"My reactions may not be as fast as a chip's, but my instinct's are a damned sight better"

For fucks sake, it's not like Apple have a hard thing to do here... if ( recipientLastUsed() > days(1) ) { removeFromiMessage(); } icloud/imessage "logs in" right, not hard..

I think much the same thing about drupal "programmers"

Reads like bullshit anyway. Something went wrong, he throws up the "it wasn't me it must be those evil hackers" defence rather than accepting the blame for putting his device together poorly or letting it go out of range. There would be no way of knowing for sure if another device took control during the incident (because who would build that in to a home made UAV), so he *may* be telling the truth, but if it happened twice in one day either someone is out there deliberately hashing the channels to mess with everybody, or he just went out of range/did something wrong/etc.

Not me, no. I mixed two threads into one comment.

One of the states particularly in my mind intercepts SSL, ostensibly purely for DPI/content Filtering. Knowing their internal structure moderately well, I'd say this is about all their capable of - using McAfee's gateway to do it. A large number of private schools do it, particularly the more wealthy ones, and I've even seen it in a few government departments.

The other comment was more of a fall-over from my days as an exchange admin. Controlling the EXSRV means I can, if I choose, attach a mailbox anywhere I please. Got better things to do than read peoples email though..

The entire department of education out here (.AU) installs a root CA with the express purpose of intercepting HTTPS to "protect the children". There are secondary certs installed at every school so that 802.1x doesn't crap out when you try to sign in (in point of fact, pretty sure windows installs the profile by default when you bind a machine).

There is the potential for creepy, but pretty sure 99% of the techs at schools aren't actually smart enough to intercept traffic. Being one of the 1% who can (actually not a school tech, a consultant, but anyway) I can say in all honesty that there is better porn available for free on the Internet. I'm only going to look if you kick up a fuss about my ability to look ;)

The ability for pretty much anybody to learn Excel, to interface it with a database (with, admittedly, a little help from their local friendly IT guy), to build An entire damned RPG inside a spreadsheet is a pretty good case for defining the most popular, user extensible, spreadsheeting application on the market as Microsoft's Excel. There are a number of reasons Microsoft is big in corporate - Excel is right up there with Active Directory and the OS GUI.

There are two options available to you - 1. Apple's caching server works perfectly (so long as your external IP doesn't change and everyone is on iOS 7 and Mountain Lion or Mavericks) - you download once (on demand rather than syncing the whole repo "WSUS" style) and distribute to many. This saves heaps of space without screwing with the end user, and it doesn't need to be managed via GP or anything like that. 2. SCCM on demand packages. Not an SCCM guy, but if you can replicate the caching server from Apple in SCCM, you're on the way.

Neither of these options gives a flying crap about HTTPS or Authentication.

If I put wheels on your metal office desk you can have a cool (temperature), fast (relative to otherwise stationary), usable (it's the top of a desk), and it will be bug (termite) free. That's all you get.

Working as an internet server is easy, sure, we've had Microsoft's IIS and Raspberry Pi's doing it. Working as a safe, stable, secure one is hard, and for that we have the BSD's.

Pretty sure whoever wrote "House" was looking at Theo and thinking "You know... that fucker could make a great TV show character". Of course it was probably followed by "but screw that IT crap" but whatever.

Which is surprising (assuming he is telling the truth) considering he includes Planet P, Zim, and Diz.

I've always, personally and with no basis in fact, felt that Verhoeven claiming that he didn't read the book is his cop-out for creating a movie that cops so much flak.

Of course the problem with this whole bullshit line is - what happens when the UPS' die.

So *if* they had power cycled and lost the device they were configuring there is a serious dereliction of duty there, or at least gross incompetency from the engineer who configured the devices. They would have known and could have started getting him back to reset passwords or w/e. Instead, there was a huge song and dance because, apparently, at no time was anyone with political power willing to turn to the nearest 6 year old and ask what they thought should be done.

Nice to see some staff around. Assuming you are correct, it is also safe to assume that a privacy advocate is using adblocking software, or has set the DoNotTrack header, and thus doesn't *want* their data protected, because they don't want people collecting their data at all and are making efforts to make this happen.

The problem, however, is that even with AdBlock, and DoNotTrack the end user runs into two issues which are almost insurmountable for the user experience.

1. The user can still be tracked by script, which is where NoScript comes in, unfortunately the lack of scripts makes a large number of websites unusable, and significantly degrades the user experience. More so when, like I suggested initially, most sites are hosting their script files with any third party.

Which leads me to 2. Even with script blocking enabled, there are still cookies to consider, and the same problems arise when attempting to access most websites.

So the average user can not concern themselves too much with privacy, not so much by choice, but because if they do they can't do all the things their friends are doing - youtube videos, the escapistmagazine (who need about 9 different hosts bypassed in NoScript to make their site *work* and are representative of a non-google entity), and the like all become effectively unusable by a group of people who are not highly technically minded.

I suggested originally that there are people who successfully browse the internet in a "private" fashion. Their selection of privacy usually means: Use a search engine that is inferior to google (because most of them are - and the term "google it" is being used even by clients of mine who use bing exclusively). Have a web browsing experience that is noticeably slower (Tor), or one that is noticeably "broken" (NoScript, No Cookies). AdBlock is about the only piece of software that sits, nicely, in the background relatively unobtrusively.

So, to sum up as it were, for the end user the business policy is excellent. They get a great web experience at the compromise of (a limited amount of?) their privacy, corporations have to use less bandwidth, web designers have to host less files, etc. etc. The privacy advocate gets an inferior experience because taking advantage of these features means their web traffic is monitored very closely in the name of better targeted ads.

Note: AdBlock means I don't get targeted ads (except in gmail), and google's work means I get web search results that are relevant to me. I love that it works like that, just pointing out the other side.

Sure, and I agree totally, unfortunately we can not convince others how to host their sites. I use jQuery on my sites, for example, and host the files myself. However, and especially with the advent of "cloud" computing, I have found this to be less and less the case. Google Analytics are another good example - people don't use AWStats (or similar) as much because Google does it all for them.

Great business model, terrible for privacy advocates.

It's not much of a choice - over 65% of the 10,000 most visited websites use jQuery (for example). If you want a semi-decent web experience, giving up on Google is particularly difficult. I don't imagine that it is impossible (queue hater geeks who get away with it), but it's not going to be easy.