Clearly they are all hacks.

You insensitive clod.

> It looks like Rackspace made, and open sourced, the test suite.

So, vendors can extend the open source test suite to alter the parameters of compliance :)

even slimmer: debootstrap --variant minbase on another partition

more info on debian installation manual.

Any criminal can. Stolen laptop, open or cracked wireless access point.

Good point but the possibilities are varied. It might be that the US or some other state wants to throw money at cyberwar prevention (a bogus issue most of the time), so Israeli contractors have one succesfully thwarted attack in their track record.
Or OTOH Israel has some infrastructure problems and that they fake an Anonymous attack to deter other from trying the same.

After all, everybody can impersonate Anonymous.

An eye for an eye.... an eye squared.
Invalidating 10 good patents as chosen by the competitors would be more fitting IMHO

>I think the important part of the wiki article (English version) is that it mentions nuclear attack orders may be relayed through the station and that there are four others, with additional wiki links to those stations.

oh ok then, they simply want to draw the hackers' attention to the base so that a nuclear first strike can be blamed on a hacking attempt :)

You don't need to devour spy novels or watch 007 all night long to understand one simple aspect of the story (as reported in the summary, at least): once news about X leak out, X is to be considered COMPROMISED.

In this case it is blatant. Something that shouldn't have been there is available? assume the bad guys got it, if it is important, STFU if it's not important.

So, this move from the French secret service is muscle flexing, or counterintelligence (making people concentrate on a decoy), or a way to make openness and free exchange of information look contrary to national interests.

It is not a way to increase national security.

> Some Microsoft guy made some comments thorugh personal channels...
That COINCIDENTALLY reflect the corporate views. It's not astroturfing, never ever.
"As much control as possible" is the corporate view for most corporations. "As much freedom as possible" is the people view for most people.
Well, more precisely, the view is "As much doing_whatever_I_want as possible", which becomes "as much slavery as possible" if you soak up enough propaganda. But I digress.

Yes, the linux stigma is pure speculation.

Fact: google doesn't name linux in its linux based offering.

Fact: NOBODY ELSE, who sells stuff based on generic things available through other channels, stresses that fact. They want to make the consumer think they are different from all the rest.

How many drugs are based on generic substanced that have fallen out of patent protection? how many say that in the ads? NOBODY of course. "Get FOOSPIRIN B, with the same active ingredients that you find elsewhere for less!!!" sounds like a convincing campaign?
Neither does "Get Google ChromeBook, it runs LINUX, the same operating system that you can install for free into your existing laptop, else you can install a different flavour of LINUX in our ChromeBook to ruin our business model!!!"
Neither does "Get Ubuntu! if you have problems with it you can always fall back on Debian or Mint!!!"

In my grand unified theory of everything this move is a psychological operation. "Stay away from those firearm nuts, stay away from firearms" is the idea. Soft terrorism. Unsurprising. (Terror is useful for those who already have power, not for those who want to obtain it, see examples that range from the kings, the French revolution, the adverse effect of indiscriminate attacks on the public opinion).

The second reason: mass criminalize everybody first, then pick up the troublemakers and jail them as it suits you, the law is on your side. This is very handy and a symptom of failing democracy.

Fighting crime, not that I am an expert, should be to WEED OUT the innocents, not increase the database of suspects, that's increasing noise.
But even if I am wrong and you need the database, the best data is to be gathered at ISP level, FB and GOOG work on subsets. So why not asking them instead.

Some might believe removal of firearms is in the collective good, they might be right, but to me it is just the same old story of powerful interests looking to augment their power by reducing everybody else's. Nothing new under the sun.

Linux has the same confusion. Ubuntu to Android, all labeled as Linux.

No confusion whatsoever, one is GNU/Linux, the other barely Linux.

Stallman was right AGAIN.

Oh wonderful. Mandatory therapy for everybody just to stay alive.
Who controls the therapy controls the world, democracy becoming a meaningless term.

Oh wait, I think that it IS the plan already. Through money, drugs and/or pollution. The invariant for our societies, no matter if fascist, democratic, socialist, is that the single man/family has less power and control of his own property. Technological advancement could be used to empower the individual, instead it empowers the system. For economic reasons (which are engineered by the system itself). Orwell was a rookie.

Hey, but nobody wants us to have fast data transfers.

If somebody did, by now we'd have symmetrical DSL instead of reduced upload capacity and the cloud would be about putting some more personal servers somewhere else in the net.

In fact we should be peering instead of dealing with ISPs. The hurdles are legislative, not technical. No amount of google glasses can potentially spy you as much as the ISP can. I guess that theoretically, the ISP can access all traffic but the one encrypted with one time pads or certificates exchanged outside the network.

Therefore Google aims to become an ISP if it really hates us :)

This is like saying: "riding an unicycle is easy, because you can put its wheel into a bike and ride that one instead".