Tim Cook Says Apple Can't Read Users' Emails,

No he didn't.

Apple previously said that even it can't access iMessage and FaceTime communications, stating that such messages and calls are not held in an "identifiable form." [Cook] claimed if the government "laid a subpoena," then Apple "can't provide it." He said, bluntly: "We don't have a key... the door is closed." He reiterated previous comments, whereby Apple has said it is not in the business of collecting people's data. He said: "When we design a new service, we try not to collect data. We're not reading your email."

He said they cannot read iMessage and FaceTime, and they are not reading your email. That is a very important distinction. It might be one he was hoping you would miss, and you did miss it, but he did not say they can't access your email.

And I'm not blowing sunshine up his skirt. I came here intending to kick him in the balls (metaphorically, of course) for lying, but he didn't.

Pro-tip: If any system includes a password recovery mechanism that allows you to get back messages, then the administrator of the password recovery system can read your back messages.

"an open group of companies who run open source programs" who are seeking to "committed to working together in order to overcome" the challenges of using FOSS

If the megacorps want to get involved in the advancement of FOSS, they have an incredibly clear path to do so: Paid Development. They can fund it themselves, if they want to decide what gets built next. Or, to get a little creative, how about this: Put together some training materials for corporate legal departments explaining that companies can legally, safely, contribute code developed on company time back to FOSS projects. Put together a promotional campaign to convince corporate bean counters that contributing code back to FOSS is a worthwhile investement of company resources.

In short; help channel money into FOSS, either directly or by clearing the red tape that keeps us from creating and kicking back enhancements built for the benefit of our companies. Hey, maybe lobby congress for a tax write-off for code contributions to 501c3s.

Developers contribute to FOSS by giving of their greatest strength, development. If megacorps want to help, they should give of their greatest strengths; money and bureaucracy.

(and yes, I know, they think telling people what to do is their greatest strength, but they've got another think coming when it comes to telling FOSS developers what to do)

Indeed. The newfound ability to do very bad things always relates to operational capability.

Next this needs to be done with what we call "autism". There's a reason it's called the "autistic spectrum"; it's a MUCH bigger but nebulous target than schizophrenia. There's so much symptomatic comorbidity that the diagnoses would be funny if the consequences weren't so depressing.

Aside from the other thread arguing that they were still guilty of unethical behavior whether anyone criticized them for it or not, there's another potential bit of misdirection here:

What if Snowden's means of raising concerns had nothing to do with e-mail and he only used verbal or hard-copy means, and the NSA knows it?

In 2001, William Binney, an NSA investigator, began blowing the whistle on NSA warrantless surveillance. He went through official channels to his superiors, then to Congress, then to the major media. He was harrassed and prosecuted by the government, and ignored and maginalized by the major media. He has kept at it for the past thirteen years.

In 2010, Thomas Drake started blowing the whistle. He was also prosecuted, harrassed, ignored, and marginalized.

In 2011, Ron Wyden began warning the public about the secret interpretation of the PATRIOT Act, as loudly as he could without violating his clearance to be on the Intelligence Committee. The major media ignored him.

In 2013, when Snowden released his docs, the major media finally started listening to Binney, Drake, and Wyden. The establishment's treatment of Binney, Drake, and Wyden is why Snowden had to follow the path he did.

The President of the United States has said that these programs should change. Programs that Binney, Drake, and Wyden tried to warn us about through official channels. Programs that we still would not know about if Snowden had gone through official channels.

NSA officials were unable to find any evidence Snowden ever had.

This is essentially the "I do not recall" equivalent of paperwork investigations.

The essential question here is whether the NSA can conclusively deny that Snowden never raised concerns at the agency. Since if he did raise concerns, he probably would have raised them to people personally, a document search is not nessesarily going to uncover whether he did.

What will uncover this conclusively is a simple interview of NSA and affiliate company employees and especially supervisors who worked with Snowden. But since such a set of interviews would either a) reveal that he did raise concerns, b) involve people having to sign their names to untruths, or most unlikely c) reveal he really raised nothing, then I think it's easier for the NSA to just pretend that a half-assed email server word search constitutes an appropriate investigation.

Education? ... Yes! Why it's great for education! In fact, it's the future of the classroom! And don't forget, Oculus Rift is both a floor wax and a dessert topping!

But seriously:

And if we can make virtual reality every bit as good as real reality in terms of communications and the sense of shared presence with others, you can now educate people in virtual classrooms, you can now educate people with virtual objects, and we can all be in a classroom together [virtually], we can all be present, we can have relationships and communication that are just as good as the real classroom

Classroom teaching is a bug, not a feature. It is a side effect of the fact that our earholes and eyeballs are connected to our skulls, and until recently we had to put them in the same meatspace where the teacher was talking and showing pictures. Once you step into the no-physical-presence-required realm of using a VR headset, you can release the restrictions imposed by the simultaneous physical presence requirement.

One simple example: Lecture halls, with their tiered seating -- those are designed that way because we can't see through each other, not because it is better to be sixty feet away and at a thirty degree angle from the teacher.

And how about discussions? Hierarchical, collaboratively moderated, store-and-forward discussion threads are much better than "realtime whoever gets the teacher's attention before the bell rings." We've been using the latter because that's the best we had for thousands of years.

It certainly less risky than walking around the streets with huge money clip

Did you not even read the links about Home Depot, Supervalu, and Albertson's? It is not certainly less risky. For example, it is more risky if you live in an area that has very little threat of mugging, or if you are perceived as a bad target for muggers. I generally have a few hundred dollars in my pocket, and have never been mugged; but my card is for sale on the Russian markets right now because I used Home Depot.

You are as stubbornly ignorant as people who say self-driving cars will automatically be safer. Computers aren't magically endowed with perfection. Believe me; I'm a software engineer, and I've seen some really heinous bugs. I'm not saying electronic payments (or autonomous vehicles) are bad -- I'm saying software and networks have risks just like meatware and meatspace.

in my kid's school in the USA the only way to pay for school lunch is to send a check once a month... no tracking

Interesting difference, there. There must be tracking in your kid's school's system, otherwise they wouldn't know who paid for lunch, but the tracking data probably doesn't get appropriated by an outside company. Presumably, this biometric company is not just making a buck on the scanners, software, and cloud-based management contract -- presumably they also have a plan for monetizing the data they are collecting about the kids.

The benefits are that pupils are less likely to lose [money stored in the fingerprint system than money carried in their pockets]

That is a spurious claim. The security on money stored in pockets and exchanged by physical transfer of a monetary token is fallible, but so is the security on the cafeteria electronic wallet system. Home Depot, Supervalu, and Albertson's are very recent examples of major compromises, and the number of small scale compromises is enormous.

Fingerprints can be faked, networks can be cracked, databases can crash. Merely moving from physical currency to electronic currency does not make it more secure -- just ask Mt. Gox.

from what i understand of the definition of "customer", a "customer" means "someone who is paying for a service". here, there's no payment involved, therefore there is no contract of sale.

The correct legal term for payment is, "consideration." The user's relationship with Gmail does involve payment in the form of consideration, and they are customers.

As a counter-example; if you download Free Software, or Open Source Software, and use it without making any promises to the developer, you are not a customer. Possibly if Gmail had no ToS or AUP, they could argue that their users gave no consideration. I'd be interested to see that argued.

I saw what you did there, and it was pretty cool.

After reading this, I must go and have a bacon and egg sandwich with ketchup...and extra salt