Forgot to mention: any official policy that the US would disclose the purchased security vulnerabilities would be a sham. They would undoubtedly hang onto the most important/useful ones for some period of time. Lying is not an aberration at the TLA's, it's more like their job description.

Fair enough, thanks for commenting. I enjoy beating up on ACs, hope you take no (major) offense. :)

Interesting. At least I don't have false negatives on my Yahoo account, as I get hundreds per day. I don't take the time to look for false positives, and I agree that would stink.

Yeah, I definitely believe that this AC uses an old WP7 phone. They just exude credibility, and there's nothing fake or phony about their outrage whatsoever. Given that you can pick up an Android off Ebay for peanuts that will run circles around an old WP7 device and support a lot more apps to boot...

Eh, WP7 is old. I don't think people will be that shocked. They should feel guilty for being so far behind the times, and give all their money to a smartphone manufacturer right away. /sarc

I'm sure somebody at Microsoft is annoyed at this, but the Skype devs are probably relieved to stop supporting it. It's easy to forget that WP7 was essentially a 1.0 product. It was a restart from Windows Mobile 6.5, and very limited versus concurrent Android and iOS. With WP8 and 8.1 they've been getting up to speed nicely. I still want to see better third party Bluetooth support for devs, though.

1. Exploit sellers will turn around and secretly sell the same goods to other parties regardless of any agreement they signed with the US government.

2. This will inflate the sale price and create perverse incentives to inject defects to "discover" and sell them later.

3. The government is really bad at pretty much everything it does. Some of it is necessary stuff so we tolerate it, but c'mon, this isn't!

4. Everybody is mad at the NSA for its misbehavior and spying on Americans/the world right now -- is this really the best time to remind people that the US government wants to collect tools to hack everybody?

My comments were re: general usability. I don't know that I've lost email, and my message history goes back to 2000. Hmmm, this is disturbing, will have to research this some more. Do you have any specifics about how it happened, or did stuff just disappear?

Ah, I see. Poor linux support is a shame, but it doesn't surprise me.

Yahoo mail improved dramatically after Marissa Mayer became CEO. It seems to me that they are actually trying to be more like Gmail, and it shows in a positive way. They still fall short, but as a longtime Yahoo mail user I'll take what I can get. At least their recent improvements are much better than your characterization, for sure.

To be fair, I'd rather be an ethnically-Persian-to-some-degree Jew or Catholic living in Iran than the equivalent in Palestinian controlled Gaza. The Iranians pride themselves on at least paying lip service to tolerating Persian Jews and Christians, as opposed to forming mobs and murdering them. For example, Iran actually has a Jewish member of Parliament. Of course, democratic/representative government there is basically a sham since it's all under the ayatollah.

And yet, Iran is the most imminent threat to Israel and Iran's rulers routinely scream about their murderous intent involving WMDs.

Bottom line: Iran is a weird place.

Those nations don't just censor social media streams (Twitter, Facebook), they also censor regular news media, web sites and public conversations.

Before anybody dons the proverbial tin foil hat, consider:

1. It is not possible to exert mind control over an intelligent and reasonable person simply by throttling their social media streams.
2. The "stuff you don't like" that it hides is more likely to be worthless drivel than desperate attempts of the suppressed Resistance to unify against The Man.

This is all speaking as an outsider -- I don't use Facebook and I can't imagine what would make me want to (to each his own, I suppose).

I can think of somewhere else to snip first that would probably have a significant effect. (And no, I don't support punishment of "thought-crimes", even though as a parent I can't help but perceive risk from people inclined to such things.)

If you hosted a well known "true black hat" hacker at the conference they would still command everybody's respect purely for their abilities, and everybody would want to hear what they had to say. You take for granted that much of it is going to be a lie, but it's still more interesting and on topic than (say) inviting a politician to speak.