I have nothing worth hiding, but I have an even simpler method:

Don't put incriminating things on your phone.
Don't use biometrics AT ALL. Literally just turn them off.

My bank app tries to remind me every 6 months or so and I just dismiss it. Google also seems to think that I can "pay" with a biometric as an option whenever I buy an app or book on their apps... which is interesting because I've literally never given them one. Selecting the option wants me to enroll a fingerprint using my Google password. Nope.

Paypal tries the same - keeps pretending that I can "login" with my fingerprint as an option despite the fact that I have no stored fingerprint on my phone or Paypal account.

The only place I've ever been required to give a biometric was when applying for a passport. That's it. I consider that a reasonable extra metric to have on such a document to help prevent forgery or misuse of my identity if it gets stolen. Nothing else has or could verify my biometrics whatsoever, certainly nothing consumer/commercial.

(I think that too many companies are just too tricky in trying to obtain your details. Whatspp, for example, demanded I furnish them with a ton of information to "confirm" who I was when I asked them to remove data... and 50% of the information requested has LITERALLY never been given to Whatsapp or any partner company... it was just a data-hoarding exercise. "Give us your home address if you want us to remove your data from our servers"... er... no. You have absolutely nothing to confirm that against, and if you do we have a FAR LARGER problem almost immediately).

Disable biometrics, they are not required. Stop faffing around using them as a convenience method, because that's all they are. They are not, and cannot ever be, secure because you're giving them out to every device that tries to read them.

Not storing incriminating evidence on a cloud-controlled mass-market consumer piece of technology is probably a good idea too if you want to avoid such things coming to light.

At the point of arrest, are you suggesting that the police couldn't open a locked door that they suspect has evidence behind it?

That they'd have to arrest the guy, take him away, go to court, get a warrant, in order to open the boiler cupboard?

No, it doesn't work like that. Reasonable suspicion of a crime has rules too, and those allow such actions. It's always "unreasonable" search that's the problem.

Otherwise criminals would put cheap tiny padlocks on everything they own, including their phone, and make you get a court order to open every single one.

Talk about burdening the court systems with nonsense.

"We've arrested the suspected child kidnapper, but we can't possibly open the door to his cellar because it has a small luggage padlock on it, so we have to wait for the court order to come through, and hopefully it does that in 24 hours or we won't be able to charge him and will have to let him go."

Yup, and requiring a warrant is nearly the same as no requirement at all. Indeed, since at least 2015, many FISA warrants were, recently issued despite flawed or plainly illegally obtained.

From an article:

"the OIG reviewed 29 FISA applications from eight FBI field offices to check for compliance with mandatory “Woods Procedures.” Those procedures require agents to compile supporting documentation for each fact contained in a FISA application to ensure that they are “scrupulously accurate.” The OIG found four of the 29 didn’t have any Woods file at all; the other 25 all contained multiple deficiencies:'“Although all 29 FISA applications that we selected for review were required by FBI policy to have Woods Files created by the case agent and reviewed by the supervisory special agent, we have identified 4 applications for which, as of the date of this memorandum, the FBI either has been unable to locate the Woods File that was prepared at the time of the application or for which FBI personnel suggested a Woods File was not completed.”

“Additionally, for all 25 FISA applications with Woods Files that we have reviewed to date, we identified facts stated in the FISA application that were: (a) not supported by any documentation in the Woods File, (b) not clearly corroborated by the supporting documentation in the Woods File, or (c) inconsistent with the supporting documentation in the Woods File."

The government isn't playing bu the rules now,. and hasn't for years, probably decades. More rules will not be enough to change this.

I am John Galt

And proper retaliaiton for military air base noise after you've bought your house directly underneath the air traffic pattern (this is a big thing near where I live) is to demand your sales agent/broker, seller, builder, all make you whole and solve your problem - no doubt by relocating you.

Thsi is such a big deal near where I live that now, if you are in the real estate sales business, even if you are not actually at work, but are in that city, even just visiting, you must carry an 8.5"x11" full color map of the air base, surrounding area, and the boundaries of noise level and potentially offfending aircraft operations. To be found without it will cause a $500 fine. Every time you are found such, even if you are merely having lunch with your daughter. Yeah, they aggressively enforce this. Retaliation.

And on nearly the opposite side of the valley, when GM sold off its proving grounds, the space was immediately touted as a unique opportunity for a new and massive residential development. And right in the traffic pattern of a nearby airport. The city zoned it specifically to prevent residential development without exception. And yes, several developers have made concerted efforts to change this. So far, no success, and hopefully they avoid this mistake. Avoiding retaliation.

That number should be zero. If there are currently a negative number of business the US government can force to eavesdrop on Americans without a warrant, then maybe expand the list to zero.

If your enterprise depends on a product that can't parse a textfile correctly without appropriate and simplistic sanity-checking, you absolutely and desperately need a new product for your enterprise.

And if that product says "Oh, we can't do that, because it's undocumented and the format could change at any time, so no warranty for that..." take that as a hint.

I would guess that absolutely nobody is paying the kernel team to solve their boo-boos with their third-party, out-of-tree, unnecessary KConfig parser for enterprises that they're charging a fortune for. It's on them to fix it if their parser is so immature that it can't handle a space in an often manually-edited config file.

If it's undocumented, third-party integrators should be asking for such and/or KNOWING that their integration could break at any time and that they should therefore do a lot more sanity-checking.

It's actually incredibly likely that we're NOT.

But the problem is that simple physics gets in the way and the chances of two civilisations existing at the same time, within communication distance of ANY kind, and who notice each other and can do anything about it (beyond having conversations with 4000-year round-trip times), are infinitesimally small, even with a million such civilisations.

Basically, the limiting factor here is the speed of light - and if that's literally the limit of the universe, every civilisation that exists will basically be forever isolated from all others, just by sheer probability. It doesn't matter how advanced they get, how fast they spread through their galaxy, how many millions of years they last.... the chances are they won't meet another, or even catch a glimpse of evidence of their existence.

It's far more likely we're one of countless civilisations, even in our own galaxy, but almost certainly in the countless trillions of galaxies we can see, but that we'll never actually know that. The maths tells us so.

And if someone can "break the speed of light" (without tricks like holes in space, etc. but actually break the speed of light), they could probably also go spend all of eternity locating every civilisation that ever existed anywhere from the point they discover that, and basically visit them at any "time" in that civilisation that they desire. Would they choose 2024 Earth and humans from a universe of possibilities? Almost certainly not.

We're not alone, we're not the most advanced life. But we will likely be entirely unable to provide any evidence of that for the complete window of our entire existence. That's, by far, the most likely scenario for every civilisation in the entire universe.

That's the first thing I noticed in TFA. 'engineers will be needed to operate...'.

It's now sop to hire engineers to operate equipment? That used to be the role of technicians. A different strata.

They don’t need them: they’re the redcoats!

Assange added 8 years of his own to his sentence.

In reality, he's only done:

April 2019: ejected from the embassy
May 2019: 50 weeks prison for skipping bail
May 2020: everything else starts taking effect

So not even 4 years yet - for a complex, public, international extradition case. BBC News has a story of a rape conviction that took 6 years to get to court only this morning.

That's including a denial of extradition on health grounds, an appeal by the US and escalation to the High Court.

And look... it's about to happen, as the final chance at a successful appeal started in February back at the High Court.

The fact that Asssange himself wasted TWICE AS MUCH TIME AGAIN just to go on the run is his own fault, and self-imprisonment contributed greatly to the mental decline that was later successfully used as an argument in front of a judge to try to avoid extradition and only overruled on appeal.