You mean an ATO, obviously.

In fact, at least when it comes to the web presence of anything to purports to be a journal, one Web of Trust site would already be up to the task, with browser plugins available. Users just need to crank down the "Trustworthiness" know on any flim-flam journal site they come across. One just needs to hope that hordes of creationists and climate-change deniers don't then start gaming this for their own agendas.

I've looked over the comments on this thread with frustration, seeing that the conversation swiftly derailed into being *just* about Crypto. The MCTL covers all areas of technology that may be deemed militarily critical. It is not really possible to find a publicly hosted .gov or .mil site that gives much info any more, but this university page stills shows the 20 areas covered: http://www.wright.edu/rsp/Security/T1threat/Mctl.htm , including things like space systems and nuclear technologies.

Ubuntu's current practice is a 5 year term for LTS. Microsoft's 10 years leads to supporting pretty ancient stuff (in Internet time, anyway). They were forced to extend XP support all the way to 13 years since Vista and Windows 7 can't run reasonably on a lot of the hardware that XP was happy on.

For the previous decade, I personally think 5-8 years somewhere is a good LTS term for operating systems and kernels.

Now that CPU's aren't really getting faster, just more cores and energy efficiency, perhaps 10-20 years may again be reasonable.

Are there any distributions that are known to plan on using this? Debian would be a natural fit, I suppose.

I'm surprised. I thought 8.04 LTS, 10.04 LTS, 12.04 LTS & 12.10 were the only currently supported releases.

David Brin often discusses the solution to this on his blog: Watch the watchers. http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2012/11/is-law-enforcement-going-dark-dilberts.html?m=1

TFA incorrectly called this a zero day. It has to be known to be actively exploited in the wild first.

Is there even any good proof that all this tracking is even more effective for the advertiser's customers, than not tracking?

Exactly. The FBI doesn't have to have gotten the data directly from Apple or NSA hackers or somesuch. However, you can't discount that the hackers might have been motivated to lie in order to smear the FBI, too.

Oops. Need to check if I'm logged in when I comment. Above comment I'm replying to here was mine.

Advertisers and sites that depend on them don't want to admit that choosing to use a certain browser and allowing itts default settings *is* a choice. They are also free to request the user to turn DNT off before they serve up key features. They apparently *really* don't like the idea of having to explicitly ask, "can I follow you wherever you go after this"?

XP, Win7, and Server Core are affected, but somehow, Vista isn't!

Not to belabor the obvious. This is one reason open source, over time, is more secure that closed source. Which would you rather rely on, software that has source code anybody can look at, or software that only the development company and the military of the world's sole superpower can look at?

Of course, nefarious elements can put subtle security bugs in open source projects, but one hopes over time that the community is able to find and eliminate them.