Data is easy to keep but it's also easy to leak. And given the consequences of leaks, companies need to start asking themselves whether it is worth storing all this data in the first place.

How many times did Mozilla ever actually use all this personal data internally? How many times on average the data for each of the 76,000 developers used? How many records were never accessed at all?

If you don't need all this data, then just don't store it. It's easy!

Property Rights? Trespass to Chattels? No abuse of state powers for private gain? How easily the mask slips when a few cold pounds are involved.

But the people I feel really sorry for are the victims of crime in London, whose cases go unsolved due to precious police resources being wasted on internet nonsense like this.

I love how pretty much every country has come to the same conclusion: We can bypass our own laws if we have someone else do it for us.

There's nothing surprising in this. Most countries hire consultants and advisors from the same international legal/accounting firms, who themselves have been trained in the same schools of thought, and often the same universities. The international ascendancy is mostly a mono-culture.

I would read it as:

Dear Interconnected Computer Network Customer. Would you like your children to think like Daily Mail readers?

[ ] Yes. God Save The King!
[ ] No. I am unfit to raise Britain's future ruling class.

I think this is less about genetics and more about how "Evolutionary Biology" and "biological anthropology" are entire disciplines founded on the notion that present day sexual prejudices can inform the study of extinct mammals.

It's hard to take your point seriously when the only link you provide is to a webcomic.

And very unfortunately, such jerks are more likely to be able to grub funding for their research labs from government offices.

Perhaps it's time for companies to realise that they cannot keep data secure. That they will never be able to build, much less be willing to pay for, the security required to keep this information under any kind of seal.

Perhaps it's time for companies to ask themselves: "Do we really need to store this?".

Would someone like to translate the summary into english?

"Buy My Book! Buy My Book! Buy My Book! ....."

Daikatana was about as Japanese as the Teenage Mutant Turtles.

Well, if you've already trusted your national defence, university education, ideological belief system, and popular cultural to the homeland of said foreign company, entrusting your national telecoms infrastructure is a relatively small step.

What about the Cloud? The great workaround to constitution in the digital age?

Reading between the lines here, it seems fairly probable that Truecrypt has either

a) Very serious security bugs, or
b) Had backdoors introduced by the NSA.(Does Truecrypt use elliptic curve cryptography?)

In either event the code is basically tainted and shouldn't be used for any future projects.

The vague and sometimes bizzare nature of the statements from the Truecrypt dev team, including this one, lead me to believe that they have been placed under a standard NSA gagging order and have decided to burn Truecrypt rather than see it be turned against its users. Comments like "Forking is Impossibe" appear to be an open code for communicating that they are essentially unable to communicate, but that Truecrypt is no longer a trustworthy piece of software.

Reading though the Lavabit case, it's clear that those placed under NSA gagging orders have very, very little room for legal/media maneuver, but nevertheless still retain the freedom to walk away from their projects and tell others not to use them. Such actions appear to be the last defense of cryptographers in the US, and I think that is what we're seeing with Truecrypt.

Launch the data into oputer space on a satellite, programmed to transmit the data after a set time period. For best results, send the machine on a massive period orbit to the outer solar system, or in a pinch, crash land it it on the Moon or Mars.

Governments will either have to give up, or else fund massive space project. Either way, we win.

It's about making people feel better about their car. Who cares about your outdated value-add notions like "efficiency" or "safety"? Pshhh! BTFD.