Per the video, the NSA iPhone compromise requires the NSA to obtain physical access to the device, and suggests they did this by rerouting shipping.

To me, that says that what they've done is exploited holes in iOS -- of which there have been many, that's how jailbreaks are possible -- and used them to install their own spyware. There's not only no need for them to involve Apple to do such a thing, involving Apple would actually be a bad idea, because it increases the number of people who know about it and might leak it.

I believe Apple had nothing to do with it. I believe the NSA has spyware for every version of iOS ever made, as well as Windows, OS X, Android, Linux (well fragmentation of the last two means there might be some versions which are safe -- but not the major ones), AIX, etc. If they don't, they're not doing their jobs. I don't think anyone should be the slightest bit surprised by any of this.

The "techies" part is debatable.

The current generation of Google Glass doesn't have "recording active" LED. The screen is on when recording, so there is some light, but it's not obvious whether it's from something being displayed or Glass recording.

I suspect the commercial release of Glass will have a recording light.

It's not so much that it's a ripoff, but that it deters rentals. It's just a stupid business practice.

I often decide not to rent something when browsing because I'm not sure I have time to watch it before the rental period expires. I may or may not ever stumble across it again later when looking for something to watch. Give me multi-month access for $3, and I'll rent stuff on a whim. Make it viewable multiple times, and I'll rent even more, because I may rent stuff that I think I'm only marginally interested in but my family might want to see.

On the other side, what's the potential loss? I've been renting movies in various formats for 30 years. I don't believe I have ever, in that entire time, rented a movie and then rented it again within a few months. If I have done it, it's definitely only been a very small number of times, a tiny, tiny fraction of the number of times I've rented. I don't think I'm unusual in this. So, shutting off access after a few days, or a single viewing, is not going to extract another rental fee from me.

Back when I was renting physical media, there was a clear purpose for the short rental periods. They needed the tape or DVD back so they could rent it to someone else. With streaming media that issue is gone. The cost of streaming a movie to me is negligible, and there is no limit to the number of people they can rent to simultaneously. So if the content owner's goal is, as would seem logical, to extract the maximum possible amount of money from viewers, they should allow repeat viewings (which will hardly ever be used) and long rental periods -- not long enough that rental can be confused with purchase, but long enough that people don't have to think about whether they'll have time to watch it before the period expires.

You're still ignoring the fact that piracy motivates some purchases that would not otherwise have happened, either directly, where pirates decide a work is so awesome they want to buy it, or indirectly, via buzz created by pirates who don't buy themselves but whose word-of-mouth recommendations motivate other buyers. It also eliminates some purchases that otherwise would have happened.

Whether or not piracy costs content owners depends on the ratio of those two things. What is that ratio? It's different across different types of works, and hard to pin down even in one specific case. The most careful studies done to date mostly conclude that piracy is neutral to beneficial for copyright owners, but there are still a lot of unknowns.

In general, we can't really say whether piracy really costs or benefit content owners, or to what degree. The fact that they're still enormously successful, however, at least gives us reason to believe it's not a problem.

(Note that I personally do not pirate, nor am I a content owner of any note other than small bits of open source software packages, so I have no stake in this.)

I'd modify your list a little:

Instead, how about "Unless required by law not to disclose it, organizations are required to notify each person whose information they share. Said notification is required each time the information is shared, and must include the information shared, the party to whom it is disclosed, the purpose of disclosure, and the privacy commitments provided by the receiver, which must be at least as restrictive as those of the sharer. In the event of information shared in aggregated form, the notification must be delivered to a government agency whose responsibility it is to evaluate whether or not it may be possible to identify any individual included in the aggregate. If so, the organization that shared it is required to notify all identifiable individuals. Failure to notify results in steep and exponentially-increasing penalties."

Obviously the goal here is to address information sharing between all sorts of organizations, governmental and commercial, including company-to-company, company-to-government, government-to-company and even government-to-government... including US government to foreign government. Note also that there's nothing in there about "first to share"... the notification requirements exist at every step. Because this would be a dramatic, and in many cases expensive, change in notification burden, it should be phased in over time, but it should ultimately apply to all personally-identifiable information, even information which is currently considered public. Oh, non-commercial sharing by private individuals should be exempted, and "non-commercial" should be defined pretty loosely... posting a friend's wedding announcement on your blog shouldn't be a crime, even if you happen to have some ads on it. There are undoubtedly other adjustments that need to be made to the concept, even though I've tried to be as thorough as I can.

Your "forbidden to disclose" is pithier, but I'd like to leverage this to address commercial sharing as well, and I don't think flatly forbidding that is in society's best interest. I think instead making people aware of what is being done and allowing them to make decisions about who they interact with, based on different organizations' privacy policies (which should be legally binding... may need some language about that, too), allows the most flexibility for an information-driven society to evolve, but allows individuals to retain control.

Further, I'd limit the "disclosure restricted by law" bit. Restrictions on disclosure should be temporary, and their duration should be specified in the initial (court-reviewed) document, with reasonable justification. When the time expires, it should be the responsibility of both the agency that requested the information and the organization that provided to provide full disclosure to the target, including supporting documentation explaining the rationale. If, as the expiration approaches, the agency has reason to extend it, it can go back to court and justify the extension. Oh, and "because this would be embarrassing" should be specifically excluded as justification for restricting disclosure.

And, historically, parents always felt that they should not have to outlive their children. The fact that it was common never made it anything less than heartbreaking.

It's also part of what's right with just about everything nowadays.

Seriously, willingness to compromise your own wishes to accommodate others is the basis for human cooperation, which is the basis for not only not killing each other at an astounding rate (archaeological evidence suggests that pre-historical peoples had homicide rates about three orders of magnitude higher than is typical for first-world nations today), it's also the basis for all of the societal structures that enable commerce, technological progress and government, among many, many more.

I agree with you that the number of ridiculous compromises has been rising in recent decades, but that's been accompanied by large reductions in all forms of violence, including both retail and wholesale murder as well as rape, bullying and domestic abuse, just to name a few. I don't think the two are unrelated; I think both are driven by an increased willingness to "give in just a little so we can all get along", due to increased levels of empathy, and eye-rollers like unnecessarily removing Wifi are probably an acceptable price, as long as it isn't too high. In this case they're replacing Wifi with wired Ethernet, so they'll get some significant reliability and bandwidth benefits out of the change as well... and eventually I'm sure they'll put the Wifi back.

Actually, California banned so-called "assault weapons", which are small-caliber, low to moderate-power rifles. Your granddad's deer rifle, on the other hand, is high-powered.

The Berne convention requires that signatories' copyright statutes meet some requirements for duration and scope of copyright, but it doesn't say that people in one country must apply the law from another country.

US copyright laws apply in the US, regardless of whether the copyright owner is US-based. Same for other countries; they each get to apply their own laws.