Why not? The only thing that Google really does better than anyone else is search (and maybe free machine translation). For everything else, there's a better or at least equivalent option.

Gmail is actually doing quite a good job as well. What other mail provider does probably BCC every mail you receive and send to the NSA cloud for safekeeping and backup?

Google suspending Orkut is but a tiny example of why you better communicate with people by using e-mail directly. Or, if you must, go the old fashioned way (*cough* Usenet *cough*). But rely on a specific social network run by a single company, and you're sure that it will be shut down sometimes down the road. Even Facebook, not to mention Google+ will someday go the way of Geocities.

Selling bitcoin - or ANYTHING ELSE - at an auction in exchange for US dollars does not set ANY kind of precedent establishing that bitcoin - or ANYTHING ELSE - is now legal tender. In fact, it establishes the opposite.

You're right. It would make bitcoin legal tender only if you could pay for the auctioned bitcoins with... bitcoins. But then again, that would be pretty pointless, wouldn't it?

How you get from a military theocracy to some sort of representative and stable government is a question that has yet to be answered.

Well, for Egypt, the question is rather to choose between an autocratic military regime on one side, and an autocratic theocracy on the other side.

I very seldom agree with your islamophobic comments, but on this point, you're absolutely right. Autocratic rule is much better for minorities, but also for moderate muslims, than a theocracy imposed by muslim brothers or similar sects like ISIS. This, Obama's administration doesn't understand (yet), and keeps pushing islamism on muslim-majority countries that would better be left alone, as they know better how to deal with their demons.

How can anybody be so naive as to think that NSA isn't already crawling with Russian spies? Everything NSA knows, its Russian counterpart knows nearly at the same time. It doesn't take a Snowden to achieve that. Remember: Russians have a long tradition of building up sleeper and secret agents in foreign targets, and they are renowned for their patience and the time they take in placing those agents in high positions.

When they are finished with him, he is either going to be returned to the U.S or he is just going to "disappear" into the abyss.

s/XOR/OR/.

I'm wondering how exactly you're generating and reading quantum noise. Care to submit some details?

30% of tech support could not pass the Turing test

Because they are (semi-)automated reply-templates anyway?

There are some companies out there who don't want to see their trade secrets being spied upon, and sold / given to competitors. That's my primary concern: industrial espionage, done by state actors on behalf of their local companies. Everything that helps keep those state actors (and private spying groups that exist too) at bay, reinforces the security barrier. Even protecting the privacy of those who work at said companies, helps to make them less blackmailable, and less open to secret services "suggestions."

It's been a quarter century since I chased down those hackers.

I saw a translation of The KGB, the Computer, and Me that aired back then on German TV, and it was fascinating! Great to see you here on Slashdot Cliff!

FreeBSD just issued a security advisory w.r.t. OpenSSL. You better update to -STABLE asap.

Basically, I was already in paranoia-mode, long before Snowden went public with his story (that stuff was partly known and published in James Bamford's books on the NSA, the rest of it was common knowledge among us sysadmins working in sensitive sectors). So, after careful evaluation of what has been published so far, I didn't see any reason to change anything security-wise.

Basically, we're making it WAY too easy for the NSA to spy on us. But, even if we all switched to encrypted mail, that's not enough: with their metadata collection, they can still infer a lot of things from our communications patterns. So technically, we need I2P, Freenet or similar anonymizing technology to hide in the crowd. However, to REALLY fix the problem once and for all, we need to take it to the political arena, and fight for majorities to get Congress to reign in NSA in earnest, no matter what "Yes We Scan" Obama wants. If we don't, Orwell's 1984 will remain in effect, no matter how much we use OSS, encryption and so on.