so we can make new works using them. You know, Disney didn't write the story in the Lion King, right? It's an age old story. They don't write _any_ of their own stories (even Lilo and Stitch was just something they bought because they thought they could get 626 toys out of it).

The idea was that copyright and patents encouraged people to share information so that it wouldn't be lost. The entire point was to get the works into the public domain at some point. We've turned it into a rent seeking scheme. If it started out this way we'd all be paying royalties to some Nords and a few Egyptians who claimed ownership of stone tablets from 200 B.C..

in order to qualify for the "Safe Harbor" part you have to take down the "infringing" content immediately. No questions asked. Only _after_ you take it down can the person who put it up apply to have it put back up.

It makes it really easy to get stuff silenced and much harder to get it back out there; especially for quasi-legal journalistic sources like leaks.

is that this is exactly the sort of overreach of intent that people said would happen with the DMCA. There's a lot of dirt in those emails on Sony (like them coordinating with Attorneys General to attack Google). Much of that information falls under what used to be freedom of press. The DMCA screws all that. Now anything you don't want making the rounds you just copyright and an ironclad and unquestionable law shuts it down instantly. I believe the phrase is "Chilling Effect"...

If software manufacturers actually cared to fix things fast, there would be no need. But as fixing bugs costs money and there is _zero_ penalty for not doing so, most do not bother unless forced to. 90 days is plenty. Things not fixed in 90 days will never be fixed, unless there is at the very least a risk of bad press.

90 days is plenty if they are actually prepared to maintain their stuff. It seems MS is not.

Indeed. But since it is FOSS, a single "true überwizard" that then submits a patch is enough for all to have a patch. In the closed-source case, some mediocre, underpaid and unmotivated corporate slave has to take an interest and manage to fix it, and that takes far longer in most cases. 90 days is completely unacceptable though.

Actually, for FOSS projects a single user that fixes it and submits a patch is enough for all users to have a patch. This is much more powerful and the reason fix-times are often measured in hours for well-done FOSS projects.

I agree. Even a second-rated software shop should have no trouble meeting that deadline. It appears that MS is still third-rate. The only thing that will help is making them fully responsible for any and all damage caused by their inaction.

They try to spin it as so malicious, including:

This is at least the second time a U.S. warrant has been served at Google for data from someone connected to WikiLeaks. A sealed warrant was served to Google in 2011 for the email of a WikiLeaks volunteer in Iceland.

Right, it's not like they had any probable cause of illegal activity back in 2011, no sirree.... You've got a Wikileaks volunteer who was at the time acting as an unofficial spokeman for the organization in the news, voluntarily coming up to them and telling them that Assange is working with Anonymous and LulzSec and ordering hacks and spying, including against US targets, and providing troves of data - are they supposed to just ignore that?

A lot of people think that by joining and taking up a civilian-ish MOS, they're not actually in any danger. Which is simply not true. I had, for example, a friend who joined up for a job doing lab biopsies of medical samples. Figured he'd always be stateside. Then the Iraq War broke out and they simply reclassified his whole unit as field medics and send them over to a FOB near Fallujah.

If you're in the military and they decide they need more people on the front lines, it doesn't matter what your MOS is, you're "draft pick" #1.

We will see. While I tend to agree that a new global totalitarian catastrophe is in the works, I am not totally convinced that it will happen this time. The problem is that totalitarianism and fascism are exceedingly bad for business. They always result in an economic collapse, might just take a few decades. I have some hope that plain, old-fashioned greed may safe us this time. Wouldn't that be ironic?

I can recognize faked irony...

You forget that there are far more IT criminals than there are NSA employees....
This thing scales in several dimensions.