You may have noticed I don't care how it got there, only why they are acting now the way they are.

Many companies have this immune system response that if something happens that shouldn't have, they will at the same time punish someone internally, and defend themselves externally claiming everything is proper.

They are taking a calculated risk knowing that very few GPL lawsuits actually went to court. They know it takes money to fight a legal battle and hope the opposing side doesn't have it, or will run out of it before reaching a final verdict. And finally, from the fact that they've been at this since 2012 - they probably think that it's a fairly cost-efficient way to buy more time and make business.

The only way you can have losses that exceed your net-worth is if someone has given you a huge amount of money that they really shouldn't. Typically, it means the banks gave these guys credit beyond even the most loose definition of sanity.

More and more I'm thinking that the fantasy worlds we live in when we play roleplaying or computer games are much closer to reality than the fantasy world of the financial industry.

Yeah, I wonder if these two could be in any way related...

MS is a design and UI fiasco and always has been. The only reason few people realize how unusable the crap is, is that we are so used to it that we don't notice anymore - until the next major update, or if you don't use it daily and then suddenly sit in front of it and wonder who the fuck came up with this stupidity.

And everyone who knows anything at all about mobile devices and usability knows that nobody on the planet wants a windows desktop experience on their smartphone. People want a smartphone experience on their smartphone, what's so difficult to understand about that?

Oh, speaking of that: People also don't want a mobile experience on their desktop. They want a desktop experience on their desktop, that's not so difficult, either.

It works for bombs and tanks, but not for computer networks and communications. It might have even worked in the time of telegraphs and snail mail letters. But for encryption, it doesn't work. A cipher is either weak, or strong. You can compromise a foreign postal system without affecting the security of your own, but you can't secretly build a backdoor into an encryption algorithm that works only for you.

Now you're trying to reverse the chain of causality just to make a cute finishing sentence. :-)

Oh man sweet an unbiased report about the importance of Linux certifications! From a job board and a organization selling Linux certifications no less. I bet this report is totally legit and has hard numbers to back up all of the claims. I'm probably not going to be disappointing from some obvious slashvertisement.

Everyone knows about the evil bit. That's what prompted me to write the bracket remark. But it's not quite the same as a "we're from the NSA, nothing to see here" flag.

What's with the clickbait headlines? By itself, the headline is total BS. The actual statement made, however, is spot on. The hole in your security doesn't care who exploits it. There's no "good guy" flag in IP headers (though I'm sure some April 1st RFC will soon introduce it).

What worries me most is that we could win this fight, if it weren't for our own governments deciding to betray us. There are vastly more people interested in secure communication and other people not being able to spy on or subvert our computers and mobile devices than there are people interested in compromised communications and systems (basically only criminals and some deluded, criminal-if-the-laws-were-right elements of governments).

There is just one problem to Bruce's argument: The largest and most powerful spy agency in the world disagrees with his fundamental assumption. We often forget that the NSA has two missions, and they are exactly the two things that Bruce argues cannot co-exist: To secure the computing infrastructure of the US against foreign espionage, and to provide espionage on foreign communication.
The NSA believes, and/or is tasked with exactly these two things that Bruce says (and I agree) are mutually exclusive. No surprise they've gone rogue, their very mission statement is a recipe for a mental breakdown through cognitive dissonance.

Doesn't it depend a lot on what you refactor, when and how?

I have 3 year old code that I would like to refactor because I've since switched framework (from CodeIgniter to Symfony 2) and it would bring it in line with all my other projects, allowing me more easy code-reuse and not maintaining two frameworks both on servers and in my mind. But it's largely a convenience factor and I would agree that it will probably not improve code quality very much.

But I also have 12+ year old code written in plain PHP with my own simple database abstraction layer. I'm quite certain that refactoring that would do a world of good.

Just because the NSA is trying to weaken encryption standards, why do you have to pile on too!

As I've said before, if he's really this stand up guy, why did he run? IF he really had good and legal reasons to do what he did, take it to court and face the music.

I know, right? Like how the Sons of Liberty didn't disguise themselves as Indians before dumping a load of tea into Boston Harbor, and then when done, turned themselves in to the nearest British garrison? We need more heroes like those fine, upstanding, nametag-wearing gentlemen.


if you break the law to make your point that the law is unjust you should stand ready to be arrested, imprisoned and tried in court for what you choose to do.

"Ready to be" doesn't mean adopting a Gump level of naivete and making it easy for the government to remove you from the public view. By him fleeing the country (and seeking asylum in a country we traditionally mock for their lack of an open and fair government, no less), we continue to discuss Snowden's actions years later. If he had stuck around, we would all have forgotten about him as soon as the next weekly scandal distracted the media.

I admittedly don't usually look at the submitter. If the FP gets my attention, I'll click through to read the rest of the submission, and, maybe, even TFAs where appropriate.

In Bennett's case, I have to admit he has become a truly master-level troll, in that he has learned to write an opening paragraph that gets my attention but doesn't give away his essential Bennett-ness. By the third paragraph, though, I usually catch on, stop reading there, and just write the obligatory "fuck Bennett" post.

I think Bandai would say it's a "parody" of the IP they stole.

As in the original movies and cartoons that Power Rangers ripped off and spliced in "local content" to appear to be "original".

There is no stealing from crooks.

Cash, even though it's now traceable, is still much better.

If they don't accept cash, they don't get my business.