And has Opel ever sent updates out to maintain your father's car to increase its security and resilience to accidents free of charge? Because Microsoft has been doing that for Windows XP users for 13 years!
I got warranty work done on my first car, a 1981 Chevy Malibu wagon, when it was 13 years old. I think the most amusing part was that the warranty work cost GM more than I originally paid for the car.
Current gaming builds with the latest graphics cards max out at 8 GB.
Really? I've got 2 desktop machines, one with 16 GB, and one with 32 GB. The first, I've had for over 3 years, so it's hardly "current," and the other one is about 7-8 months old. Where are you getting a "current" machine that'll only hold 8GB?
The US keeps having mentally unstable people going into schools, malls, etc, and shooting up a bunch of people, before turning the gun on themselves. I realize there aren't really a lot of these, considering the population of the US, and the number of guns in circulation, but that's irrelevant to my point.
If we accept that these kinds of shootings are going to happen regardless, as long as you keep your guns, which seems to be the prevailing opinion (again, not saying it's right or wrong; just that that's what US citizens say, for the most part) then why don't these unstable people do something to benefit society, and go shoot up a bar full of NSA management? It's not like their chances of dying are going to change. They're going to pull the trigger on themselves before the police have a chance to do it for them, so what difference does it make to them who they shoot? Heck, they could even shoot their way into a certain data center in Utah, and it's not like they'd be any more dead at the end of it.
But if one of them did this, it would probably be looked on much better by the rest of the US population than going and shooting up a public school.....
You're focusing on the number of employees/company, rather than the number of employees/industry sector.
There's only 1 aerospace corp with 4000 employees locally; but there are dozens of florists, bakeries, bars, and other small businesses that employ a LOT more than 4000 people locally. SMEs generate a significant amount more economic activity than large businesses, in virtually every geographic area.
The most Apple can do is say that they're not aware of a backdoor, but I doubt this will satisfy anyone with a tinfoil hat.
The tinfoil hat crowd won't be satisfied with anything, you're right. The healthy sceptics, on the other hand, tend to notice not what was said, but what was not said. In this case, Apple specifically avoided mentioning the lack of knowledge of any backdoor. Why would they do this, if they didn't know of one?
You can't promise what you can't prove, and you can't prove a negative. All they can say is that they have not put any backdoors into their own code. They can't promise that there are no unknown exploits or tools that the NSA has developed or acquired to do it.
That's true, but they could at least say "We don't know of any backdoors into our iPhones." That would be a heck of a lot more reassuring, even to an Apple fanboi, than what they actually said, and still doesn't require proving a negative.
GP didn't say "all Apple customers," they said "the Apple customer who'll believe anything coming from Apple, no question asked." That's clearly not all Apple customers, just as the bitching and complaining ones on the forum/blogs are obviously not all of Apple's customers.
Clearly slashdot's common sense quotient has passed its apex with the number of up-mods on this. Snowden didn't download the full NSA database of everything. Ever. Nobody in the NSA has that level of access. Nothing like that likely even exists at the NSA.
Really, it's quite impressive the knowledge you have of internal, top-secret NSA operations. How exactly do you come up with this information? On top of that, it's pretty widely known that Snowden didn't use just his own credentials to download documents. He accessed several different high level accounts. Between the lot of them, it's entirely possible that he could have accessed everything, or at least the vast majority of data.
Snowden's gone. He's not part of current operations. Who is to say that after he left, the NSA decided to embark on a new intelligence initiative. I know -- it's shocking, but organizations sometimes continue to function and do new things after someone leaves it. And that person, no longer being part of the organization, will know nothing of them.
That doesn't make his old information irrelevant. It just means that any new program which we don't know about is even more of an overreach than all the stuff they've been doing in the past.
The data he stole doesn't offer that kind of granulated access... it's like he shoplifted a library, but all the pages in all the books are ripped out and thrown in the middle of the room. Without the organization and analysis of the data, it's largely useless anyway.
How do you know what he stole? You've never seen it. Maybe it's files organized by folders with very descriptive names, readme documents explaining exactly what's in each folder, all signed and verifiable with a public NSA key. Maybe it's a dump from a database like SharePoint, that embeds documents into the database, rather than pointers, and all the descriptions/categories/other....ahem...metadata, are right there in the SQL, organizing everything exactly as the NSA had it set up.
I doubt it's the dissent that people don't like. It's your NSA-ass-licking sig that they don't like.
Justice? For capturing Snowden? WTF?
How about justice for capturing all the NSA agents and leaders who are regularly commiting perjury, violating every right that is supposed to be sacred in the USA, and covering it all up with lies multiplied by lies? How about justice for removing from the bench all the judges who say "What the NSA is doing has to be legal, because the government finds it useful!" In other parts of the world, leaders have been assassinated for less.
Google's is very well behaved by the way, so please don't spread FUD.
Yeah, well we all thought the NSA was well-behaved. Look how that turned out.
"We all"? Who's this "we all" of which you speak? Do you mean, prior to Snowden, you thought the NSA was well behaved? That's a little naive.
While I didn't realize the extent they've gone, I certainly never expected them to be squeaky clean, by any means. But then again, I'm neither blind-government-trusting, nor American, either.
Anyone, anyone, who implicitly trusts their government is just begging for trouble.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures" That sure sounds like privacy to me.
...Killing the svchost.exe process to shut down Windows Update is the equivalent of paint removal with a 12 gauge shotgun. It'll work, but it causes a lot of other problems at the same time...
But you must admit that sounds like a lot more fun than doing it with a putty knife and a heat gun.
Well...yes...it kind of does. I guess there's some redneck in me, too. (Heck...I don't need to guess that. There's plenty of redneck in me....)
"I just want to install a program, don't ask me for that password gobblegook."
How is that different? Windows does the exact same thing, unless you don't have a password set. If you're running under an administrator account, you don't get asked for a password, but that's the same thing that happens on Linux under a root account.
I fail to see a reason for your complaint here.....
When Larry Ellison buys Google in the next 10 years, do you think he'll have any qualms about selling peoples' data to anybody?
Oracle's market cap is currently less than half Google's. I don't see Oracle gaining a lot of ground in the next decade, or Google losing that much value. If anything, Google would acquire Oracle, rather than the other way around.
Now, there are certainly companies that are big enough to buy Google, but they're certainly few and far between.
Slashdot Mirror
And has Opel ever sent updates out to maintain your father's car to increase its security and resilience to accidents free of charge? Because Microsoft has been doing that for Windows XP users for 13 years!
I got warranty work done on my first car, a 1981 Chevy Malibu wagon, when it was 13 years old. I think the most amusing part was that the warranty work cost GM more than I originally paid for the car.
Current gaming builds with the latest graphics cards max out at 8 GB.
Really? I've got 2 desktop machines, one with 16 GB, and one with 32 GB. The first, I've had for over 3 years, so it's hardly "current," and the other one is about 7-8 months old.
Where are you getting a "current" machine that'll only hold 8GB?
Maybe it's punctuation:
White hats go to jail unless....your worth: billions of dollars.
Re-read the GP. Then comprehend it.
Maybe you'll realize that your post agrees with the GP.....
Here's what I'm thinking:
The US keeps having mentally unstable people going into schools, malls, etc, and shooting up a bunch of people, before turning the gun on themselves. I realize there aren't really a lot of these, considering the population of the US, and the number of guns in circulation, but that's irrelevant to my point.
If we accept that these kinds of shootings are going to happen regardless, as long as you keep your guns, which seems to be the prevailing opinion (again, not saying it's right or wrong; just that that's what US citizens say, for the most part) then why don't these unstable people do something to benefit society, and go shoot up a bar full of NSA management? It's not like their chances of dying are going to change. They're going to pull the trigger on themselves before the police have a chance to do it for them, so what difference does it make to them who they shoot? Heck, they could even shoot their way into a certain data center in Utah, and it's not like they'd be any more dead at the end of it.
But if one of them did this, it would probably be looked on much better by the rest of the US population than going and shooting up a public school.....
You're focusing on the number of employees/company, rather than the number of employees/industry sector.
There's only 1 aerospace corp with 4000 employees locally; but there are dozens of florists, bakeries, bars, and other small businesses that employ a LOT more than 4000 people locally.
SMEs generate a significant amount more economic activity than large businesses, in virtually every geographic area.
Hey.....did you guys hear something? I thought I heard a voice say something, but I couldn't quite hear what it was....
So, don't buy a phone online and have it shipped to you. Buy retail only.
Good catch. I missed that one.
The most Apple can do is say that they're not aware of a backdoor, but I doubt this will satisfy anyone with a tinfoil hat.
The tinfoil hat crowd won't be satisfied with anything, you're right. The healthy sceptics, on the other hand, tend to notice not what was said, but what was not said. In this case, Apple specifically avoided mentioning the lack of knowledge of any backdoor. Why would they do this, if they didn't know of one?
You can't promise what you can't prove, and you can't prove a negative. All they can say is that they have not put any backdoors into their own code. They can't promise that there are no unknown exploits or tools that the NSA has developed or acquired to do it.
That's true, but they could at least say "We don't know of any backdoors into our iPhones." That would be a heck of a lot more reassuring, even to an Apple fanboi, than what they actually said, and still doesn't require proving a negative.
GP didn't say "all Apple customers," they said "the Apple customer who'll believe anything coming from Apple, no question asked." That's clearly not all Apple customers, just as the bitching and complaining ones on the forum/blogs are obviously not all of Apple's customers.
Clearly slashdot's common sense quotient has passed its apex with the number of up-mods on this. Snowden didn't download the full NSA database of everything. Ever. Nobody in the NSA has that level of access. Nothing like that likely even exists at the NSA.
Really, it's quite impressive the knowledge you have of internal, top-secret NSA operations. How exactly do you come up with this information?
On top of that, it's pretty widely known that Snowden didn't use just his own credentials to download documents. He accessed several different high level accounts. Between the lot of them, it's entirely possible that he could have accessed everything, or at least the vast majority of data.
Snowden's gone. He's not part of current operations. Who is to say that after he left, the NSA decided to embark on a new intelligence initiative. I know -- it's shocking, but organizations sometimes continue to function and do new things after someone leaves it. And that person, no longer being part of the organization, will know nothing of them.
That doesn't make his old information irrelevant. It just means that any new program which we don't know about is even more of an overreach than all the stuff they've been doing in the past.
The data he stole doesn't offer that kind of granulated access... it's like he shoplifted a library, but all the pages in all the books are ripped out and thrown in the middle of the room. Without the organization and analysis of the data, it's largely useless anyway.
How do you know what he stole? You've never seen it. Maybe it's files organized by folders with very descriptive names, readme documents explaining exactly what's in each folder, all signed and verifiable with a public NSA key. Maybe it's a dump from a database like SharePoint, that embeds documents into the database, rather than pointers, and all the descriptions/categories/other....ahem...metadata, are right there in the SQL, organizing everything exactly as the NSA had it set up.
I doubt it's the dissent that people don't like. It's your NSA-ass-licking sig that they don't like.
Justice? For capturing Snowden? WTF?
How about justice for capturing all the NSA agents and leaders who are regularly commiting perjury, violating every right that is supposed to be sacred in the USA, and covering it all up with lies multiplied by lies?
How about justice for removing from the bench all the judges who say "What the NSA is doing has to be legal, because the government finds it useful!"
In other parts of the world, leaders have been assassinated for less.
Which operating system do you know of that hasn't been exploitable at some point by visiting a web page?
DOS.
Well, the stink from the fart probably knocked him out for a while, so it might have been only a few minutes of actual, you know...consciousness....
Google's is very well behaved by the way, so please don't spread FUD.
Yeah, well we all thought the NSA was well-behaved. Look how that turned out.
"We all"? Who's this "we all" of which you speak?
Do you mean, prior to Snowden, you thought the NSA was well behaved?
That's a little naive.
While I didn't realize the extent they've gone, I certainly never expected them to be squeaky clean, by any means.
But then again, I'm neither blind-government-trusting, nor American, either.
Anyone, anyone , who implicitly trusts their government is just begging for trouble.
"Why, those dirty pinkos!"
"We mustn't judge them by the colour of their feet, sire."
If you want privacy then do it the old fashion way and lie.
I do. There are several online services that think I was born at the North Pole on New Year's Day, to my proud parents, John and Jane Doe.
you can't trust ANYTHING that any......politician does ever again.
Huh? Since when did we trust anything that politicians do?
You don't see "privacy"
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures"
That sure sounds like privacy to me.
or "abortion" in there anywhere either.
WTF has that got to do with this conversation?
...Killing the svchost.exe process to shut down Windows Update is the equivalent of paint removal with a 12 gauge shotgun. It'll work, but it causes a lot of other problems at the same time...
But you must admit that sounds like a lot more fun than doing it with a putty knife and a heat gun.
Well...yes...it kind of does. I guess there's some redneck in me, too. (Heck...I don't need to guess that. There's plenty of redneck in me....)
Was that aimed at the GP, the NSA, or the judge...?
Yes.
Yeah, it just needs different BS.
"I just want to install a program, don't ask me for that password gobblegook."
How is that different? Windows does the exact same thing, unless you don't have a password set.
If you're running under an administrator account, you don't get asked for a password, but that's the same thing that happens on Linux under a root account.
I fail to see a reason for your complaint here.....
When Larry Ellison buys Google in the next 10 years, do you think he'll have any qualms about selling peoples' data to anybody?
Oracle's market cap is currently less than half Google's. I don't see Oracle gaining a lot of ground in the next decade, or Google losing that much value. If anything, Google would acquire Oracle, rather than the other way around.
Now, there are certainly companies that are big enough to buy Google, but they're certainly few and far between.