If you're worried about someone tracking you, then I hope you pull the battery when you aren't using the phone. Even something that would be called a "feature phone" or a "dumb phone" has to keep in contact with the towers. A cell provider knows which towers you're in range of and the strength of signal to each tower. It's enough to get a decent idea of your location.

Social media is crap. I like having texting available, though (and I think you'd be hardpressed to find a phone that doesn't support some form of SMS). I like being able to carry a phone, GPS, camera, bookshelf, set of reference materials, pile of games, music and video player, programming environment, instrument, voice recorder, and OBD-2 reader in my pocket with me. Other than that, I agree; smartphones are only good for social media nonsense, email, and texts. Completely useless.

But if you have previous agreements with a large number of property owners to put up cameras in public places and use *those* to record someone's every move, you're not likely to be charged with anything (especially since setting up those agreements implies you have money, power, or both).

I'm in that market, generally. I own disks for most of the movies that I'd care to have. On DVD, $3-$5 is a good impulse buy price, $10 is reasonable for something that I'm really interested in, and something in the $15-$20 range *might* be doable if it's something that I really want (maybe one video per year). Blu-Ray *might* be reasonable to me at the same cost tiers, except that it's still less flexible. I can play a DVD on the device of my choice, using the OS of my choice. With Blu-Rays, I'm stuck using an appliance like a stand-alone player or a game console. It's more difficult to use them the ways that *I* want to, and in the most favorable light that I care to shine on them, the inconvenience provides a near-equal offset to their increased quality.

I've bought a number of them when the price came close to the price of the same thing on DVD (or when the package has both kinds of disk). My original assumption was that the encryption would be reliably cracked pretty quickly. That didn't really happen, so now I've got a bunch of disks that won't play in un-updated players, won't play on my PC that has a Blu-Ray drive, etc. When I buy a movie (a rarity, now), I tend to go for the DVD first. Blu-Ray is pretty, but it's a pain in the ass, and it's generally not worth the hassle and extra cost.

I think the words you were looking for are "totalitarian police state", or the like.

Let's have a computer analogy. I write a piece of software that can fail in some known way (say, it can't open a file containing a cache of previously-retrieved information). Instead, it warns of the error, re-retrieves the information, and continues operation (essentially with a 0% cache hit rate). I release a new version that fails the operation if it can't open the cache. I'll receive complaints from customers. Similarly, extended crank time is a warning of impending trouble, but allows the vehicle to be used at a degraded level of operation. Proper handling of failure modes most certainly *is* "designed, intended function", and if you flub it, then you deserve the complaints you get.

Or I'm using a commonly-understood metaphor and assuming that no one's going to take me literally. Political correctness is bullshit. Heaven forbid I should ever say something that offends someone.

Change "web services" to "targeted advertising" (i.e., get rid of the marketing obfuscation), and most people will say "no" again. If you don't clearly tell someone who you're giving their information to and for what purposes, then the "yes" that they give isn't exactly informed consent.

Or, you're a grandmother, the computer-box is working like it always has, and you're afraid of changes that an upgrade would bring, don't have money for new hardware, etc.

Sprint recently (mid-March) announced a pay-as-you-go no-contract plan. I hadn't really looked into it; apparently your device choice is limited (iPhone 4s, Moto G, Galaxy S3, Galaxy S4 mini, and a feature phone). In my case, I bought the phone after my contract ended and got it activated on their network without signing a new agreement. I guess I should've attached a couple of asterisks on the end, in their case. AT&T has a bring your own device no-contract plan. I don't know when they announced it. T-Mobile has been offering no-contract plans for a while now (about a year ago).

Regardless, yes, you're right. T-Mobile is the only one of the "big 4" carriers that really advertises no-contract plans. There are a number of smaller carriers that do, but they often have device limitations. The U.S. is far behind Europe in terms of cell phone service and consumer choice; I was mostly taking exception to the statement that it is actually impossible to have a smartphone without a contract here.

The company adds itself as a "known ca" on the equipment that it provides to its employees. Compromise the list of valid certification roots, and you've got carte blanche, in terms of network (in)security.

You log into a site. The little lock icon (or whatever) says you're good, so most people won't give it a second thought. If I check in Firefox, I see "Verified by: [My Employer]". If I deploy a machine and don't put my employer's root CA cert on it, I get stopped *constantly* by the browser complaining about a man-in-the-middle attack. If I really need to do something personal while at work, I sometimes bring in my laptop and tether it to my phone. It makes me envious of Europe's employee rights laws.

We use (I believe) SHA-256 for a similar purpose, and with similar justifications. A few billion (or even trillion) records? No problem. It's difficult to comprehend how little of the hashspace we've covered.

A hash function is just a mapping of data of an arbitrary length to data of a fixed length. The function could be guaranteed to map all strings below the output length to guaranteed-unique values, or there could be hash collisions. It depends on how the function is defined. Hash functions that are cryptographically useful don't have easy ways to find collisions, but there are an infinite number of not-useful functions that are still technically hashes.

Yes. The phone's only got 2 models (in terms of radios, that it): US and World. The difference between them seems to be which CDMA bands they support.

True, and it's one of several reasons that I'm switching carriers.