Really? Given that Scotland Yard have been taking an active interest what is available on the Internet for a long time, including sending letters to ISPs in 1996 asking them to remove certain groups from their Usenet feeds, I think that you're being a little naive. I would like to bet that there is some department, either of government or the police, that are supplying lists of sites that should be added to the ISPs filters.

The Usenet filtering comes from personal knowledge. I was working for an ISP in 1996 and we were in the position of providing 64Kb leased-lines to various customers. We also provided a Usenet service. During this period the bandwidth for a full Usenet feed went from below the 64Kb/s to around 70Kb/s as such customer's feeds were backing up. We contacted one such customer and asked them what they wanted trimming from the feed. The reply was,"Just send us the alt.sex and alt.binaries.pictures hierarchies".

We thought this was a bit of a laugh at the time. Someone was pulling porn down their company's leased line. A few months later the legal time got a letter from Scotland Yard demanding the removal of 30+ groups containing material that they had determined was illegal in the UK. My ISP followed the instructions. Not all UK ISPs did the same, Demon in particular ignored it.

It wouldn't be the people that removed her but the government, probably with the support of the opposition. The power of the Queen in law making is grossly over-estimated. You can have a hereditary ruler overruling the wishes of a democratically elected government.

Fixed it for you.

Without disclosure then their is no proof of collateral damage, instead you have to believe the word of the agencies who were suppressing the information leaked in the first place.

What was proven by Manning's leaks was that the US Military were covering up war crimes. Nothing new there, its standard practice, the last thing the US wants its their soldiers being held to account for their actions.

The Snowden leaks have proven that the NSA is, in all probability, in breach of the US Constitution. Which I think is illegal.

Is that really the average life of an Apple device? Where are you getting your information from, or are you extrapolating based on contract length? Apple devices seem to last quite well and I know of many that are still running fine despite being 4 years old.

Looking at the Apple update release page there hasn't been a Security Update since Mavericks was released so there is no evidence to support the assertion from Sophos.

The last Security Update from Apple was 2013-004 and included updates for Snow Leopard, Lion, and Mountain Lion. Until Apple releases a security update that *only* targets Mavericks this is just Sophos FUD.

There's a big difference between grabbing a drone and a truck.

Sigh ... if a phone identifies that its running a benchmark application and changes its behaviour then the benchmark is of the maximum hardware performance rather than that available to a normal application. In doing so its not giving a real world measurement of the performance of the device.

By your argument all of the single threaded apps that run slowly on the S4 are at fault for slow performance because the programmer hasn't optimised their application for the S4 instead preferring to be compatible with all Android phones out there.

So, whilst the rigged S4 may be faster in raw power, its not what the end user is going to see. Which is cheating?

The danger of speed varies dependent on the road conditions and traffic. There are ways to break limits safely, and it sounds like he took precautions with having spotters for him on the route. The greatest danger was to himself should he lose control at that speed.

Oh dear. I really hope that you aren't in charge of anything involving strategic decisions. It takes time for ideas to mature and their time to come.

All of your arguments could be made against tablets. Who wants an expensive device that you can really only consume content on? Apparently now that a usable interface has been designed millions of people.

Consoles since the PS2/XBox haven't been primarily about playing games but rather being an entertainment hub in the living room. The XBox-360 and PS3 advanced that, the XBox One and PS4 will continue the trend. Computing is ubiquitous but computers are becoming less necessary for the majority of people.

I don't think so. I think its self importance. Because we understand the issues we place ourselves above those that don't. We make decisions on their behalf because we know better than they do. The issues around DRM on streamed content take on an almost religious aspect with those that opposed without reservation. They believe that all DRM is wrong and nothing will convince them otherwise. The ordinary user doesn't really care as long as they can view the content.

The point I was trying to make are that there are people that regardless will view anything that enables DRM as being wrong and will oppose it. They pursue this with an almost religious fervour and are out of step with the real world.

My post was in response to one such post where the real world was being dismissed because it didn't fit with the world view of the poster. In an ideal world we wouldn't need DRM, we also wouldn't need locks on our doors, passwords on our accounts, etc etc. However we don't live in such a world and need to face up to that. As technologists we should strive to deliver the best we can, to push the boundaries, but we shouldn't dismiss those that don't understand the technology as being somehow less than we are. In short we shouldn't get lost in our own self importance.

Ah, the self-important views of the Technorati. Sadly its this sort of attitude that makes the Technorati look like myopic fools. "The data must be free!".

The whole Internet as a commune thing was something of the 1990s, the Internet has moved on sadly there are lot of supposedly intelligent people that haven't. We already have DRM protecting video content (Widevine, Playready etc). They work with custom plugins which restricts the platforms they are available to. There is the potential here to have a standard decoding mechanism that will be easy to port and allow content to be more widely available.

Given that certificates expire, often yearly, do you really think that this would be a useful thing to do? Think about it for a minute...

The majority of people don't know much about certificates other than the nice little GUI change to show that a site is validated ok. If you start popping up dialog boxes telling them that a certificate has updated at fairly regular intervals what are they going to do? Check the certificate to make sure its valid, or just click the box away? If people get used to getting a message about certificates that basically says everything is ok there is more chance that they'll accept a true certificate warning message and end up compromised.

It's a little more than that. Once unlocked the fingerprint can be used to authorise the iTunes and App stores ... not that that does you much more than allow you to download stuff to your stolen phone at present. Maybe Apple were aware of the limitation and that's why they've withheld access to the TouchID API from developers. It would be different if you could authorise real world purchases with it.

If you go down the route of listening to the customer and focus groups you end up with a mess. Apple has been there in the past.

On the comment that the public has stated that they want bigger. Is this really true or have you been watching too many Samsung adverts? I see more iPhones around than large screen Android phones, and more small screen Android phones than either.