Then why does newspaper columnist Marian vos Savant have a recorded IQ of 228?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

All this is saying is that in three years when the law expires ...

Ahem. Laws don't "expire", but that's why I suppose you chose to post that comment under AC, instead of a proper username.

SIM-lock issue is no biggie, you can always simply buy the phone without telco as middleman.

...except in the United States of America.

You might be outside the US, but you literally cannot purchase a phone in the US without specifying which carrier you're going to bind that phone to, contractually. Not Samsung/HTC/LG/Motorola/Google, not Microsoft, not Nokia, not iPhone and not BlackBerry.

So you're luck to be outside the US. For the rest of us, we're stuck paying full price for phones off-contract, and still being held to carrier restrictions.

...and even if he doesn't sign it, it becomes law anyway, as long as Congress is in session.

I use this on my Android device with AdAway with tremendous success. I also use Android Firewall with some custom rules to block annoying apps from trying to send my data through servers in China, Romania, etc.

Here's my AdAway custom lists:

http://adaway.org/hosts.txt
  http://hosts-file.net/ad_serve...
  http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/...
  http://someonewhocares.org/hos...
  http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/ho...

Use these, and you'll have a nice, clean, tight setup. I also use Squid on my LAN, and my router is configured to send every packet through Squid (custom iptables rules on the router; a Buffalo Wireless running dd-wrt), and on the Squid side, I block about 12,000 separate ad URLs, domains and sites, so again, the experience for anyone on my segment, is nice and clean and fast.

The side benefit of Squid, is that I can see every single request, phone home, ping, malicious or otherwise, that my devices try to do, and I can permit, prohibit, redirect or block entirely based on schedule, as I wish.

You'd be surprised how chatty a standard iPhone and Android device are, without "training" on the Squid/AdAway side.

Can I set my own key? Set and maintain my own hash? No?

Not interested.

We want true, user-controlled security, not vendor provided.

We've learned our lessons already. The trust is gone.

(posting from my uber-low ID)

They were probably doing it anyway, and now want everyone to opt-in, so they can cover their arses before they got caught for tracking everyone without their consent.

...not to mention, doing so is a Felony. No wonder they posted as AC.

Yay for BlackBerry!

Unfortunately, not supported by AT&T, Verizon or T-Mobile here in the US.

Sorry, 0.facebook.com is only supported by select mobile carriers and is not available from your mobile carrier.
If you are contacting your mobile carrier, mention that your IP address 99.16.210.3 is not supported.
Go to m.facebook.com (Standard data charges may apply) Report a Problem.

You may have uninstalled the app, but did you also freeze the in-ROM Facebook SNS service? Not likely, and it will bridge (eg: phone home) to other apps that integrate with and talk to Facebook.

Get Titanium Backup and freeze SNS, or use Root App Delete (for rooted Android phones) and get rid of that bugger. It eats data, leaks your location every 60s, and does all sorts of things you don't need or want it doing.

And what if that outlet, with the "TSA-approved Cable(tm)" is doing more than just powering on your device?

This is why USB Condoms exist (no, this is not a joke)

http://int3.cc/collections/fro...

"Have you ever plugged your phone into a strange USB port because you really needed a charge and thought: "Gee who could be stealing my data?". We all have needs and sometimes you just need to charge your phone. "Any port in a storm." as the saying goes. Well now you can be a bit safer. "USB Condoms" prevent accidental data exchange when your device is plugged in to another device with a USB cable. USB Condoms achieve this by cutting off the data pins in the USB cable and allowing only the power pins to connect through.Thus, these "USB Condoms" prevent attacks like "juice jacking".

Despite Apple and other corporate plans to move everything and everyone to "The Cloud", the masses are doing quite the opposite, moving everything away from the cloud and hosted resources.

There's already a growing exodus to use personally-controlled storage, cloud and other environments, or heavily encrypted storage platforms to hold their data, making apps that expect "iCloud(tm)" and other in-the-clear, branded solutions from being all but useless.

So as long as these "replacement" versions work primarily, and with full functionality without feature-reduction 100% locally and by default, then they'll be fine. If they require the iCloud/cloud to function, they're going to suffer from diminished adoption.

The same is happening with digital currency v. analog/paper currency, resulting from increased eroding confidence in the system (eg: Target failures, identity theft, and hundreds of other examples in the news, nearly weekly).

If these features aren't being demanded by users (and there's plenty of evidence they're not), then why the big push to store everything you have and own, off-premises?

On my side, every single packet across the wireless side of the router, goes through a local Squid instance. Not only can I inspect the logs, but I have Squid filtering out tens of thousands of sites, domains, ad spamming pages and other things, so if there were any abuses coming, I could just block those too, or turn on other block index files and filter off even more.

Easey peasey.
 

My ISP charges $0.50 per gig overage

Now THAT is impressive. Here in the Northeast US, where we have AT&T for phone and DSL, each GB over your cap, costs $15.00. It used to be $10.00, but they jumped it 50% without warning a few months ago.