So does this mean I'll have to finally get a twitter account, in sympathy and solidity with Turkish "outlaws"?

Or, more generally, anyone who stores anything on a commercial server and expects privacy is a fool.

Yes, this is especially true with "free" services, which must be profitable or they won't exist for long. But one should generally assume that any data that's ever been on any company's machines will be saved (at least backed up) and available indefinitely to any company employee or customer who's willing to pay. Anything else just shows a total misunderstanding of how these companies work.

Actually, some of the jobs I've had has involved maintaining and troubleshooting the email systems. I've had many occasions where as part of fixing a reported problem, I subtly let the people involved know that, yes, I can see the content of all their messages, so they might want to be a bit more careful about what they put in writing. In a few cases, they've even thanked me for this extra warning.

I've found that a good way of explaining this is by telling people that email isn't like a postal letter; it's really more like a post card. Everything is visible to the people who handle the delivery process. Usually they won't read anything, but they can, and with email it's so easy that I often have to carefully avoid reading the content. And in a few cases, I've had to dig into the content itself to figure out why the delivery system messed it up. (I don't like to do this, but some email software does "interesting" things to the content, and the damage can only be fixed by looking at the text itself.)

And, as others have said, with a free service you should understand that you're not the customer, you're the product. Or rather, the content of what you're sending and receiving is their product, which they sell to their actual customers.

Some time back, there was an informative pair of pictures in an xkcd forum. Scan down for "but this" for the images.

There might be a way to include such a search string in a URL, but I don't know how to encode it ...

Yeah, but you violated another well-known of grammer's rules: Don't use commas, which aren't needed.

Um, if that's true, then why didn't the judge cancel Fluke's trademark on this color scheme? As others have pointed out, most (but not quite all) of the multimeters on the US market use the same or a very similar color scheme. I did a quick check of my basement and garage work areas, found three multimeters with dark bodies and yellow edges, none of them a Fluke. (A 4th in a kitchen drawer has a red edge.) The fact that this color scheme is so widely used should have automatically wiped out Fluke's trademark claim.

Anyone know why they succeeded in this one challenge? Why this victim, and not all the other "infringers"?

Oh, I dunno 'bout dat. I recall a few years ago, getting an informative email from one of djb's folks, telling me how to exploit an open-source program that I was using in the software behind a web site that I was responsible for. I ran their test, dug into the code and fixed the problem (and several similar problems in other parts of the code), and sent them a nice letter thanking them for their help. I also forwarded their email and my patches to the author of the program, but I didn't hear back from him.

This only fails to qualify as "seriously" if you dismiss all of academia as not serious. In reality, that's where you'll find most of the people who take security seriously. You don't much find them in "industry" (as the summary puts it), for management reasons that are well-understood by pretty much anyone who has ever tried to get security problems fixed in a corporate-management environment.

Maybe it's time for yet another reminder that the entire Internet can be viewed as a "front" for the US military, via (D)ARPA, the 100% military-funded organization that paid for almost all of the Internet's early development. (Yes, a bit of money did come from independent sources, mostly in academia, but this was < 1% of the funding until around 1985 or so.)

What makes this irrelevant is that the Internet's standards and almost all of its low-level code have long been open-source, and easily available online. This fact was the main reason it won out over OSI. In the 1980s, I worked on a number of projects that were primarily aimed at OSI, but there were delays caused by all the paperwork required for purchase orders for the official standards, and even longer waits for copies of the libraries and compliance-testing code, so while waiting, we built some prototypes on top of IP. By the time all the purchasing bureaucracy gave us what we needed, the IP version was working, so our clients took that, and the rest is history. ;-)

So even if the NSA is funding this work, if the code is all open (and we can compile it ourselves), that doesn't much matter. The problem then is the proprietary code that will be piled on top of it. History tells us that this will continue to be secret, and the major source of security problems. Code designed to collect "marketing" data about customers is inherently easy for people interested in other kinds of spying to take over and redirect for their own purposes.

________ is dead, Long Live ........! (It's clearly more compact, and its components don't run together confusingly like those _s do.)

Note that "listening" and "reading" are verbs that describe activities, not beliefs. So TFA in fact agrees with nobebeast's interpretation.

So he contradicted himself in the article. ;-) Actually, I'd wonder how (if at all) he tested whether it was the beliefs or the activities that had the observed effect.

And we might note that both are possible. We have a word for beliefs that have pharmacological effects: "placebo". People tend to think that placebos are ineffective, but a number of studies have turned up cases of placebos having an effect on people who believe that they are actual medicines. In particular, belief that X can have an effect on a specific brain activity can easily lead to X having just that effect on people who believe that it will.

But the real problem with religious beliefs is that they have a history of leading to very negative effects on non-believers who encounter the believers.

Actually, that's not all that far off from reality. Except that, in our solar system, nature has only one fusion reactor, which went critical roughly 4.5 billion years ago. Nature has been powered by the output of that one runaway fusion reactors ever since then. And life here has had to handle the fact that our power supply is available only about half of each day, so each species needs to develop ways of surviving a total failure of the power plant every day.

Here in the US, there's a widespread "church" that officially takes this approach: The UU (Unitarian-Universalist) church.

When my wife and I moved to the Boston area back in the early 1980s, we lived in the suburb of Belmont, and the UU church there recently celebrated its 150th year of existence. Back in the 1850s, a new "town center" had grown up at the junction of three adjacent towns, and the people wanted to form a new town. At the time, Massachusetts law required a town to have a church, but (as the story goes), the truly religious churches in the area had a problem: If one of them was accepted, members of the others would have problems using that church as the town meeting place. This was settled when members of the area's Unitarian churches got together a committee that created a new church. This was acceptable to all, because they knew that the Unitarian church would support all local groups regardless of their religions (or lack thereof).

This has pretty much always how the UUers work. It's why, here in New England, they often have the title "First Church in <town-name>". They don't require any declaration of religious belief for membership, and they actively work to be the local central meeting place for all (especially non-profit) organizations. They do hold regular Sunday-morning services, but typically a lot of members never go to those services, and this is socially acceptable to everyone.

But they do tend to be community "activists". That's the primary function of a UU church. It's legally a "church" to gain tax exemption, so they can more easily support non-profit community activities. If you're an atheist with little interest in community events, you probably wouldn't find them useful. If you're an atheist trying to be more involved in the community, they're often a good place to find like-minded people who won't give you a hassle over your lack of religious beliefs.

You obviously don't work for the company that I do. The meatloaf-peeler vendors have persuaded our management that meatloaf peeling is an important capability these days, and any company that hasn't adopted this new approach to meatloaf consumption is doomed to quick obsolescence. So, whether our jobs need it or not, we are all being supplied with the top-selling meatloaf peeler, and other brands are banned from our desks.

But don't worry, your bosses will see the light soon, and a new MS meatloaf peeler will be installed on your desk, too.

And next we'll read of publishers suing Amazon to the their "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought ..." lists. This is just encouraging customers to ask for a package that contains books from different authors or different publishers. (But they do also use it to suggest other works by the same author.)

The most rational response to such perversions might be to simply eliminate the copyright laws. The primary function of such laws is for blocking useful things like we're discussing here.

Actually, in normal American usage, it is true, in the same sense that I can tell people that I'm Scottish or Welsh or French, while also saying I was born in the US, and most people would understand what I mean. We USians routinely say we "are" whatever nationality or ethnicity any recent immigrant ancestor was. One of Obama's parents was born in Kenya, so calling him Kenyan is no different from calling me Scottish or Welsh or French.

Huh? That doesn't make much sense. The weather forecasts that I follow usually use the phrases "tornado watch" and "tornado warning", explicitly saying "tornado" if that's what the forecast predicts. In other situations, they say things like "hurricane watch/warning" or "blizzard watch/warning", etc., with whatever is predicted as the adjective. I don't think I've ever head the watch/warning terms used without specifying the type of event. I've even heard them engage in a bit of self-parody by saying things like "warm, sunny day watch/warning". Last summer I heard one weekend described with a "backyard barbecue warning", with advice to lay in a good supply of burgers, brats and beer for the duration of the weather event (which I did, and emailed friends to tell them where they could take cover for an afternoon). So who were these two "racists", and how does that connect with watches/warnings of serious weather events? Historically-curious readers want to know ...