So because you choose to have Google profit from your work, you declare everyone else must have the choice taken away from them?

I shan't speak in defence of copyright or "intellectual property" but I shall speak in defence of rule of law. And while there is copyright law then the largest corporations in the land must obey it as much as the man on the street. The worst possible progression of copyright is for big businesses to either sidestep it with lawyering or (as seemed to be happening with some recent lobbying of Cameron in the UK) changing of the law specifically to advance particular corporations' business aims.

If we are to have an alternative to copyright then it must balance rights and obligations. For example, a Stallmanesque philosophy would require Google to release the source for its digitisations so Google is at no advantage over any other individual or organisation which wishes to redistribute works. Google isn't even offering this.

No, there is nothing good about what Google is doing, except to the very short sighted.

If I use any modern mobile 'phone then I assume anything I put on it and where it is can be read by the OS vendor and the carrier. The environment is too tightly controlled and lacking in openness for me to be able to come close to verifying otherwise. We can assume that the facility is only used on rare occasions because one significant revelation of data transmission will put people off buying the product, IOW the only thing keeping anyone safe is the "you're not important enough to matter" card.

But if you're doing anything remotely interesting, whether that's in industry or activism, you'd be a fucking idiot to use the routine features of a smartphone.

Look, it's an open secret. Even college newspapers routinely cover it.

If you think some stranger on the Internet is going to provide exclusive "evidence" of people who were taken on or had some hand in recruiting then you're a fool.

My experience begins and ends with observing that exercise. Otherwise I wouldn't be here making the criticism.

I can't say the same for some of my ex-schoolchums. :-(

This isn't a recruitment exercise. It's a behaviour observation exercise.

Any submitted solution is likely to be collaborative and/or copied from the guy who first posts it.

My experience is that the British intelligence services tend to hand pick people starting with informal chats at the elite universities. If you've spent the last decade awake and seeing how the government uses the services for particular special interests subsumed in politics then you'd have to be lacking completely in moral fibre to pursue.

So the CPU can't keep up with routing? Really? (As in, evidence please?)

Sorry, which activity is CPU bound here?

Conjecture: People who have the money to buy "commercial real-estate and mult-unit dwellings" aren't stupid enough to be swayed by a bit of retouching of pictures and the only person being conned is the Realtor[tm] who pays the photographer. "It took me all that time to make all these changes!"

Micro-soft shill!

To treat him exactly as any other criminal would be necessary, sufficient and unlikely.