Bitrot does happen.
When a disk has a bad block and detects that, it will try to read the data from it and put it on a block from the reserve-pool. However, the data might be bad and corrupt, so you lose data.
Disks do have a Reed-Solomon (aka par-files) index, so it can repair some damage, but it doesn't always succeed.

Anyway, what I do for important things, is have par2 blocks that go along with the data. All my photo-archives have par2 files attached to them.

I reckon you could even automate it. To have a script that traverses all directories and tries to repair the data if it's broken. If it fails, you get notified.

It's just politics. None of the politicians came across as serious when the first revelations of Snowden came out. Only the SP wanted to ask questions to Snowden directly, but he definitely won't fly to Holland :).
When it comes to this situation, there's no real party you can trust.

I know GPG. But I do not know anyone who is using it. I haven't seen a gpg-signature in years, except my own :).

Maybe I'm naive or ignorant, but what can a normal user do about e-mail?
Most e-mail from ISP's runs over port 25, and it all gets logged by logboxes and tappers. I don't think the default for an MTA is port 465 or 587, but still 25. If I'm wrong. please correct me.
What should be done here, can someone inform me. Is there something a user, admin or mta-developer should do here?
I read my mail over imaps and pop3s, and store it on my own-hosted imap server. But what to do about smtp-traffic?

The best description on Slashdot I read about the MS-Nokia deal is:

Microsoft rides Nokia like a cowboy rides a horse untill it dies. Then they hop over to the next horse.

I think it's an interesting OS to watch for. I can see similarities with the web. The web seemed to turn into a proprietary format. Firefox stumbled on, but it seemed like an uphill battle that would never succeed. However they did succeed, by just keeping to their goals. The web now is more open then 10 years ago, where you couldn't even access the website of your bank with Firefox.

Now with this OS, it might turn out the same. It's all somewhat closed platforms. Apple uses Obj-C, Android a Java variant. Other platforms use Qt. Now Firefox comes along and uses a platform that is already open, html5/css/js, and uses it for apps.

I just hope the other underdogs follow suit, and use the same API, like Ubuntu, Jolla, Tizen.
We'' lees what the future brings. I think they can do it, and provide a common platform for the future.

Hmm, I expect you have a good reason to not have an online presence. If you wanted that, you'd have it. So advising to create that presence seems like an unwanted idea.

I would just put it in my resume, with a well worded sentence that you don't have an online presence. I would expect HR to check your online presence, so it's good to write it in advance.

> if the number of people you decribe are less than 5000 a year in the USA, it is a small enough number that it doesnt even register.

Are you talking about terrorism here? How many died last year from that?
And how many died from attacks because of their gender?

> They aren't even bothering to go after the US market. They're focusing on smaller, less competitive markets like China, Europe, and North Africa.

The US is the smaller market compared to China.

You can even blame Nokia, for throwing away their business in Asia and Africa with Symbian, just to try to capture the smaller US market with Windows Phone. And they even hardly succeed with that.

I expect Jolla to sell quite good in China, and hopefully somewhat in Europe too.

> If Blackberry and Microsoft with their $Billions can't compete with Google and Apple, how can a tiny project like this?

If everyone said that, we would not have Google or Apple. They too started as tiny projects. I wish them well, and hope to see them succeed.
The Nokia N9 sold well in China. It has allready been in the news that Jolla has good relationships with Chinese and European carriers. They will sell, probably some millions. Who knows where things are going.

I always used to feel that Debian was a bit behind the curve in regards to included packages. 10 years ago there was really visible progress, like anti-aliased fonts in GTK or the X compositor, so I went with other distro's that were more bleeding-edge. The install and configuration also was a bit hardcore (it still somewhat is, where is my DrakX?).

Nowadays I feel it's just the right spot. No over-engineered crap like systemd or journald. You can easily disable pulseaudio. And everything and the kitchen-sink is available in the repositories. And for just Firefox or Chrome you can easily add packages. There's no real need for bleeding-edge anymore. Linux is mature and stable.

The statistics that the AMS-IX gives out do not show any rise in network traffic, maybe even a slowdown.

Stats

For a Dutch provider, you would at least suspect a slight increase in traffic on the Dutch Internet Exchange.