What I find ironic is how they manage to mention the people who actually cracked Enigma twice and only in passing. First one of those British intelligence types blurts out something about Enigma being "stolen by Polish intelligence" and a second time when Turing claims his machine is based on "an old Polish decryption device" (or something to that effect). At the time this movie is supposed to have happened the bomba kryptologiczna, which is probably what they are referring, to was about 3 years old. That may be dated technology today but by the standard of the 1930s three years was not 'old technology'. Turing achieved great things but he and his team didn't crack Enigma all on their own with British ingenuity. They stood on the shoulders of people like Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rozycki and Henryk Zygalski and many others who cracked Enigma with Polish ingenuity. They were the ones who originally had the audacity to think that they could crack the world's most sophisticated cypher technology with the meagre resources the Polish cypher bureau had.

Over 20 years of buying Macs for my family? I don't think so. My employer hands outs Samsung brand Android phones to employees who want a company bought phone. You'd be surprised at how many of those get trashed every year. A couple of dozen of them got sent to the recycler with a broken display from the wear an tear suffered by people pocketing them. According to the Samsung agent the ribbon connecting the display to the motherboard came loose (and people whine about 'bend-gate'). The same goes for their sizeable fleet of Lenovo and Dell laptops, workstations and monitors. The Lenovo laptops for example suffered from ethernet cards that just died after a few months of operation and we had to issue large numbers of users with USB ethernet adapters. Some of the Dells started to suffer bulging battery syndrome and we also had a brief flirtation with using Windows laptops from HP who suffered kernel panics every 3rd or 4th time you plugged them into a (HP brand) dock. I have a lot more examples but I'll let this suffice. I can't honestly say that these other 'reputable vendors' have a noticeably lower fault rate than Apple. I'm just sick and tired by these opinionated wing nuts who come here writing an angry post condemning some companies entire product line based on their experience with one or two their devices that they bought. If you are in the IT business get used to the idea of suffering equipment failures or get out o the IT business.

OMG!! Apple doesn't have a Twitter presence! .... Get a grip will you?!? Sure there are some problems/bugs Apple doesn't fix and that I had to research and solve myself but then again I have had the same sort of hardware and software related problems with Windows and (Sacrilege!!) Linux. I have been a Mac user for coming up on two decades and I cannot say that I have ever had a major problem with their service. Some of the things that I have had issues with are:

1. A Macbook that refused to boot out of the box. Exchanged without a world of protest for a functioning unit.
2. A Macbook that had a defective display. The display was swapped out three times, because of two defective Sony LCD panels. The first time they replaced the LCD when I bought the laptop in for a RAM upgrade without me even having to ask them to do it.
3. An Apple cinema display that I traded in because of dead pixels. Exchanged for a new unit without a word of protest.
4. Several charging devices whose connector cables wore out. All were exchanged for a new unit without a word of protest.
5. More software problems than I care to remember, many solved via the Apple support forum. I have also initiated several support issues with Apple online and so far they have never refused to help me.

Let me dispel a few myths for you (and apologies in advance for robbing you of reasons to feed your irrational hatred of Apple) Apple products do not always 'just work' out of the box, whatever Apples marketing dweebs may say Apple does not deny the existence of problems with their products because they do not flip you a bird when you ask them for support, Apple is no worse than any number of computer software and hardware vendors that I deal with on a regular basis and in my experience Apple is quite a bit better than many of them.

One small point, it you really do all of this you will stick out like a sore thumb because you will be relatively easy to find in a sea of unencrypted data. Police have actually caught offnders like that. Better yet, the NSA, unlike the cops has compromised most VPN and SHTTP service providers so you will be one of a rather small number of people whose signals traffic they can't decrypt which narrows things down even more. You can usen couriers but you had better be damn smart about how and whewe from they do their transmitting because pattern analysis can still narrow down your location. If one of them uses the same internet cafe too often the next thing you know a van is permanantly parked outside your house to be followed by Virginia farmboys in ninja commando outfits smashing through your doors and windows.

I'm willing to bet the NSA has prior art on this.

I've always considered SMB to be a steaming pile of crap for reasons that have nothing to do with security and this incident just adds another steaming shovel full of manure to that pile. The best protection agains SMB worms is not to use crap like SMB but pick something more secure instead, that is to say if such an animal even exists. In that case you can either try to find a vendor who offers a similar product and does a better job of testing and patching it than Microsoft does or go with an Open Source alternative which gives you the option of hiring a third party to test and patch it to your satisfaction. Mind you even if SMB is a pain to use the problem does not necessarily have to be with Microsoft. The problem could actually be with your systems department being lazy and negligent about patching their SMB software and the problem could also be with lax, amateurish or even non existent security policies or if you do have a proper security policy the problem could be a complete failure to enforce it. In that case you really only have one alternative and that is to light a fire under your people, fire them if they put up a fight and hire some proper sysadmins and a security chief with the same attitude toward instilling professionalism and security awareness in your employees and a marine drill sergeant has toward making proper soldiers out of every batch of teenage drama queens he is handed by the recruitment office.

Plus he has nothing to loose by pissing off the Republicans who aren't going to approve a single bill his administration pushes anyway even if they had to do it to save their lives. Hell, half of those people don't even believe he was born in the USA. Of course Obama is going to veto all the most important stuff the Tea party and the Republican want to do so basically everything is exactly like the Tea-baggers and Republicans like it. Congress will be in complete and utter gridlock for at least another two years, four if you get a Democratic president (read: Hilary Clinton, which will have every Republican/Tea-bagger reaching for his vampire killing kit). Every time I despair over the state of politics in my own country I take a look at the US congress and the way your Republicans and Democrats are behaving like a bunch of petulent kindergarteners to remind me that things could be a lot worse. Compared to the lot of morons you guys have managed to vote into office my lot looks like a panel of Nobel prize winners.

Let's not forget either that Constantine's personally approved proper religious authorities didn't just clamp down on Christians that didn't agree with them they embarked on a campaign of destroying, pillaging, desecrating, vandalising pagan temples, tombs and monuments as well as raping and murdering adherents of these religions who weren't willing to see the light and accept the state approved flavour of Christianity (i.e. the same basic package heretic Christians were treated to). Examples of Christian intolerance and willingness to subject minority religions and secular groups to extreme persecutions and violence (which is a base insult to everything Christ preached) are legion.

You can find examples of such violence and intolerance beginning at the moment Christianity became dominant enough to be able to afford committing such atrocities and they continue until today with one of the latest, worst and most frequently forgotten being the mass murder of Moslems in Bosnia by Christian Croats and Serbs. It pisses me off every time Christian fanatics in my community try to portray Christianity as the religion of love charity and peace while Islam is the religion of war and hate, yet whenever I bring up the subject of Bosnia and what was done there in the name of Christianity they are unwilling to even discuss the issue. The obvious conclusion is that Christianity is not an inherently violent religion any more than Islam is even if some of it's adherents have found clever ways to user these religions to rationalise acts of violence and downright inhuman criminal acts like blowing yourself up on a bus, sawing peoples heads off on camera, torching places of worship or setting up a concentration camp camp where the local Christian perverts can get their rocks off raping moslem women. I don't really see the difference between the way the Serbs behaved with their rape campaigns in Bosnia and the way ISIS is doing by selling Yazidi women in markets in Syria like cattle at an auction.

You managed to Godwin this thread on with the fifth post.

I suppose this could not possibly be because Google dialled down the abuse now that they are under the microscope of the EU competition authorities? I have to say I am in awe of how you managed to render any anti competitive investigation of Google's business practices unnecessary with a single web search!

Like I tried to explain to presidenteloco this isn't about a monopoly per se. What we are talking here is Google leveraging their search engine monopoly to take away the consumer's right to choose services that compete with Google's which IIRC is one of the things people got their panties in a twist over when Microsoft tried to do it, i.e. Microsoft decided to get in on the some segment of the software business , so they built their own Microsoft brand specialist software and bundled it with their OS with the result that hardly anybody bothered to investigate competing alternatives. They took away consumer choice by leveraging their dominant desktop OS to kill off competitors just like Google is now leveraging its dominant search engine to put links to the products of competing service providers on the second page of search results or some similar skullduggery. That's a conflict of interest. It was recognized by German law makers back in the 12th century that it's a bad idea for a physician to be his own apothecary because they invented diseases so that they could sell drugs to cure them and for the same reason it is bad for Microsoft to have their consumer and OS software operations in the same business unit and for Google to have the same business unit that handles web searches also pushing Google services. It encourages them to abuse one to gain a competitive advantage for the other.

Product names should be descriptive. How about Quisling? ... or Canary? ... Stool Pigeon? ... Rat? ... Grass?

I'll wait for the final report thank you very much.

And you are basing this on what? A few low resolution pictures in some news reports?

Because this is is an really strange story that does not make sense on any level. I would have expected better fiction, even from a conspiracy theorist. The fighter in that picture looks like a MiG-29 or a Su-27 to me. The UkAF has both of these fighters and they can fire BVR missiles. BVR missiles are big fat 3.5-4 meter long monsters with a massive range and a large warhead intented for air to air use for anything up to bomber and large transport sized aircraft. The main BVR missile variants used by the RuAF and the UkAF are the R-27 (Nato code: AA-10) and the newer R-77 (Nato code: AA-12). The range of the AA-10 and AA-12 BVR missiles is something like 80-110 kilometers. I'm not sure if the Ukrainians have any AA-12s but they definitely have the older AA-10 whose seekers they have extensively upgraded to the point where they are still able to sell the AA-10 abroad for use on modernized MiG-29s and SU-27/30s with other air forces. So why the hell would a Ukrainian air force fighter have had to shut up the crew of MH17 with gunfire before downing the airliner with a WVR missile (presumably an AA-11, 7kg fragmenting warhead) when they could have picked MH17 off with a more powerful AA-10 radar guided missile (which has a 39 kg fragmenting warhead) that more closely mimics a BUK? I'm pretty sure that even if a UkAF fighter had fired a BVR missile from a 60 degree cone behind MH17 to make sure the crew did not see it coming (a more realistic scenario), they could still have fired it from about 25 km away and that missile would have come like a bat out of hell for the crew of MH17. They wouldn't have known what hit them, i.e. no need for gunfire and with a 39 kg warhead... you can imagine the rest.