This is exactly why international phone calls are impossible and the telephony system is so broken... oh, wait.

The ITU is controlled by the UN and the phone system works just fine

Now that you mention it, how are those non-deterministic 011-xx-mmm calling codes AND uneven international phonecall rates* working out for your definition of "just fine"?

Thanks to your comment I now see this is a great opportunity for organizations to troll for unanimous approval of distance-based (or at least tld-based) dns resolution "fees", as well as... off-peak rates, "roaming" away from favorite areas, and the like of today's US telco non-sense.

You may restrict yourself from browsing certain domains, but you still can't prevent emails from reaching you from un-protected domains. And given how little control we have over today's incoming email, spammers in cohoots with the new overlords will love to generate revenue-generating spam. We never stopped SMS spam, or even charges for receiving phonecalls.

The NSA has contingency plans after all, and this is a Snowden-based fake-out against only non-technical people that looks good on paper for US-based e-commerce and cloud tech. It's a symbolic gesture to wash their hands when people come looking, while they still have their hands in the regional DNS with plausible deniability. It allows for backroom deals between a few governments (which may or may not still be making deals with the USA) so pricing is not so far-fetched since the US can no longer overtly enforce the one-mind nature of its dictatorship over dns. Grass is always greener on the other side, so we'll need to see where this still leads. But there'll never be a turning back.

* Last I checked, a call from the the New York to CUBA cost about 3 times as much as a call to Mexico, which is a few more thousand miles away.

Why not send the previously collected bursts while you're playing games? Remember the big stink about the last generation of games needing to be online originally? well, we're already all doing online games and services (netflix, Facebook, twitter) on the TV anyway. The XBOX data can go wherever it is the online data servers are, and distributed man-in-the-middle-style from there to MS, and thus, the NSA. Just sneak a bit at a time into the game / video / DLC bursts and encryption will hide the rest.

Must be a troll, given the bait-y capitalizations.

I'll just leave this right here Control + F , type remote wipe.
If "they" let YOU administer it from your own webmail interface, why WOULDN'T the server administrator with a vested interest in their company-attached device be mightier than the BYOD peons?
I turned it off and killed the permissions when I realized that vengeance, incompetence, or a virus might trigger this stuff.

They don't even implement this on laptops, which are more likely to have your work files than cellphones. So why so aggressive on the security hole of their preference anyway?
It's not access to data they're safeguarding, since they don't enforce even half of the wipe privs if you just browse your email on the smartphone.

Why'd you buy a phone that couldn't be rooted?

• In the real world, people walk into a store with no research whatsoever and blow money for what's got fame and good marketing, even if it sucks. Or did we forget that there ARE Zune, windows 8 and Windows Phone lovers on this site?
• In the real world, alternatives do not exist for everything. See the HD-killed-high-res-screens debacle. See the hardware-keyboards-smartphones-are-scarce standard
• In the real world, you buy devices that cannot be rooted or unlocked because it's a pain to leave your carrier, (we're not Europe), there's network effect (aka peer pressures ... how did Facebook become so big?), and premiums aren't everyone's cup of tea.

That you stop to interrogate this one user as if he'd violated some law shows just how blinding self-selection becomes... you've forgotten that we don't sign a contract to follow all these tenets you hold unthinkable to ignore. Just because we are slashdotters does not mean we're ALL zealots.

Being a different presentation medium killed that chance right off the bat, sadly. Touchscreen input, specifically, makes it so you can change software keyboards at will. Apple, never offered hard keyboard support on their "hip" tablets and phones. The clickwheels on the moderately ancient iPod design should have been a hint that input tech trends would never be the same.

This is a losing battle for us everywhere. HPs and other low-end desktops opted for full size keyboards w/laptop-like blunders --for no sane reason, so even desktops are slowly losing the freedom we used to enjoy, and no good choices are being offered.

Today, ALL mobile manufacturers ignored Blackberry's coveted keyboard layout (probably due to patent issues?) and bypassed the Windows keyboard, altogether. Even a $650 high-end Samsung smartphone lacks hard keys. If even laptops are losing, and Mobile is even more bleeding edge than them, where can we go? Bluetooth keyboard layouts suck, and desktop-sized BT keyboards do not sell at brick stores even in large cities, no matter what price tier.

Google's "behavior" yet again shows their twisted anti-privacy slant. I don't wanna know just how much Chrome has contributed to
1) loved ones spying us
2) lost passwords due to complacent workers who never hit log out

Just today I got yet another user who made me wonder just HOW people never learn their passwords and manage to keep logging in for 2 years, till their laptops are lost or refreshed. Between site-controlled "remember me" boxes and lazy browser culling, I think this solves the mystery. Thanks for opening my eyes to another frog boiling attempt.

The alt browser with the restriction options I mentioned was either iCab or Opera, btw.
-vlueboy

Not the whole story. Internet Explorer, that ol' browser none of us use when idle, is pretty aggressive blocking even onclick.
It makes little sense that it's a default setting, and I can't recall.
My first sense that browsers were in bed with the bad guys was 10+ years ago. I found some alt browser that expressly allowed me to block annoying behaviors:
* scripted window movement and resizing
* status bar text changes (crudely obfuscating hover text when you want to see where you'll land)
* hide the menu bar, navigation bar and url so as to give a small HTML window popup (so you can't tell what url it loaded, how to turn back without keyboard [obscure to Joe Sixpack], and what domains to ban)

All three of those may have had true uses before web 2.0 during your banking or e-commerce session. But today, css and floating divs can be used to blur the window selectively as to highlight the necessary context. They are vestiges that are not needed by legit sites, and yet are overused by sneaky sites. Browsers phased out blink tags, http + https iframe mix, urlbar javascript execution and other stuff, but don't get rid of pop unders, even as an option somewhere? intentional

Linguo dead?

Love the industry's hubris to standardize a number pad on 15 inch laptops...redundant!
and STILL managed to crunch the arrow keys and mess with the Home / End placement. PC gamers have really complicated setups that need the keys to be in specific places. The home row is sometimes used as a secondary WASD control area where you can rest your right hand to issue commands. An N64 emulators I used years ago suffered when I used a laptop because the four c keys to play Link's ocarina were out of order with respect to the fullsize desktop keyboards.

Why don't they sell fullsize bluetooth keyboards at small stores for the purpose of controlling android phones? no, apparently all cheap keyboards target some sort of tablets-mount standard that was silently pushed out to the world. Even fullsize keyboards are increasingly pushing forced innovation.

You mean a cellphone? ;)
Pardon my 2 year old stats...
http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/06/prepaid-mobile-phone-users-in-america-hit-record-high/ says most US phones are run by contract (75% users as of that article posting)
IIRC, contracts normally come with carrot-stick: you actually want those hmmm-tasty subsidies to knock half off that phone's MSRP, so you must pass a credit check. But that credit check is tied to your social security number, which gives the government your identity. And my retort isn't off: http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/06/prepaid-mobile-phone-users-in-america-hit-record-high/ 80+% of Americans owned a cellphone back 2 years ago.

All brought to you by a nice Google Glass collection front-end

I thought GP was going to cite what I was thinking about in that quote.

You didn't either. What I was looking for is what I've heard about forensic tools that are now available to any cop, if I recall correctly, where they just plug in your phone and sluuuuurp! Done!
So you don't even need to unlock it, regardless of whether it's iOS or Android based. Since the US government has agreements with all those companies and there are backdoors in everything, the war is lost if the device leaves your hands, being it the good guys, or the bad guys.

http://www.androidauthority.com/xry-software-crack-ios-android-70132/ (plus some irony in the comment section given those were made in pre-Snowden days of 2012)
http://www.hotforsecurity.com/blog/us-police-forensic-tools-can-collect-suspects-smartphone-data-without-warrant-aclu-says-5574.html

Because given misunderstandings, the only good guy when it comes to your personal data is your own self. Nothing will stop "parallel construction" from creating a probable cause to view your data in some new light.

One of the only problems is when you have to lend someone your seat. Don't get me wrong --I use NoScript and maintain my lists on-demand too, and page loads are awesome with JS off by default... but here are some examples of what this does to others:

I can't hear the music on this streaming site!
My flash games aren't showing!
I can't see xyz button on the page, or clicking does nothing!
I can't see the videos on Youtube! your PC is broken!
FB is broken!

You can do "temporarily allow" for a few domains that day, but every new site they visit will probably not be in our geeky pre-processed list, requiring you to step in to fiddle with their mouse several times. AND they'll open you up to cookies that will remain long after you deny all the JS.

The web stopped working long ago because HyperText was not intended to use dynamic modules and plugins (flash, vrml, quicktime, realplayer --we've been dancing around presentation pretty badly because apparently only academia likes text and static jpgs). When you come from google to visit a forum to grab info or files, it may want you to register, or says the thread is 404-long-gone. Worse yet, the web has also added paywalls, interstitial ads, captchas and download counters.
Here's a recent example: Do you like fanfics? Go to http://icybrian.com/ and click on "Fanfic Library" on the left.
Go, I'll wait...
.
.
.
Thanks, PHP and Mysql!
Look at the site edit dates. That content is probably lost forever unless archive.org and simple url slugs were slurped. None of this is sign of a "healthy web".

Dynamic content introduces slowdowns and more points of failures. It is barely progress --to get back to the topic at hand, it was precisely javascript that brought us slowly to this point...
Noscript is just forcibly removing the veil that AJAX donned on every one of us under the gospel of web 2.0. Any public content that cannot reliably slurped for posterity without masquerading and running extra code, does not deserve to be there temporarily either.