So, now you have strong evidence that the people you talk to are not representative of America as a whole.

I would not put it that way. I'd say we have strong evidence that opinion polling can easily result in confusing or apparently contradictory results. The first sentence of the linked blog post has an air of mild surprise about it, and not surprisingly - when polled, 75% of Americans disagree that their government is trustworthy all or most of the time, yet they view most departments favourably? That makes little sense.

Something else doesn't make much sense. This result can easily be read as "people approve of what the NSA is doing". That must be what favourable means, right? Yet this very same polling agency has found a year ago that a majority of Americans oppose NSA practices. It's possible things have changed in the span of 2014, but other polls frequently return contradictory results too. This one by the Washington Post says, in the same set of questions, most people think monitoring all online activity to prevent terrorism isn't worth it, but monitoring all phone calls is. Why the difference?

At any rate, it's certainly true that the civil liberties wing of western societies has done a really appalling job of explaining to people why this sort of behaviour by governments is so risky, and Americans don't have recent local experience to fall back on. Unlike, say, people in former Soviet bloc countries, or Germans.

TFA is actually covering opinion polls relating to several government agencies, but in typical Slashdot form, TFS only focuses on the NSA section, because that will be more inflammatory.

.... or maybe, just of more interest to a tech/geek focused site? I guess the NSA is a lot more relevant than the VA, especially to non-American slashdotters like me.

The poll isn't very surprising given its consistency with previous polls, but that doesn't change the fact that the attitudes of Americans don't seem to be very internally consistent or easily explainable. Either American people are just strangely illogical or there's some subtle issue with the polling method (or both?). The big question mark this survey leaves hanging is why trust in government is at an all time low (along with falling trust in most institutions), yet iterating specific parts of the government yields mostly favourable views. This is such an odd result that the very first sentence in the poll writeup says:

The public continues to express positive views of many agencies of the federal government, even though overall trust in government is near historic lows.

Yes, indeed. The public does A even though B. How strange.

The way the poll works means there's little information that can be used to explain this. Perhaps the 8 departments they chose to ask people about aren't the reason people distrust government. Perhaps their distrust falls exclusively on Congress, or on the judicial branch. We can't tell from this result alone.

Another possibility is that the wording of the poll - although superficially neutral - does trigger bias. The question was "do you trust the government in Washington always or most of the time?". People might be distinguishing between "the government in Washington" and "other bits of the government", e.g. the NSA is not actually in the city of Washington whereas Congress is. Ditto for various other departments and especially the military which does a great job of spreading itself around the country.

My final thought is that people might be more naturally inclined to take out their dissatisfaction on Congress than on the executive branch, because getting mad at Congress feels like it might achieve something due to voting, whereas getting mad at the NSA is about as useful as getting mad at a brick wall. They answer to no one and can't be controlled, so it's a lot more comfortable if you can convince yourself they're on your side rather than not.

Unfortunately, the US does not have free market capitalism on broadband communications. In most areas it is either monopoly or duopoly

That's what a free market will usually naturally gravitate to. Competition is bad for all competitors, so cartels or monopolies are strong attractors in the system. If you want competition and choice you need market regulation to make it happen.

We had plenty of choices for dial-up too, what we lacked particularly in the UK was free local calls, that made modem calls expensive compared to the US. Since then everything has been going our way.

However, the issue of free vs metered local calls hasn't been relevant for a long time. I don't think government intervention is a great explanation either, given that the UK telecoms network was privatised.

For large parts of Europe I think there's a simpler explanation - a combination of population density and more regional competition with ISPs. Whereas in the USA you have a handful of nationwide ISPs. There's no equivalent of Verizon or Comcast in Europe that serves the entire continent.

I kind of want the opposite. I've got a big, capable laptop at home, and several computers at work. When I go out, though, I'm not going to do any real programming or make a presentation or things like that when I'm at a cafe with my wife, or sitting on the train home from work. I'll surf the web, read a paper or play games. A tablet lets me do that just fine.

A small, light laptop has too many compromises; little memory, slow CPU (that gets throttled after more than a few seconds at 100%), small screen and keyboard. And it's still much heavier than the Tablet Z I carry. The tablet is light and thin enough that I really don't notice it in my bag at all.

We're all hunting for the impossible: a matchbox-size computer with the power of a workstation and a 40" screen. Instead we have to compromise. And we all end up with different compromises. I've even thought of cancelling my smartphone and go back to a small, light feature-phone. It's cheaper, more durable and the battery lasts for a week. Use only the tablet for apps.

There will -always- be flaws. However, part of a company selling security is how they respond to issues, and here, BlackPhone has performed quite well. There was a problem, they fixed it, and that is what matters.

I agree that how a company handles incident response is important and the BlackPhone guys have apparently handled this well.

However, there are several things that are troubling about this story which lead me to not trust BlackPhone and question the security experience of the people designing it.

The first thing we notice about this exploit is that the library in question appears to be written in C, even though it's newly written code that is parsing complex data structures straight off the wire from people who might be attackers. What is this, 1976? These guys aren't programming smartcard chips without an OS, they're writing a text messaging app that runs on phones in which the OS is written in Java. Why the hell is the core of their secure messaging protocol written in C?

The second thing we notice is that the bug occurs due to a type confusion attack whilst parsing JSON. JSON?! Yup, SCIMP messages apparently contain binary signatures which are base 64 encoded, wrapped in JSON, and then base64 encoded again. A more bizarre or error-prone format is difficult to imagine. They manage to combine the efficiency of double-base64 encoding binary data with the tightness and simplicity of a text based format inspired by a scripting language which has, for example, only one kind of number (floating point). They get the joy of handling many different kinds of whitespace, escaping bugs, etc. And to repeat, they are parsing this mess of unneeded complexity .... in C.

Compare this to TextSecure, an app that does the same thing as the BlackPhone SMS app. TextSecure is written by Moxie Marlinspike, a man who Knows What He Is Doing(tm). TextSecure uses protocol buffers, a very simple and efficient binary format with a schema language and compiler. There is minimal scope for type confusion. Moreover, the entire app is written in Java, so there is no possibility of memory management errors whilst trying to read messages crafted by an attacker. By doing things this way they eliminate entire categories of bugs in one fell swoop.

So yes, whilst the BlackPhone team should be commended for getting a patch out to their users, this whole incident just raises deep questions about their design decisions and development processes. The fact that such a bug could occur should have been mind-blowingly obvious from the moment they wrote their first line of code.

Indeed. I once read that the limiting factor on how high we can build skyscrapers is not structural engineering but the explosion in space occupied by elevator shafts as you try and go higher and higher whilst preserving reasonable wait times.

No, if you read the article they clearly state the keys were fraudulently obtained. If you obtain keys via fraud, they are almost by definition not "good keys".

RedPhone is free and open source end to end encrypted telephony that works OK (not amazingly, but as well as a typical commercial VoIP app does). People authenticate each other using their voices.

This is very true. However, WhatsApp appears to be a counter-example. They are deploying full end to end encryption and instead of ads, they just ..... charge people money, $1 per year. WhatsApp is not very big in the USA but it's huge everywhere else in the world.

The big problem is not people sharing with Facebook or Google or whoever (as you note: who cares?) but rather the last part - sharing with a foreign corporation is currently equivalent to sharing with its government, and people tend to care about the latter much more than the former. But that's a political problem. It's very hard to solve with cryptography. All the fancy science in the world won't stop a local government just passing a law that makes it illegal to use, and they all will because they all crave the power that comes with total knowledge of what citizens are doing and thinking.

Ultimately the solution must be two-pronged. Political effort to make it socially unacceptable for politicians to try and ban strong crypto. And the deployment of that crypto to create technical resistance against bending or breaking those rules.

That's not what the second link says is happening though.

My reading of the second article is that there is the following problem. Website G2A.com allows private re-sale of game keys, whether that's to undercut the retail prices or avoid region locking or whatever is irrelevant. Carders are constantly on the lookout for ways to cash out stolen credit card numbers. Because fraudulent card purchases can be rolled back and because you have to go through ID verification to accept cards, spending them at their own shops doesn't work - craftier schemes are needed.

So what they do is go online and buy game activation keys in bulk with stolen cards. They know it will take time for the legit owners of the cards to notice and charge back the purchase. Then they go to G2A.com and sell the keys at cut-down prices to people who know they are obtaining keys from a dodgy backstreet source, either they sell for hard-to-reverse payment methods like Western Union or they just bet that nobody wants to file a complaint with PayPal saying they got ripped off trying to buy a $60 game for $5 on a forum known for piracy and unauthorised distribution.

Then what happens? Well, the game reseller gets delivered a list of card chargebacks by their banks and are told they have a limited amount of time to get the chargeback problem under control. Otherwise they will get cut off and not be able to accept credit card payments any more. The only available route to Ubisoft or whoever at this point is to revoke the stolen keys to try and kill the demand for the carded keys.

If that reading is correct then Ubisoft aren't to blame here. They can't just let this trade continue or it threatens their ability to accept legitimate card payments.

In this case UBISOFT has a dispute with gray marketeers and decides to take it out on the customers instead of taking it to the courts

Ubisoft might not be able to take them to the courts. For example if these resellers are in China or developing countries where the local authorities don't care about foreign IP cases. Technically speaking, it's actually the customers who have a dispute with the resellers, because those resellers knowingly sold them dud keys. It's not much different than if you buy a fake branded Mac, take it to an Apple repair centre and they tell you to go away. Your dispute is not with Apple. Your dispute is with the entity that sold you the fake goods.

Look at it another way. What if these "resellers" were actually selling you random numbers instead of game activation keys. When you try them out and discover they don't work .... your dispute is not with Ubisoft. They would be totally correct to deny activation of the game. Your dispute is with the fraudster who sold you the invalid keys.

Legally speaking that would be a dispute between you and the bogus reseller. They sold you something that was effectively counterfeit. There's lots of well established law in this area.

How many unauthenticated remote exploits in a HTTP stack does it take to lose a customer?

Not many, I should imagine, but your comment is irrelevant because there were no such bugs fixed in this Java update. The way Oracle describes these bugs is horribly confusing. Normally we expect "remotely exploitable without authentication" to mean you can send a packet across the network and pwn the box. If you actually check the CVEs you will see that there's only one bug like that, and it's an SSL downgrade attack - doesn't give you access to the box. All the others are sandbox escapes. If you aren't trying to sandbox malicious code then they don't affect you.

Java doesn't have security holes like C or C++ .... or so I was told.

Then again, I haven't seen too many security patches for gcc or libstdc++ or glibc

You're comparing apples and oranges. The "remotely exploitable bugs" in this Java update, like all the others, are assuming you download and run malicious code in the sandbox. GCC and glibc don't have protecting you from malicious code as a goal, in fact Linux typically requires all software to be installed as root no matter what. Obviously if you never even try, you cannot fail.

The interesting story here is not so much that sandboxes have holes (look at the Chrome release notes to see how many security holes are fixed in every update), but rather than the sandbox makers seem to be currently outrunning the sandbox breakers. In 2014 Java had security holes, but no zero days at all - all the exploits were found by whitehat auditors. Same thing for Chrome, people found bugs but they were found by the good guys.

I'm not sure if this means the industry is finally turning a corner on sandboxing of mobile code or not, but it's an interesting trend.