Worse, if the question ever ends up before the EU Court, I'm almost certain that it would not look very favourable on this "everything outside Germany is external for purposes of surveillance" idea (substitute Germany for the your favourite EU member country), considering that the "Common Market" makes exactly that thought forbidden by default. As in, you need a very very good reason, and claiming national security might not get you far in the context of an European Court.

Well, first of all, it's about declaring an obvious fabrication as such (that an US company can, even they wanted to, comply with EU regulations, which US courts have ruled they are not allowed to, so it's obviously a fairy tale). That completely leaves the situation open concerning government aided spying, which by the way, European governments have been trying under cover. Well, vermin likes it dark.

On a commercial side, currently the situation is completely unsatisfactorily: European companies are forced to deal with privacy issues (privacy is a human right written into the EU treaties), while US companies are allowed basically to ignore the rules. So either enforce privacy rules against all comers, or get rid of the limitations on the EU IT industry.

What this might mean is that US companies will have to disassociate themselves rather strongly from their EU subsidiaries so that US courts cannot enforce US "national security laws" against them. (Hint, US companies had no problems supporting Nazi-Germany, creating the necessary legal separation. Google Dehomag if you don't believe me.)

The funny part here is, that the European High Court has had, in the past more than once kicked ass, by enforcing European law over convenient national law in the past (e.g. it has basically killed data retention no matter what the politicians wanted), and Privacy is a basic human right which means that simple economic considerations are irrelevant.

Worse, if you want to maintain any schedule, you must make sure that the maximum effort is being carried out the whole time.

Basically, a secret that needs 10 years of cracking, has the issue that you need to motivate somebody to invest the energy (real and figuratively) into decrypting it.

Now you've got the issue, if there is enough motivation, your key might be cracked faster (because the adversary decided to throw a billion bucks into the game, or the hardware got much better in an unplanned way), or it might be cracked never (the stocks your foundation "Crack The Secret" was invested in to finance the ongoing cracking, went bust).

Well, one important detail. Exactly the neighborhoods that have a high level of SmartTVs, will also be receiving their programming via cable or sat, so your RF highjacking is received by only tiny subset.

Well, have fun blocking only on specific urls, basically every time something "unwanted" and "wanted" share a hostname.

OTOH, a hosts file does have it's own use, you can apply it easily enough for a WLAN, while filtering on http urls is way uglier, without running an application level proxy on your router, which again is far from trivial.

The APK link on the other hand looks a little bit like spam to me.

Guess the guys should have thought what the benefits but also drawbacks and costs are. Not only for them, but for all people involved.

Dead, Inc. offers this incredible new service, dispose the your ex, for a dynamic fee.

And these pesky authorities around the globe insist that it's murder and illegal. Obviously the authorities want to protect the interests of divorce lawyers.

Basically Uber decided to ignore local laws in most jurisdictions, so I think they should be happy that they are just ordered to cease operating, instead of getting a confiscation order for their illegal gains.

You do realize, that a huge chunkof IP US stylee is rather new.

Software patents
Business method patents

Come immediately to mind

Guess with current roaming fees, 4G is a really quick way to create a 5-6 digit bill

Affordable 3G (big enough data a package, or flat fee) is probably way more useful.

4G just mean that you can in theory use one GB in 1-2 minutes.

Another thing you might want consider is that you probably don't want to be reach able transparently, personal experience show that getting voice calls during the night (locally) just to say Hi is not only expensive but also gets boring really quick.

LOL, considering that the *US* courts are really known for finding for foreign companies.

Because the police is not interested in catching the criminal. They are interestesting in arresting somebody that could get realistically convicted.

they need the statistics to look good.

police officers have been known to get the wrong belief.

police officers do lie, and they commit perjury. Can land you in innocently in death row. (And the funny part is, because a crime needs to be proven, and many of the crimes that law enforcment commits require intend, and intend is always very hard to prove, these creeps tend to go home freely.)

From having seen it myself, an interrogation is quite often not much better than bullying the "suspect" into confessing. "Ok, so you don't want to confess, no problem, let us book you, and we'll talk again with you when you've lost your job for not being there for some days. In the meantime we'll probably have to check on all your family, bring them in for interrogation, I'm sure their employers will be understanding if we question them for a day, ...." While many innocent people might be okay with fighting for their innocence, see how many won't try to avoid pulling their family into the hole?

So basically, never talk to the police tends to be a good starting point. Try to prepare mentally. Use any breaks the system allows you, and that means "do not talk" and "ask for a lawyer". Fact is that nearly everything you say can be twisted into making you look bad.

The only drawback is that law enforcement can ruin almost any person that relies on their work to feed themselves and their family. With impunity.

Yes, think about the kids. I mean they will be devasted if you require them to learn something.

True. And McVeigh was mostly a home-made terrorist.

That still leaves some issues:

• How do you influence a government (and their private sector buddies, let's call them the "elite")? They've shown many times that they don't really care much about their constituents. Plus they've shown time over time, that they don't consider them bound by the rule of law.
• One has to wonder how the press in GB at the time described the Founding Fathers. Wonder if they were described as nice loving freedom fighters. And how the current press (current language usage, morals, understandings, would describe the situation in the colonies.