It doesn't matter who people have decided to support. What matters is if they actually vote. In my mind, the presidential election is won by a campaign which gets their supports to the polls and disenfranchises their opposition from the political world enough they don't bother.

Mobile users who don't need to use a mouse for extended periods of time. But if you wanted to pick one golden scenario, it would be 'perfect' for on-the-go users of office on a win8 tablet, which is still mostly a desktop-based experience.

Tor's main purpose is anonymity. That's a little different.

Not quite true. You don't have control over the servers in the middle with internet traffic. The key isn't who is running the central server, it's whether or not the software uses public key encryption for the actual VOIP traffic. You can write a service to be secure, and you can write the service not to be. I would presume that skype shares the encryption key for their VOIP traffic with their central server. I'm not sure what laws enforce this. Perhaps it's not required in all countries. Perhaps the skype-to-skype calls are secure.

The most important thing to note is that this is a closed-source app with a central server. There's no way to know if the VOIP keys are being sent to the centralized server. From a security standpoint, you can't assume they're not. And since skype won't go on the record, it seems to make a whole lot of sense to assume they do.

In any case, I wouldn't recommend it for chinese dissidents.

Pretty much exactly right. I'll just add that the important tools for building dynamic sites are the tools built into the browsers. Dreamweaver isn't going to help you debug your javascript. Laying out a little DOM is typically not where the majority of development time is spent.

WYSIWYG editors are only useful for quickly prototyping ideas. They produce throw-away quality results. Professional developers, such as myself, create throw-away quality results by hand :)

You need to pay to have an OS signed. That is true. But you can certainly still install an unsigned OS such as linux. So for the intel version, the answer is "absolutely yes, of course you can run linux. It's a PC, not an ipad!" But yes, like most every ARM device I know of, the RT model is locked down and would need to be jailbroken for anything else.

Just assume it'll be in line with ipad pricing and have slightly worse battery life. Then you won't be disappointed. For the pro version, compare it to a small ivy-bridge ultrabook. They tend to be expensive and still have shitty battery life when compared to ARM devices. It really doesn't take a lot of thought to come up with reasonable expectations.

Not trying to start a war here. Just a couple points/corrections.

idevices happily support bluetooth keyboards. There are apps for many printing scenarios which mitigates that somewhat if you can be bothered. A lot of home printers are on your home network rather than solely USB. Beyond that, a lot of routers have a USB port for a shared printer, etc. So support is limited/tricky but it's not "fugetaboutit". A lot of solutions are built up within apple's walls when 1st party support is lacking.

You don't really need a 3rd party data service. I think you can sync/store your stuff with their cloud. So that's 1st party. If your goal is to put it on a usb stick, that doesn't work.. but you could just as easily say the surface can't burn CDs. If all your devices are synced, passing around usb sticks is a nice-to-have rather than a need-to-have.

Enterprise administration is definitely important. But keep in mind RT does not have AD support. So only the surface pro will be targeting the enterprise directly. Companies will still need to think about how their IT policies deal with non-domain joined devices. I'm sure it'll have exchange support though. So I would imagine that it'll support the same activesync standards as high-end cellphones or the ipad already do, eg pin-lock and secure erase/encryption requirements. No idea what else they might have in mind for RT though.

Zune had music subscriptions and some limited social scenarios. It was just a really bad time to get into the market. At least all the work they put into building their own music store is useful. That service lives on. If you have a subscription, it works on windows, windows phone, xbox, and it'll probably be the underlying service for music/movies on win8 devices as well. Who knows if the name will live on or perhaps get replaced by some xbox marketplace (or just marketplace) naming.. but I think getting their feet wet with a music service was absolutely the right thing, even if the hardware sales were a bust.

I guess it keeps the lawyers happy and product secret when you reuse a name you already own. It's a good name.. may as well use it for something popular.

They're blocking their servers from downloading the videos. They aren't removing it from their search results. That's exactly what I'd do in their case. They'll simply feed it URLs, see who connects to download the video, block the IP, and repeat.

This seems like a complete non-story to me. But then, I've never heard of that site before. If it is actually popular, I can see why that alone would make it news-worthy. As a technical person, I'd look for a browser plugin to download the video, then a desktop app to rip the audio. Searching for a website which automates the process wouldn't have even occurred to me. It's funny how being technical can cause you to miss the boat on some trends just because the problem addressed was just never a problem for you in the first place..

It was hiding in plain sight. It was signed with valid certificates which essentially white listed it.

Actually, it sounds like it was an MS-controlled server issuing a cert for a remote desktop scenario which was inadvertently issuing certificates that also had code-signing privileges. No one cracked the signing process or forged anything from scratch. The attackers just found something that hadn't been locked down properly. Of course, it's still a rather huge fuck up. They were essentially handing over the keys. The point is though, it' was a human-error fuck up that allowed this to happen, not a broken security model that needs replacing. Oups.

A correction.. IE uses the windows certificate store. It doesn't hold it's own set of certs. I know firefox used to have its own set of certs. I'm not sure if that's still true. I'm pretty sure chrome also uses the windows certificate store. In most cases, using the windows cert store is the right thing to do. I can understand why mozilla would want to manage some of this themselves. If they need to roll their own cert store for their cross-platform support, it might just be easier to do that than keep up with all the differences between platforms.

But the main idea is that if you trust the windows cert store, when things like this happen, the cert will be invalidated for everything, not just IE, or Safari, or whatever. Companies can also then add their own certs, regect some, etc in a central database. It's annoying for an IT dept when individual apps do their own thing and don't respect the platform's settings.

The people working on features like this very rarely wrote the original code. If someone handed you 50 or 100k lines of assembly code with little/no documentation and needed you to make a few fixes or add a feature, it's pretty easy to miss some of those assumptions. And it's especially true now since virtually no one writes assembly code. New products are written in modern languages like c# or java specifically for these kinds of things. A lot of language features were actually developed to manage problems like trust in an enforceable way. There are going to be issues like this cropping up for years to come but it's certainly a situation which is getting a lot better each generation as more and more components are re-engineered with modern security.