That's right, Putin is leading a secret proxy war like the ones that were common on both sides of the iron curtain during the Cold War. It's so sad that we still have to watch such a retarded behavior nowadays, what a bad and disconcerting beginning of the 21st Century. Not to speak of the long-lasting harm Putin's 'soviet union light' aspirations cause to Russia.

The "rebels" do not receive their weapons from "Bob the arms dealer", they receive them directly from Russia. More specifically, they received the BUK launcher with a large transport on rails from Russia sometime around June and were subsequently trained by Russian specialists in using it. Unfortunately, they were not trained in distinguishing civilian from military planes.

As a matter of fact, probably every third of the "rebels" you speak of is a Russian intelligence officer or another member of the Russian military without insignia. That alone is a breach of the Geneva Convention (Article 4).

Not every change is progress.

The ebook sales statistics are forged anyway. Most book sales are still print books, and things will stay that way until there are cheap ebook reader that aren't destroyed immediately when you take them to the beach.

It's much more likely that they mistook the plane for a Ukrainean military machine. That's what happens when you hand over advanced surface to air missile systems to violent thugs and morons.

You've got the facts all wrong. Like Russian TV?

These operations are massive in many countries, they have for example been going on for months in German news forums like the "tagesschau" meta comment section. These forums are swamped daily with hundred of pro-Russian comments, even on stories that have nothing to do with Russia.

Not sure what they want to achieve with it except pissing off everyone. Perhaps the idea is to cast doubt by constantly repeating bullshit. After all, it worked for the US in the beginning of the second Iraq war for some short time period, so perhaps Putin thinks it will work for him this time, too. It won't have any noteworthy effect, though, because it is crystal clear who shot down the plane.

What's wrong with those Trojan authors nowadays? There are whole programming language implementations that run in less than 20KB!

Don't they code in assembler any more?

Why wouldn't he?

The important question for me personally is this: As someone living in Europe, how can I ensure that I see the US search results? Does switching to google.com suffice? Or do I have to use a proxy or VPN?

The sad fact is that your justice system is totally broken, and it probably has been since you've been hanging horse thieves on nearby trees.

Microsoft is giving other governments the possibility to install their own backdoors by cooperating in special "transparency centers", provided they pay for it and are buying enough Microsoft products instead of switching to open source alternatives.

First, malware is primarily spread by Microsoft Windows. And secondly, I want to access my home server, which does provably not spread malware, and Microsoft and some US court have just cut down the dynamic IP system I need for this.

One more evidence that using a .com domain is insecure. I'll be sure to only support business with a .eu domain in future.

As someone who is also affected by this sudden outage, I have to agree with you. Noip was the last free service that my home router supports. Thanks to Microsoft, I can now log into my computer, curl the external url, note it down, and adjust my remote access scripts every day.

I cannot believe that this is apparently legal. In my book this proves beyond any doubt that the US legal system is totally fucked up and that we need international treaties to protect non-US users and customers from this system. This is also the first time I am seriously considering taking a lawyer and press charges against Microsoft and/or the court responsible for this. It is probably not going to happen, though -- much too expensive and not many chances of success.

Is there anything else that can be done about this?

I'm a postdoc at university, though not in a field in which you usually study human behavior. Anyway, if I experminted on humans without their prior consent, I'd loose my job. In every application for a project that involves studies on animals or humans there is an ethics form to fill out, and I must wonder how they got funding without cheating in one of those forms.

Lying to tests subjects is to some extent necessary, of course, or otherwise research in pschology would be almost impossible. However, conducting experiments on humans without their prior consent is unethical. Everybody knows that. Whoever conducted this study needs to be investigated by an ethics committee.

My 2 cents.