If they want to talk to him, they only need to ask and I have no doubt it would be granted.

The problem is that this would be an utter waste of time as anyone who had ever been through a police interview would tell you since the Assange would be free to terminate the interview at will by simply walking out of the room where the prosecutors could not follow.

Also, anything they mention in the interview would not help their cause one bit. Either they would make it obvious that the charges against him are utter drivel that will not stand up in court by having no worthwhile evidence to put on the table in which case he can be fairly sure that the idea of him being sent onwards to the US to be thrown in a supermax next to Mr Manning is really on the cards or they would have a tons of evidence that they put to him that makes him realise he really does stand a chance of being convicted of some sort of statutory rape charge and thrown in jail in Sweden then deported as an undesirable upon his release.

Obviously the flight back to Oz would have to stop in the US to refuel along the way :)

PS - I know he has lost his Oz citizenship but if Sweden were deporting him as a convicted criminal I reckon they would send him there anyway then just let the US intercept him enroute.

What happens if the police kick shit out of you in your own home for 8 hours with the FBI who shoot you while you are being interviewed?

What the constitution states seems to be pretty irrelevant in light of the shooting of Ibragim Todashev. It seems plausible that the officers in question just decided to execute him as they could not prove anything or because they were waterboarding him in his kitchen sink and he accidentally drowned.

If they can get away with murder, they can probably get away with the odd illegal search.

Do you trust anyone else not to share your data with the NSA? If you do I have a bridge to sell you.

No, its not. If you could edit the hosts file programmatically without jumping through this many hoops then you could force entries into the hosts file that redirected traffic to your bank to a different server.

Just the administrator account should be enough, but too many people use administrator accounts for day to day stuff just so they can install software. On linux you end up needing to put in the root password or use sudo for tons of stuff, windows have tried to avoid this but some things like editing the hosts file are such dangerous edge cases compared to what most users do that they need to be protected differently.

To be honest, there is a strong argument that you should NEVER edit your hosts file on a windows machine (ok, I admit I do not always follow this advice). If you want to do crap like that maybe you should run a local DNS server just so you know what you are doing, especially if you run a linux server on your network since DNSMasq is so easy to use. It might still involve editing a hosts file, but at least it is a hosts file on a separate server and becomes the central point for all local DNS changes you make. Using DNSmasq also lets you test anything you are testing on a number of devices on your private network without having to keep track of hosts file entries on each device.

Seriously, DNSMasq is a much better shout for most stuff like this if you need to do it regularly.

Why should the company have to regain any trust anyway? The fact is the US government is currently mandating that they do all of this crap and issuing them with gag orders so Google can't tell anyone.

The only way Google can get out of this is relocate their HQ to russia, exactly where the Brin family escaped from. Even if they did this it would probably be no better as Putin is not exactly Mr Privacy.

The truth is that companies cannot do a damn thing providing congress and the supreme court keeps saying this stuff is all fine and dandy. The US Military and spy agencies calls the shots since 9 - 11. Sometimes I often wonder if they just sat back and watched it happen knowing it would strengthen their hand for decades.

I am not sure you have any clue what your talking about here.

The UK government can dictate policy to BT because they can pass laws that BT (like any other company doing business within our shores) has to follow and we do not have a list of constitutional rights quite like you do in the US. There are cases when UK laws are shot down by higher powers like the EU or due to us signing treaties on human rights but nobody has yet taken this to our supreme court to decide whether the right to watch violent rape porn is actually included in our basic human rights. I say violent rape porn because that is all the UK government is currently looking to ban and it is currently a long way from being law.

They are also looking at making all ISP's (including ones that are not BT like Virgin) also provide an opt in / opt out to other porn though at the same time but then will just be a case of you telling your ISP you want to watch porn on the net and then them letting you. I am not saying this is not a crap idea or doomed to failure, but I do not think it is quite the same as a ban on all porn. I actually think it is doomed to failure as the filter will have so many false positives that most people have to opt in just so they can browse wikipedia even if it does become law a few years down the line.

Currently though we are still at the point of an unpopular prime minister in a weak coalition government that barely holds a majority moaning about something that he knows will be popular with his own parties supporters in order to distract from the shit storm he is currently trying to keep quiet about as a result of his party being openly bought by various lobbyists from the cigarette and alcohol industries. He knew that his recent climb down on cigarette packets having to be plain was going to be unpopular with parents, so tried to come up with something else that would win him a few votes back or at least distract them.

Finland could ignore these treaties. America would go to the WTO crying foul, the dispute settlement body would probably agree, then finland would have to either repeal the relevant law or suffer the consequences. In this case the most likely consequence would be the US getting to take retaliatory measures of some kind against Finland, either an import tariff on Finnish goods or maybe even getting to crap all over finnish copyright.

This might be just what we need to get rid of Linus as he loses the copyright on linux to some huge american corporation (obviously this bit is a joke).

Some people are just too stupid to train in this manner. This is especially true if you are a system admin for an office that employs dolly bird PA's just to make tea and look pretty on the front desk when a client comes to visit.

Blokes can be just as stupid too though, I had to clear up a PC after one of our support team clicked on one of these BS fishing emails as he installed some software that "cleaned" his Windows XP PC. He just has an inability to pay attention to what he is doing. He will most likely spend his entire like manning a helpdesk phone line helping people allow popups (We have to use them as many elearning courses are designed to only work in a popup and we host other peoples courseware).

Often these people are employed in dead end jobs earning no money so training them to take their head out of their arse is like trying to get blood out of a stone. Hiring someone with a brain would cost more and they might not need it for the job they have to do anyway.

Not that any form of network security for this is a magic bullet either. Unfortunately there is no one solution. All you can do is try and block as much as possible at the email gateway via a decent spam filter and make sure people only have the minimum admin rights on the PC's that they need to do their job. The final layer of protection though is making sure you have a damn good disaster recovery policy to allow you to recover a machine from nightly backups easily and can also rollback to previous days until you get a clean image.

In the real world that is simply not an option. I have to be able to view PDF's on my work PC.

This original question seemed to be posed by someone wanting to protect a network, in that case he definitely cannot mandate no PDF's. The trick to being a good admin is doing your best without getting in peoples way. Blocking all PDF's at the mail server would definately get in peoples way.

What about the victims right to privacy? Ok, they had a right to life that was violated by their killer but didn't they also have a right to privacy? What if the victim has no clothes on when they are killed should it still be ok to publish the video of their killing?

I actually think this is somewhat similar to child porn in that it should be illegal not just to make snuff movies, but also just to be in possession of one. This would make online distribution a definite no-no.

Why?

Selling 50,000,000 copies for $1 generates the same turnover as selling 100,000,000 for 50c. The difference is that processing 50,000,000 transactions is cheaper than processing 100,000,000 so they make more profit by selling half as many at twice the price. These are just figures plucked out of the air but they are designed to illustrate how choosing a higher price point can make you more money even though less people can afford to pay it.

Since I am not a record company accountant I cannot be 100% sure which way they make more money, but I reckon they probably choose to keep prices high for a reason.

I hadn't checked in a while my hourly rate as I have been salaried for the past decade so was plucking figures out of thin air. After having worked it out it seems more like 2 minutes to earn each dollar.

Home TV screens being bigger mainly.

Also, there are now other forms of entertainment to take into account too like computer games.

I think if you take the amount spent on movies, tv, music and games all together you will find that it has not change much over the past few years. It might have gone down a little actually but that is probably just due to the means of delivery getting cheaper so the costs to and user going down as well when you take inflation into account. I think if you compare the cost of an album in the shops now to in the 60's the price has actually fallen.

The big change though is that piracy has become easier from a technical perspective with the advent of digital recordings so people who refuse to pay for their entertainment find it easier. Also, there is the notion that nothing is lost by that extra copy somehow making it acceptable.

Are you sure? I earn $1 in about 5 minutes so it seems fair to pay that to me, especially for the amount of time and effort someone has to put in to create a song that I like. The problem is that to most young people (who engage in most piracy) that 1$ is worth far more since they earn less. A cup of coffee that last about 5 minutes costs twice that and can't be consumed twice.

When I was a kid I would go round gathering up supermarket trolleys to return that people had walked off and left the coin deposit in. I could not understand why the hell anybody did this, now I can. If I lose $10 I am slightly annoyed but nothing more, to really piss me off I would have to lose a few hundred. If get too drunk and miss the last train home I just get a cab all the way, that costs about $80.

This is the real problem, the vast gap in earnings between those of us who have a real career type job and the low wage McJobs that are open to young people. That vast gap in ability to earn money means that the price points chosen for lots of products like DVD's and music now are very high from young peoples point of view. Young professionals are often the target market for music and entertainment now, and that means if you are still a student the prices chosen seem obscene.