I'm going with 1 *and* 2. Based on discussions I have had with Chinese tech companies the days of China having to steal all of its tech and being incapable of developing its own are long since past and they are now quite capable of developing stuff on their own, from scratch if need be. Any industrial espionage is more than likely just to save them time and effort so they can take a shortcut and compare notes.
I'm also reminded of how the US once published spy satellite pictures of the Nile delta showing all of the subterranean waterways as a means of informing the Russian military that they could, by inference, also see all of the missile silos and other underground facilities the Soviets had build in Siberia, etc.; so this is probably also about sending a similar message. Quite nicely done too, unlike the Russian's ham fisted efforts with their "leak" of nuclear torpedo schematics via state TV over the weekend. Yeah right, like the Ra-Ra-Putin Channel doesn't have an official censor to vet everything it airs...
That is supposedly the objective of the "Great or Dead" project - strip out all the crap, discard the stuff that few people use outright and reimplement the rest as optional modules/plugins or whatever. Quite how Mozilla is defining "optional" is to be determined, but I doubt it's going to be a simple case of opting for a custom install and then telling the installer not to install the modules that you see as worthless. I'm skeptical, given that things like the ill-received Pocket module bring funds to the foundation, but we'll have to wait (and wait, and wait) before we find out - despite the rapidly increasing version numbers the actual amount of change between so called major releases is awfully small.
Yeah, there's a lot of irony in that, but it's par for the course and with good reason. Just about all the regions of the EU that are seeking independence from their parent state also intend to submit themselves for EU membership as well should they succeed, and there are a lot of them, albeit most seem unlikely to achieve autonomy. Ultimately the EU affords more independence over many local political and administrative matters than many national governments are prepared to afford their provinces, despite what UKIP and the like would like people to believe, so it's not as daft as it seems.
While you are right on the voting demographic and media bias/propaganda, I think there's possibly a major wrinkle in the debate coming that's going to seriously upset the applecart for the exit campaign. The Scottish are collectively much more pro-EU than the south of England, and the Scottish National Party are in the process of putting together a set of criteria that will trigger another referendum on their own independence from England. I'm fully expecting to see "UK voting to leave the EU" being right at the top of that list of criteria when it's announced, and if there's one thing that is likely to upset the anti-EU crowd more than remaining in the EU it's the very likely prospect of Scotland leaving the UK shortly afterward if they win.
What, you thought the US had the monopoly on turning politics into a car crash TV event?
Very much depends on the individual port. In some cases sea level rises are actually a good thing because they could increase the height of the docks as required in order to handle ships with larger displacements and/or operate with longer sailing times due to a reduced impact from low tides. Others will need major civils work to prevent extensive flooding of adjacent facilities, so depending on the degree of the sea level rise it might not be economical to try and keep the port in operation compared to rerouting goods elsewhere and allowing the lower lying areas to flood with the tides. Historically, ports have moved around all the time; there are plenty of ancient ports that are now either completely submerged or silted up due to changing conditions; new ports are constructed near by, the cargoes get rerouted, and commerce goes on.
No, I don't think science can ever be said to be finished. There's always going to be a further potential for refinement, follow up question, or piece of inexplicable data that needs exploring, and that's the nature of the beast. I was just driving home the point that there is always an agenda, even if it's the business as usual, and rather benign given how we approach funding science, "we need more money".
No matter where you stand on the debate, at this point people should be taking ALL climate change studies with a healthy degree of scepticism; there are too many people with an agenda on all sides to assume that any of it is completely free of bias. Even so, I think NASA handled the discrepency rather clearly in the article; they disagree with the IPCC's figures on ice loss/gain, but not with the overall sealevel rises - ergo, they conclude that the difference is either coming from additional water entering the oceans from somewhere else or there is something else going on in Antarctica. Well, duh! What they don't do is speculate what that might be, so in otherwords it's also serving as a "give us more money to do further research" piece. What was that about having everyone having an agenda again...?
I'm not saying it's not a success or worth doing, just that it's perhaps not *quite* the degree of success that it might seem. Keeping in mind that there likely to be lots of groups trying out this kind of scam, each using their own sets of keys and potentially also distributing them across multiple C&C servers to help mitigate against this kind of countermeasure, then the number of victims for a given C&C server is likely to be quite low to start with. According to the site iteself there are around 15,000 keys in total (the 750 mentioned in TFA was just the initial batch), although that might not correspond in any meaningful way with the number of victims or files that have been encrypted. What I'm hoping for is that Kaspersky will follow up on this with some indication of how many of those ~15,000 keys are actually used by victims of the gang to successfully recover their data, how many unique victims they identified, how many files were recovered, and so on.
While it's a worthy effort, I suspect that it's mostly just a PR stunt though since I doubt very many people will actually be able to use these keys to avoid paying the ransom, given that the criminals will indeed switch to new keys pretty much overnight, potentially re-encrypting any data on PCs they have already compromised in the process if they can re-establish control via other C&C servers. Of the potential victims that could benefit from this, once you've eliminated those who have already paid the ransom, written off their data and started over, or were fortunate enough to have good backups to restore from, are there *really* going to be that many left who will also be capable of finding the site with the decryption tools on it? That we don't here the security companies trumpting the numbers of successful decryptions using recovered keys like these makes me think that there are probably not all that many.
Many video editing and conversion tools claim that they "require" that QuickTime be installed during installation (although in many cases it's not actually required depending on the individual's specific needs), and then proceed to either download and install the current version or install an almost certainly out of date version from installation media. Since a basic version of a video editing tool is included with most devices with video capable cameras, I suspect this is probably responsible for bumping up the number of QuickTime installs on Windows much higher than it really needs to be, especially given how reticent some Windows users seem to be about installing updates.
That's definitely the real head scratcher here. On the one hand, an untrained crew possibly wouldn't even know to look for an override in the first place, yet on the other a properly trained and responsible crew ought to suspect that the aircraft with the civillian IFF might actually *be* a civillian aircraft and take the necessary precautions, so why would they fire regardless? Even assuming that Russian military personnel were on site, and there are numerous instances of the Russian military generally not caring about civillian casualties such as downing other commercial aircraft, numerous hostage "rescues" where few hostages actually survived, and so on, it's still a case of "who knows?". There are any number of things that might lead to a SAM battery crew downing a civillian airliner, whether deliberately or through sheer incompetence, and obviously none of them are going to reflect well on the image of the Russian military being a professional and well trained outfit. It's pretty clear that image matters a lot to Moscow, so a threat to both that and the fabrication that they are not overtly involved in Ukraine would quite likely cause the kind of knee jerk reaction we appear to have got.
I don't think that's the issue that the Russians are so touchy about. Realistically, it's highly unlikely that the Russians would just "give" a BUK to the separatists and let them drive it away without there being some unofficial advisors along for the ride to provide at least some training/oversight. That implies that not only are Russian personnel officially on the ground (something they are still denying, despite all the evidence to the contrary) but that they were almost certainly on hand when the BUK was used since a BUK apparently requires override to enable it to fire at a commercial aircraft that was presumably broadcasting its IFF, something untrained personnel wouldn't have been likely to know how to do.
I don't think it's about the slap on the wrist for culpability they might have got (or not, given what happened in the aftermath of all the events you listed), and others like KAL007 and KAL902, it's about maintaining the pretense that they have no official involvement on the ground. Basically, in their panic after MH17 was shot down, the Russian government rushed out a story to maintain that pretense that was never going to stand up to scrutiny instead of taking their time and coming up with something that might at least have raised enough doubt. Now they are stuck with either trying to defend a story that has more holes in it than the fuselage of MH17 or changing their story and risking blowing away the fiction of their non-involvement they have spun for their own people.
Sure they could. They'd only have needed to have done a little handwavium over where the BUK launcher used actually came from (not too much of a stretch given that the Ukrainian military operates the launchers), continued to deny any official Russian military involvement, and insisting that it was all the work of separatists. That still fits the official internal Russian storyline, yet provides a much more plausible story to everyone else that maybe the Ukrainian government really might have "misplaced" a BUK in the turmoil and that it fell into the hands of separatists who, not being suitably trained in its use, then proceeded to shoot down a target without adequately verifying it wasn't civilian - or even did so regardless. Not perfect, certainly, but a heck of a lot better than all the indications of a cover-up that they are now ensnared in.
Dumb thing is that KAL007 should have taught them nothing much would come of it even if they did own up, and in this case they could quite easily have pegged the blame on some unidentified rogue elements of the Pro-Russian forces in Eastern Ukraine right from start and probably have walked away from the whole affair without so much as a slap on the wrist. Instead, all the heavy handed actions, conspiracy theory level alternative theories and random protestation, just make it look all the more likely that they have something to hide - which is kind of ironic coming from the nation that pretty much made the concept of "if you've got nothing to hide, then you've got nothing to fear..." not all that long ago.
Obviously Limestone still have problem customers, but actually taking action is new for them based on my past experiences with many, many ignored abuse reports. Have they cleaned up their act recently, or are they still a ghetto and we should operate under the assumption Cisco did some arm twisting to make this happen?
Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and most of the other cloud computing services, already *have* data centres in the EU, so they can get into full compliance "simply" by ensuring that no applicable EU citizen data leaves those data centres. In Microsoft's case this is probably excellent news since they now have another argument they can use to avoid the US DoJ's attempts to compel them to hand over emails they have in their Dublin DC. It's the smaller US companies that are probably going to take the brunt of this - the one that don't currently have any servers in the EU.
It's probably a good day to be a CoLo provider with spare capacity in the EU...
You jest, but that's actually not a bad idea. Picking a country that you have absolutely no connection with and that has a less than friendly relationship with your own government is probably the best you can do in the current mass-surveillance climate - provided that you don't do anything that violates the local laws of your hosting country in a major way. Sure, they might well be monitoring your data, but they almost certainly won't care about it, and if your own country's law enforcement/copyright cartel/whatever comes knocking for any reason they'll almost certainly get nowhere.
Unjust or not, the issue then becomes one of whether or not it acceptable to try and change a law by wilfully violating it - as Uber et al are doing in some of the locales they are operating in - with the implication of whether that slipperly slope is *really* one that you want to go down, and especially so when it's a corporation making that decision just because it's inconvenient to their business model/profit margin. In some cases, sure, mass civil disobedience is necessary to bring about change, in others a lone individual might do as a trigger (Rosa Parks, for instance), but generally those are for far more egregious or morally corrupt laws than the kind of bureaucratic red tape and entrenched industry regulation that Uber is opposing.
Yes, much of that legislation is unjust, anti-competetive and so on, just as Uber is claiming, and some of it is also there in order to at least try and establish a minimum standard of safety and service. The correct process for Uber and the like to take is to challenge the unjust, anti-competetive laws first, potentially citing public demand for their services, *then* start operations if (and only if) they can successfully establish a framework that enables them to operate legally and in compliance with the safety and service legislation. Starting operations regardless and dealing with the legal fallout might be acceptable to them, possibly even considered as an acceptable risk within their business model, but it also smacks of "we're above the law" arrogance, which will lose them some of the public support they might have had if they were purely fighting it through the courts and better discriminating between the two sets of rules. Factor in the stories of how Uber treats its drivers when things go wrong, drivers having their cars taken of the road, and even the issue of their status as contractor or employee, and it's easy to see how people who might otherwise be supportive of Uber are not.
Some potentially interesting implications with Cuba getting into bed with China though. Given historical ties with Russia (or rather the USSR) and the high probability that Cuba would look the other way regarding the numerous sanctions in place against Russia due to the involvement in the Crimea and Eastern Ukraine it seems like Russia has lost out on some major opportunities here, not least the ability to get a bit of a PR coup and rattle the cages of some of the more hawkish US political/military crowd. Presumably the stronger long term prospects of the Chinese and any concessions they may have offered won out for Cuba, but you have to wonder what China's long term game plan is here and how badly the US will react when they finally realise what it is - or when Chinese naval vessels start arriving in the Caribbean.
Regardless of what you think about China's Great Firewall and censorship, at least the Chinese government realised that if they wanted to censor their own population then it was up to them to try and implement a technical solution at their own expense instead of trying to force others to do their hard work for them and pay for it as well. Apart from the futility of the latter approach given the whack-a-mole approach to all the many, many avenues of locating the same data (as those trying to exercise their Right to be Forgotten will no doubt eventually discover), it still doesn't actually remove the data from the Internet, nor is it ever likely to given how global media works in the Internet age.
Anything that is written into law anywhere becomes written into law everywhere.
Be careful what you wish for is SO much more fun: freedom of speech, freedom to practice any religion (or none at all), freedom to blaspheme, ownership of guns, ownership and consumption of alcohol and some narcotics, the right to birth control and abortion... Lots of locally contentious issues are protected by laws and constitutional rights somewhere... Perhaps that would be worth taking onboard some of the more completely insane (and likely to be mostly unenforceable and thus ignored) ones out there?
Let's see. Based on what information we have so far, which almost certainly isn't the whole story, the incident happened on Friday night. It's now early Sunday morning in the US and some employees have already been terminated, presumably for gross misconduct since mistakes can (and do) happen, so that alone implies this was probably a willful act and the perpetrators were somehow either caught in the act or there was a clear audit trail when the fake "google.com" certificate came to light. There have already been allegations that the US' TLA agencies have been planting employees in US tech companies for such purposes so OP's conclusion isn't completely out of the field, although it could just as easily have been a large criminal organization or foreign government. Due to the requirements of making effective use of fraudulent certificate it's highly unlikely to have been a get rich quick scheme dreamed up by those involved without some form of government/organized crime support.
I expect this will blow over very quickly for Thawte. They appear to have procedures in place to tie specific certs to specific individuals, will no doubt already have revoked the certificates concerned, and we can probably expect some explanatory notice to be published in the next few days to explain their version of events; there really isn't much more they could have do in the face of rogue employee. They should also be handing what evidence they have over to law enforcement for potential prosecutions, which could get interesting if the individuals involved were indeed working at the behest of a US security agency...
Who said anything about commercial flights? As stated in the article, this is more about airshow appearances and potentially private charters, most likely for things like prolonged viewing of eclipses or short jaunts for special occassions and the like, so the noise of take off and supersonic flights over populated areas are probably not going to be all that much of an issue. They just need to make it clear that if you want to go from the UK to mainland Europe and back for the day, then you can't realistically expect to go supersonic, but if you just want to loop out over the Atlantic and back then that could well be an option.
They've certainly timed the announcement well, anyway. The UK's current publically funded historic display aircraft is doing its farewell flights over the next few weeks, so there's every liklihood that they'll be able to pick up a lot of the donors who supported the Vulcan over the last decade or so for another historic example of UK aviation engineering.
There's no monopoly for Apple to keep, and never has been. Apple has less than 20% of the market for smartphones which is dominated by the various Android manufacturers and isn't even the largest single player overall by many accounts (that would be Samsung), with several other major players and very long tail of also rans. I'd say the smartphone handset market is actually pretty healthy and competetive at present, the smartphone OS market not so much, but there's still a reasonable choice with nice hardware on several platforms. It's a similar situation for tablets, and in pretty much every other market they are currently in Apple is essentially an also-ran in terms of market share - definitely no monopolies.
What Apple does have though is a disproportionate amount of media coverage (both paid for advertising and articles), so perhaps that's skewing peoples perspectives?
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I'm going with 1 *and* 2. Based on discussions I have had with Chinese tech companies the days of China having to steal all of its tech and being incapable of developing its own are long since past and they are now quite capable of developing stuff on their own, from scratch if need be. Any industrial espionage is more than likely just to save them time and effort so they can take a shortcut and compare notes.
I'm also reminded of how the US once published spy satellite pictures of the Nile delta showing all of the subterranean waterways as a means of informing the Russian military that they could, by inference, also see all of the missile silos and other underground facilities the Soviets had build in Siberia, etc.; so this is probably also about sending a similar message. Quite nicely done too, unlike the Russian's ham fisted efforts with their "leak" of nuclear torpedo schematics via state TV over the weekend. Yeah right, like the Ra-Ra-Putin Channel doesn't have an official censor to vet everything it airs...
That is supposedly the objective of the "Great or Dead" project - strip out all the crap, discard the stuff that few people use outright and reimplement the rest as optional modules/plugins or whatever. Quite how Mozilla is defining "optional" is to be determined, but I doubt it's going to be a simple case of opting for a custom install and then telling the installer not to install the modules that you see as worthless. I'm skeptical, given that things like the ill-received Pocket module bring funds to the foundation, but we'll have to wait (and wait, and wait) before we find out - despite the rapidly increasing version numbers the actual amount of change between so called major releases is awfully small.
Yeah, there's a lot of irony in that, but it's par for the course and with good reason. Just about all the regions of the EU that are seeking independence from their parent state also intend to submit themselves for EU membership as well should they succeed, and there are a lot of them, albeit most seem unlikely to achieve autonomy. Ultimately the EU affords more independence over many local political and administrative matters than many national governments are prepared to afford their provinces, despite what UKIP and the like would like people to believe, so it's not as daft as it seems.
While you are right on the voting demographic and media bias/propaganda, I think there's possibly a major wrinkle in the debate coming that's going to seriously upset the applecart for the exit campaign. The Scottish are collectively much more pro-EU than the south of England, and the Scottish National Party are in the process of putting together a set of criteria that will trigger another referendum on their own independence from England. I'm fully expecting to see "UK voting to leave the EU" being right at the top of that list of criteria when it's announced, and if there's one thing that is likely to upset the anti-EU crowd more than remaining in the EU it's the very likely prospect of Scotland leaving the UK shortly afterward if they win.
What, you thought the US had the monopoly on turning politics into a car crash TV event?
Very much depends on the individual port. In some cases sea level rises are actually a good thing because they could increase the height of the docks as required in order to handle ships with larger displacements and/or operate with longer sailing times due to a reduced impact from low tides. Others will need major civils work to prevent extensive flooding of adjacent facilities, so depending on the degree of the sea level rise it might not be economical to try and keep the port in operation compared to rerouting goods elsewhere and allowing the lower lying areas to flood with the tides. Historically, ports have moved around all the time; there are plenty of ancient ports that are now either completely submerged or silted up due to changing conditions; new ports are constructed near by, the cargoes get rerouted, and commerce goes on.
No, I don't think science can ever be said to be finished. There's always going to be a further potential for refinement, follow up question, or piece of inexplicable data that needs exploring, and that's the nature of the beast. I was just driving home the point that there is always an agenda, even if it's the business as usual, and rather benign given how we approach funding science, "we need more money".
No matter where you stand on the debate, at this point people should be taking ALL climate change studies with a healthy degree of scepticism; there are too many people with an agenda on all sides to assume that any of it is completely free of bias. Even so, I think NASA handled the discrepency rather clearly in the article; they disagree with the IPCC's figures on ice loss/gain, but not with the overall sealevel rises - ergo, they conclude that the difference is either coming from additional water entering the oceans from somewhere else or there is something else going on in Antarctica. Well, duh! What they don't do is speculate what that might be, so in otherwords it's also serving as a "give us more money to do further research" piece. What was that about having everyone having an agenda again...?
I'm not saying it's not a success or worth doing, just that it's perhaps not *quite* the degree of success that it might seem. Keeping in mind that there likely to be lots of groups trying out this kind of scam, each using their own sets of keys and potentially also distributing them across multiple C&C servers to help mitigate against this kind of countermeasure, then the number of victims for a given C&C server is likely to be quite low to start with. According to the site iteself there are around 15,000 keys in total (the 750 mentioned in TFA was just the initial batch), although that might not correspond in any meaningful way with the number of victims or files that have been encrypted. What I'm hoping for is that Kaspersky will follow up on this with some indication of how many of those ~15,000 keys are actually used by victims of the gang to successfully recover their data, how many unique victims they identified, how many files were recovered, and so on.
While it's a worthy effort, I suspect that it's mostly just a PR stunt though since I doubt very many people will actually be able to use these keys to avoid paying the ransom, given that the criminals will indeed switch to new keys pretty much overnight, potentially re-encrypting any data on PCs they have already compromised in the process if they can re-establish control via other C&C servers. Of the potential victims that could benefit from this, once you've eliminated those who have already paid the ransom, written off their data and started over, or were fortunate enough to have good backups to restore from, are there *really* going to be that many left who will also be capable of finding the site with the decryption tools on it? That we don't here the security companies trumpting the numbers of successful decryptions using recovered keys like these makes me think that there are probably not all that many.
Many video editing and conversion tools claim that they "require" that QuickTime be installed during installation (although in many cases it's not actually required depending on the individual's specific needs), and then proceed to either download and install the current version or install an almost certainly out of date version from installation media. Since a basic version of a video editing tool is included with most devices with video capable cameras, I suspect this is probably responsible for bumping up the number of QuickTime installs on Windows much higher than it really needs to be, especially given how reticent some Windows users seem to be about installing updates.
That's definitely the real head scratcher here. On the one hand, an untrained crew possibly wouldn't even know to look for an override in the first place, yet on the other a properly trained and responsible crew ought to suspect that the aircraft with the civillian IFF might actually *be* a civillian aircraft and take the necessary precautions, so why would they fire regardless? Even assuming that Russian military personnel were on site, and there are numerous instances of the Russian military generally not caring about civillian casualties such as downing other commercial aircraft, numerous hostage "rescues" where few hostages actually survived, and so on, it's still a case of "who knows?". There are any number of things that might lead to a SAM battery crew downing a civillian airliner, whether deliberately or through sheer incompetence, and obviously none of them are going to reflect well on the image of the Russian military being a professional and well trained outfit. It's pretty clear that image matters a lot to Moscow, so a threat to both that and the fabrication that they are not overtly involved in Ukraine would quite likely cause the kind of knee jerk reaction we appear to have got.
I don't think that's the issue that the Russians are so touchy about. Realistically, it's highly unlikely that the Russians would just "give" a BUK to the separatists and let them drive it away without there being some unofficial advisors along for the ride to provide at least some training/oversight. That implies that not only are Russian personnel officially on the ground (something they are still denying, despite all the evidence to the contrary) but that they were almost certainly on hand when the BUK was used since a BUK apparently requires override to enable it to fire at a commercial aircraft that was presumably broadcasting its IFF, something untrained personnel wouldn't have been likely to know how to do.
I don't think it's about the slap on the wrist for culpability they might have got (or not, given what happened in the aftermath of all the events you listed), and others like KAL007 and KAL902, it's about maintaining the pretense that they have no official involvement on the ground. Basically, in their panic after MH17 was shot down, the Russian government rushed out a story to maintain that pretense that was never going to stand up to scrutiny instead of taking their time and coming up with something that might at least have raised enough doubt. Now they are stuck with either trying to defend a story that has more holes in it than the fuselage of MH17 or changing their story and risking blowing away the fiction of their non-involvement they have spun for their own people.
Sure they could. They'd only have needed to have done a little handwavium over where the BUK launcher used actually came from (not too much of a stretch given that the Ukrainian military operates the launchers), continued to deny any official Russian military involvement, and insisting that it was all the work of separatists. That still fits the official internal Russian storyline, yet provides a much more plausible story to everyone else that maybe the Ukrainian government really might have "misplaced" a BUK in the turmoil and that it fell into the hands of separatists who, not being suitably trained in its use, then proceeded to shoot down a target without adequately verifying it wasn't civilian - or even did so regardless. Not perfect, certainly, but a heck of a lot better than all the indications of a cover-up that they are now ensnared in.
Dumb thing is that KAL007 should have taught them nothing much would come of it even if they did own up, and in this case they could quite easily have pegged the blame on some unidentified rogue elements of the Pro-Russian forces in Eastern Ukraine right from start and probably have walked away from the whole affair without so much as a slap on the wrist. Instead, all the heavy handed actions, conspiracy theory level alternative theories and random protestation, just make it look all the more likely that they have something to hide - which is kind of ironic coming from the nation that pretty much made the concept of "if you've got nothing to hide, then you've got nothing to fear..." not all that long ago.
Obviously Limestone still have problem customers, but actually taking action is new for them based on my past experiences with many, many ignored abuse reports. Have they cleaned up their act recently, or are they still a ghetto and we should operate under the assumption Cisco did some arm twisting to make this happen?
Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and most of the other cloud computing services, already *have* data centres in the EU, so they can get into full compliance "simply" by ensuring that no applicable EU citizen data leaves those data centres. In Microsoft's case this is probably excellent news since they now have another argument they can use to avoid the US DoJ's attempts to compel them to hand over emails they have in their Dublin DC. It's the smaller US companies that are probably going to take the brunt of this - the one that don't currently have any servers in the EU.
It's probably a good day to be a CoLo provider with spare capacity in the EU...
You jest, but that's actually not a bad idea. Picking a country that you have absolutely no connection with and that has a less than friendly relationship with your own government is probably the best you can do in the current mass-surveillance climate - provided that you don't do anything that violates the local laws of your hosting country in a major way. Sure, they might well be monitoring your data, but they almost certainly won't care about it, and if your own country's law enforcement/copyright cartel/whatever comes knocking for any reason they'll almost certainly get nowhere.
Unjust or not, the issue then becomes one of whether or not it acceptable to try and change a law by wilfully violating it - as Uber et al are doing in some of the locales they are operating in - with the implication of whether that slipperly slope is *really* one that you want to go down, and especially so when it's a corporation making that decision just because it's inconvenient to their business model/profit margin. In some cases, sure, mass civil disobedience is necessary to bring about change, in others a lone individual might do as a trigger (Rosa Parks, for instance), but generally those are for far more egregious or morally corrupt laws than the kind of bureaucratic red tape and entrenched industry regulation that Uber is opposing.
Yes, much of that legislation is unjust, anti-competetive and so on, just as Uber is claiming, and some of it is also there in order to at least try and establish a minimum standard of safety and service. The correct process for Uber and the like to take is to challenge the unjust, anti-competetive laws first, potentially citing public demand for their services, *then* start operations if (and only if) they can successfully establish a framework that enables them to operate legally and in compliance with the safety and service legislation. Starting operations regardless and dealing with the legal fallout might be acceptable to them, possibly even considered as an acceptable risk within their business model, but it also smacks of "we're above the law" arrogance, which will lose them some of the public support they might have had if they were purely fighting it through the courts and better discriminating between the two sets of rules. Factor in the stories of how Uber treats its drivers when things go wrong, drivers having their cars taken of the road, and even the issue of their status as contractor or employee, and it's easy to see how people who might otherwise be supportive of Uber are not.
Some potentially interesting implications with Cuba getting into bed with China though. Given historical ties with Russia (or rather the USSR) and the high probability that Cuba would look the other way regarding the numerous sanctions in place against Russia due to the involvement in the Crimea and Eastern Ukraine it seems like Russia has lost out on some major opportunities here, not least the ability to get a bit of a PR coup and rattle the cages of some of the more hawkish US political/military crowd. Presumably the stronger long term prospects of the Chinese and any concessions they may have offered won out for Cuba, but you have to wonder what China's long term game plan is here and how badly the US will react when they finally realise what it is - or when Chinese naval vessels start arriving in the Caribbean.
Regardless of what you think about China's Great Firewall and censorship, at least the Chinese government realised that if they wanted to censor their own population then it was up to them to try and implement a technical solution at their own expense instead of trying to force others to do their hard work for them and pay for it as well. Apart from the futility of the latter approach given the whack-a-mole approach to all the many, many avenues of locating the same data (as those trying to exercise their Right to be Forgotten will no doubt eventually discover), it still doesn't actually remove the data from the Internet, nor is it ever likely to given how global media works in the Internet age.
Be careful what you wish for is SO much more fun: freedom of speech, freedom to practice any religion (or none at all), freedom to blaspheme, ownership of guns, ownership and consumption of alcohol and some narcotics, the right to birth control and abortion... Lots of locally contentious issues are protected by laws and constitutional rights somewhere... Perhaps that would be worth taking onboard some of the more completely insane (and likely to be mostly unenforceable and thus ignored) ones out there?
Why?
Let's see. Based on what information we have so far, which almost certainly isn't the whole story, the incident happened on Friday night. It's now early Sunday morning in the US and some employees have already been terminated, presumably for gross misconduct since mistakes can (and do) happen, so that alone implies this was probably a willful act and the perpetrators were somehow either caught in the act or there was a clear audit trail when the fake "google.com" certificate came to light. There have already been allegations that the US' TLA agencies have been planting employees in US tech companies for such purposes so OP's conclusion isn't completely out of the field, although it could just as easily have been a large criminal organization or foreign government. Due to the requirements of making effective use of fraudulent certificate it's highly unlikely to have been a get rich quick scheme dreamed up by those involved without some form of government/organized crime support.
I expect this will blow over very quickly for Thawte. They appear to have procedures in place to tie specific certs to specific individuals, will no doubt already have revoked the certificates concerned, and we can probably expect some explanatory notice to be published in the next few days to explain their version of events; there really isn't much more they could have do in the face of rogue employee. They should also be handing what evidence they have over to law enforcement for potential prosecutions, which could get interesting if the individuals involved were indeed working at the behest of a US security agency...
Who said anything about commercial flights? As stated in the article, this is more about airshow appearances and potentially private charters, most likely for things like prolonged viewing of eclipses or short jaunts for special occassions and the like, so the noise of take off and supersonic flights over populated areas are probably not going to be all that much of an issue. They just need to make it clear that if you want to go from the UK to mainland Europe and back for the day, then you can't realistically expect to go supersonic, but if you just want to loop out over the Atlantic and back then that could well be an option.
They've certainly timed the announcement well, anyway. The UK's current publically funded historic display aircraft is doing its farewell flights over the next few weeks, so there's every liklihood that they'll be able to pick up a lot of the donors who supported the Vulcan over the last decade or so for another historic example of UK aviation engineering.
There's no monopoly for Apple to keep, and never has been. Apple has less than 20% of the market for smartphones which is dominated by the various Android manufacturers and isn't even the largest single player overall by many accounts (that would be Samsung), with several other major players and very long tail of also rans. I'd say the smartphone handset market is actually pretty healthy and competetive at present, the smartphone OS market not so much, but there's still a reasonable choice with nice hardware on several platforms. It's a similar situation for tablets, and in pretty much every other market they are currently in Apple is essentially an also-ran in terms of market share - definitely no monopolies.
What Apple does have though is a disproportionate amount of media coverage (both paid for advertising and articles), so perhaps that's skewing peoples perspectives?
Dr. Fred Edison, is that you?
P.S. It doesn't work out too well...