You contradicted yourself.

Google has been revealing (via their own transparency reports) that governments want your searches, email, and whatnot that are stored on their servers. Twitter is telling people that the governments are doing the same. I don't think it'll really hit home until Facebook follows suit. Only then will people really "get it" that the government is mining the details of your online life to do whatever they want with it.

I said this before on here: Big Brother was made "cool" and the public welcomed it with open arms. In this case, FB, Twitter, and anything else on the internet along with your cellphones and now your televisions.

... delay the inevitable.

Every new security feature they can dream up can and will be bypassed with enough time.All they can do is build it hard enough that it takes more time to crack.

I tried to sign up for a gmail account for use with various *nix message boards maybe a month or two ago and it tried to force me to provide a phone number. There was no Captcha option when I did it. I entered my information and went to the next screen where it demanded a phone number.

I ended up opening a hotmail account instead.

Can anyone else outside of the US report back on this? Does Google require a phone number in your country?

There's more to it than meets the eye. I don't have a FB account, so I can't fathom why they would ask for you to include your phone number on it for any reason. I do know that Google now REQUIRES it just to open a Gmail account.

Some part of me simply doesn't trust this. We all know about correlation engines and how they work, and we know that the NSA collects and reads your emails (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/sep/15/data-whistleblower-constitutional-rights). Now we add into the mix your phone number, which, as we already know is subject to warrant-less tapping (http://www.businessinsider.com/senate-renews-controversial-law-which-allows-warrantless-wiretapping-of-us-citizens-2012-12) and if the number you provides happens to belong to your cellphone, we know that it can act as a covert "roving bug" (http://yro.slashdot.org/story/06/12/02/0415209/fbi-taps-cell-phone-microphones-in-mafia-case). All of this provides more data to track you, what you do, who you interact with, who you're near at any given moment and those individuals interactions... All in the name of "keeping you/this country safe".

This simply doesn't sit well with me.

Finally the line "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" can be used against law enforcement. Since law enforcement agencies across the country are adopting ever more invasive tactics to monitor citizens, it's refreshing to see that we can finally monitor them without fear of reprisal.

Didn't this game have page turning animations in it back in '83?

At some point the light should go off in everyone's head to see where governments are going with this. It'll probably be too late, but at least we will realize what happened... But then what?

Immediately after the Symantec/Huawei joint venture in 2007, backdoors and trojans began to appear that targeted Symantec products. Symantec products have been a staple of DoD environments for a number of years (http://www.symantec.com/press/2003/n030527a.html), so something like this likely raised more than a few eyebrows. I'm honestly surprised that it took this long considering how much trust we have in the Chinese (extremely little) and the fact that Huawei products had already been blacklisted by the DoD.

Surely we can all agree that "Facebook Privacy" is an oxymoron.

As I've stated below, I know who he is, but why should that even matter? This was about as newsworthy as RNS tweeting what he ate for breakfast or Miguel de Icaza blurting somewhere that he's on his way to Ecuador for some R&R.

His contributions to FOSS don't make him above a bit of criticizm or someone poking fun at a post on his blog.

I know exactly who Bruce is. Doesn't negate the fact that this was not "News", and it's STILL the ramblings of a guy (Bruce Perens, male = guy) on the internet (his blog = on the internet).

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/04/19/192207/expect-mandatory-big-brother-black-boxes-in-all-new-cars-from-2015

... that I'll never get back.

This was not "News For Nerds", it was "the ramblings of a guy on the internet".