Freedom does not require you to operate in secret. If you feel the need to operate in secret, either you need to fix your culture, or you need to fix yourself.

Preventing misrepresentation is a social positive. Preserving secrecy is a social negative. Compromises have to be made, but protecting your secrets is not a noble goal in and of itself, shouldn't be necessary in a free society, and in fact represents a threat to other peoples freedom.

I know, but.. Sony, North Korea and the FBI. Not exactly a triumvirate of trust.

Instead of "The Interview", a theater in Texas has decided to show "Team America" instead....

Except in Texas they think Team America World Police is a documentary.

I don't know what to believe. On one hand, we have Sony. On the other, North Korea. Finally, the FBI.

Shit, they're probably all lying their asses off.

Interesting that you mention Pepsi. Speaking of stuck in the 1990s, did you mean to allude to former Apple CEO John Sculley?

Yes, I've noticed that what Google is embracing with Android is the walled garden model. One little thing their search engine does, and a big reason why I'm trying to move away from them, is this redirection. Click on a link on their search results, and it doesn't send you straght to the linked material, no, it sends you to a Google URL that does a little something, then sends you on to the link. It's slow. I thought I could get away from that at DuckDuckGo, but they've been doing the same thing.

What about Google's language, Go? Anyone using that? I've been looking at webRTC, from Google, wondering if it could be used to move away from the client server model of web and Internet usage. For instance Skype (now owned by MS), requires that users connect to a central server, which does provide a little bit of service, tracking who is avaialble and who is away. But at what price?

As to being stuck in the past, I still don't trust Microsoft. Remember OOXML? That wasn't the 90s, that was 2008 when they ran their ugly campaign to cozen and bully ISO into making it a standard. Then there was the little technical problem from 2012 in which Windows 7 didn't offer users a chocie of browsers as they had promised, and for which Europe penalized MS. Now one of MS's latest stunts is this huge change in how they sell Office. You can't buy it any more, you can only lease it? If you think file format lock was bad, how about cloud dependency? Be a real shame if you let your Office 365 subscription expire, and lost access to all those documents you foolishly stored in MS's cloud. Of if you became dependent upon their services to sync and share your documents. Not to mention the little detail that sensitive info may be in their cloudy hands, ripe for data mining, seizing by law enforcement, or leaking in industrial espionage incidents.

It also increases interest in the movie. If it hadn't been for this threat, I doubt many of us would even be aware of "The Interview".

The Aurora shooting lawsuits are still working their way through the courts.

Those cars didn't receive specific threats. The theaters did.

Groups of people have the same speech rights as individuals.

For-profit corporations are not groups of people, they are aggregated capital.

The nature of the group (corporation, labor union, activist group, etc) does not matter.

See above.

Media corporations (i.e. traditional news) have no special rights with respect to speech, all corporations have the same speech rights.

They don't deserve ANY rights at all. They are just aggregated capital allowed to exist for the purpose of deferring liability. Why should money have rights?

If somebody damages your car, would you want your insurance company to pay to fix it?

That means they can set prices based on risk. And risk in this case means "perceived risk". It's not brave or not brave. It's just corporate behavior. This is why corporations are not considered people except by reactionaries and the far Right.

Encryption has a cost, it isn't free. It increases CPU utilisation and power consumption. It interferes with caching and reduces network efficiency.

This is a dumb idea. A very dumb idea.

Yes, because it is very hard to find a barber here in Austin at a reasonable time

I've been to Austin, and judging from the looks of the locals, it did not appear that the barbers had been very busy.

Yes, I'd go to the mall. I have a better chance of being killed in an accident driving to the mall.

I will bet your chances of being killed in a mall go way up if there are specific threats against that mall.

I would bet that the decision to not show this movie was made entirely by whoever provides insurance to the theater chain. It must be killing the theater owners not to show a movie that has gotten this much publicity at opening. But if your insurance provider says "No", you do what they say.

A few years back there was a great deal of interest in computers doing visual processing and recognition, and I was doing a little work in this area. The interest is still there, but news about it seems to have retreated from the front page. The security industry was especially interested in facial recognition. Alongside that interest were the usual peddlers of hype and hysteria. It was difficult to sort through all the noise. When I looked into research papers, I found that the details told of all kinds of limitations. Yes, they could match faces with 90% accuracy. If the lighting was good. And was the same level in the two photographs. And the subjects were all facing the camera at the exact same angle. And the subjects hadn't grown or removed any facial hair or glasses, or even changed hair styles. And they didn't have different expressions. And the database didn't have more than a few hundred subjects. But never mind, soon we would have video cameras on every street corner, matching every passing face to enforcers' databases of millions of criminals.

Despite the noise, which might lead a cynic to think that it's all hype, facial recognition has improved over the years. It will be the same in robotics. We won't see Robot Basketball Player replace Kobe Bryant anytime soon, no Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island. But we will see more and better robotics. John Henry scored a pyrrhic victory against a steam hammer. Fighting like that to keep jobs from being taken over by robots is just as useless and futile.

We may yet see that promise of more leisure time come true at last, thanks to robotics. So far, all our labor saving advances somehow have failed to free up much leisure time. Instead, we've put that time towards doing more work. Our parents worked hard so that we can have a better life, meaning, less hardhsip and more leisure time. But it seems more leisure time doesn't automatically make for a more satisfying, better life. Asimov's combination of his Foundation and Robots books had this idea of robots doing so much for us that we became slack and unable to do much for ourselves, and at the same time very unhappy that the struggle had been removed from life to such an extent that it felt empty and meaningless, so that finally we had to abandon the robots. I don;t think that will happen either.