They have denied, in effect, that they even are competent to evaluate cryptosystems or that they are competent to protect their customers as they claim. This denial I think is actually worse for them than saying they actually knew what they were doing and did so anyway.

Indeed, locally encrypting and then mirroring is a good solution. Another can be to use something like ecryptfs if one wants "live" usable files shared in a folder and synced over multiple machines. The service (dropbox, gdrive, whomever) only see the encrypted files, and are happy to mirror that without awareness that they are encrypted at all. You only need to make sure to not pick a NSA friendly cipher ;). You can then access your files on each machine directly through the ecryptfs mount point. ecryptfs can also generate encrypted filenames, so what little you do still leak is only file size and creation date this way.

Indeed, this would return us to a state of affairs much like it was prior to the introduction of the gun. European feudalism held together and remained in control of very restive populations precisely because small numbers of heavily trained mercenaries (knights) were able to effectively suppress even very large mass popular rebellions. There were in fact a number of mass peasant rebellions during the middle ages. Every last one was successfully crushed this way. The first where a somewhat different outcome happened (the English civil war) was also the first large conflict to see the introduction and use of personal firearms. However, we are not like English round-heads fighting the king anymore. The force multipliers of drones and other technologies changes this balance once again to potentially favor the few violently controlling many, regardless of how many firearms a population may have access to. However, there are other forms of more selective warfare where small numbers of personal firearms and other means could still make a measurable impact.

Indeed, that is exactly what I said would happen at the time, too... that he made a deal to return and be Ballmer's successor once he was done doing to Nokia what Belluzo did to SGI. The similarities are strong too; remember, Microsoft then needed Belluzo to take down a unix workstation vendor to help establish market presense for it's own crappy new proprietary workstation OS that nobody would want then either; it was called NT. Thugs rarely change their MO, unless or until they are finally imprisoned for it.

Its not that anyone didn't see this coming, both inside and outside Nokia. I wrote at that time that clearly Elop was doing the same thing Belluzo did to SGI, all the time working for Microsoft's benefit, not the shareholders of Nokia. And that the reason he would go along and do so is that he was promised to be Ballmer's heir when he returned after Microsoft purchased Nokia cheaply. But where are the Finnish authorities in all this? They should arrest that thug for securities fraud if nothing else, and run him out of the country.

Just to please you... In NSA America social networks join you!

How do they reconcile their claims with "Snapchats Don't Disappear: Forensics Firm Has Pulled Dozens of Supposedly-Deleted Photos From Android Phones" - http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/05/09/snapchats-dont-disappear/?utm_campaign=forbestwittersf&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social

"A 24-year-old forensics examiner from Utah has made a discovery that may make some Snapchat users think twice before sending a photo that they think is going to quickly disappear. Richard Hickman of Decipher Forensics found that it’s possible to pull Snapchat photos from Android phones simply by downloading data from the phone using forensics software and removing a “.NoMedia” file extension that was keeping the photos from being viewed on the device. He published his findings online and local TV station KSL has a video showing how it’s done ..."

Opps...sounds closer to fraudsters

Indeed. At least cryptocat I had heard about...never heard of this ever before. Sounds like self-promotion by a private commercial entity...and then there is this about it (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapchat)

"...In May 2013, Forbes reported that the photos do not actually disappear, and that they can still be retrieved even after their time limit had expired.[6]..."

Oops...maybe your snapchat really is only shared with your friends and every three letter agency in the book?! :)

There is a third reason not mentioned, but can be seen in places and societies that were subject to inter-generational surveillance, such as Ceausescu's Romania. People adopt by learning to be deceptive in their entire lives, for wearing false face becomes essential for anything you do that stands out might be perceived as a threat, and anyone else might get you in trouble. All personal relationships, families, friends, marriage, work, become managed through such deception as a basic survival skill. It is the very destruction of a society as a whole at ALL levels over time.

I gather thats a vote for solyient green

...to "coverourass.com"?!

Wow!

I am not sure there is anything else that could be said...

Using his charity to both invest in and lobby for Monsanto and British Petroleum as a means of investing in private wealth to evade taxes and demanding nations change laws to suit his business needs before engaging in his self serving charity used as a mask for greed and malevolence worldwide. This would be the very business model of Lex Luther, if you ask me...

I think they pay them in Ireland, actually, and at a nicely reduced rate, too :)

While your overall statement could be thought of as broadly correct and relevant, it does so by being a chimeric language where you have two completely different and unrelated syntactic forms (C and smalltalk) that are superimposed on each other. I personally feel this reduces overall legibility.

Another consideration is that since method calls are messages with signatures that are symbolically matched at runtime as each method is invoked, there is some runtime overhead in method calls that are very different than found in C++ methods, even in respect to C++ virtuals, and this may become very important depending on how methods are used. To me Objective-C tends to make you use smalltalk as the framework for "overall" application structure and then use pure C for the details, where C++ is better for applying object oriented methods even to low level details, and this is where execution speed often does matter.

Finally Objective-C's runtime library standardized threads and conditionals, which makes writing multi-threaded applications more consistent and even generically cross-platform. However, all the issues with using pure C functions and libraries that are not re-entrant do of course remain.