Upper management are making these arguments because they're afraid of exactly that - if they can't hire the best people, their competitors will and their company will lose out (i.e. they will lose out).

If I believe the data is going to already be mostly sorted why wouldn't I just use insertion sort?

If you have an appropriate Android device Google Now will (apparently) display information based on your current context (e.g. if your phone learns where work and home are it might display information about traffic jams on the route home around the time it believes you will be traveling). You need a logged in Google account to use this feature.

OK Google is a way of using your voice to interact with your device (or Chrome web browser). So if I have the appropriate phone and it's been set to listen I can say "OK Google" and it will activate an app/mode where it will accept further voice input. On the Android phone I saw (and in my Chrome web browser on OS X) I can then ask it "What's the weather like?" and it pops up some weather related information and speaks back "It's ten degrees in ". Sometimes when you ask it questions just does a web search other times (on the device) it would start applications (e.g. mail) and so on. You do not need to be logged into Google to use this feature.

Silk Road did a spinoff where guns were being sold as the primary goods (the Armory) and they closed it because it wasn't profitable enough.

You're probably unaware that the GP specifically used 'HSBC' because they were caught laundering trillions of dollars of drug money and nobody was indicted.

He probably isn't unaware of that. He may well have actually read the indictment itself or a detailed summary of it, which made clear that the US case was very weak to the point of hardly working at all. In particular, not only did they fail to clearly establish that drug money was really moving (their case was "there is so much cash, some of it must be from cartels") but in particular they failed to show intent by HSBC execs to help drug cartels. Actually their case boiled down to HSBC didn't try hard enough, they weren't suspicious enough, etc. (I'm ignoring the Iranian transactions here which gets into issues of international jurisdiction, as you only brought up drugs).

The reason you think the are guilty is twofold. Firstly US anti money laundering laws are unbelievably extreme. The PATRIOT Act removed the need to have intent to be found guilty of money laundering. Bankers can now be found guilty of AML violations even if they genuinely tried hard and had no intent to break the law. Hence the accusations from the DoJ that were of the form "HSBC should have designated Mexico as high risk", etc. Secondly as part of the plea agreement HSBC had to act guilty and accept whatever the DoJ said about them. So you only heard one side of the story, the prosecutions side (except there was no court case). No surprises that you think the whole thing is cut and dried.

It's no crime to be ignorant of such things, but just try not to hold any policy positions on the subject.

Given that there was never any court case and HSBC was never able to defend themselves, pretty much everyone is ignorant in this case because we never heard the full story. But I'm pretty sure if DoJ had emails from HSBC execs that looked like the ones from BitInstant there would indeed have been prosecutions.

No but if you got a government request for your keys you'd know about it.

The government "request" would come in form of customised malware and you'd never even know you got hacked.

If google gets such a request you wouldn't know you were compromised.

You aren't gonna know, no matter what.

It isn't like they are sending l33t hackers to break in and get the data.

Schmidt isn't an idiot, despite how the press like to portray him via selective quoting (note that TFA does not provide much context for this quote). When he says Google is the safest place to put your data, he's probably comparing Google to other companies that provide similar services, not some hypothetical fully self hosted system - bearing in mind self hosting of email is rapidly going the way of the dodo even in business situations (it died for home email a long time ago).

Given that Yahoo still have not fully deployed SSL everywhere let alone encrypted their internal datacenter links, and if Microsoft have a similar effort they aren't talking about it, there's some evidence that he might be right. After all, if you get a government warrant for your data you're just as stuck as Google is: not much you can do about it. On the other hand, you are unlikely to secure your infrastructure as well as Google does.

But Google makes money from targeted advertising

Google makes significant sums of dough from paying corporate customers who use Google Apps. These clients can switch off advertising if they like. These are also the places where some of the most sensitive data is stored.

So Google have both the financial means and incentive to solve the end to end crypto problem for such clients. The difficulty is not financial. It's technological. Matching even just the feature set of Gmail with end to end crypto is insanely hard, and that's before you hit the "everything is a web app" problem.

The point of forward secrecy is there are no such keys to seize. The "master keys" are only used for identification, not encryption. So whilst a gov could theoretically seize Google's keys, this does not help them decrypt wire traffic. They'd have to do a large MITM attack, and to get everything? They'd have to decrypt and forward ALL Google's traffic. Not feasible.

Good use of applied cryptography means that realistically the only way for a government to get data out of it means requesting it specifically from the providers. In places where the warrant system has been vapourised (which certainly includes the USA and UK), this might not seem like much, but it does help prevent fishing expeditions.

Well that explains a lot, a few months ago I discovered that my laptop had started to trip the mains when i took it into the office which had a more modern fuse box than at home. Figured out through trial and error that it was the cable from the wall to the psu, and application of a multimeter showed a measurably small resistance between live and earth when the cable was disconnected. I put it down to wear and tear, chucked it away and bought a replacement. Sounds like i was lucky to spot it early before it caused a fire, as that cable was usually left plugged in at home.

Thus spake sexconker, on advertising-supported Slashdot, which he has been reading and posting to for five years.

In practice, a certificate is nothing more than a long password

Fail. A certificate contains a public key. This is nothing like a password. You're thinking of a private key. The whole point of a certificate is that you can prove your identity to someone without sending them your password.

Unlike the password in somebody's head or even on a sticky note behind the monitor, these certificate files can often be stolen remotely!

Double fail. Firstly, nobody actually steals certificates. Certificates are public. When someone says something was signed with a "stolen cert", what they actually mean is "stolen private key the public part of which is contained in a certificate signed by a trusted third party", but that's a mouthful, so we simply and say "stolen cert".

Secondly, private keys can and absolutely should be protected with a password! Or they can be kept in special hardware. However, as you may have noticed, Sony got pwned pretty hard so presumably whatever private key was stolen either had no password, or they were able to just keylog the password when it was used.

These people are a joke.

The joke is on you ..... certificates are not a replacement for passwords and if you think they are, you didn't understand what they're used for.

More news (seems this story is unfolding right now) - apparently the driver did NOT have a prior conviction for rape at all, but in fact had only been arrested due to an accusation. So it seems that the first possibility was the correct one, and there's really nothing that could have been done here (unless you believe anyone should be able to ban anyone else from being a taxi driver for life with nothing more than an accusation).

W.R.T background checks, someone on Twitter has found a photo of a notarised police certificate stating the guy has no criminal record. So either whoever reported he has one is lying, or the police verification process in India is as unreliable as people say it is.

Regardless, I expect it will make little difference in the court of public opinion.

If that is the case, and the guy came up clean but yet still went on to do X, how is Uber any more culpable than a taxi company hiring a cabbie with no record, who subsequently goes out and does X, or a tour company hiring a bus driver with a spotless background, who nonetheless does X?

They aren't. But it seems like there's a new trend in town - when a foreign tech company could potentially have guessed that someone using their service might potentially have done something bad, they're automatically at fault. See: Facebook and Lee Rigby in the UK.

In this case, the logic seems fairly simple - the guy apparently had a prior conviction for rape, thus, should not be allowed to be a taxi driver. If Uber had checked then the rape wouldn't have happened (assuming it did). The problem is the guy's prior conviction was also for raping someone in a taxi cab, so obviously this isn't a solution to all such problems because there's always a first time. Another problem is that I've read India doesn't actually have a national conviction database system, indeed they barely have a coherent national identity scheme at all (I remember reading about programmes to try and introduce biometric identity nationwide to fix this but it's a huge job). Apparently the way you do a background check is walking in to the local police district office and asking. If the crime happened elsewhere, tough luck. For anyone who knows the real situation in India, I'd be interested to know if this is true.

Anyway, even with reliable background checks, you can quickly end up in a situation like the USA where former felons cannot get jobs anywhere (see recent /. story about this problem), and then you get rules like in Europe where former convictions get wiped from the record after a few years to stop that happening, so there are no solutions that make everyone happy.

More so, if a bank robbers getaway vehicle went on a toll road then the roads operator should be charged with profiting from the proceeds of crime, they clearly facilitated the crime.