You mention laptops and mobile devices, and claim that they get hacked way more often than they get lost/stolen. This is absolutely not true. Look at the many, many instances of laptops being lost or stolen with sensitive databases on them, and the ones that get reported publicly are just a tiny fraction.

It's also not necessarily the case with ext4 encryption that a box getting hacked reveals all of the data on it. Ext4 encryption allows each user account -- or even various subdirectory, IIRC -- to have its own keys. So a hacker can only get access to the directories whose keys have been loaded into memory. So the attacker has to own the box and then maintain ownership and connectivity until the data he's after has been unlocked.

You're also ignoring implementations which use hardware-based keys (HSM or similar) with other access controls on key usage, potentially even including rate limiting. So even if an attacker manages full privilege escalation and fully owns the box, he can't get access to anything encrypted unless he can satisfy the other access control requirements, and may also be rate-limited.

Only if said malware can manage a privilege escalation attack. Granted that this issue is orthogonal to disk encryption, which is all about protecting against attackers with physical access to a powered down (or, to a lesser extent) locked device.

Expendable humans are easy to find anywhere, and much easier in Africa than most places.

It's not about the stability of the explosive, or even the detonator, it's about the mechanism for triggering the detonator. It has to be sufficiently sensitive that it is certain to go off when the horn is removed, but cannot be triggered accidentally even by the enormous forces rhinos put on their horns. For that matter, getting the fake horn attachment to withstand those forces may not be trivial.

Just means the poacher needs an expendable human, too. Those aren't particularly hard to obtain, unfortunately. And you also have to be very careful to ensure that the bomb won't go off when the rhino smacks something with its horn. Though I suppose blowing up all the rhinos will stop the poaching...

Heck, some European countries are beginning to get fairly concerned about population decline. Denmark has gone so far as to to run PSAs encouraging people to have children. Globally, it seems pretty clear that we've already passed the peak birthrate and it seems that we can expect it to continue dropping. Although births are declining the total population will continue to rise for a while because right now the world demographics are heavily weighted to the young end, so population will rise as the age distribution is "filled out". We're on course to hit a peak of about 10 billion people, sometime around 2040-2050. This assumes we don't make great breakthroughs in life extension.

I guess by your test, Google Music All Access gets an A, though personally I think what it does is better than immediately playing motown. What it provides is several sections: Motown artists, Motown albums, Motown songs, Motown Radio stations (similar to Spotify), Motown Playlists (apparently put together by users and shared to the world) and Motown videos, each with a selection of a half-dozen choices and a "See All" button that takes you to the rest of the matches for that section.

Not caring for Motown myself, I can't comment on the quality of the contents of the sections. It all looked pretty reasonable, though.

Relative to the points in the summary, Google also has Adele and Taylor Swift. Beatles... not so much. There are a bunch of "albums" but most of them are interviews along with a couple of albums including somewhat random songs... but none of their actual album releases. It's also possible that a couple of the music albums I see are not in the library, but were uploaded by me (you can upload your own music and it appears in the streaming service just as though it were part of the library. I think Metallica is also not in the library. I've uploaded all of their albums, so they're all there for me. It's possible I also uploaded some Adele, though there are albums I don't have so they must be from the library. And I don't own any Taylor Swift, so I'm sure all of that is from the library.

Oh, and Google Music's subscription also includes YouTube MusicKey, so whatever isn't available in the streaming service is almost certainly available there. The Beatles' music is, though not under a music license, so it's not available for download or background play.

(Disclosure: I work for Google, though I'm speaking here as a satisfied customer of the music service.)

The world without web search, or even the pre-search model of curated indexes (Yahoo!, also based on targeted advertising, though of a less effective form)? You're either trolling, or stupid.

Really? Keep in mind that without it Google search wouldn't exist... and neither would DDG, because most of DDG's sources are other engines that are also funded by advertising. Odds are that without Google's business model you'd also be seeing a lot more, and a lot more intrusive ads. You are probably too young to remember what the commercial side of the web looked like in the mid to late 90s, but I'm sure you've seen the "one weird trick" sites with pages and pages to present a small amount of content buried in mountains of ads. That was pretty much where we were headed until targeted advertising came along.

That would be the easy part. There'd just be no way for them to tell.

Android doesn't send any particular different parameters during setup. There's really no way the carrier could even know the difference. And if the device could send something that meant "hey, doing setup, don't charge this" you know custom ROMs would arrange to send that *all* the time, or at least as often as they can get away with.

Really? Care to support that claim?

Ctrl-F is your friend :-)

In that particular example, it's not even a change. None of the search engines have ever indexed much in the way of non-alphanumeric characters.

It couldn't be that bad, or people on mobile networks would burn most of their month's data setting up a new device.

And the idea would be to get as much as possible out before it's encrypted. It would still be tough to analyze, but people would figure it out.