I imagine the developers at Mozilla who are willing to make these comments are the sort of folk who would be unemployed for approximately half an hour. If they start laying off developers for these comments, there will be recruiters parking RVs in Mountain View, waiting for them.

Google now incorporates things such as your search history and your emails to provided a customized start page.

So if Google knows you live in Atlanta, GA it will show you the weather for Atlanta. If you have a flight booked to San Francisco, you will also see the weather for your destination and confirmation of whether your flight is on time - this happens automatically if the flight confirmation went to your gmail account.

If you search for an address or store on your desktop computer, Google Now on your phone will be aware of this and will offer directions. If you have an appointment at your Dentist in your Google Calendar, your phone will remind you, letting you know what time you need to leave to arrive on time taking into account current traffic conditions.

It's a fair point, but at least Google gives you the means to turn this off. Also, you're getting something you can place a value on in return, so you can make a reasoned decision as to whether location services are a price worth paying.

All the same data is, however, still available to the government. And there's no off switch there.

Well, if you're looking for something that measures perhaps a couple of meters at best, and you're in a plane, high up and traveling at a cruising speed of 400 knots, it's pretty easy to miss something.

If you're in a submarine or a surface ship traveling at about 20 knots, with listening gear that requires you only have to be within 10 miles of the black box to hear its pings, I'd imagine that location process is comparatively straightforward and pretty quick if you can start close enough

Tl;dr : You must be batshit crazy to think that was legitimate without a court order. But hey, MS said so. Must be true then. Facepalm

So, you say they can't do it without a court order, but don't seem to address their statement that they cannot get a court order.

So what exactly is your proposal in these circumstances?

Okay, so the $100 begin doesn't work. REI have a $300 one that uses iridium with global coverage pour to pole. $50 per month for ten minute location updates.

Even considering the lie data capacity of iridium, I think it could handle ten minute location updates from the few thousand jets in the air at any one time.

At 35,000 feet on a jumbo jet, you're usually above the bad weather. If bad weather does appear, most pilots will fly around it.

Surely the transmission range to a satellite is the same when you're at 35,000 feet whether or not you're above water? REI will sell you a satellite beacon that can ping your coordinates as often as every 2.5 minutes and costs less than $100 with a $99 per year subscription fee for the Immersat service.

But the price tags are also differet my several orders of magnitude.

A GPS tracking device that broadcasts its location via satellite costs $100 plus a small monthly subscription. Obviously that isn't going to have cleared all the regulations for avionics, but it still shows the hardware cost is minimal and there's no need to rely upon cellular networks. Indeed the plane in question was already broadcasting hourly to the irridium network. So that bit of the hardware already exists.

Which is a fair point, but it could still broadcast it's GPS location and altitude every five minutes. If I rent a $20,000 dollar car from Hertz it lets them know where I am with their car. Why airlines let planes costing hundreds of millions fly around the globe absent similar technology is surely a little strange?

If you want to commit suicide, why not ditch the plane straight down? Why would you plot a course somewhere into the middle of the Indian Ocean?

If you didn't want it to look like suicide, why not ditch into rural China? There has to be some way a professional pilot could make it look more accidental.

If his data is legitimate, legally aquired media, he has hard copies anyway

You do realize that some people create their own data?

No idea why the parent is flagged interesting, as it is entirely misleading. The typo redirection can be easily disabled under the opendns control panel.

$ nslookup slashdot.og 208.67.222.222
Server: 208.67.222.222
Address: 208.67.222.222#53

** server can't find slashdot.og: NXDOMAIN

If they're transparently grabbing your DNS traffic, shift it to another port. Opendns will accept queries on port 5353.

As John Gilmore (I think) said, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."