"leaving law enforcement a way in" like a rubber hose?

FTFY.

Obama puts it another way, more bluntly: "There's no scenario in which we don't want really strong encryption." However, the president says the public itself is driving concern for leaving criminals no way in: "The first time that an attack takes place on millions of bank accounts in which it turns out that we could have prevented it with encryption, the public's going to demand answers."

Existing cars are pervasively computerized. We seem intent on hooking them, along with everything else, up to the Internet because the immediate cost of hooking things up to the Internet is low and decreasing and there are promised benefits of convenience, efficiency, or safety. Control does not make the list.

My choice of "timebomb" was poor. I meant only that something complex, valuable, and easy to connect to would be in danger of getting compromised, and that being able to receive patches OTA would mitigate this threat better if it didn't make the thing even easier to connect to.

There is some risk of seeing manufacturers ship (literally) cars that are half-baked, but there are still consequences to messing up. While the prohibitive costs of a recall force some more attention to detail during design, they also can act to discourage manufacturers from acknowledging and fixing things. There's moral hazard either way -- it's difficult to design one's way out of sloth and risk. From a security perspective, cost / benefit analysis and "appropriate" security is often emphasized over defense in depth, so there's risk that resources spent on, eg, private cellular access are resources taken away from other system hardening efforts rather than something layered on top. It's often the case that the defender isn't really playing to win.

If you don't allow updates, then a drive-by-wire car with a bunch of wireless systems (keyless entry, keyless starter, bluetooth, cellular, 802.11p (DSRC), ... ?) connected to its bus is a timebomb. If updates are allowed, at least there is a way to fix problems on a larger scale. If that update mechanism is the open Internet, then it presents an attractive large-scale, low-risk target. An OTA update mechanism that is privately networked (eg, dedicated cellular APN) might at least make mass attacks by relatively unsophisticated attackers unlikely. If that means building in two cellular radios, one that's for dedicated use by the car and another that's completely isolated that's for "apps", it's a small cost delta.

The open Internet isn't necessarily the one that is most suited to things.

Other side effects include aggression and being banned from sports competitions.

The person who brought the challenge to the regulator's attention was a graduate student. I don't think he has very much money, just training and time.

We know it's you, Linus!

The day Windows 10 was announced in place of 8.2, meaningful support for 8.1 seemed to die.

Praising the agencies as silent heros, he nevertheless admitted there had been errors by the agencies since both of Rigby’s murderers, Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, had been known to the security services for some time.

So, they were being watched, to some extent. According to the article, one was being watched more than the other, but the one who made the comments on some US-based service was the one they were watching less.

However, he admitted there was legal uncertainty about the duty of internet companies based in the US to cooperate with UK agencies due to conflicting laws in the US. The company that did not inform the agencies has not been named by the government."

It doesn't sound like they were asking in quite the right way.

Downing Street sources said Cameron did not expect to make any more progress on communication data laws this side of a general election. But he made clear his support for greater powers for the agencies, saying: “Are we prepared to have a means of communication using the internet which we do not have the means to intercept? My answer is no.”

Unless the Prime Minister means "using rubber hose cryptanalysis," he's bound to end up disappointed.

The data the article presents really just shows a ton of Netflix traffic breaking the Internet for other users. Shouldn't all that adaptive bitrate stuff make it NOT break other flows? Apparently, not so much. Did Netflix respond by making their video delivery less aggressive, the way Bittorrent did with LEDBAT? No.

What did we learn?
1) Netflix breaks any link it's on. Period. Full stop. The rest of the Internet only gets through when Netflix isn't peered together with it.
2) Therefore ISPs -- ALL ISPs -- bad.
3) Therefore Net Neutrality so Netflix can break the Internet.

Of course, one might be tempted to conclude that big data users should work out their own peering and financial arrangements so that they don't mess up the Internet, but that would make one a corporate shill.

I did a registration system for a pre-school this way thinking having everything land in a spreadsheet would be about their speed. It was kind of awful. You think of

Google as having a bunch of great APIs that let you do all sorts of fantastic things, but stuff that would have been absolutely trivial to do in MS Office 15 or 20 years ago using VBA (minus the web part, which was barely around) were hard to impossible to make happen.

Want that input form to look nice? Want the submitter to be able to preview it or edit what was on it later? Good luck doing that without building a whole different front-end. Google docs lets you use a form to add lines to a spreadsheet, but that's pretty much where the magic ends. I hacked in editing the thing by sending out links that pre-populate fields in a second spreadsheet which Google docs copies over to the first spreadsheet. Yes, it's stupid. No, it's not me. It's Google.

If you're a developer on Google docs and reading this... thanks for making it possible to add a line to a spreadsheet from an ugly form. I am so sorry that they make you do these crappy "20%" effort projects that you're not really proud of and that aren't good enough to help anyone. I know you probably want to put in the time to make a great HTML5 form builder or make it easy to manage an entry using a unique key or validate input in some way, but it's so difficult to focus on those Friday afternoons. So, don't worry about it. Those charities didn't need that technology anyway. Right?

It's such a fantastic case. Netflix is the largest traffic source, and they try to run their business with almost no infrastructure. Their computing and storage is almost all Amazon -- a direct competitor -- and their distribution is through ISPs that also run competing TV services. Some fraction of the disputes with Comcast and Verizon have been over inter-city distribution. The argument from the ISPs is that while the customers have paid for the access portion, the way Netflix or their CDN partners have been using their networks they've essentially been dumping long-haul responsibility on the ISPs. When they're negotiating with Netflix for "paid" access, some of it is about CDN hosting or local interconnect rather than just "now we'll peer at 300G in SF". Because this is America, Netflix's pleas to have "all traffic treated the same because it's an Internet right" are more about infrastructure cost avoidance than about maintaining YOUR rights. Net Neutrality says the ten millionth copy of a Breaking Bad episode being streamed from California to Texas is just as important as unique data you send on that link, and if that stinks it up so be it. It doesn't get us to the obvious technical solution of a cache-box in-state (if not in-city), but is a convenient hammer to pull out in commercial discussions over CDN hosting. So, as much as you may love the internet and feel there should be some kind of totally impractical rights framework involved to ensure that there is a flag available to wrap around the Internet's abuse, consider spending ten minutes thinking through the motivations of the actors involved. At the end of those ten minutes you may decide that you want Netflix holding that hammer -- the ISP's leverage has been talked about a lot and brinksmanship is apparently part of what makes America great -- but at least you'll do it realizing that all of the companies involved would like you / the Internet as a hostage.