Suppose you send me a snail-mail letter and my secretary reads it to decide if it deserves my attention. Has your privacy been violated? Suppose I take your letter and put in on the company bulletin board so everyone can read it. It may offend you, it may be socially gauche, but would it be illegal?

My e-mail secretary is called GMail, and I chose to let it read all my incoming mail. That's between me and Google, and I don't see why you (the sender of my incoming messages) has any right to complain. Moreover, the text of the incoming messages is only used to show me targeted ads, so I really don't see why you should care.

If (and that's a big if) Google put information from scanned incoming messages into its online profile of you (for ads on non-google websites), then there might be some cause for concern, but that's not what they do, and even if the did I don't see the problem. If you send me a message and I decided to let Google read it then Google should be in the clear..

People are shocked, shocked! to discover that the email service that makes money by showing them targeted ads based on their messages examines the content of the messages for this purpose.

I mean, come on: nobody was forced to sign up for gmail.

When the laptop was new, the battery would last about the indicated time. It's now 6 years old, and the battery capcity is about 80% of what it was originally. Of course, I only put the battery in the laptop when I use it away from an outlet, which only happens once every few months ...

The summary above is highly misleading, possibly because of the bad headline the NYT editor put on the story. The judge didn't rule on the merits at all. All he did is issue a preliminary injunctiion, which forces the drug company to maintain the status quo for the duration of the trial. The judge didn't "block an attempt by the drug company" he just deferred the attempt until the case is over. If New York wins its case, the judge will actually block the attempt by entering a permanent injunction.

In other words: this ruling only reflects a judgement that, until we know who wins, it's better to force the company to keep the drug on the market, which is obvious to everyone. It doesn't reflect a judgement on whether the drug company may legally withdraw the drug.

Now that Google has every reason to crush Firefox, what is Mozilla's market share going to be in 2019?

I agree that the Google being both a competitor and (until now) a sponsor is the major consideration here, not the quality of search results. The question is whether Google really are more motivated to support Mozilla when they are getting revenue from browser searches than when they aren't. Quite possibly the Mozilla Foundation concluded that Google would compete with them in any case.

It will be hard for anyone here to assess this move. Having not used Yahoo! search for a long time, I have no idea about the quality of their search results. It is even less clear whether the typical Mozilla user will care about any possible differences, or the extent to which Mozilla users might change browsers because of this

If I had to guess, I'd say that very few people choose their brower based on the default search engine, and therefore very few will change browers because of this. If the userbase is really fixed then Mozilla should try to maximize their revenue by letting Yahoo! and Google bid for the rights.

Coal is both extremely polluting and costs lives to dig out of the ground. Phasing it out is a great idea.

On the other hand, unless fusion arrives before 2050 (not very likely), fission is a much better idea than "rewneables" like wind and solar which are very expensive and (with wind) environmentally damaging..

I you really let me sit between you and the source of the download, I can mess with your download of the public key, and therefore replace signatures.

In other words, OS updates cannot be attacked this way (presumably OS vendor's the public key is included in the installation). But if you patch my download from www.example.com, you can also patch my download when I get the public key used by www.example.com to sign downloads.

Digital signatures is exactly the technology that solves this problem. If you download binaries from the internet (especially if you have need to use Tor to get them!), check the signatures!

Now, it may be possible to also dynamically patch the signatures when these are downloaded -- but that requires much greater control since signatures can be obtained separately, and since Tor can mitigate the problem by routing different downloads through different exit notes.