You bet it's censorship.

No, it's not censorship. Censorship is the government controlling your actions by coercion, the threat of using force against you.

This may be a business taking a position that they know better than you what is good for their bottom line; in that case, it most likely represents a balance defined by the clients of the business, with the business betting that more clients will be pleased by this than displeased. Alternatively, it may simply be an artifact of someone powerful relative to the business's control who is imposing their morality upon all of the business's customers. In either case, the affected users can take their business elsewhere to a platform that does not impose moral restrictions upon them.

When the US government censors, it is almost impossible to stand against it effectively. Particularly as it often is finally determined by non-elected actors, such as the FCC and SCOTUS, both of whom have demonstrated outright contempt for the US constitution.

When a business imposes "mommying", for whatever reason, all you have to do is stop using their product and (a) you have done them a small, but real, bit of actual damage, and (b) you can return to operating as you please via no more effort than selecting a more open platform.

The bottom line is that there is a world of difference between a private entity insisting on bounds within a limited space, real or virtual, that they legitimately control, the maximum end result being that you don't get to use a space you didn't have any rights to in the first place if you insist on your position; and a government enforcing bounds everywhere using violence, where insisting on your position can lead to anything from a monetary fine to your rape and/or death within the prison system.

Math has prior art on the use of the term. In fact, Physics' use of the term is just plain derivative.

Physics has prior art on everything; math is just a metaphorical tool of physics (or else an amusing curiosity.)

I would agree in general but I see a big potential loophole. What about foreign sim cards? Does Pakistan plan to apply the same restrictions to people who visit the country? If so then I would think that this might provide a significant hindrance to international tourism and trade - "no cell phone for you unless you go register it with the government while you're here!" On the other hand, if they don't do it, then lawbreakers will just get foreign sim cards.

Maybe the government could make a fairly painless process for foreign visitors.. for example, sim card registration at the point of entry to the country, for those willing to do it (and for those not willing to, they just can't use their phone).

I thought about other potential loopholes, such as phone / sim card theft, but one presumes those cards would be rapidly disabled when reported. A rather nasty possible workaround to the problem would be to kidnap and murder people, steal their phones, and continue making payments in the deceased's name until someone catches on. That could of course carry a risk that if someone did catch on, instead of disabling the stolen phone they may just use it as a beacon to catch you. Satellite phones would work, of course, but they're a lot more expensive, both in terms of hardware and service. And someone not associated with the government in Pakistan using a sat phone is probably as it stands immediately be flagged on the watch list of anti-terrorism task forces the world over.

Moore's law is really all about "cost" per transistor. While process shrinks are certainly an important enabler they don't have to be the only driver that keeps things going.

Anyone smart enough to write an HTTPS proxy able to dynamically create and sign certs surely must have known enough about underlying technology to recognize and comprehend importance of validating trust chain. How does someone innocently "overlook" this in either design or test? Simply MUST have occurred to someone.

Even in public stalking is still illegal.

This strikes me as highly non-obvious, do you think the average person spends more than $10/month purchasing music?

Annual US music sales are about $7bn

With the US population at 320 million that's only ~$22/year per capita, not counting Spotify's cut (and whatever portion of that already comes from streaming) that's means if no-one bought music any more only 22% of the US population would have to stream to make up the difference.

I doubt there are many people spending $120/year purchasing music long term. $10/month strikes me as a wildly lucrative prospect for the music industry.

This is only news to those who have had their head in the ground, listening to fox news and government shills.

Just paint the earth white - works during ice ages.

Quite true. Last spring I went to the US (Indiana and Texas) from Iceland with my then-fiance to show him where I grew up and went to school (he grew up in Iceland). It was too bright for him in Indiana, and in Texas it was downright painful for him.

We don't get much of that "sun beating down straight overhead" stuff here that you get in the states, it more sort of rotates around you, with really long sunrises / sunsets (sometimes with multiple sunrises / sunsets in a day as it moves past mountains).

Waaah. I live in Iceland, don't complain to me about a lack of winter sunlight.

I wasn't excusing anything - I don't support any geoengineering that works by increasing the albedo, for many different reasons. But it's simply fact that a large portion of the world's people live in areas that get proportionally little sun. And contrary to myth, they don't have higher suicide rates or anything like that.

The US (where many if not most slashdotters live) is actually an unusually sunny country, by first-world standards. Even Seattle is sunnier than Berlin, which is sunnier than London, which is sunnier than Glasgow...

Yeah, a lot of people already live in the sort of environments that they're warning against. This line got me:

And the sky is one of the few sources of that experience that's available to almost everybody

Is that a joke? People's ability to see the night sky varies vastly depending on where they are. In big metro area, all you can see are the brightest of stars. There's little to no majesty to it. It's when you get out into the deep, deep countryside and look up at the uncountable multitude above you that you feel little and insignificant compared to the cosmos around you. There's nothing universal about ready access to a dark sky. And it's getting rarer and rarer.

If they create an exchange with a current crypto currency and conver all their money to it except what is needed from day to day, then drop out of the Eurozone and create their own dollar, each crypto dollar will be the value of the crypto currency used.

Sorry, but unless there's hard assets behind it, it's going to float. And the float will be way down, just the same as any other Greek currency. Greece's creditors and exporters don't want New Drachmas, CryptoDrachmas, or anything of the sort: they want dollars and euros. To get dollars and euros, Greece has to make and export goods and services at a rate competitive with their rate of imports. For their government to get dollars and euros, they actually have to stamp out corruption, tax evasion, and so forth. Greece's inability to do these things is the reason they're in the bind they are today.

You mean this article? Albeit the summary was poor, but it covers the firmware hacking.

And FYI, if anyone actually takes the time to read the Kaspersky report they'd catch that the infection is believed to have been done on thousands to tens of thousands of computers, NOT "most HDDs". The firmware has the capability to infect most HDDs, but most HDDs are not infected - according to the very source report itself.

Which should be obvious. Because if you're the NSA and you're writing a super-infection to use against top-level targets, the last thing you want to do is have it on every last computer in the world, increasing your likelihood of being found by many orders of magnitude. The NSA's preferred method of infection is interdiction - intercepting objects while in transit to targets, such as CDs or hard drives, infecting them, then letting them continue on their way.

Once again, the NSA doesn't give a rat's arse if you're going to the Pirate Bay to download I Am Legend. It has far more important things to worry about, like people building atomic bombs and invading other countries.

Whatever they convert it into, New Drachmas or Cryptodrachmas, it's still going to devalue like crazy. Both, being backed by the same entity (the state) will have the same credibility problem. Except even moreso for the cryptocurrency because of all of the concerns that carries with for many investors.