I'd imagine it's also because the Kaspersky guys spend much less time than Krebs trying to dox various malware authors and so on. The real life identities of those people are just much less relevant. So if a journalist comes and starts asking questions about various people who "anyone in the business should know" etc, and if your job is just analyzing malware all day but you don't much care about the real names of the people who make it, then you might come across as evasive when really they're just thinking, "that accusation might be kind of weak, but I don't know for sure either way, best to stay out of it". Especially if you'd rather not appear in print with your name next to the real name of a bad guy.

The Kaspersky question was kind of dumb anyway. Let's imagine that they have some sort of shadowy deal with Russian intelligence to avoid flagging their IC malware. I doubt it, but let's pretend they do.

What are you gonna do about it? Kaspersky is the best at what they do, and they've blown the covers of way more government malware than any other company out there, period. If you say, gosh, I don't trust those awful Ruskies, what if I get hacked by the Kremlin, I'm gonna go with a True Blue American Patriot AV company ..... then all you're doing is siding with a team that not only hasn't revealed NSA malware, but generally, hasn't revealed any government operations at all. Does not seem like a win. Especially because the Russian government is about 1% as scary as the ridiculous Western propaganda would have us believe.

Of course they can control their economic destiny. They could impose massive spending cuts, refuse to pay pensions, take big wage cuts and so on, and trigger the recession that way. But they'd rather not (no surprise)

Bitcoin is not actually deflationary. Its supply grows constantly until it eventually stabilises. The fact that Bitcoin prices have fallen a lot is more because lots of new people have discovered the project and decided they want some, but that effect will eventually peter out as Bitcoin becomes boring and everyone finalises their opinions of it.

Greece doesn't need fiat currency. What Greece needs is hard money – like the Euro (which is hard-ish, though not as hard as Bitcoin). This is because the Greek government is notoriously corrupt and the fact that they couldn't just print the pensions of their civil servants was one of the few things creating pressure to reform, and preventing outright pillaging of the savings of Greeks who do actually work in the private sector. Seeing Greece as one monolithic entity isn't right: there are different factions, not all of whom want the government to suddenly be able to spend whatever it wants. Hence the Greek people apparently voting for both keeping the Euro and not enacting any spending cutbacks, a contradictory position.

Ultimately Greece is going to get a lot poorer, no matter what. In many ways it's practically a third world country, one that was simply kept afloat by huge injections of foreign cash. But it never really stopped being third world in the way that it was run.

Bitcoin could, theoretically, benefit some Greek people now in the heat of the crisis because the Greek government wouldn't be able to impose capital controls on it. Thus preventing the outright theft of whatever little cash Greek's have left in the bank (sorry, I mean, solidarity tax/haircut/pick euphemism of choice). It is no magical cure for Greece's problems but it could tip the balance away from a government that discovered it was paying salaries and pensions for entirely non-existent departments, and towards people who are just trying to make a living.

Lots of things can be considered an API. For instance, who owns the copyright on OpenGL? Does anyone even know? What about HTTP? After all, a protocol is basically an API that runs over wires instead of call stacks. And HTTP/2.0 is a derivative work of SPDY which is .... developed by Google. And is now being added back into Java. What about SQL? It's managed by ISO these days so probably Oracle would avoid slicing their own throats like this.

Following this US ruling all sorts of people and companies are now finding that they own IP they never even knew they had. This is already making lawyers the world over start licking their lips. It's going to be a shitstorm.

Of course they will (and do). They want their customers to have a great experience so they don't go to the competition. Hence the ability to review drivers, hence the automated calculation of the trip cost and so on.

It's systematically ignoring laws and regulations while going "wah wah, we're teh underdogs".

Uber is not unregulated and they do not stand in opposition to regulations in general, contrary to what many seem to believe.

What we're witnessing here is not State Vs Anarchy Round One. What we're witnessing is quite simply State Regulation vs Corporate Regulation. The existential question Uber faces is, can they convince society and government (not the same thing) that they're better at regulating taxi drivers via their technology than local taxi commissions are via paperwork? Even if Uber triumphs, this will not mean widespread usage of unregulated taxis, it just means that taxi drivers will live in fear of getting low star ratings instead of having their local medallion revoked.

Getting drunk and running amok is something you do when not home--at home you might exercise some moderation, or there'd be people who'd call you out on it whose authority you'd feel obligated to respect

I hate to say it, given that I'm British, but unfortunately the problem of a subset of Brits getting completely wasted and engaging in shitty, boorish behaviour isn't something restricted to holiday times. For some reason the UK just has a far more serious problem with drinking than other cultures and it happens at home as well. I normally don't go to the sort of European resort towns that the hooligan set like to frequent but on the occasions that I have done, it's always embarrassing as fuck to be a young male British tourist because you can sense the suspicion locals have that you might be about to do something stupid. The worst was when I visited Bratislava. Lovely city (well, town, by UK standards). The pub in the city centre had the phone number of the British embassy on the beer mats, for people to call in an emergency. The men's toilets had a poster warning Brits specifically not to hit on the local girls. When I was there, a group of Brits came in with some unbelievably grotesque, obese men being led by some extremely hot local girl. Very obviously a stag do. As one of the fattest guys walked past the table where me and my friend were sitting he said (very loudly) "I want to see some TITS".

I pretended to be Canadian. Luckily I don't have a strong British accent at all and I was travelling with an American, so it was somewhat plausible.

I think you're completely right that this behaviour is partly learned and transmitted, like some sort of mind virus. For some reason Brits seem far more likely than other people to feel they can't have fun or be socially relaxed until they've got drunk, and will happily admit it. It's not seen as something shameful, people just blurt it out, like saying it somehow makes them one of the group. Combine it with a culture that practically celebrates "laddishness" as being fundamental to being a man, and you've got a recipe for trouble.

Did you ever check out Microsoft Research's Singularity OS, which implemented a new OS kernel from scratch in a dialect of C#. It has no traditional processes and relies on software/compiler enforced isolation instead of VMM/page tables. It has some other rather interesting ideas in it too, like contract based IPC channels. Relatedly, there was some work done a while ago to allow better integration between garbage collected heaps and the kernel swap system (bookmarking collectors), but the patches were never merged. Do you have any thoughts on how Linux could better support non-C/C++ based software in this way?

Probably would have prevented Satoshi being anonymous when he launched bitcoin.org, and thus might have led to Bitcoin never existing at all.

For this reason the sane way to implement IPv6 as to do DHCPv6-PD and assign either 0 or 1 IPv6 address on the link interface.

From reading the linked bug report/discussion, it seems the Android team are open to implementing DHCPv6-PD. Their objection is basically to the notion that a lazily run network might use DHCPv6 to try and ensure devices only get a single IP address, thus forcing app/OS developers and users to deal with the crappy flakyness of NAT all over again. They are worried about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, in other words.

So I think your position is not so incompatible with Google's. Though if/when they plan to support DHCPv6-PD I do not know.

DHCP v6 exists not to coddle or comfort admins used to a v4 world. DHCP v6 was added because v6 will /Never/ be adopted without it. Ever. Full stop. DHCP facilitates two-way communication prior to address assignment and lends flexibility to deployments that are now considered indispensable.

Having waded through the mega-thread with Lorenzo (who I've met by the way and he is a top class guy), this appears to be the nub of the dispute. It's some kind of immovable object/irresistible force situation.

The Android team build what is primarily a consumer product. When they make decisions, they think in terms of what is best for ordinary consumers. They also consider the needs of software developers. Therefore they highly prise qualities like "it just works" and "my apps don't break" and "I can tether without restriction". From this perspective as far as I can tell, Lorenzo's position is 100% correct. The founding vision of IPv6 was that you should always have as many addresses as you need for whatever purpose, and we should never need bizarre technical hacks to work around a lack of addresses ever again.

The network admins on that thread are building what they perceive as a 'take it or leave it' service, often, provided to a captive audience like a university campus or enterprise. Therefore they highly value qualities like "I can satisfy the legal department" and "I can use my existing hardware that only supports feature X" and "I can block tethering to my network to implement some security policy". They care relatively little about user or developer experience, as evidence by the number of comments on the thread of the form "If we can't get our way we'll just ban all Android devices" or "The device should tell the user that 464xlat is unavailable and let apps break" or "the device should tell the user that tethering is forbidden". They care little about application reliability or complexity as long as they can tick some boxes at the end of the day and satisfy various policies. From their perspective Android is just making their jobs harder and Lorenzo is therefore being mind-numbingly unreasonable.

This situation is somewhat confused and hard to distill because there seem to be multiple different things being discussed on the same thread, e.g. DHCPv6 PD which is apparently unrelated to address allocation.

Now, frankly, having read and understood many of these comments, I find myself siding (weakly) with Lorenzo, and not just because I know him. As an Android user and an app developer, my priorities are more closely aligned with that of the Android team. I do not wish to experience apps breaking or "tethering denied" messages in future due to some lawyer buttcovering that was translated into a network setup with the absolute minimum of effort by a monopolist IT department. If that means I fall back to IPv4 for a while instead, well, so be it. If that means my phone cannot reach the small number of IPv6 only networks when connected to some random university campus, OK, I'll use my LTE connection. And then I'll complain to the IT office and tell them "just buy an iPhone" is not an acceptable answer, so they had better get on it and allow my device to grab as many devices as it wants without having to go through a DHCPv6 server. Just like my home and mobile ISPs do. And if that means they have to do more work to satisfy the next BSA audit - well, that's why they get paid the big bucks.

Even recent history is littered with examples of the biggest military machine on the planet (and it's cronies) having much more trouble with "inferior" forces than they should.

Define "trouble"? Recent history is littered with examples of the US military immediately and utterly crushing the armies and rebel groups in any country they invade. The rabble that remain and try to resist occupation cannot inflict any conventional military damage, which is why they resort of extreme tactics like suicide bombings. Tactics that don't work, but between soldiers, drones, warplanes, and NSA surveillance they have no better ideas that might work.

Likewise, the chances of any US citizens successfully engaging in armed resistance against the US government is zero. Here's what would happen:

1) If you decide to take your gun and resist oppression alone you will be gunned down within minutes or seconds, reported in the press as having mental health problems and everyone will have forgotten your name within a couple of days

2) If you try to find other like minding people and raise a resistance group the FBI and/or NSA will learn of your plot before it happens, and you will be arrested before you have any chance to make real progress with your plan. You will be charged with domestic extremism, terrorism, or some variant thereof, and disappear for the rest of your adult life into a Supermax.

In no situation does having a gun allow you to resist even very petty government corruption or abuse. You simply stand no chance at all, you will always lose. The only way to seriously change a government is through the ballot box, which is why every country except the USA doesn't pretend an armed populace has anything to do with freedom.

Thankyou for your polite reply.

I am sure that if one were to carefully analyze the situation, some of the deaths caused by the police are due to the fact that Americans are more likely to be armed. But I do not believe that is the exclusive or even majority cause of so much violence by our police.

Why not, though? In the UK virtually all police are unarmed. It's very hard to get shot by the police due to a misunderstanding or otherwise. In the USA all police are armed and there has been a steady stream of stories, videos and even civil unrest triggered by on-the-spot police executions.

Those things aren't happening because someone might be carrying a gun.

Then why are they happening and why do the statistics suggest levels of police violence in the USA are wildly different to otherwise very similar countries?

I know ownership of weapons in America is a highly contentious topic so I fully expect to get modded down aggressively for this post. I want to try out the argument anyway. Please humour me.

Let us imagine two different countries: Macroland and Microland. The governments of the two countries are mostly similar, with two notable exceptions.

The government of Macroland punishes resistance to its rule heavily. It jails approximately 0.7% of its population. Its enforcement troops kill about 60 of its own people each month.

The government of Microland is dramatically less aggressive. It jails only 0.1% of its population, but more importantly, it virtually never kills its own citizens no matter what they did or how strongly they resist the government's rule. It took Microland about a quarter of a century to kill as many people as Macroland did in just one month.

Which country has the most oppressed people? Microland or Macroland?

I think most reasonable people would say that the citizens of the country that kills them the most often are the most heavily oppressed. After all, what's the basic power that lies behind abusive government oppression? What's the basic mechanism governments use to remove people's freedoms? It's violence. The country that dishes out the most against its own people would seem to be the most oppressive.

You have, of course, already figured out that the statistics given above are real. Macroland is the USA. Microland is (just for comparison) the United Kingdom.

Americans have the US Constitution and it is a mighty document. The Constitution has always been a vital part of protecting the freedoms of ordinary Americans from overreach by government. Yet the Constitution is flawed in one terribly dramatic way. By allowing and even encouraging a heavily armed society, it fails to strike any blows for freedom - as police have always had and always will have better access to top grade weaponry and armour. The chances of ordinary US citizens successfully mounting an armed uprising against the government is zero. And yet it simultaneously gives those same police a cast iron excuse for arming themselves to the teeth, as they are expected to enforce the law against an exceptionally dangerous population.

The result is that whilst Americans and British people have very little differences in their levels of freedom, they have enormous differences in their chances of being executed by their own governments ..... or by random mental patients.

I am British and I would like to see the UK adopt a US-style constitution. But not if it included a copy of the second amendment. Real data from today's world seems to suggest it makes no real difference to freedom but does make the world a vastly more dangerous place.

Free/illegal speech is about government restrictions, not restrictions on speech in private forums.