Perhaps you could have a two tier level of trust where repositories that are from signed approved vendors are automatically permitted, but unlisted ones require specific admin permission to install from. Of course, power users could mark an unlisted certificate as trustworthy to prevent the auth request, but it would prevent installs from silently coming in from hijacked repositories in the scenario described above.

There might as well be a Dunning-Kruger effect built in to Photoshop, considering the number of photographers who suffer under the delusion that the terrible shit they produce is actually art.

Full disclosure - I'm a cranky photographer who's not total shit but is still mostly shit.

Her description of the location of the classified documents sounds like something my computer illiterate grandmother would say trying to relate the plot of "War Games" or "The Net."

What IT person do you know in this world that says shit like that?

"commercial, nonattributable spyware that's proprietary to a government agency"

You can't parse that and have it make sense.

Commercial spyware that's somehow unable to be attributed to a person or organization? That defies the whole point of a commercial software product.

Commercial yet proprietary to a small group of government agencies? Again, that's not really the definition of commercial.

I can believe she had some sort of breach on her machine, most likely malware. Hell, I'd even be willing to believe there was some sort of spearphishing attack against her by someone who wanted data off a well-known reporter's computer but the rest of it just reads like a bad movie about the internet.

Is that really what they are doing? I have a counterfeit Prolific device that "broke" after a driver update. I simply uninstalled the new drivers and installed an old version to make it work.

Admittedly, that's a different OEM, so they may be doing something different.

None of these analogies are correct.

They are not changing the device at all, they are simply making their drivers not work with the fake ones.

There is no reasonable analogy that can be made involving a Gucci product.

This is exactly correct. I've experienced this with a radio programming cable with a counterfeit chip supposedly from Prolific. The drivers that Windows automatically downloaded for it caused the device to not function. Rather than stuffing around with the supplier, I simply downloaded an old working driver, uninstalled the new driver, installed the old driver, and done.

Certainly not a job my mother could do, but also not the same as the OEM bricking devices, which would legally be dangerous for them as it could be argued that they were willingly causing property damage.

From a commercial point if view I think it is an appropriate measure, albeit perhaps not the most reasonable from consumers' perspectives.

SurfaceRT was a failure. The only way only explanation that I can think of for you asserting that the Surface Pro line has been a failure is if your head is located in a place that makes it difficult to see what's going on in the world around you.

The main difference is that FreeBSD users know what Google is and how to use it.

Tortious interference maybe? Name them as a party, as it was their actions that precipitated the firing action.

They will take a CNN and a Fox newscaster and lock em in a cage until only one is left reporting.

I'll avoid that. I don't think I could stomach such brutality.

I’ve got news for you. The sexual liberation movement has already been and gone, and most of society no longer has a puritanical view of sex and sexuality. You’ll have to find some other reason to explain the difficulty you’re having getting laid.