Even better: will they build something that does download Java and then blocks the Ask.com shit? I want to see the reaction of Oracle on that.

Would they also block downloads with Chrome bundled? That spyware is definitely unwanted on my system.

H1B's are less likely to be NSA spies anyway.

Thank him for saving the rest of the world for buying inferior American-made spyware. This is like blaming a consumer organisation that points out serious flaws in a product.

In another posting, Huawei announced it has open positions for thousands of experienced people. However, since lie detector tests are required to rout out foreighn spies, US candidates are mostly turned down.

Better than checks which appear to be still in use in the USA. At least it's anonymous.

Remember this. When windows phone 9 comes out, Skype will probably quickly stop working on the old wp 8 phones.

"Microsoft broke what had already been working, by changing the network protocol and turning off the existing servers."

If they have, then how can you explain that Skype on my old Symbian E72 still works (tested it today)? The installe, which I kept of course - never trust companies to keep such things around - is from 2010.

They should indeed stay out of the US entirely. There was a huge fuzz here about AMS-IX (Amsterdam internet exchange) starting a US company. Although they went to great lengths to make it independent and assure no Americans (who cannot be trusted due to their totalitarian laws) will have access to any sensitive information it remains to be seen how this will work out.

Microsoft always sold their cloudservices in the EU with the argument that the data is physically located outside the US so the Patriot Act doesn't apply. Now that this has been proven false, EU-based cloudfirms will use this argument to choose a non-US based firm even more in their commercials than they do already. Good for the non-US based firms.

Since the US is run by companies and 3-letter agencies I would not call it exactly "by proxy".

Another reason: I want to be able to reinstall everything manually so I keep installers. No need to hassle around with stores or repositories when you can have apk's.

Easy. XPrivacy. Requires root, but I would rather use Symbian than an unrooted Android.

"Android apps by default work off the internal SD card. It's actually a separate partition that's mounted at the same place as old phones used for external SD cards. You can't change the default to use an external card."

Depends on the phone. I have a cheapass Android phone with only 4GB of internal memory, but it let me choose (out of the box, no root-only tricks here) wether I want the internal memory or the physical microsd card mounted as /sdcard0 or /sdcard1. The phone switches them if you like (and that is very reccommended with this little internal memory).

" Oh, and block apps from writing to most of the external SD card"

SDFix to the rescue. Requires root but if you're running XPrivacy you already have that. It saved my Sygic installation after I upgraded to 4.4.