It's not enough to download some files: in order to be susceptible to the attack, those devices should download stuff as root in recursive mode from a compromised ftp server. I honestly can't see that happening in reality.

(But then again I wouldn't believe that home routers could be sold with an internet-facing backdoor open by default in their stock firmware, until that happened.)

Hey, western engines don't blow up! They undergo rapid unscheduled disassembly.

As a user of autoconfed packages, I find autoconf superior to cmake. Packages built with autoconf have standardized mechanisms for uninstallation (a cmake package may generate an install-manifest file, an uninstall target, or none of the two), to specify where to put documentation, for cross-compilation, and to fine-tune the build and the installation. With cmake, I can't even tell the package where to install libraries (most packages will allow you to do it, but each package has a different standard about the way to be told); with autoconf, I can even specify a sed to be run on the name of the installed binaries (useful if different packages provide different implementations of the same binary) and still have the installed package work. Also, with cmake packages building both static and dynamic libraries at the same time is usually impossible.

Moreover, modern autoconf scripts are (relatively) easy to debug and patch when they don't work; cmake scripts are more scattered and they're written in an obscure mainframish language.

That said, I imagine that using autoconf on non-posix systems might be less funny.

make money != be the Government

This has to be the biggest piece of Apple adulation that I've ever seen. A practice of flattery over everything Apple do is always superabundant in most of the output of the American tech press: we're used, for instance, to the reviewers' pirouettes when they first dismiss some bad choice by Apple as irrelevant, and then they have to praise the reversal of that choice as the best thing after sliced bread in some later version of an Apple product.

But in this case, well, Apple does something wrong (not even remotely comparable to the trainwreck that Microsoft did with Metro, I'll concede) that devalues the largest part of its already expensive product line, with the exception of the most expensive products, and without adding any value to those either, but Apple fan are happy nonetheless because... it's good to be shown how Apple does not care about who doesn't spend the most?

What is this, an exercise of asceticism in the path of the true Apple worship?

A dev announced that extFS support had been removed in beta. To people protesting, they replied that the feature was going away full stop. They even modified the ChromeOS feature page stating that ChromeOS had ext support.

Because of FUD. Stating that supporting the ext file system poses a security issue is FUD: it is FUD by definition, and it is FUD in particular because ext is massively used in security-critical contexts including Google's servers and Google's Android operating system. Why, ext4's key developer is a Google employee IIRC!

Because they didn't want to implement the few lines of code supposed to invoke the already existing facilities that set the file system label. A thing that, for tricky that it may be, was done right by the Commodore 64's 1541 floppy drive OS, by MS-DOS, by all versions of Windows, by all Linux-based desktops, by AmigaDOS, by OSX, and probably most existing operating system.

After the slashdot story was published, after my comment was written, when more and more people started stating, most of them politely, that removing ext support would make ChromeOS unsuitable for their work, and that they were upset because there was no credible explanation for the removal of the feature, only after that developers stopped ignoring their discontent and decided to leave ext support in for the time being, but still without writing the code required to alter the filesystem label.

And when did I say otherwise? I even said the same thing in another comment.

Open Source != GPLv3. People can write all the code that they like but unless Google want to, their chances of actually seeing that code running on Chromebooks is zero. In this case, Google have already decided that the feature (which is already there) has to go, because simplicity.

Buy a real laptop if you want to do whatever you want with it. If you buy (?) a locked-down device, which is controlled by a remote commercial entity and not by you, then don't act surprised when they don't support some use case of yours which doesn't help them make money.

DRM in HTML will “break the internet” too, and you pushed for it. Surveillance sucks whether the data is gathered by a hostile government or by a friendly commercial entity.