It was never about enlightment. Sauron just wanted to get the government to use his all-seeing eye for royalties. It worked.

That we're even considering it "IP" is a (bigger) problem all its own.

since it is Windows 8 it has the option to turn SecureBoot off, for fuck sake even Microsoft's own device, the Surface Pro, allows SecureBoot to be turned off

We don't know if it's an ARM system, which (unlike intel ones, like the Surface Pro--buyers, look carefully for that "Pro") do have the Restricted Boot bug.

but like the issue of UEFI we do have a pretty good idea about it

Given the above, and that Microsoft can even dictate which archs can turn off Secure Boot and which cannot in the first place...no we don't. Have they signed a contract to not change their mind? (Remember, IE10 Metro went from plugin-free--"yay, no more Flash!", said many--to one of the browsers with its own Adobe Flash--"wha!?", the many wondered.)

Pretty much. At the extreme, "offer walls" basically offer Joe and Jane in-game currencies or other bonuses (depending on where used), if they are willing to pick a sponsor's ad(s) on it and watch videos, give their address and email and phone-#, take surveys...

So yeah, you can already get a slice of the pie. Just don't expect a substantial one unless you really like the service you find those ads on (you probably won't get much actual cash for them), and do expect to feel dirty and less secure-in-privacy for it.

At the very least, Erdogan's Pave-A-Park Plan is incredibly tacky. It demonstrates everything wrong with an oblivious and uncompassionate government, in orange-juice-concentrate form. I mean, replace a nice park with a historical symbol of war (as if we should remind ourselves to be perpetually on such footing)...and then put a...shopping mall...inside...?

wat.

Maybe Github shut down to...voluntarily add law enforcement backdoors. Yeah. Completely voluntarily. Totally not due to legislation by BSA bribe or anything.

What really catches my eye, irrelevant as it may be to its biology, is the capsid's vague resemblance to a monarch chrysalis.

On the contrary, they were really good at making people and distro maintainers move from their MySQL to MariaDB.

If your doctor told you that you have a disease that make you cough incessantly and will kill you in 3 months, and he gave you a medicine that would stop the cough but not the kill, when there are medicines out there that cost less and do both, would you be happy you got the cough-only medicine?

Calibre is the Robitussin, sure--it makes you feel good, and at least lets you talk without sounding like some sci-fi monster, so it can be used if the other medicines are out of stock--but not adding the bloody DRM is the cure.

Will there be a bug bounty program for our codes of law, or do I still have to be in a corporation and pay them for my fixes?

British badgers: beautifully badass.

I'm game kid and I approve this story.

The manufacturers probably already make them do this, though perhaps less to reduce future harm and more to keep secrets.

Stallman wants users to do exactly that, wrt regulations.gov and others, in the case "when the use of the nonfree software aims directly at putting an end to the use of that very same nonfree software". That's how he developed GNU: until it was more mature (and Linux came along), he used non-free Unix to test.

The BIOS, you say? Stallman's way ahead of you there.