The tool just teaches you how to redistrict - but has absolutely no real-life outcome. "It's full of smoke-filled back room dealmaking by political insiders with little public input" - highly doubtful that this will ever change.

It's like watching Man vs Wild.

All your base are belong to us.

"The intruders do not appear to have stolen passwords of Gmail users, and the company quickly started making significant changes to the security of its networks after the intrusions."

"Does not appear" falls kinda short of a satisfactory statement. Considering the intruders took two days to get the source code, one wonders what else they were up to in that period of time. I'm changing my gmail password now..

From TFA: "By clicking on a link [sent on Microsoft Messenger] and connecting to a 'poisoned' Web site, the employee inadvertently permitted the intruders to gain access to his (or her) personal computer and then to the computers of a critical group of software developers at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Ultimately, the intruders were able to gain control of a software repository used by the development team."

I don't know about you, but I'm quite shocked at how an innocuous thing like this can lead to the theft of "one of Google's crown jewels". Are their security practises that lax over there in Google China? And, considering that this happened to Google - a leading Tech-savvy company - how many other corporations and conglomerates have already been hit by a similar attack? Banks? Military? Oil and Gas? Heck, MSFT?? After all, TFA reported that it was a "lightning raid that lasted less than two days".

And yeah, while TFA sounds like Luddite fear-mongering, I think it's a valid concern for everyone.

TFA says "The person was able to play with it and see the iPhone 4.0 features. Then, Apple remotely killed the phone before we got access to it."

It's interesting that Apple has this killswitch -- looks like a good security feature to have. I wonder if regular iPhones have it, and if it's available as a 'value-added-service'. Previously, the killswitch was only there to disable apps on the device.

As a side note, Apple builds in a bunch of other phone-home elements in their prototype/developer devices. They get cellphone operators who offer the iPhone to do a lot of field testing for them. Where I work, one of the dev people said pretty much everything you do on that phone gets reported back to Apple. Maybe that's how it is with other companies' products as well.

In TFA, JWZ said "It was ridiculously difficult, because I refused to fork the MacOS X code base: the desktop and the phone are both supposedly within spitting distance of being the same operating system, so it should be a small matter of ifdefs to have the same app compile as a desktop application and an iPhone application, right?"

FLAMESUIT ON
At the risk of being shot down by every MacOS/iPhone hacker here... There are two main points that JWZ makes which are quite interesting:

1) I refused to fork the MacOS X code base
2) the desktop and the phone are both supposedly within spitting distance of being the same operating system

So the beef he has, while totally valid is because of:

a) refusal to fork the codebase
b) assumed that both iPhone OS == MacOS X

Hmm. I understand the refusal to fork the codebase, but if that's what's _required_ then that's what needs to be done to have the app on the iPhone. And what's the other bit about "assume" making an ass out of you and me? Ditto for the OpenGL/OpenGLES rant...
FLAMESUIT OFF

I used to work as a helpdesk consultant -- this was waay back 13 years ago -- and part of my duties was to lug bigass monitors for the company from one workstation to another (they were a publishing house with a lot of DTP guys). One day I lifted a monitor the wrong way, and long story short -- the back pain stayed with me right up until a couple of months ago.

Used to be I couldn't lie face-down for more than 10 minutes before my back would start hurting. And I couldn't carry my kids much. One day the pain got so bad I went to a chiro, and the guy did manage to straighten out my back. Hurt like heck when he "realigned" my spine, but that 13-year-injury is no longer there.

So yeah, I used to think they're bogus. But now I dont. YMMV.