Wow, you mean commercial products designed to connect to the internet have absolutely crap security?

Well, color me fucking surprised and shocked.

No, wait, the other one .. where I point out these companies are either incompetent or indifferent to security, have no penalties or liability, and have products rushed out the door by asshole CEOs and marketing people who don't give a damn about security.

This is precisely why I look at pretty much every damned product which wants to connect to the internet, or has an app for your smartphone and think "oh hell no".

Trusting this shit is idiotic, and quite frankly, I'm beyond the point of sympathy for people who buy this shit. It's insecure so that it can be convenient. Pretty much at least weekly we see an entire class of products has pretty much zero security. And we're a long way away from being able to trust them.

Just stop buying this crap.

Oh a comedian, US corporations are pretty malevolent, from pharmaceuticals lying and killing people to generate extra profits, to oil companies taking cheap ass short cuts and killing people to the US military industrial complex actively promoting war for it's own sake and killing people. These psychopaths run the US government and that pretty much makes the US government as malevolent as it gets.

What the US government press really wanted to say in the press release "We were breaking laws all over the world in collusion with US corporations and mostly getting away with it, so fuck Snowden and as a warning to others who believe in honesty and justice, we will kill him and any other traitors to Psychopaths Incorporated 'er' the US Government". This is not about justice, this is about promoting the take over of the whole world by US corporations and enslavement of the worlds population. Of course psychopaths being psychopaths, it really is all about promoting global chaos because psychopaths thrive in chaos, it is quite simply who they are.

How about bring them back and crowd fund a slashdot commentators buyout. We know the goal is to get maximum value by pretending the purchaser will be able to control commentating and moderation to turn it into a propaganda channel but we also know that fails every single time they try it.

Choosing whose ads you allow to run and whose you block is the reason why I use https://noscript.net/ in preference to adblock, a bit more work but it lets me choose who ads to run and whose to block. So blocks for intrusive ads (Content first then ad), blocks for just hinting at blocking volume control (seriously how big an asshat are you), blocks for auto running videos (my choice not yours whether or not to watch the video), blocks for shitty product advertisements (be selective in whose products and services you will promote) and, blocks for supporting nasty web sites (don't support bad web sites with advertising revenue). Some of this stuff should be regulated and bad ads and ad agencies should be prosecuted.

Completely agree. You don't have to be able to bang out an OS, but man, if everybody just knew how to grep through some files or automatically run an SQL query, dump the results into an Excel file and email it to somebody, the world would be a better place.

A lot of the complexity is driven by programming languages themselves. The conflict between compact code bulky self explanatory code, not having to rewrite functions creating large algorithm libraries, coding conventions as they differ from normal language and maths use, language logic being simply the arbitrary decisions of the people who coded the coding language amongst other issues. What to know how bad coding languages really are, give code without any documentation at all and get another coder to figure out what is going one and how to fix problems. Why is this inherently bad, it is like handing a text book to someone, and they requiring a second one in order to be able to read the first one, even when they know the language used in the first one.

So what is this really all about, cheap greedy psychopath business types who have no idea at all about how to code but who want cheaper and cheaper and cheaper programmers (minimum wage cheap). So they want to flood the market with coders, whether by internal training as long as those coders pay for it themselves or by bringing in cheap temporary immigrant coders.

Pick your poison. Get robbed by your coworkers or get robbed by your boss. You're still getting robbed. But I bet your coworkers will rob you less, given that they're being robbed by the same process.

Resistance was futile!

Do you have any evidence to back that claim up?

There are a number of features in Chrome that optionally talk to Google. But you can change them all if you prefer. Do you have any proof that it "phones home" in any hidden way? It should be quite easy to prove; Wireshark is all you need.

FWIW, I know some of the guys who started the Chrome project. Actually, they didn't start Chrome, they started V8. The point was to prove that Javascript engines could be orders of magnitude faster than they were, and to push the rest of the industry to get better, so Google's apps would be able to do more, faster. The rest of Chrome was just to show off V8. Then it became successful, both at pushing Javascript engines to get better, and as a popular browser, and Google started to use it as a test bed for other ideas about how to make the web "platform" better. Security improvements like certificate pinning. Performance (and security) improvements like SPDY and QUIC. UI simplifications like the omnibox (which geeks like to hate, but non-geeks love). Better development tools (though Firebug was and is quite good). And so on.

I don't think "better tracking of users" has ever been a goal, stated or unstated, of the Chrome project. And, seriously, why would it? It's not like the normal web standards don't offer everything that's required for whatever tracking anyone would like to do.

So when the NSA intercepts your hardware before it's delivered?

Just look for the guy in the black suit, sunglasses, and earpiece lurking around the door of your server room with a cell phone plugged into his laptop.

Seems like those are applications that scream, "CHEAPER TO DO WITH DRONES!" to me. :)

How many Americans never leave the country in their lifetime? Probably a large majority of them. So how's being stuck in Russia much different?

Apples and oranges. Assange did his playing around in Sweden. Russia is nothing like Sweden, or even the US. Accusations of date-rape in Russia are probably laughed at.

(first off, teacher pay isn't in the same money bucket as NASA, they do not compete).

This is totally incorrect. They're all part of the overall government budget. Yes, a lot of funding for schools is at local levels, but not all. And there's plenty of politicians who would love to eliminate one or the other, or better yet both, and use the savings to pay for tax cuts for the rich or for more bloated defense programs.

My response to sites that ask me to disable ad-block is to point them to ad-block approved ads. I don't mind those.

I think the advertisers are stuck between a rock and a hard place. The metrics show that their ads have lousy response rates, so they make them more obtrusive, which increases their click-through rates, yes. But then those buying the advertising eventually look at 'completion rates', and find that the obtrusive ads have lower completion rates - IE somebody actually buying the product/service, signing up, whatever. Most of the increase is from a higher mis-click rate where the user is hitting close or back as quickly as they can.

Thing is, earlier advertising was much more nebulous about it's benefit. It's hard to tell how much soda any given soda commercial sells, whether it's worth it, etc... What metrics they do have shows that as the number of ads increase, the response rates fall - viewers become immune. And we're very immune at this point.

Hell, at this point aliens might find that we're 'utterly' immune to their propaganda due to the barrage we face every day.