If you think you are a competing power to the US, there is nothing better that could happen to you than a Trump presidency (if you disagree and think a Trump presidency would be fine, just stop reading). China would most likely love to see that happen, because they want to extend their foothold in the South China Sea.

I am not so sure about Russia. Deep down they must know they are a third rate country now, albeit with strategic nuclear weapons. Pressuring their neighbors only works, because those neighbors are so much weaker. On the world stage, they are only posturing. So I am not even sure they think they would benefit from a weakened US.

Rumors say the only reason OSX didn't go ZFS was because Jonathan Schwartz spilled the beans. Either Steve Jobs gets to make the announcement about the 'next big thing' in his big Apple presentation or there is no 'next big thing'.

Here is the Slashdot story from 2007:

https://apple.slashdot.org/sto...

I read some of the accounts and feel that there is a different issue that is not being discussed: The community that allowed this all to happen right in front of their own eyes.

Just now they disavow the abuser and tell the victims to go to the police. But the justice system is not really any help in most abuse cases. First of all nothing criminal happened in many of the stories. Yet the actions taken by Mr. Applebaum, while not criminal, where despicable none the less. And he did so in front of numerous witnesses. By not speaking up and putting an end to them they condoned his actions and encouraged this behaviour. People at the Tor project admit they knew what was going on. Applebaum may have created the toxic environment in the first place, but the people that didn't put an end to it or even helped him bully the victims into silence abetted him.

The community is to blame for this at least in part.

Even sexual abuse cases are complicated, because they often happen within an existing relationship with existing trust and power structures. A lot of abuse is not black and white, but in a grey area, when it comes to the criminal assessment. Just because someone is a severe asshole in a relationship and abuses their partner doesn't mean a crime happened.

There is currently a criminal case in the news about a rape that happened on the campus of Standford university. Two witnesses came upon a scene where a person was raping an unconscious body. Even though this seems to be a clear cut case, the victim still had to answer to questions regarding her sex life and endure a lengthy trial. Even though she wasn't conscious during the crime so couldn't answer any questions about it. Imagine how complicated cases are where the victim was conscious. I don't even know how I would or could design a trial or justice system that does a better job. In the end, most sexual abuse cases are about the question which side tells the more believable story. Which is far from perfect.

The fact that the communities around Applebaum (Tor was not his only project, he was part of the CCC, cDc and possibly more) simply sit back and tell the victims to go to the police instead of opening investigations about the issue is deeply troubling.

Any project that Applebaum was part of and does not at least issue apologies for allowing this to go on and taking steps to prevent similar events in the future are highly suspicious.

How many more Applebaums are out there, working inside Tor, inside the Chaos Computer Club, inside the Cult of the Dead Cow and abuse helpless victims?

Symbolism matters. Especially in politics. A black president proves that blacks can be president. Nothing else will. Which is why Obama's election was important in race relations purely for the fact that he was elected and black. It says something about America and race.

What politicians and other influential people say also matters. People listen to them. Trump being racist against Mexicans, being the owner of a beauty pagent, being Islamophobic does matter. Bush saying "The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends." mattered.

Electing someone who calls Mexicans "rapists" says something about America, which is pretty much the opposite of what electing a black guys says about America.

Scott Adams has been desperately trying to hide his huge Trump boner at least for a year. His admiration for what he call "persuasion" feels like a cult. A little "self help" with a couple sleazy car salesman techniques thrown together. Adams seems to think Trump is some kind of mastermind using these techniques, disregarding the possibility that he is simply a sleazy salesperson whose particular nasty style strikes a cord with a lot of people after 20 years of Fox News preparation.

Like most of his fans (and most of the fans of other candidates like Bernie or Obama) Scott Adams is somehow convinced that good things will happen when his candidate is elected. Disregarding that Trump is especially good at promising just that to everyone. Minorities excluded.

The article is talking about a feature in Google Maps, that seems to be enabled by default on some Android phones. It stores your location data. You can turn it off. You can also delete stored location data in your Google account settings.

A much more interesting way to track people would be the Android location service itself. In order to get precise location data, all phones (including Apple, Microsoft, ...) will scan nearby wifi access points and cell towers and upload this information to the designated location service, which has a database of all these stored. It works both ways, btw. Once you have a gps location by satellite, the phone will upload the same data, including gps location to keep the database updated.

So every time any service on your phone wants to know your location without waiting for the satellite (which won't work indoors at all, btw.), your location will be known to the location service. This can be turned off as well, btw. Though few people would do this, since this is very useful.

If police, or three letter agencies can access this data, they will know who is where at all times. Perfect location tracking for almost everyone.

I found another presentation from the same speaker. This video is 28 minutes long:

https://re-publica.de/16/sessi...

What is missing in the Slashdot summary is the misery of the human "digital sanitation workers", who usually have to sort that crap out. There has been some recent reporting on these unfortunate people. I believe this reporting is the reason why Facebook has come forward to show their effort, in order to counter the possible negative impact, if this hits US media outlets.

The German political foundation "Heinrich BÃll Stiftung" did a workshop on this phenomenon. Unfortunately there is little English language reporting I found, as for now. Here is a link to the original source (the workshop):

https://calendar.boell.de/de/e...

But one of the presentations is in English and available on Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

A couple facts:

- the service is called Commercial Content Moderation

- 150.000 people work in this industry in the Philippines alone
- the Philippines is the major site for this job, because while being cheap, they being Christian means they are supposed to have a good sense of what is considered appropriate content in the USA and Europa

- a lot of the workers report "issues" because of the extreme content they have to endure, including relationship problems and substance abuse
- they are not allowed to work longer than 24 month in this job, supposedly because of the issue mentioned above

Making Android apps run on Windows Mobile was tossed around surely a couple times in Redmond and would have technically been feasible.

One reason they didn't do it (as I was told), was that they wanted to help the app developers that committed to their ecosystem. Allowing Android apps on Windows would have immediately crushed any native apps that Windows Mobile had and dry up the market for them instantly. They would have thrown their developers under the bus.

And for what? What can Microsoft gain by allowing the Google Play store on their phone, essentially earning money on Microsoft devices? Why should customers choose Windows to run Android apps instead of directly using Android for Android apps?

The free software movement was founded as a consumer protection movement. It was about having control over your machine. With free software, you have user rights and user freedoms to do what you want with what you buy.

Open Source ensures that you can review the code at any time to ensure it does what you want.

But that has completely changed. Everyone runs open source now, but we have even less control, because the computing doesn't even happen on user owned hardware anymore. It doesn't matter if Facebook or Google run on open source. It doesn't even matter if large parts of iOS and Android are open source.

iOS is a lot more closed off compared to Android, yet users have much more control over the apps and what they are doing in iOS. So from a user control and user freedom perspective, iOS is currently (Android 6 brought a lot of important updates in this field, but few phones have it) preferable. Same with encryption technology. Boxcryptor is a good example of how open source is currently of little relevance, when it comes to protecting the users rights.

The world has changed. Richard Stallman is still right, but very little relevance. Moxie Marlinspike is currently the man of the hour.

Maybe Buffett thinks that there is lots of money to be made in the automobile industry. Maybe because of the number of orders Tesla received for their new model. One think Apple was able to deliver on was satisfying a huge demand for their product. Which isn't easy and which Tesla now has to prove they can do as well.

Algorithms are still far from ready to decide what could be promoted and what not. Otherwise you would have all kinds of weird stuff trending. Especially right wing nut pages (the ones that get "censored") float all kinds of bullshit and have it shared all over Facebook, which means it is trending.

Imagine all the really random "Obama-is-secret-suicide-bomber" stories that you keep getting from your nutty relatives being promoted as "trending" on the official Facebook. There is a reason why Glenn Beck and Fox News exist. Because they make a shitton of money. People eat that crap up.

That is why you need filters. Lots of them. I also explained why this whole thing is a non-story anyways here:

https://slashdot.org/comments....

When I say that governments should contribute, I meant by spreading the word about free software, sharing training materials and issueing bug reports. Government does not need to write office software. It already exists. They should simply become part of the community. Because public funds should benefit public software, which builds the common good.

Government usually also order special software to be written for special tasks. There is a huge backlog of this kind of software in use, which makes any transition, be it from Windows to Linux or from Windows XP to more modern versions very difficult. They could require all vendors that create software for them to license it under the gpl.

When I mean public software, I am also thinking about the "standing on the shoulders of giants" model. Free software distributions as we know them today are made up of thousands of little parts. When you want to create something new, you can build upon a lot of already created building blocks. This reduces duplicated efforts. Similar to how human knowledge works. Once one guy figured out how a wheel works, everyone benefits. This adds to the public good. By modularizing software and sharing as much as possible, governments can add to the public good, because duplicated efforts are reduced. Since so much free software already exists, governments don't even need to take the lead, as you seem to suggest in your comment. They only need to participate.

> If government is going to push a scenario where it controls it's own software

The Italian military does not control LibreOffice, nor will they ever. They also don't control the Linux kernel or any other part of the Debian distribution. Or any other government. But they could require vendors that produce software for them to use as much free software buildings blocks as possible and modularize what they write and host those modules as independent open source projects, hoping that other government entities, possibly even from other countries, or simply other entities will make use of those modules. This strategy indeed reduces the control the vendor has over the product and thus "increases" the control the government has over the software. But only in as much as anyone else in the public now controls said software. Though, again, this only applies to special cases where governments order software to be written for them, which happens a lot more often than you might think. And it insures the government against a lot of problems, including, but not limited to bankcruptcy of the vendor. On a sidenote: There are as many reasons for open source projects to exist as there are open source projects out there, but I have heard a small company (two people) that said they were required by their client (a rather large company) to turn their software into an open source project to guard against issues stemming from buying from such a small company. So this very thing is already happening in the private industry.

Though, again, my main point is not government controlling software, but merely government participating in community software. Which brings us to an argument that I haven't mentioned: Where the money flows. For US government bodies, this doesn't apply as much. But this is Italy. When "buying" free software, government entities have the option of spending the money locally, as opposed to giving it to a US company. Which also is a political issue.

Last but not least: Those are all political arguments. I agree with you about costs and I respect your opinion. People have different opinions about politics. I simply explained mine.

This is the "Linux is more secure" argument. There is valid reason to believe that Microsoft does not cooperate with the US government agencies on weakening their security or providing backdoors. Any discovery, which is bound to happen sometime down the line, since old copies of Windows are simply out there and can be analysed using future methods, would hurt sales so much, that the very survival of Microsoft as a company is threatened severely. US government agencies have other ways into systems. Which leads us back to the "Linux is more secure" argument. Not only US, but also Russian and Chinese, and possibly countless other government agencies and private entities can easily and stealthily access most computers connected to the internet. And there are ways to combat that. My point is that good security shouldn't rely on a certain operating system. The reason we often get to see the ugly fallout of large security failures connected to Microsoft is because Microsoft has a huge market share. Many desktop Linux systems also have security issues, but they don't matter, because no one attacks them. This principle is best proven by Apple. They have a horrible track record on security, yet there are no Mac viruses. And they have a much bigger market share than desktop Linux. Yet...

I am very much in favour of governments using free software. Governments are the heads of communities, after all. Public funds should benefit public software (e.g. free software or community software) wherever possible. And when communicating with the public via documents exchange or otherwise, it should be possible for the public to engage in that communication using free software, if possible.

Mind you, those are all political reasons. I have researched this topic a lot. And I have to agree with Microsoft that licensing costs are a very, very small part of overall costs of software projects. Thus any cost savings could be offset by any number of slightly more cost effectiveness in another area that is costlier. Such as training, for example, where Microsoft argues that their monopoly in the Office software market lowers the cost of training. After all, a license of MS Office should not be more than a day or two of what a government worker earns, if you count correctly. And then there are all kinds of other nasty gotchas when converting from one office to another. Especially of not all government bodies convert. Because they no use partly incompatible office suites.

So I am not buying any cost argument. At least not for 5 years. After that, and if most of the government has converted, you get the benefit of not having to pay for the upgrade, and the next upgrade. But if you discount those future cost savings to the present, they become rather small.

Then again, politics is not about honesty and voters and the public don't understand community software or free software. So just keep using whatever questionable argument you want. For example the "Linux is more secure" one. Or this cost savings one. The other side is doing that too. Microsoft has spread so much FUD about Linux over the years. Ballmer himself compared free software to cancer. Just remember that it is all bullshit.

Do I sound jaded?