> I mean really, are you planning on sticking glue in the CDROM drive and USB ports to prevent them
> from booting a ubuntu live distro with TOR? Because that's all it takes.

Do you really think 10-12 year olds and younger have the know-how to find and download a live distro, flash/burn it, then configure TOR, and access porn!? Even if it were so, a properly locked down system would ask for a password before allowing boot from DVD or USB, and even writing DVD/USB can be turned off for child accounts. As for mobile, a solid netnanny type software on mobile should be even more difficult to circumvent as booting of alternate media and bypassing the OS wouldn't be possible with it.

As for your argument that an average parent doesn't themselves have the capability to install such measures, I tend to agree. But is it the proper strategy to deal with someone ignorant of X by forbidding Y or rather educating them on X?

Anyway by all means let the UK have its netnanny filter if it wants. I think time will show that it failed in its stated purpose. I just hope other countries don't follow this lead. Freedom on the Internet has been enough eroded as it is, without people who themselves search for porn in legislatures telling me I can't do this or that! At the very least such a filter should be opt-in, not opt-out.

Well I'm not saying children should be exposed to everything with no regard to age. My point is, this is more the domain of parents and teachers rather than a law codified by government and forced upon the whole of society. If I were a parent I'd start by installing software that blocks access to specified URLs. If properly done, then it ought to be impossible to circumvent without considerable technical knowledge or reinstalling the whole system, which a pre-teen or a young teen should be too inexperienced to do. Something like a community workshop for expectant parents could give them guidance in case they already do not know how to do this. And follow this up with education that frankly discusses our biological nature (and not hide it as dirty or taboo) and also a set of values and ethics which say such-and-such is healthy while such-and-such is not. Beyond that we can't control someone determined to do something... they'll do it even in spite of all the enforcements in place.

In my experience obsession with online porn happens only when real life relationships fail, and real life in general fails to enthuse. That's something that society will have to look into, as to how it can help youngsters to live meaningful lives. No one in a truly meaningful life will give porn more than brief passing interest, and they won't let it control and twist their psyche. On the contrary, when society is structured in such a manner that more and more youngsters are finding lesser and lesser lasting purpose in their lives, simply having a net filter is unlikely to keep in check their negative outpourings.

Try tor with bridge relays. If that doesn't work too then you're stymied I'm afraid. Only way would be ask someone you know living outside the country to download what you want and have them emailed to you, but remember govts these days can read your mail, so ask your friend to encrypt it with PGP before sending it.

> All to opt out of censorship by a poxy mobile provider. Forget that - I'll just take my money elsewhere.

Until all of them start doing this. Only a matter of time. The relevant laws need to be reappealed.

That's what parenting is for, and nothing can replace good parenting. Blocking all porn from teens won't really matter in the long run. They'll access it through proxies, and once you block proxies and have an impenetrable wall... well simply they'll start 'doing' it with their peers in the real world, and how're you gonna stop that? The biological drive cannot be stopped, only directed in the right direction and tools given to the children (in the form of value based education) to deal healthily with it, and also deal with whatever they encounter out there in the world. Blinkering their eyes to the reality of the world and protecting them behind the govt's apron isn't gonna really work. We can't really protect someone from seeing, hearing or thinking about something... somehow they'll find a way to do so. We can only teach them how to react sensibly to what they see, hear, and think.

> No need to create tensions with dinosaurs like Linus. I'm happy with using C++ for applications only for now and leave system to C.

AFAIK you wouldn't be able to use C++ in Linux kernel coding, even if you wanted to, since Linus has disallowed it.
See: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/linus

Well from what I see, the kernel itself is pretty heavily reviewed and inspected, but on the other hand it is also a HUGE code base, and many old code could be lurking without any recent review. Also lots of manufacturer provided binary blobs are accepted into the kernel, and these could conceivably be an easy route for NSA etc to infiltrate the kernel, by forcing the company providing the binary blob to insert their backdoor. There was also discussion recently how writable microcode on recent Intel chips can be another possible vector for malicious code, again by NSA forcing the microcode provider to include their payload.

And then there's the whole area of compromising the integrity of cryptographic code, both when the standards themselves were being framed, and also specific cryptographic implementations, by inserting a mole into the development team. Such types of "subtle compromises" would be very hard to detect except by an expert in that area, and presumably, for cryptography, such experts are few and far between, and more than a few of them could've been contacted by the NSA...

So while it is a bleak picture, at least the open nature of the code base gives a chance of auditing (not sure if that'll happen though. People seem to've pretty much given up at this point) and replacing suspect components, but again, it could always be compromised again, and the NSA has unlimited resources and patience on their side. How long can the community keep auditing, and stay vigilant? Eventually it'll erode mutual trust in the community, and people will get tired and give up.

Reprisals would begin only when conditions get really bad. A nebulous invasion of privacy on digital networks is not something the average guy can either understand nor care. No, it'll take an economic, military or humanitarian disaster (not necessarily US based. Even a global disaster affecting the US) for the populace to really begin to rethink, and even then, as other parts of the world have demonstrated, most people will simply react in a knee-jerk manner and run towards the other extreme, and start the cycle again. In the long term, true education and building of values could do it, but once again the paradox of who will take the initiative, and how it is going to achieve critical mass are the questions. In short words, we are probably in for a very very horrible century of attrition, with positive values making only slow headway, against negative values built-up over millenia of our evolution. It's not just the US, it's the same everywhere.

It'll certainly flag the packets to NSA as deserving of extra long retention!

> OpenGL and glx run many windows DirectX games under Wine FASTER than Windows running DirectX.
>
> Many games ported to use Linux and OpenGL natively show up FASTER than their Windows relation, either OpenGL
> (being faster on Windows than DirectX) or DirectX on Windows.

I can testify to this as well, having run Need for Speed Hot Pursuit as well as Roadrash under WINE.

No because enough people with the necessary level of mathematical expertise are not available here. Any such are busy now working for the US govt and companies in return for fat paycheck, and that happened because the government is made up of people who never even completed high school and are rouges, and don't know or care about the wider implications of science and technology for humanity, and are in general content with milking money of lucrative deals, securing their office and living their decadent lives. Not saying things couldn't improve, but I can't see who are what can kickstart this ground-up sea change that needs to happen.

The mobile hardware can't be trusted, especially not in conjunction with the mobile carriers, and even one single piece of closed source software or firmware on such a phone could render it worthless. So, I suppose practically speaking Android can be assumed to be as compromised as everything else, although the scope to make it more resistant in future is better than with the closed source counterparts.

Not surprising given that the smartphone hardware and software are very much propreitary in nature, and allow for easier exploitation since third party auditing is practically impossible for the entire ecosystem.

At this point nothing except a ground-up freshly designed and built system and either written from scratch software or highly trusted ones like OpenBSD (without installing anything except base system) can be regarded as tentatively safe, and even this security is gone once such system connects to the Internet since once data is beyond the system, NSA can still intercept and crack it.

We need clean engineered hardware, and software, and that's not going to happen anytime soon, so we have to make do with open source software and best security practices and air-gapping sensitive stuff, or not storing it in digital systems in the first place

We can say that while the open source based Linux/BSD ecosystems are without a doubt safer security wise, and better privacy wise, from non-state crackers and blackhats, it is probably at best only marginally more difficult for state players like the NSA to infiltrate. NSA is primarily exploiting the human weakness angle in it's efforts towards surveillance, and that human element is as weak in the open source community as in the commercial sectors. The one real advantage is the "many eyes" effect, which still allows for potential backdoors and weaknesses to be spotted and corrected, which would be hopelessly impossible within a closed source codebase who's parent company is in the NSA's pocket.