But what I wouldn't do is go somewhere to blow up random civilians. Even if it was effective. And I certainly wouldn't pretend that God wanted me to do it.

Are we discussing the behaviour of governments, or you personally? Because you start out by saying you'd never do something that the USA routinely does (drone strikes) and does in ways that no other country does. So if this is meant to be some kind of pissing match between the USA or Iran then Iran wins, as would basically any other country.

Iran with nukes is more war, not less. And if there is going to be a war, I want the US to win it, because in the end, we'll at least try to do the right thing, and failing that, we'll leave

Iran with nukes is probably just Iran with nukes, same as lots of other countries that have nukes but don't invade random other places. But you keep on believing in American exceptionalism if it makes you feel better. The rest of us will mentally place the USA right where it belongs - rock bottom on the peace tables.

You must have missed the giant Viacom lawsuit that was won by Google largely because of the absolutely insanely massive ContentID effort that was put in place after the acquisition.

If you have never checked out ContentID at a technical level, do - it's quite astonishing. It's very hard to argue that YouTube is a platform for massive copyright violation these days given that ContentID was thought by many to be impossible, yet there it is.

Java is ugly. It is not complex by any reasonable definition, unless you're comparing it to BASIC or something. Part of the reason Java is ugly is that it's so simple, in fact - it eschews syntax sugar and various conveniences that'd make the code shorter and prettier.

I tend to feel that Java is on the wrong side of programming language trends here: there's a lot to be said for simplicity, but some languages are showing that you can add a lot of convenient and helpful features to Java-like languages without exploding the language's complexity budget. C# for instance is widely agreed to be more pleasant to use than Java (at least, widely agreed by most devs with experience in both that I've met).

On the JVM unfortunately we've been kind of limited until now in the "simple, beautiful yet performant" space. There are languages like Scala that are static enough to be reasonably fast, but there seems to be a growing consensus that Scala is very complicated. I've seen it be called the C++ of the JVM. There are lots of dynamic languages like Ruby, Python, Groovy, Clojure etc that gain simplicity and terseness by abandoning static typing entirely but sacrifice maintainability and performance. There's Frege, a Haskell dialect that I have no experience of, but lazyness-by-default seems a controversial choice at best.

Lately there's also Ceylon and Kotlin, which seem to be exploring a new space in PL design that can be summed up as Scala but made a lot simpler. The syntaxes are terse and compact, the typing is static, the IDE support is developed alongside the language, and they compile to both the JVM and Javascript. Kotlin is my personal favourite. The feature set eliminates much of the tedious boilerplate in Java without adding much potential for code maintenance disasters or excessive complexity. It also increases safety, like by making nullability a part of the type system.

It means it makes Chrome more secure.

This sort of thing is why Debian is so often seen as a realm of knee jerk lunatics. Debian isn't keeping up with features Chrome needs to be more resistant to browser exploits (which are used to install ACTUAL spyware) and the answer is "Chrome gathers statistics on how it's used so it's evil and we don't care if it breaks". WTF?

Unfortunately the amount is fixed in dollar terms and does not automatically adjust for inflation. When that exemption was set it was considered a large amount. However currently it's $97,000. The dollar is not an especially strong currency. That's about 60k GBP+. You can earn more than that just by being a decent computer programmer in London. And of course the OPs kids don't have to worry about the threshold today but rather in 20 years. There is zero incentive for Congress to be lenient here because now they have FATCA they can actually collect tax from anywhere in the world - it's taxation without representation which is ideal for them.

The USA charges its citizens for evacuation, unlike all other countries in the world who also evacuate their citizens from trouble zones ..... for free.

Will the U.S. government pay for my travel? How much will it cost?
Departure assistance is expensive. U.S. law 22 U.S.C. 2671(b) (2) (A) requires that any departure assistance be provided "on a reimbursable basis to the maximum extent practicable.” This means that evacuation costs are ultimately your responsibility; you will be asked to sign a form promising to repay the U.S. government.

These costs have bankrupted people in the past, leaving them wishing they had not been "rescued".

US citizens are in many places treated better as a result.

US citizens are becoming systematically toxic and are treated like shit as a result, especially by the financial system. FATCA is a completely insane law and has resulted in banks around the world terminating accounts and refusing to make loans just because someone is a US citizen or has a green card. And unfortunately what many don't realise is you cannot get out of US citizenship just by paying a few thousand dollars as the summary suggests. There is a crippling exit tax that forces you to pay tax on the assumption you just sold all your assets. It's a form of capital control, except one you cannot escape from due to the long arm of the US government. Even better, USA can decide that the citizenship revocation is invalid if they think it was done for tax reasons. They can just keep forcing you to pay taxes forever, if they want to. It's basically modern slavery.

My advice to the story submitter - don't do it!!. US citizenship is already dramatically worse than citizenships in other civilised countries and it's getting worse every year. In fact it's akin to a form of slavery. US citizens abroad have no functioning representation in Congress and they are routinely exploited as a result, citizenship based taxation being only one example.

Swedish and Belgian citizenship together is a perfect combination! Why would you want anything more?

The important thing about Electrolysis isn't performance, it's that it will allow them to finally sandbox. My respect for Mozilla has lessened over time (and I used to be a minor contributor, back in the early days), partly because they don't seem to care about security as much as the Chrome team do. Chrome prioritised sandboxing over many other things and is a lot more robust as a result. Firefox is still just one JS engine exploit away from total ownage of the running system.

That article says the autopilot was disconnected and "[The investigation] will help us to understand whether there was a problem with the Airbus or in the training received by flight crew in manual aircraft handling at high altitude."

In other words they don't know what happened, but at the time of the near stall the plane was no longer under the control of the auto pilot. BTW if a plane suddenly finds itself overspeeding, climbing to lose speed is the right thing to do.

Can you cite one please?

Do pilots still need licenses in the age of autopilot? Well yes because machines aren't infallible.

Not quite. It's "yes" because most people would be unable to get over their fear of flying in an entirely autonomous plane, not because we need heroic pilots to override the computer when things go wrong.

Consider that about half of all aviation accidents are traced to pilot error. The percentage of crashes caused by autopilot error is zero.

Seagate is correct. Putting a hash on the website doesn't improve security at all because anyone who can change the download can also change the web page containing the hash.

  The fact that this practice is widespread in the Linux world originates from the usage of insecure FTP mirrors run by volunteer admins. There it's possible for a mirror to get hacked independently of the origin web page. A company like Seagate doesn't rely on volunteers at universities to distribute their binaries so the technique is pointless.

A tool to verify the firmware is poetically impossible to write. What code on the drive would provide the firmware in response to a tool query? Oh right ..... the firmware itself. To make it work you need an unflashable boot loader that acts as a root of trust and was designed to do this from the start. But such a thing is basically pointless unless you're trying to detect firmware reflashing malware and that's something that only cropped up as a threat very recently. So I doubt any hard disk has it.

BTW call a spade a spade. Equation Group == NSA TAO

The issue with Silent Circle isn't their jurisdiction. It's that their code is of deeply questionable quality. They recently had a remote code execution exploit that could be triggered just by sending a text message to their phone. It's been literally years since one of these affected mainstream software stacks, so how was that possible?

Well, they wrote their own SMS parsing code, in C, and used JSON to wrap binary encrypted messages and there was a bug that could cause memory corruption when the JSON wasn't exactly in the form they expected.

The amount of fail in that sentence is just amazing. They're a company which justifies its entire existence with security, writing software to run on a smartphone where the OS itself is written in a memory safe language (Java) and yet they are parsing overly complex data structures off the wire ..... in C. That isn't just taking risks, that's playing Russian roulette over and over again. And eventually it killed them. Remote code execution via SMS - ye gods.

After learning about that exploit and more to the point, why it occurred, I will strongly recommend against using Silent Circle for anything. Nobody serious about security should be handling potentially malicious data structures in C, especially not when the rest of the text messaging app is written in Java. That's just crazy.

I think the Gemalto response seems reasonable, actually. The documents suggest they weren't doing anything more sophisticated than snarfing FTP or email transfers of key files, which Gemalto say they started phasing out in 2010. And the documents themselves say they weren't always successful.

NSA/GCHQ are not magic. They do the same kind of hacking ordinary criminals have been doing for years, just more of it and they spend more time on it. If Gemalto are now taking much better precautions over transfer of key material and the keys are being generated on air gapped networks, then it seems quite plausible that NSA/GCHQ didn't get in. Not saying they could NEVER have got in that way, but these guys are like anyone else, they take the path of least resistance.

Besides, it's sort of hard for them to do something about a hypothetical hack of their core systems that they can't detect and which isn't mentioned in the docs.

It's hilarious. For a moment I wondered if the transcript is even real. This makes Eliza look sophisticated.

Q: Which of those countries should we give backdoors to?

MR: So, I’m not gonna I mean, the way you framed the question isn’t designed to elicit a response.

AS: So you do believe then, that we should build those for other countries if they pass laws?

MR: I think we can work our way through this.

AS: I’m sure the Chinese and Russians are going to have the same opinion.

MR: I said I think we can work through this.

He seems to believe, "I think we can work through this" is an acceptable answer to a simple yes/no question. The guy doesn't even have a coherent answer to one of the most basic and obvious questions he could possibly be asked. I thought Comey did a poor job of explaining his position but this takes it to a whole other level.

Why would people not report a SIM as stolen currently? They have every incentive to. They'd need to do so, to get their old number back anyway.

But seriously, if you're a terrorist, you're not going to be fazed by just doing some street muggings to obtain cell phones first. It doesn't matter much if the cards get de-activated a day later. Heck, just point a gun at a SIM vendor and force them to activate the cards with fake data. If the vendor doesn't have the IMSI codes for every SIM in their inventory, they can't even report them as stolen.