Not only that, it'd generate thousands of support calls and people would end up just taping it to "on" all the time.

More important and useful (and cheaper and easier) would be a mic indicator light as an option. If you want to see whether the mic is active, like you want to see if the webcam is active, just look at the light.

No disturbance, no unnecessary support calls, and an option to turn it off if it bothers you.

"Hiding" the phones among the IPv6 ranges is just stupid and not "security" at all (literally, security by obscurity!).

Even then, chances are that there's a range of consecutive IP's and just block-scanning through the IP's at random (say, scan every sensible address suffix because most people will start them on something sensible) will narrow it down quite quickly before you'll notice anything's happened. And chances are that most people will split at the usual boundaries, use the same IPv6 range (or the next one up) as their web servers are on, etc.

As stated above, the phones themselves have NO need to be on a public network. Push them through a VPN or similar if you really must but they should be on their own VLAN anyway (so you can QoS them properly and easily) and they shouldn't require direct access to the Internet anyway (the voice gateway is another matter that's separately handled).

But, better, stop buying, producing and selling devices that have debug interfaces that let you do ANYTHING on the device, remotely, without authentication. Because that's so dumb it's orders of magnitude more dumb than trying to hide your IP ranges in a IPv6 haystack.

Which is just one reason why I'm always incredibly dubious that cyber-attacks "coming from China" etc. are used as potential justification for retaliation. This is entirely different to "proved originating from", where China etc. could just be an unfortunate third-party, a plant, or deliberately infiltrated to further some other countries ends with a cyberattack that DOES come from their country even if they don't know it.

Sorry, but you cannot go to war on the basis of what packets travelled over the Internet. It's just too damn unreliable and unaccountable that you can't do such things.

And yet all the first-world nations are saying that such things could be "just cause" for doing exactly that.

If your military systems are THAT bad that you can even get into anything at all from the ordinary Internet, it's your own fault.

What about bog-standard boring conventional warfare?

The people beta-testing SteamOS or the Steam hardware? Steam basically ran a competition over Christmas part of which involved early access to the hardware.

Beyond that, who wouldn't? Indie gamers have a vast wealth of software at their disposal that'll run on any old machine that they haven't got a Windows licence for. It's literally the "thorw this in the kid's bedroom" kind of hardware and you can play an awful lot of games. Turn on big picture mode or go as far as putting the SteamOS iso in the drive and you have a self-contained gaming platform that you don't need to manage for them.

1/3rd of my Steam library is available on Linux. It's far from what it used to be. I could keep a kid/teenager entertained for YEARS with what I have on Linux.

And then include family sharing, streaming, etc. and they can play all those games while I am.

They may be playing the same game, but the problem is that the code might be vastly optimised towards one platform. Chances are they didn't spend nearly as much time optimising for Linux as they did for Windows, even if they DID port it over. This is not a fair comparison by any means.

Past that, Linux having "far more responsive" controls - again, I'd like to see a fair comparison (and, personally, how the hell you'd tell the difference past a certain point anyway - unless it "feels" unresponsive on one platform, I don't see how it can "feel" more responsive on another.

Friends don't bully, or extort, friends.

Anyone with a brain that doesn't want to have their files read will stick it in a private "cloud" and access it remotely and securely anyway.

Hell, £100 NAS boxes have this functionality nowadays without any third-party storing the data. Or rent a VPS for the duration.

The problem I have with laws like this is that you ONLY catch the stupid people anyway. If they are going through customs with a laptop full of "how to beat customs" documents, then they get what they deserve and shouldn't be that professional.

What you're doing, though, is doing NOTHING to stop an actual, determined guy with half a brain from doing whatever he wants.

Spend less on junk like this, and just get more passengers a five minute interview to find suspicious people, or spend fives minutes longer on checking the faces, passport lists, etc.

Not really. UEFI etc. is pretty standardised and one compromise could easily be found that affects an entire hardware architecture.

Similarly - if you DO get this malware, how do you disinfect if every machine you have requires a different tool/process to remove the malware (and maybe even a different tool for every malware / hardware combination, which would be even worse!)?

"and haven't bought a Valve game since Portal2"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Which just means you didn't buy DOTA 2 (which is Free-to-Play) or CS:GO. They don't pump out a lot of games.

BTW: Those are their current two "Top games by current player count"

http://store.steampowered.com/...

by an order of magnitude over third-place TF2.

Not insulting you, but I don't think they care much about your boycott. And I bet if they do release HL3 and it's anywhere near decent, you'll end up buying it.

I agree they should continue the franchise, even it's just a Source-engine HL2:Episode 3 that is quite short while we wait for a proper HL3 (but I don't see that happening). But I'd much rather nothing than cocking up HL3 entirely.

DNF changed hands, was abandoned, resurrected, revamped, rewritten, etc. with the details in public before it ever got close to a release. The screenshots from 10 years before look NOTHING like the final game at all. At some point, someone just said "Let's push anything and live off the scam to at least recoup our money".

HL3 doesn't have that legacy. Same guys (probably not exactly, but near enough). Same software. Same engine. Same designers. Same artists. Same programmers. Same company. No hype. No feature promises. No screenshots, even. A company making money hand-over-fist outside of game development to invest into the game. It's a totally different scenario (which makes it much more frustrating).

At this point a HDR HL2 sequel that was written in the same engine, same quality of graphics and game style with a few gimmicks would go down just as well and you can just say "This is Episode 3, the same as Episode 1 and 2 but finishing the story somewhat, and Half-Life 3 will come out later".

That they don't do this makes me think they have something planned. SteamOS maybe? I don't know. But I'd rather they kept the HL universe alive with some "expansion" to HL2 than cocked-up HL3 in the same way as DNF. I can't imagine them doing either, though.

I agree they shouldn't rush HL3 (or Episode 3 or whatever), but that's no reason to leave the Half-Life universe hanging.

Opposing Force and Blue Shift were basically keeping HL alive until HL2 came along, and they did a pretty good job.

I'd rather have some spin-off that CAN crash and burn and wait for the big "movie" that we CAN'T have crash and burn get perfected.

I was quite hopeful for things like Lost Coast etc. to provide some kind of in-betweeny bits but I'm still waiting with my character on the brink of death (at least three times now, I've gone through the whole series of games just to play them again) to find out what happens next.

Distract me, or tell me. Don't just ignore me.

In other countries, they are spies who will be treated as such if caught. Please do catch them.

Unless, of course, those other countries are allies or part of the EU where they may (or may not!) have allowed international co-operation for items of "national security" anyway.

The question is not what GCHQ does, but who is allowing them to do that. The answer in the UK is "the people who draft laws", the answer worldwide is "the people who draft laws" and/or "nobody".

Only for where they are explicitly disallowed will they face punishment abroad, and - let's just think about this - they are spies who need to spy on foreign risks, so the exact countries likely to prosecute (or more likely, assassinate) GCHQ members are exactly those countries they will be keeping an eye on.

Note that I'm not EXCUSING any of this. This is just the reason. But what they are doing to allies is allowed, what they are doing to "enemies" is not allowed in the enemy territory but it's an enemy anyway, and what doesn't come under those categories is extremely difficult to determine without co-operation of allies / enemies anyway.

This has, is, and will go on no matter what for what is essentially a spy agency. How legal it is on our own people, on our own soil is the only matter for UK law (the rest is really foreign policy), and UK law says they can. And EU law says they can. So we can ask to change the law, and the answer will be the same as ever "In the interest of national security..."

This is why almost every law is covered by an exemption for the purposes of law enforcement (police pretending to be someone else in a sting operation, for example) or national security (which is what GCHQ hide behind).

Like the "Google not paying UK tax" thing - what they did was ENTIRELY legal, or else they'd be before the courts. But it's considered morally "wrong" so the law gets changed over time to match with the expectation (the "spirit" of the law and not just the "word" of the law).

Almost by definition, anything that GCHQ - a military department, effectively, like MI5 etc. - claim they did in the name of national security is legal. Even murder. Otherwise all war would be illegal too.

The law is not one line in a book. Like group policy, it's the result of overlap of thousands of lines from hundreds of books, all with different precedence and priority, and all with confusing text to describe how they operate, to arrive at a single answer for whether someone is allowed to do X or not.

And how does freedom NOT include the choice to use proprietary software if you want? You can be as free as you like, except when you make THIS choice? Great.

Implying that "Free", meaning liberated, means YOU CAN'T USE THAT for something is completely hypocritical. Thus his concept of "freedom" does not extend anywhere near my concept of freedom at all... and is merely a subset.

Richard Stallman is, in this opinion, "less free" than the average person. Sorry, but that's just stupid.

Given that, I'd rather not associate his name with my concept of "open" because he's more restrictive than I, or most open source programmers, choose to be.

You can have any colour you like, said Henry Ford, as long as it's black.