems to work like this.
You go to the messaging app. This is the default messaging app. It does text messages (SMS), and it does iMessages. So far so good.

You enter a number or directly a contact. It checks if that contact is believed to use iMessage by way of the phone number. If it believes the contact uses iMessage, it will send it as an iMessage, otherwise it will send it as a text message.

Still so far so good.

Now that contact stops using iMessage - the example given being that they switch devices, keeping the same number. They didn't "turn iMessage off", because why on Earth does that seem like a logical thing to have to do? Especially if, say, they switched devices because their iPhone died; in which case, they can't turn it off (or can they? Oh yes, they can contact Apple Support; http://support.apple.com/kb/TS... ).

Now you send them a message. The iMessage app is clueless and sends an iMessage because hey, nobody ever told it that the contact is no longer using iMessage. iMessage will eventually come back and say that it failed, and you as the sender either send again or shrug it off, but it might not occur to you to send as a text message instead. If you even can. Yes, if it already failed, you can hold the text and force that to send as text message. But the very next one you send is going to be an iMessage again. Of course, you can disable iMessage on your end, but that disables sending iMessage to all of your contacts. Short of deleting pre-existing iMessages for a given contact, it doesn't seem there's a way to just flip the "this contact uses iMessage" bit.

But here's the rub.. they shouldn't have to explicitly set anything at all.
A. Receive iMessage from contact -> set iMessage bit on contact.
B. Receive text message from contact -> clear iMessage bit on contact if present.
C. Failed iMessage -> re-send. Failed again? -> re-send as text. Delivered? (if supported by the networks) -> clear iMessage bit. Otherwise, see A/B.
D. User enables / disables iMessage explicitly -> set state in central registry (Apple ID is involved, right?).
E. Every once in a while, send as an iMessage anyway if the central registry suggests that the user really should have iMessage because they never turned it off. Worst case: the send ends up with situation C said 'every once in a while', which would be transparent to them. Best case: after a few of those, even the central registry could get a clue and disable the iMessage bit on their end, allowing it to propagate.
Having the onus of 'iMessage bit' state at the sender's side be solely on the end of the recipient is stupid.

I wouldn't say that it is a case of lock-in, though. Just a suboptimal approach. (And yes, I realize there's potential issues with A-E above as well). The bit that makes it peculiar, to say the least, is that this problem has been complained about since at least the end of 2011. Just not by enough people for it to be "an actual story", I guess.

Correct me if any of the above is wrong - I'm certainly not an iPhone user so I've only got the most basic of google search results as my sources.

Ah, this reminds me of another innovation that slashdot doesn't seem to have reported on yet: "Corephotonics' dual-camera tech will change smartphone imaging." It gives cellphones more telephoto capability by having a color sensor with a wide-angle lens, and a monochrome sensor with a telephoto lens. The idea being that you're more sensitive to details in luminance than chrominance. (In fact many image formats allocate more bits to storing luminance than chrominance). It also makes sense since the longer focal length lens cannot be much larger (this is in a cellphone) so it gathers less light, and monochrome sensors are more sensitive (no color filter to absorb it). At close distances you would have a parallax problem, except then you're using the wide angle and probably don't use the telephoto image at all. I think it's really clever.

No light. Here - see for yourself: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023...

"There is no tiny red LED light flashing when Glass is in recording mode. However, the Glass display is on when recording, and people in close proximity on the other side of the lens can see the tiny reverse image of what's on the display. But the act of recording video or picture taking may not be that obvious from a distance or to the uninitiated. It's clearly less obvious than someone pointing a phone in your direction."

http://news.cnet.com/8301-2707...

OMG!!! Ponnies!

Perspective: Inside Cisco's eavesdropping apparatus

April 21, 2003 4:00 AM PDT

http://news.cnet.com/2010-1071...

By Declan McCullagh

"Cisco Systems has created a more efficient and targeted way for police and intelligence agencies to eavesdrop on people whose Internet service provider uses their company's routers.

The company recently published a proposal that describes how it plans to embed "lawful interception" capability into its products. Among the highlights: Eavesdropping "must be undetectable," and multiple police agencies conducting simultaneous wiretaps must not learn of one another. If an Internet provider uses encryption to preserve its customers' privacy and has access to the encryption keys, it must turn over the intercepted communications to police in a descrambled form.

Cisco's decision to begin offering "lawful interception" capability as an option to its customers could turn out to be either good or bad news for privacy.

Because Cisco's routers currently aren't designed to target an individual, it's easy for an Internet service provider (ISP) to comply with a police request today by turning over all the traffic that flows through a router or switch. Cisco's "lawful interception" capability thus might help limit the amount of data that gets scooped up in the process.

On the other hand, the argument that it hinders privacy goes like this: By making wiretapping more efficient, Cisco will permit governments in other countries--where court oversight of police eavesdropping is even more limited than in the United States--snoop on far more communications than they could have otherwise.

Marc Rotenberg, head of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, says: "I don't see why the technical community should hardwire surveillance standards and not also hardwire accountability standards like audit logs and public reporting. The laws that permit 'lawful interception' typically incorporate both components--the (interception) authority and the means of oversight--but the (Cisco) implementation seems to have only the surveillance component. That is no guarantee that the authority will be used in a 'lawful' manner."

U.S. history provides many examples of government and police agencies conducting illegal wiretaps. The FBI unlawfully spied on Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr., feminists, gay rights leaders and Catholic priests. During its dark days, the bureau used secret files and hidden microphones to blackmail the Kennedy brothers, sway the Supreme Court and influence presidential elections. Cisco's Internet draft may be titled "lawful interception," but there's no guarantee that the capability will always be used legally.

Still, if you don't like Cisco's decision, remember that they're not the ones doing the snooping. Cisco is responding to its customers' requests, and if they don't, other hardware vendors will.

Cisco's Internet draft may be titled "lawful interception," but there's no guarantee that the capability will always be used legally.

If you're looking for someone to blame, consider Attorney General John Ashcroft, who asked for and received sweeping surveillance powers in the USA Patriot Act, along with your elected representatives in Congress, who gave those powers to him with virtually no debate.

I talked with Fred Baker, a Cisco fellow and former chairman of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), about his work on the "lawful interception" draft.

Q: Why did Cisco decide to build "lawful interception" into its products? What prompted this?
A: Cisco's customers, no

Perspective: Inside Cisco's eavesdropping apparatus

April 21, 2003 4:00 AM PDT
OLD ARTICLE but it still RINGS TRUE today!

http://news.cnet.com/2010-1071...

By Declan McCullagh

"Cisco Systems has created a more efficient and targeted way for police and intelligence agencies to eavesdrop on people whose Internet service provider uses their company's routers.

The company recently published a proposal that describes how it plans to embed "lawful interception" capability into its products. Among the highlights: Eavesdropping "must be undetectable," and multiple police agencies conducting simultaneous wiretaps must not learn of one another. If an Internet provider uses encryption to preserve its customers' privacy and has access to the encryption keys, it must turn over the intercepted communications to police in a descrambled form.

Cisco's decision to begin offering "lawful interception" capability as an option to its customers could turn out to be either good or bad news for privacy.

Because Cisco's routers currently aren't designed to target an individual, it's easy for an Internet service provider (ISP) to comply with a police request today by turning over all the traffic that flows through a router or switch. Cisco's "lawful interception" capability thus might help limit the amount of data that gets scooped up in the process.

On the other hand, the argument that it hinders privacy goes like this: By making wiretapping more efficient, Cisco will permit governments in other countries--where court oversight of police eavesdropping is even more limited than in the United States--snoop on far more communications than they could have otherwise.

Marc Rotenberg, head of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, says: "I don't see why the technical community should hardwire surveillance standards and not also hardwire accountability standards like audit logs and public reporting. The laws that permit 'lawful interception' typically incorporate both components--the (interception) authority and the means of oversight--but the (Cisco) implementation seems to have only the surveillance component. That is no guarantee that the authority will be used in a 'lawful' manner."

U.S. history provides many examples of government and police agencies conducting illegal wiretaps. The FBI unlawfully spied on Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr., feminists, gay rights leaders and Catholic priests. During its dark days, the bureau used secret files and hidden microphones to blackmail the Kennedy brothers, sway the Supreme Court and influence presidential elections. Cisco's Internet draft may be titled "lawful interception," but there's no guarantee that the capability will always be used legally.

Still, if you don't like Cisco's decision, remember that they're not the ones doing the snooping. Cisco is responding to its customers' requests, and if they don't, other hardware vendors will.

Cisco's Internet draft may be titled "lawful interception," but there's no guarantee that the capability will always be used legally.

If you're looking for someone to blame, consider Attorney General John Ashcroft, who asked for and received sweeping surveillance powers in the USA Patriot Act, along with your elected representatives in Congress, who gave those powers to him with virtually no debate.

I talked with Fred Baker, a Cisco fellow and former chairman of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), about his work on the "lawful interception" draft.

Q: Why did Cisco decide to build "lawful interception" into its products? What prompted this?

OLD ARTICLE but it still RINGS TRUE today!

Perspective: Inside Cisco's eavesdropping apparatus

April 21, 2003 4:00 AM PDT

http://news.cnet.com/2010-1071...

By Declan McCullagh

"Cisco Systems has created a more efficient and targeted way for police and intelligence agencies to eavesdrop on people whose Internet service provider uses their company's routers.

The company recently published a proposal that describes how it plans to embed "lawful interception" capability into its products. Among the highlights: Eavesdropping "must be undetectable," and multiple police agencies conducting simultaneous wiretaps must not learn of one another. If an Internet provider uses encryption to preserve its customers' privacy and has access to the encryption keys, it must turn over the intercepted communications to police in a descrambled form.

Cisco's decision to begin offering "lawful interception" capability as an option to its customers could turn out to be either good or bad news for privacy.

Because Cisco's routers currently aren't designed to target an individual, it's easy for an Internet service provider (ISP) to comply with a police request today by turning over all the traffic that flows through a router or switch. Cisco's "lawful interception" capability thus might help limit the amount of data that gets scooped up in the process.

On the other hand, the argument that it hinders privacy goes like this: By making wiretapping more efficient, Cisco will permit governments in other countries--where court oversight of police eavesdropping is even more limited than in the United States--snoop on far more communications than they could have otherwise.

Marc Rotenberg, head of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, says: "I don't see why the technical community should hardwire surveillance standards and not also hardwire accountability standards like audit logs and public reporting. The laws that permit 'lawful interception' typically incorporate both components--the (interception) authority and the means of oversight--but the (Cisco) implementation seems to have only the surveillance component. That is no guarantee that the authority will be used in a 'lawful' manner."

U.S. history provides many examples of government and police agencies conducting illegal wiretaps. The FBI unlawfully spied on Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr., feminists, gay rights leaders and Catholic priests. During its dark days, the bureau used secret files and hidden microphones to blackmail the Kennedy brothers, sway the Supreme Court and influence presidential elections. Cisco's Internet draft may be titled "lawful interception," but there's no guarantee that the capability will always be used legally.

Still, if you don't like Cisco's decision, remember that they're not the ones doing the snooping. Cisco is responding to its customers' requests, and if they don't, other hardware vendors will.

Cisco's Internet draft may be titled "lawful interception," but there's no guarantee that the capability will always be used legally.

If you're looking for someone to blame, consider Attorney General John Ashcroft, who asked for and received sweeping surveillance powers in the USA Patriot Act, along with your elected representatives in Congress, who gave those powers to him with virtually no debate.

I talked with Fred Baker, a Cisco fellow and former chairman of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), about his work on the "lawful interception" draft.

Q: Why did Cisco decide to build "lawful interception" into its products? What prompted this?

The fact of the matter is people believe they are entitled to take whatever they want without having to deal with the DRM, bundling of content, and other crappy service models of GREEDY record companies who earn nearly ALL the money from the recording sales. There, I fixed that for you.

The artists only make money from touring. Studies have shown that copying does not impact music sales. http://news.cnet.com/2100-1027...

Well Streaming services for unlimited music still cost you around $10/mo. (regardless of which of the services you choose).
So its not all ad supported any more.

Most of these services, and there are a boatload of them are all hovering around the same price. Some offer sales as well as streaming, others don't.

There is still the Free services that are ad supported.

WD has a really cool NAS device, if your audience has a bit of tech knowledge it should be easy to get one or even 2 of the devices (backup is great) send them to 2 of your family in geographically diverse locations and presto, private cloud storage for you and the family.
Cnet has a review posted here
http://www.cnet.com/network-st...

Until ISPs are classified as common carriers, the FCC will not have the authority to enforce any level of net neutrality - which a former FCC chairman has recently stated. I have not said, and do not believe, that we have ever had any level of net neutrality.

We had exactly that until 2005 when the FCC reclassified DSL and CATV ISPs as "information services" (not common carrier) from their previous classification of "telecommunications service" (common carrier) which they had held since the inception of the internet.

Classification as common carrier, and true net neutrality rules (the level of net neutrality most people actually want) based on that are two different things. We've never had both of those at the same time. And unless and until they're reclassified as common carriers, net neutrality is a non-starter.

Until ISPs are classified as common carriers, the FCC will not have the authority to enforce any level of net neutrality - which a former FCC chairman has recently stated. I have not said, and do not believe, that we have ever had any level of net neutrality.

We had exactly that until 2005 when the FCC reclassified DSL and CATV ISPs as "information services" (not common carrier) from their previous classification of "telecommunications service" (common carrier) which they had held since the inception of the internet.

Why would anyone believe what a low-level CSR tells them in a chat session? This is like when an eBay CSR claimed that eBay did not allow the sale of Bitcoin mining rigs a few weeks ago. The person didn't know what they were talking about.

Not to mention this is Verizon, who can't tell $0.002 from 0.002 cents. Engaging them on a topic of any complexity is sure to lead to hilarity and/or frustration.

> Let's just stop bagging on Adobe...

1. When I have to work around some bullshit because the image editor I paid for (b)locks me from even viewing what it thinks are high resolution scans of money ... Adobe can fuck off.

* https://www.google.com/search?...
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
* http://www.rulesforuse.org/pub...

2. When they start charging "rent" for software as a service ... Adobe can fuck off.

"According to CNET and various other sources, CS6 will be the last version of Adobe's Creative Suite that will be sold in the traditional manner. All future versions will be available by subscription only, through Adobe's so-called 'Creative Cloud' service. This means that before too long, anyone who wants an up-to-date version of Photoshop won't be able to buy it â" they will have to pay $50 per month (minimum subscription term: one year). ..."

"We've made it really clear to folks that you get the discounted price only for the first year," Morris said. "We're pretty confident that even when the price normalizes at the $50 list price, most of these customers are going to stay."

* Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001...

Translation: We're going to gouge customers whether they like it or not. $ucker$!

So no, we'll stop bagging on Adobe's crap once they stop being dicks not before.

This will definitely make 2014 the Year of ChromeOS on the desktop!

Maybe, but on the laptop, almost certainly.

Honestly, Microsoft is shit-scared of chromebooks and is doing their level best to spew FUD and bile into every discussion.

Did you see their spiteful "American Mom" advert? http://news.cnet.com/8301-1785...

And they have good reason to be scared.

In 2012, Google's GOOG +0.41% Chromebooks captured a laughable 0.2% of computer purchases within United States-based businesses and institutions. Thus far in 2013? Chromebook penetration has skyrocketed to a 9.6% share, and a staggering 21% piece of the sales pie when zeroing in on just notebooks.

Those statistics come courtesy of the NPD Group, which has released an illuminating report on computer sales trends within the commercial channel.

"The market for personal computing devices in commercial markets continues to shift and change,” said Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis, NPD. “New products like Chromebooks, and reimagined items like Windows tablets, are now supplementing the revitalization that iPads started in personal computing devices. It is no accident that we are seeing the fruits of this change in the commercial markets as business and institutional buyers exploit the flexibility inherent in the new range of choices now open to them.”

Indeed, we’ve seen an attractive selection of Windows tablets emerge this year, and their share of unit sales has risen from 0.8% to 2.2% in this channel. But that minor uptick in visibility is overshadowed by Microsoft's struggle in the notebook space: Windows notebook sales are down 21% from the same time period in 2012.

For those keeping score at home, Google’s Chromebooks gobbled up that 21% within 11 months. That’s definitely cause for concern in Redmond, and clearly a driver for Microsoft’s new Scroogled campaign focusing on Chromebooks.

At least 5200.

About 4000 in August 2012 and another 1200 in March 2013.

At least 5200.

About 4000 in August 2012 and another 1200 in March 2013.

Of course, MS has historically impressed me with how well they manage to do while being a 'lone wolf'.

I would think that almost everyone is a lone wolf when it comes to highly specialized server designs. Google's servers are designed to highly efficient in terms of space and power consumption. While they use an x86 architecture, the custom servers also have individual battery backups instead of a rack level UPS. While not many details are known about the motherboards (except that they are made by Gigabyte), it looks to me that they have stripped out all unnecessary parts like extra USB ports, extra SATA ports, extra PCIe slots, etc.

Not trying to flamebait here, but genuinely puzzled - what is possibly so great about the N900 versus something like a rooted Nexus 5? I see comments about cyanogenmod, etc. being a bit unstable - but comparing it to the N900, where very few people actually cared about building the OS ? The next version of the VM - ART - is nothing to sneeze at as well.
I'm not sure if you know, but when you install cyanogenmod (or one of the hundred different ROMS that people are actively developing on xda-developers), you get a Google free operating system. There is NO integration with Google. It is only if you install the "gapps" package, that you get the whole google shebang - play store, services, etc.
As a hacker friendly phone, I can develop on the N5 using Python, Golang, Scala, C#/Mono, QT, etc. - is there a usecase at which the N900 blows this out of the water ?
The only valid point I can think about is the keyboard - yes, it is a paradigm shift. But for daily use, smart keyboards like Swiftkey, Touchpal (pure open source) will serve you very well. For your developer needs, connect a monitor through HDMI/MHL and use a microusb adapter .
You have a first grade terminal emulator, IRC, low power bluetooth, built-in VPN + tethering - I would argue much more suitable for the developer than the venerable N900. Did I mention quad core processor, GPU and 2 GB of RAM with a brilliant display ?
If you want, you can install other OSes on the phone.

Easy solution: These companies should open major offices in downtown San Francisco. Build a skyscraper (vertical campus!) that is walking distance from a BART subway stop. They already have one (very small) office in the downtown SF area (opened in 2007). Same with Yahoo (though they can't afford a skyscraper), who recently bought the old SF Chronicle building.

Build a skyscraper!? You really don't know anything about SF, do you?

Easy solution: These companies should open major offices in downtown San Francisco. Build a skyscraper (vertical campus!) that is walking distance from a BART subway stop. They already have one (very small) office in the downtown SF area (opened in 2007). Same with Yahoo (though they can't afford a skyscraper), who recently bought the old SF Chronicle building.

The free app records video and audio, hides when requested and lets users send backup copies of recordings to the ACLU for safekeeping.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57467073-83/aclu-app-lets-android-users-secretly-tape-the-police/

http://web.archive.org/web/20131022194439/http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57467073-83/aclu-app-lets-android-users-secretly-tape-the-police/

http://www.aclu-nj.org/yourrights/the-app-place/

http://download.cnet.com/ACLU-NJ%20Police%20Tape/3000-2094_4-75742382.html

http://www.nyclu.org/app

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57405594-281/boston-admits-it-cell-phone-photography-is-not-a-crime/

The free app records video and audio, hides when requested and lets users send backup copies of recordings to the ACLU for safekeeping.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57467073-83/aclu-app-lets-android-users-secretly-tape-the-police/

http://web.archive.org/web/20131022194439/http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57467073-83/aclu-app-lets-android-users-secretly-tape-the-police/

http://www.aclu-nj.org/yourrights/the-app-place/

http://download.cnet.com/ACLU-NJ%20Police%20Tape/3000-2094_4-75742382.html

http://www.nyclu.org/app

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57405594-281/boston-admits-it-cell-phone-photography-is-not-a-crime/

The free app records video and audio, hides when requested and lets users send backup copies of recordings to the ACLU for safekeeping.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57467073-83/aclu-app-lets-android-users-secretly-tape-the-police/

http://web.archive.org/web/20131022194439/http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57467073-83/aclu-app-lets-android-users-secretly-tape-the-police/

http://www.aclu-nj.org/yourrights/the-app-place/

http://download.cnet.com/ACLU-NJ%20Police%20Tape/3000-2094_4-75742382.html

http://www.nyclu.org/app

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57405594-281/boston-admits-it-cell-phone-photography-is-not-a-crime/

If someone can take a principled stance against this, they should. Right now the only entities with a spine are the ones who aren't for-profit, and none of them can stand up to it, and end users should really be supporting them. Do we really want Google and the MPEG-LA to dominate like that, knowing what happens every time companies dominate something like that?

Well said. A reference on your betrayal of Google: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57612525-76/vlc-steps-into-next-gen-video-wars-with-vp9-hevc-support/

Even Firefox has surrendered on this one and said they'd use the binary blob Cisco provides

In their own words, Firefox developers were betrayed by Google for not honoring its promise to drop h.264 from chrome. Google really dropped the ball on that one.

"We lost, and we're admitting defeat. Cisco is providing a path for orderly retreat that leaves supporters of an open Web in a strong enough position to face the next battle, so we're taking it,"

The battle was lost and does weaken the open Web supporters position, but the war rages on in the likes of formats such as VP9 and Daala ("Daala is a novel approach to codec design. It aims not to be competitive, but to win outright," Montgomery said).

This pressure of Wikimedia is just another salvo from the proponents of software patent encumbered video codecs trenches, attempting to extract rents and further erode an open free for all web. For those that support an open Internet it is our duty to reject closed software patent encumbered/DRM measures that want to turn our web into a glorified AOL, no matter how inconvenient it may be in the short term to do so.

Should they have the authority to remove that too only to tell you about it later in a blog?

Microsoft Security Essentials is antivirus software. By definition it must have the authority to remove, isolate, disable, and delete software from your computer. The computer owners installed MS Security Essentials precisely to perform this specific service.

Have any Tor installations been removed that were not associated with Sefnit? It appears to me that the only software that was removed was the specific version of Tor that Sefnit used and, in most cases, when the Tor client has been installed a system service (which is very, very non-standard). MS did not remove the most recent version of the client.

You're just spreading FUD about a non-story. This is less interesting than all those stories about antivirus false positives rendering Windows unable to boot.

Yeah. It's too bad that US Citizens don't enjoy that prohibition anymore:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57364330-281/judge-americans-can-be-forced-to-decrypt-their-laptops/

Microsoft stated with Windows 8 that they'd be moving to a far faster release cadence. What's with the surprise? The version number change... or? The title says it all - Windows 8 was released a year ago, windows 8.1 3 months ago. If they're going to get Windows 9 out the door anytime soon to follow the faster release cadence they'd HAVE to be working on it already. They probably started the second that Windows 8 shipped. Since everyone here appears to have a ridiculously short memory, let me remind you what was stated at Build 2013:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-57591154-75/microsoft-moves-from-short-twitch-to-rapid-release-at-build-2013/

This has been used on slow news days for years. 2012, 2011, and 2006, for example.

Ahem.

See also: Roving Bug

Didnt they do that already with 8.1? You can now boot directly to the desktop and they even put back the start menu.
http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57591261-285/how-to-boot-directly-to-the-desktop-in-windows-8.1/

I'm likely getting a new machine for work and am very much considering Windows 8.1 with the direct to desktop mod.

When contractors raised concerns, CMS told them that "failure is not an option" and that everything has to work october 1.

From the article linked in the summary:

Late last summer, CGI executives had expressed confidence to CMS that they could deliver a functioning, scaled-back version of the marketplace by the Oct. 1 start day. But a week before the launch, the company had failed to deliver on 45 percent of those tasks, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.

I'm sure it was both. CMS said failure isn't an option and CGI and the rest of the contractors made really optimistic project plans.

Rest assured that no one at CMS will be disciplined or fired over this.

Resignations don't count?

Seem more like when Microsoft gave Apple $150M

Good thought. I should know more about the history of Tor. I checked Wikipedia and got "Originally sponsored by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, which had been instrumental in the early development of onion routing under the aegis of DARPA, Tor was financially supported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation from 2004 to 2005."

I was thinking of the more recent NSA activity

Um, do you mean like iOS in the Car that's been known about since at least June of 2013 and that has 12 car manufacturers signed on already?

Or maybe Siri Eyes Free (an admittedly really dumb name) that was announced in June 2012?

Might not have been "the first ever" but Apple certainly beat Android on this one.