Android could perfectly well let you give an app local permissions without giving it call-out-to-the-network permissions. Snapsave shouldn't need to ever call out to external servers in the first place, if it does only what it advertises.

Android doesn't do this because of their broken ad-based ecosystem, though: they don't want to draw your attention to apps that unnecessarily call out to the network, because the most common reason for doing so is to show ads.

It's true that without controlling the endpoints, Snapchat can't stop one particular attack vector: the people who control those devices saving images themselves. The usual "DRM" problem.

But what seems to have happened here is that users installed an app which, unbeknownst to them, sent copies of the images to a third-party server. That threat model is possible to guard against, although it's arguably more an issue with Android than Snapchat that something like that easily happens without users noticing, because Android's app-permission model leaks like a sieve.

It's used in a ton of places in the bowels of big companies as well.

Apple does that too, though on end-user machines. When connecting to wifi, it doesn't enable the connection until it first verifies you're really connected. It does that by trying to pull a specific known Apple URL. If it doesn't get the expected contents, it guesses you're behind a wifi hotspot's login wall, and pops up the "please log in" page. The intent of this is to make sure apps like Dropbox and your email and whatever don't think they're back online and start failing connections, in the time between when you connect to a hotspot wifi and when you log in. But it also means that if Apple's URL goes down, wifi connection will end up with extra hoops to jump through to get it to work.

I don't have any experience with the military, but I do have experience working with defense contractors on DARPA projects, and in that context I have not been very impressed.

calamari is squid, not octopus!

First of all, barely anybody lives in Saskatchewan. It has about 0.2% of the population of North America. If you plot a population density map of the continent, Saskatchewan is in the "unpopulated' part of the continent.

Second, I'm not claiming it never spikes or dips to those temperatures, just that nowhere inhabited actually stays in those range of temperatures for any significant length of time, except a few Siberian cities that exist for strange Soviet-related historical reasons. There is no month of the year in which the average temperature in Saskatoon is below 0 F. The coldest is December, which has an average temperature of 4 F (average high 14 F, average low -5 F).

Now Yakutsk, Russia, that's a cold city, which somehow has as many people as Saskatoon. Average temperature in December? -37 F (average high -31 F, average low -43 F). That is uninhabitable territory, but the USSR managed to inhabit it, go figure. However outside of Siberia, you don't find cities in such climates.

A rounding error from zero people live in such temperatures. Not even the inhabited parts of Norway have such a climate. Some parts of Siberia, basically, which were forcibly settled by the USSR.

It does vaguely fit North American weather patterns: 0-100 F is vaguely habitable, below 0 F is unlivably cold, above 100 F is unlivably hot.

* complex open source middleware

* for the cloud

My experience with doctor's offices has been that everything is kept on paper, and they fax things around if they need to transfer the data "electronically"...

Natural-phenomenon news is one of those things that isn't a recent /. change. Random example.

It is now under the primary control of Apple, certainly, but it didn't "come out of the Apple compiler group" as you erroneously stated. It came out of the University of Illinois's compiler group. In addition, Lattner was not the only person developing it there.

It is true that LLVM has been Apple-driven since 2005, but it didn't come out of Apple— they picked it up after it was already out there.

That's getting less common since Debian and Ubuntu no longer have bash as /bin/sh. There are still packages that expect that, but they now don't work on Debian, Ubuntu, or the BSDs, which starts to make it more likely the authors will care about fixing them.

Depends on what part of the government. People on the (American) left tend to be in favor of social spending but against military/police/prison spending; people on the right tend to be in favor of military/police/prison spending but against social spending. With various quirks and exceptions on either side, e.g. rural conservatives are in favor of farm subsidies (a kind of social spending) while some "national security democrats" are in favor of the War On Terror and military/police spending.