Whats there stopping this corporation to take some of that money and help develop that opensource solution. Whats wrong with you? Anything government does is away from some private sector people... Example, they could hire private accounting corporation to run the whole tax system.

Its the government, what did you expect :P Government does everything in way its most expensive as possible.

If malware dint use it before, its sure going to use it soon enough after this paper.

How do you know they haven't done that all ready? What we see in civilian side is always few years back from Military/Super secret spy stuff. You dont think army spends all that money just for guns and ammunition do you?

Hand up anyone thats suprised US goverment IT systems got hacked once again...

So software is removed now, it would be interesting to know what it was doing in those car first place.. Google mus have known they would be world in trouble if extent of their snooping comes out.

One of these claims? Something MAY happen because XXXXX.. Like those people that may escape dont know cops are after them all ready? Seriously what a joke. If their methods are/were so effective then how come there's still pedophiles free? Why aren't they all in jail? Because their methods are not so effective, except spying on all people illegally. People in power will always try to abuse those powers, if not for anything else then secure their own position of power.

I'm wondering, considering the massive amounts of money Microsoft has, the army of developers they have, just the sheer size of corporation, how the heck they cant write a single piece of software that does not have some exploitable vulnerability in it. With that massive amount of resources at its disposal and they write still crappy software... Almost like hey, lets hide all these deliberate backdoors in all these software we ship...

And yet they are very much humans and capable of making errors. Where do you think all those bug fixes comes from? If dev's would be such super humans you describe them to be, there would be no need for bug fixes ever, since their code would be perfect from start. Personally i have newer understood why Linus stopped having separate stable with bug fixes only time to time.

Its humans writing a code, humans are not perfect.. If this tools actually works as advertised, it should make fine addition to us not so perfect coders toolbox. Somehow i would have expected that compiler would warn you about it going to leave piece of code out. But i guess that's shows how little i code actually.

Personally i do not accept default option where Cannonical gets info even on local searches. So i don't use regular Ubuntu. I got couple older laptops that runs light version of Ubuntu.Thank god no mandatory warrant-less searches there. Im all for Cannonical to gain ad-revenue if they need it. But not at expence of them knowing what i search in my local repositories. I do coding sometimes and most of that is done either case by case basis or just for myself. I also have documents that im contractually obliged to keep secret. Do i want someone else to know what i search locally? Hell no. What i don't understand why don't they just ask during a installing system: Would you like to help us spy on you and gain even more advertisement revenue by letting us see everything you search on your computer, over internet or locally?

Sure makes me wonder what the heck has government of England got it self involved into... Must be something really bad if PM is making threats to news outlets. Personally i'm glad Snowden decided to reveal what e knows. Now we all get to know exactly how much NSA has been spying on us all. Long live the queen, down the PM.

Sad day indeed when politics try to dictate scientific truth. My thumps up for scientist that refuses to be puppet and sell the truth.

In some countries this would constitute as entrapment. And made collected evidence void for any legal purpose. Somehow im sure internet will soon reveal this persons identity, address, etc... Since he has nothing to hide, right?

Sounds like feds are going to have uphill battle in court trying to prove all these beyond reasonable dought. After all in court its not what they say, but what they can actually prove. Lets just hope some innocent people docent come forward and claim those bitcoing to be stolen by feds from them... Would be embarrashing, not to mention blow feds case out of water...