You're not thinking of the near future. Mass data storage of all video recorded anywhere + face recognition + trawling of video of you for embarassing / illegal behaviour. It's not hard to be worried for good reason, society needs the ability to *not* notice everything, and to forget. There are so many unknown and unclear laws that you are breaking some law all the time, you think adding the ability for that to be discovered will lead to a better society?

The world isn't black & white, despite what you seem to believe. Having no expectation of privacy is not the same as someone recording you and publishing your conversations... if I constantly followed you around with a videocamera that would be harassment.

Even in a public place there are expectations of "personal space", if "privacy" is too strong a word.

Don't be silly, nobody *uses* Google+.

Have you used a Samsung-inflicted Android phone..? They have a knack for making things worse...

"Been fiddled with for ages" doesn't really mean it's mature or ready. The fact is hasn't been on any significant number of devices in the real world would be a big flag, there's alot of refinement that comes from *actual* use in the wild that you don't get from lab development.

What happens if you take a faulty Apple laptop into an Apple store with Linux installed?

You or I might not personally agree that these goods should be considered criminal, but the fact that they're a crime goes a bit beyond "the government *thinking*". They *are* illegal.

Ah, shame then that everyone took traffic to equal hidden services... Of course hidden services are likely to be dodgy, but that is itself a proportion of tor traffic, I would expect most tor traffic is evetually accessing public websites.

Well I imagine you run an exit node and see what comes through it. Exit nodes are unencrypted (necessarily) so it should be fairly easy to do.

But there's a problem also with assuming that there's a systemic problem with a whole belief system like that. Even if it were true (which I don't think it is, and doesn't seem to be from the muslims that I know) if you start saying there's a problem with this group you single them out for discrimination which is exactly the sort of response that the extreme fringes want you to do.

http://www.juancole.com/2015/0...

Depends if someone makes a suggestion that answers...

Yeah cause wanting a laptop means you can infer developer ability. Wait, I can play this game too: I question *your* competence as a developer because you've just made a load of assumptions on a person based on virtually no evidence.

There's a bunch of reasons he could want a laptop, perhaps he works from different sites often?

I don't know if you're deliberately taking the piss... you do know people have been saying this for years?

Still, no matter how much it is said it remains to be proved that this is an actual problem rather than an imagined one.

So this is pretty much what they do do. That freedom to allow 'geeks' to fiddle with their devices is the same freedom the vendors use to customise (and occasionally improve) the experience.

(a) nothing you have suggested helps, you lose the ability to amend the system then you lose the freedom of the system.
(b) perhaps for you, but I doubt most people buying phones are that bothered about upgrades. The missteps that Apple and Google have made in upgrades recently have actually made people not want upgrades. ie, I like the device I bought, please don't change it.

The idea that Apple owns the high-end and Android is only mid and low end is hopelessly out-of-date. Perhaps in the US, but the rest of the world Android sits at around 80% share and that is not just mid and low end devices.

...this being the exact point of the article...

Only if you have someone else in your debt. If there's no debt (ie buying an object in a shop) then they can accept or decline whatever form of payment they want. (in the UK atleast)