If only it had some concept of citizen's right to privacy. Instead, it breathlessly celebrates the death of the 4th amendment.

++this. The "Three hops" rule, using a connection factor of 190 (the average number of friends on facebook), you're not a target of surveillance if none of the 5 million people that are friends of friends of friends of you are foreign nationals. http://www.theguardian.com/wor...

(You'll have to drag the slider to 190 to get the 5 million figure.)

The quality hasn't declined - it's just that the media's effort in 24-hour news channels is being deployed to make money rather than inform the public. They're very good at what they do: engage eyeballs and prepare them to absorb commercial messages. CNN and FoxNews (and other news channels) are knowingly crafting over-the-top material and - far from being concerned that they'll be called out by comedians - they're thrilled every time one of their segments makes it to the Daily Show. Beyond that, they return the favor and run segments showing how they're getting the attention of John Stewart. There can never be a negative news story when it's all about capturing your attention.

Regarding Oliver, I think he did a good job of pointing out that the abstract idea of government surveillance hasn't captured the public's attention, and helped the public understand that it's simply and clearly wrong for the government to be Hoovering up all your bits, especially your naughty bits. Citizenfour showed how Snowden was equal parts earnest and naive to think that people wanted to know the extent of these government programs. As he was explaining these programs to Greenwald, he was just becoming aware of how difficult it was going to be to effective in disclosing the leaked information he was leaking. Snowden himself was shocked to discover, after reporters found the figure in his material, that over a million citizens are specific targets of the US programs.There was really only a tiny window for the leaked information to be news before Snowden and where he'd be able to live became the news story that replaced it.

I didn't say she's hypocritical, although she would have to be if she was for women's rights or gay rights. I'll leave it up for her to choose which poison she's harboring.

when she was CEO of HP......obviously she must be against women's rights and gay rights. Thanks for letting us know, Carly.

Seriously, Tim should be proud to have brought out the schoolyard bully in Carly.

So the single byte key is derived in some undiscovered manner from the password. Given how weak the encryption is known to be already, I wonder if one out of 256 encryption keys turn out to be a zero byte. In such a case, the encryption would leave the file unchanged. (Could be patched with "key=key?key:1;")

But in this case the key size is 1 byte, and only applied to the first 128 bytes of the file. So there's that.

Well, the OTP was an 8-bit integer, and only applied to the first 128 bytes, if that makes it even more mind-blowingly insecure and even stupider.

There's an outfit in Florida that's advertising your choice of new or restored 1964.5 Ford Mustangs. If you get one "new" they create a VIN that refers to their company - if you get one restored, you get the VIN of the donor car they rebuild. They upgrade safety and emissions to some degree, but I don't know how they meet modern requirements for their "new" cars. (See http://revologycars.com/faqs/ )

The real issue that we're going to be up against is whether 3rd parties will be permitted to continue to manufacture replacement parts. Soon every part incorporates an RFID, and the car refuses to start without all the RFID tags matching the authorization database. Perhaps they'll start with all the parts that they can justify as safety-critical, 'cause, you know, for the children. The government could even push for this in order to make sure that mileage and pollution critical parts are kept unmodified, 'cause, you know, for the environment. Then when the complaints pour in that it's anticompetitive, they'll authorize third parties so long as they tithe back to the original manufacturer, 'cause, you know, for the corporations. Finally, after some number of years, they'll just deauthorize all the parts, so you have to scrap the car, 'cause, you know, you need a new car, or just because they can't be bothered to keep supplying security updates for the buggy software.

If a malevolent SWF file could be copied and hosted elsewhere, how could Adobe reasonably claim to have corrected the vulnerability at all?

I'm not defending the insane assortment of completely unnecessary sizes of barrel connectors. I'd agree that it's all horseshit - it would only make some sense if the sizes were related to the voltage, such as one size for 5v, one size for 12V, one size for 29V, etc. It's hard to imagine that manufacturers really get big money out of continually changing power connectors and battery pack designs - it never takes very long for ebay & amazon to start selling third party supplies and batteries. My personal bugaboo is how far laptops need to be torn apart to replace these connectors - and - stiff connectors that seem designed to stick out just perfectly far enough and stiff enough to maximally damage the receptacle.

In any case, two conductive contacts ought to be enough for any small or mobile device's power and data needs, and neither is there any no good justification having distinct connectors for networks, disk drives, displays and accessories. USB is among the most phenomical kludges of all time, with all the different connectors, profiles, and adapters - and Apple, as well as HP, and others have gunked it up with all manner of proprietary kludges to negotiate high power charging. The USB-C "standard" connector actually has 24 teeny little pins, doubled up from 12 just so the connector can be rotated 180 degrees. I really don't think it's a step forward to use a 24-pin connector to power a laptop.

One connector is enough when the data is wireless. And it seems like you already got started on the insane assortment of completely unnecessary sizes of barrel connectors just by mentioning them.

If you insist on data being passed over a connector, packets of serial data could be passed over the power connector by modulating the power of the supply or the impedance of the device. Think of POE.

There are more than TWO orientations. A simple cylindrical connector could allow "any" orientation (OK, any orientation that's pointing in the right general direction.), in the manner of almost every non-Apple laptop power connector and pre-USB cellphones.

Especially now that there's all number of wireless data connections, going back to a simple "retro" power connector should be easier than any connector that has to handle both power and data.

When the code executing the CPU resides on the hard drive, compromising the hard drive gives you everything. In addition, hard drive controllers and network controllers could be compromised to provide direct leak paths without involving the CPU using DMA.