I don't use "desktop features" I use applications. The only features I am interested in as far as a "desktop" are features that keep it out of my way.

In the USA the bank would pay a huge bribe, er, fine, to the Department of Justice and admit to no wrongdoing. Let's see what happens here.

This is off topic, but I would not be surprised to learn that male elementary school teachers are rare because that career to too dangerous. One nutty parent plays the pedophile card and your life and career are ruined.

One could easily argue, if people want to see it then showing it has a legitimate journalistic purpose. Even if those people then decide they want to join ISIS.

Is that what 97% effective means? I took it to mean there was a 3% chance it wouldn't work at all. i.e. if it works you could not get measles from anyone, and if it fails you could get measles from anyone else who has it. I don't think it means there is a 3% of infection on every exposure.

I did not double check, but heard on the radio news this morning the measles vaccine is 97% effective.

Google already gets your traffic through other means, they don't need to do something as crude as sniff the network directly. More likely this is a mechanism to try to sell more people on the non-search Google ecosystem, like TV, movies, etc.

This was my first thought too, but it is hard to say for sure. While agencies like this are rife with waste and inefficiency, there must be a point where budget cuts would have an impact on service even if all waste and inefficiency were eliminated. Of course the same can be said of any organization to one degree or another.

My second thought was, if their budget is cut all they have to do is reduce the scope of their mission. It isn't like their victims are going to complain about not being audited. And reduction in tax revenue is meaningless since the government will simply print money to make up the difference.

That's an excellent point, thanks for bringing it up. I will bear that in mind before voting for layoffs.

This is the kind of story I think of when I hear that these agencies need more money. It seems to me they are overstaffed and overfunded if they have time for activities like this.

This is the most effective form of security, and often the hardest. If you have nothing of value, there is no risk. Of course that ideal state is impossible but that doesn't mean opportunities to reduce risk by reducing the impact are overlooked.

You aren't going to appear to hide data if it is part of your data retention practice. If you can say that you were deleting everything over five years old long before any issues came to light, that isn't going to be a problem. Now if you start deleting it the day before you get the subpoena, you've got a problem.

I wonder how many people in NK even have access to their national 'intranet' let alone the global Internet.

The article seemed a bit overexcited to me. Is it really that surprising that they use 10.x space? It's not like Internet access is widely used in NK. And most of the other items were not what I would call weird, just what you would expect in a regime like this. Still, kudos to the author for doing this analysis.

Speaking of economics, if the government starts providing money for students with 'good grades' to pay tuition, doesn't the college now have a huge incentive to hand out good grades regardless of performance?