Listen up. Any news that casts an unfavourable light on the economy is a risk to your economic security. It must therefore be kept strictly secret. Anyone found spreading this unpatriotic propaganda is going to find themselves in a re-education camp.

Yours sincerely,

The government of North Korea^W^Wthe USA.

Same answer as always: You've Got to Be Carefully Taught.

As far as this foreigner is aware, there isn't a "US" Healthcare System, though a rather feeble one is in the process of emerging, rabid Republicans permitting. There are a lot of private companies - in relationships which are more co-parasitic than symbiotic - which puport to offer a "system", but in fact are fighting amongst themselves over the division of the spoils. If this war results in mutually-assured destruction, you haven't lost a Healthcare System, you've lost an obstacle to the establishment of a Healthcare System.

Cybersecurity doesn't necessarily mean surveillance. There's a more attractive side, too - you could spend your entire life running change control on a library of hundred-page procedure documents and reviewing firewall logs. Now, what kid could turn down *that* opportunity?

Or possibly, the discovery of such a mechanism would conveniently distract attention from the possibility of, say, a backdoor in the processor itself by means of which an unlikely but valid instruction stream might, for example, give kernel privileges to a program running in user mode. An open source software exploit might be intended to be found, and removed, thus restoring your false sense of security in your possibly compromised hardware.

Newspapers really messed up by continuing to produce paper with yesterday's news on it. Newspapers were once a disruptive technical force - a combination of large-scale printing and national distribution by rail transformed the way people received information. But new disruptive technical forces have emerged. The only things that really kept papers going once radio and then television came along was broadcast regulation and the absence of any other outlet for low-cost advertising (radio and TV adverts being outside most peoples' price range).

The interesting question is whether you can have serious, in-depth, journalism without print - there's a reason Snowden went to the papers and not to a TV station - but you're not going to answer it with engineers.

I'm not sure in a debate about privatistation how it's possible to compare two private ISPs and then infer that a non-existent nationalised ISP would somehow be better.

I'm comparing the service offered by BT in the few years after privatisation with that offered by the GPO before. That's actually a feasible comparison to make. It's you that's making the argument that 30 years on, a hypothetical nationalised telco would be better than the private providers - and you're not providing a shread of evidence for that hypothesis.

And digital wasn't "still in the labs" at the point of BT privatisation - the first System X exchange was installed before privatisation was complete and dogged BT for years after with increased potential costs because of the decision (likely taken in the Treasury) to develop a British digital exchange and support British exchange manufacturers rather than just buy a solution off the shelf in the end left BT with a single supplier of equipment and spares as STC, Plessey and GEC either pulled out of the project or merged. That's not a decision a commercial company is likely to have made.

Er, no. I'm comparing the service provided by BT shortly after privatisation with the service provided by the GPO shortly before privatisation. Those two things can reasonably be compared and I was actually there to experience them at first hand. Believe me, BT, for all its faults, was a breath of fresh air. It's you who's trying to compare the service of today with a hypothetical service that you believe might have existed if BT had not been privatised, and that's a comparison that can only be made in your fantasies since there's no way to make it in the real world. I've no doubt that today's utilities are deficient in many ways, but I suspect you didn't actually experience the nightmare paternalistic bureaucracy of the GPO, the Electricity Boards or indeed the grim lottery of British Leyland QA or you'd realise that your petty squabbles with EDF are a walk in the park by comparison.

If you really believe that the service provided by BT (and the cost to the end user of that service) is as bad or worse as that provided by the GPO (rationing of connections, waiting lists of months or years for installations, widespread "party" lines, the need to rent one of a small number of approved telephone handsets, botched, costly exchange equipment development in cosy arrangements with uncompetitive UK suppliers and daytime call charges beyond the reach even of those people who could afford phone lines), then it's your ideology (or perhaps your rose-tinted memory) that needs readjusting. A more interesting question is why companies in which the French and German Governments have a significant stake (eg EDF, Orange and DB Regio) are apparently more successful at operating utilities in the UK than the UK government has been.

The original Internet wasn't built on trust, it was built by the government for military purposes in the sure and certain knowledge that the only people that had the ability to mess with it knew what was likely to happen to them if they did.

The Internet was later coopted by groups of academics who didn't really have to worry if their communications were intercepted because they were pretty much public anyway and had nothing really to gain from abuses such as faking BGP route updates. Trust wasn't required.

The public, commercial, Internet may have had an illusion of trust, based solely on the fact that nobody historically worried about it. That doesn't mean it was based on trust, if means any trust it enjoyed was based on ignorance.

Trust in the Internet is in any case a wider issue than who is listening in. It's also knowing what really happens to the data about you provided voluntarily that gets hoovered up by all those online services chatting to each other behind the scenes.

Nor is it merely about the Internet - it's about your phone, your car, your smart watch, your contactless payment card and all the other things that can be enabled by technology to spy against you.

There isn't a technical fix to all of that, some of it has to be a political fix.

Because it really isn't a civil war: it's a proxy war being fought between Sunni and Shia branches of Islam and at a further remove by the their respective allies.

Syria is a majority Sunni country with a Shia dictatorship. Saudia Arabia (which is arguably a dictatorship of an extremely conservative Sunni-derived sect, Wahhabi) and Qatar (also a Wahhabi state) are providing the Syrian rebels with money and arms; Iran and Iraq (Shia countries) are supporting the Syrian government.

Russia has a naval base in Syria and has been protective of Iran. The US & UK have major military and economic assets in Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

This has all the ingredients of a "Sarajevo" incident (and I mean 1914 and not 1992).

Not exactly Silicon Valley, but if you have access to BBC iPlayer, check out The I.T. Girls, a documentary about early women programmers or search for more information on Dame Steve Shirley - the reason she called herself "Steve" for business purposes rather than "Stephanie" is all too clear.

In the UK, and I would guess in most of the rest of the world, women were "allowed" into IT early on because it wasn't seen as being a career. As soon as money could be made from it, the women were squeezed out. Grace Hopper likely would not have been hired in the 1960s, never mind now.

Britain did have significant numbers of women programmers - ICL used to have an army of "pregnant programmers" who did a lot of its software support while on maternity leave (back in the days of 300 baud modems) and Steve Shirley's company "Freelance Programmers" employed women based at home. And there, I think you have it: until the IT industry is prepared to employ people who want to go home occasionally and have a life outside work, it's going to be more hostile on average to women than men.

Some issues:

It's a hardware keystore under the control of the vendor: they have access to your keys, you don't have access to their keys.

If you've bought only-certified-for-use-outside-the-US hardware you may find yourself only able to run the OS-with-NSA-backdoor "export" version of your chosen operating system.

If your software vendor decides (or has decided for them) that your web browser (for example) should not permit you to access certain websites, it can be enforced in hardware outside of your control.

The remote "attestation" feature as originally designed could effectively identify individuals (or at least individual pieces of hardware) on the Internet, effectively abolishing any vestige of privacy. It is siad that Direct Anonymous Attestation introduced in the latest round of TPM specs permits the integrity of the TPM (for Digital Rights Management) to be tested without revealing the identity of the device.

In other words, if you have control of the TPM, it's exactly "just" a hardware keystore. However, if you don't have control, or if control must be ceded to another party in order to run some particular piece of software, you are entirely under the control of that party - and whoever controls them. And if you suspect your security is being compromised, you can't necessarily fire up a debugger or trace system calls, because unless that debugger has been signed by the OS vendor it's not going to run and you have no means of knowing whether it behaves as documented. It's a potential rootkit mechanism: you have to trust the OS vendor implicitly. And that's the point - it's not about allowing you to "trust" the vendor, it's about the vendor's "trust" in their control of you.