I was wondering why they'd have "sprayed insecticides over them." According to the article, "the trial was also allegedly sprayed with herbicide." There's a real distinction there. The article itself is about as long as the summary anyway.

That only works if your profit margins can spare 30%.

Well, the president of Microsoft Russia should be a reliable, trustworthy source for this kind of analysis, right? Right?

There wouldn't be much gained by actually implanting it in your skull either.

What's more, it might actually be MORE consolidated. "We want The Document Foundation to be open to code contributions from as many people as possible. We are delighted to announce that the enhancements produced by RedHat and the Go-OOo team will be merged into LibreOffice, effective immediately. We hope that others will follow suit. "

The webpage explains that "The OpenOffice.org trademark is owned by Oracle Corporation. Our hope is that Oracle will donate this to the Foundation, along with the other assets it holds in trust for the Community, in due course, once legal etc issues are resolved. However, we need to continue work in the meantime - hence "LibreOffice" ("free office")."

That's part of being "open," and many consider that diversity to be a huge advantage. Don't even get me started on: "I just want to use something that WORKs and that is NOT from MS."

The same article announcing the existence of the exploit announced the existence of the fix. That's pretty good support if you ask me, and it's hard to be too worried under those circumstances.

Bug bounties are really not far off from Scab work at all. Companies use bounties and contests to replace what could otherwise be lucrative positions for permanent employees. And as long as there are people out there willing to do the work for free, the company has no incentive to create those positions. They just paid 400$ a bug to get god knows how many people to run QA for them, and paid out the ten people that got in fresh, reproducible bugs the fastest. This is great for the companies running the contests, but it sure isn't good for workers or the industry.

Apple and Google both seem to do a really good job at drawing the media attention to their hits and not their misses. There's always a back catalog of unsuccessful software, this is just a fairly high profile case.

It looks like more recent publications have resolved this: "The alga was identified as a specie belonging to the genus Trentepohlia. The region in Changanacherry from where the red rain was reported was found to be densely vegetated with plenty of lichen on trees, rocks and lampposts. Samples of lichen collected from there also were cultured in the microbiology laboratory of TBGRI. The study showed that the lichen collected from the site gave rise to algae similar to the ones cultured from the spores obtained from the rain water samples. The spores in the rainwater, therefore, most probably are of local origin." http://web.archive.org/web/20060613135746/http://www.geocities.com/iamgoddard/Sampath2001.pdf

For the record, I'm inclined to agree. The ideal situation is for the government to enforce some level of encryption and security on carriers and hardware/software developers. Your average end user doesn't know or care about security and encryption, but many of them should. Better that we have the keys to the data in our own pockets. There's a lot the government can do as far as ensuring that records aren't kept, checking how they're stored, and so on. Audits can and do happen, at least in some places.

Someone is going to be deciding what to do with your data here, either the individual companies or the government. Personally, I'd rather that the government made the call (whether it be to keep data private, use it, etc) than maintain the current situation, where we have to beg companies to maintain our privacy, and then trust them to continue to do so. Those of us who live in democratic countries elect our government, and the theory is that they're accountable. We do not elect corporations and private companies. As with Google's "Do not be evil," promises that our privacy will be maintained are often made graciously, and perhaps with the best intentions, If your government isn't accountable, you can replace them. If RIM, Google, or anyone else decides to abuse your data... what then?

I don't think that's necessarily going to soothe people. They've seen the repercussions at their worst, or very near it, and now they're seeing what looks like evidence of a high failure rate. Outrage can be expected, and to some extent it's understandable. It's anecdotal evidence, and screams of observation bias, but the existence of those biases does not mean that people are wrong. Scrutinizing the source of all that outrage can't possibly hurt. A properly functioning government would ensure that's done.