I don't agree. A toaster can be abused and run into the ground without hurting your wallet too much. People tend to sit up and take notice when you start talking about dropping half their yearly net income on something. Now, that doesn't mean they have common sense -- plenty of people have all the sense of a turnip, but to suggest they put a car in the same category as a toaster is absurd.

As for those sensors... no, it takes more than one failed sensor to blow up your engine. There is an oil pressure sensor, and an oil level sensor, at minimum, in the vehicles you mention. But let's ignore that and say they both simply give up the digital ghost without warning... the car's onboard computer will still trip out when you exceed the odometer tracking the miles since last oil change. But even if all of that technology fails, there is still one thing left to save your engine from mechanical oblivion: Your own eyes and ears.

Engines that are low on oil tend to run hot, and they tend to run hard. They don't accelerate, they feel like they're losing power, and dear god do they make noise as they die. All that overheating metal is going rat-a-tak-tak and war-warrrrr-waaaaahhhhhrrrrr.... as it dies, smoking and belching steam. If you fail to notice all of these signs, you don't deserve a car.

I can't really think of a time when I wouldn't want to be naked in front of my PC.

Oh, and P.S., you have no clue what revenue actually means The largest company on the planet only pulls in $134.77 billion a year. Wal-mark did $469.2 in sales last year.

Nah, it's just regular cryptography. The definition of DRM requires that the owner of the data and the attacker be the same entity.

You seem to be laboring under the delusion that companies only exist, and earn profit, for one year. Then they return to their ancestral home in the profit river, where they lay their nest eggs and golden parachutes for the next generation, and then die.

Alas, companies make revenue year over year... and some of the biggest frauds this country has seen have taken decades before the government acted to stop it. So "Trillions of dollars of revenue" is not an inaccurate statement. At least not if you have more brains than an anonymous coward...

They always have friends. And an armada of satellite wannabe bullies.

On the contrary, my point is that everyone the bully thinks is in the former group is actually in the latter. Once the bully weakens, his former "friends" will inevitably betray him.

I'm not even asking for stuff like network whitelisting. That'd be nice of course, but if you want that level of control you can root your phone and stick a firewall on it and achieve that goal. I'm talking more about the fact that it'd be nice for the app to be able to identify my phone without identifying me, or to create an account without having carte blanche to all the accounts I already have, just some really basic crap so that complete strangers can't lift my telephone number.

It'd also be nice if Google's own apps weren't the permission hungriest of them all. It'd be nice if you could say that a Google app asking for access to your SMS messages was suspicious, but it's not, Hangouts not only asks for that permission it frequently pops up alerts trying to convince you to let it take complete control of SMS messaging on your phone.

I'm attempting to make a point about the privacy of medical information and the way most people don't really understand it. Your point about your telco spying on you isn't really all that interesting so there wasn't much to say about it. They can already collect the information from the existing sensors if for some reason they wanted to whether you installed a medical app or not and unless the medical app was deliberately sharing with your Telco relatively trivial security mechanisms would stop them from getting anything from any additional sensors. The information isn't really all that interesting to them in isolation and doesn't give them much about you they couldn't already have gathered from information available to them.

The reason I was discussing what I was discussing is because if you're going to start having tin foil hat fantasies about your medical privacy it's important to actually understand the level of privacy you actually have and what that information actually is.

1. You mistake "state" for "government" (that's a very usual fallacy, though).
2. You suggest that spying would be better if performed by privates (?!?)
3. China is more capitalist than the US? The Chinese State has total or partial ownership of every business in China. You just completely contradict your own initial point!

"So, do you have a current backup?"
-- Every tech support number you'll call, anywhere. Ever.

And yet, the single most basic thing you can do to protect your data gets overlooked by hundreds of millions of people, because it's just too burdensome to drag and drop from "My documents" to "My external drive". Viruses, malware, and crap like this would have gone the way of the dodo bird if people would just follow the most basic. advice. ever. regarding the maintenance of their computer. You wouldn't run your car out of oil after neglecting to change it for 15,000 miles, would you? So why do you do it to your computer?

You can't expect journalists to have a grasp of basic math. Or the general public for that matter. Otherwise the headline "Company X settles 'largest lawsuit in history' at Y billion dollars" wouldn't have the impact it does after realizing Company X's revenue was Z trillion dollars. And who knows -- with the instability of bitcoin pricing, it might well be worth $30 million next week... -_-

#unintentionalirony

The persecution complex that prompted you to put that line in your .sig must be debilitating.

Cops arrest people who are released without charges all the time. No cop witnesses a crime, and then calls the DA to ask permission to make an arrest. The cop witnesses the crime, makes the arrest, makes his report, and then the DA has to decide whether to press charges or not.