Uh. You don't know how to spell "weird". I don't think we should take you very seriously.

Amen! So a OS maker is not supposed to take steps to secure their OS? Nonsense, Kaspersky.

Since upgrading GMail late this afternoon on my iPhone and iPad, over a dozen old emails--I mean well over a year old--have been resent. None were in Drafts or elsewhere than the Sent Mail folder, and I can detect no pattern to it. Has anyone else seen this?

Seriously.

"...happen to be naked" as if it's a bad thing.

In fact, in my experience, the majority is wrong quite a lot.

Fortunately, this is not a popularity contest. The question is whether the government can compel a company to rewrite its products to make it easy for the government to snoop on its customers. If they can, it's only a small jump to forcing companies to include a backdoor in their products in the first place.

Actually, ignoring the unique hardware key associated with the Secure Enclave (because it can't be read by anything except the Secure Enclave), each iPhone does have several other unique identifiers that can be used to lock OS firmware to the device, such as the serial number, the cellular radio IMEI, and the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth MAC. As already pointed out, Apple could hard-encode those values in the firmware update and sign that. The resulting binary could not be used with any device where those identifiers did not match. Bad actors could not just change the numbers to match a random victim's phone, because the Apple signature would not match the binary. This is discussed at http://arstechnica.com/apple/2....

It is true that even having the source code for firmware creates a risk, but that risk cannot be turned into an exploit without Apple's secret key. And of course if someone gets Apple's secret key, all iOS devices are in trouble.

I think the real issue we should be talking about is whether the government can force companies to redesign their products to help the government spy on their customers. If it can do this, then why can't the government similarly require that circumvention mechanisms be built into devices in the first place to make snooping easy?

Inefficient for a computer, but very efficient for a person, who has significant dedicated hardware for language processing. That's why using combinations of words makes a good password for a human to remember, but hard for a computer program to crack. https://xkcd.com/936/

Oblig xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1102/

Oblig: Chinese Room by Daniel Dennett & Neil Cohn.

A ZX80 was functional without a cassette deck (although you couldn't save your programs to cassette tapes -- no big loss!), completely unlike a Raspberry Pi which is completely unusable out of the box.

Ah, you don't care about it so much that you're bitching about it on Slashdot. I see. Besides, why would you think you're telling someone they cannot make an edit? You're just stating your opinion and he's stating his. If you bowed out of the conflict, it's your own damn fault you lost. Whinging about it here and then turning around and claiming you don't care is just icing on the cake. I bet you're a real go-getter!

I've never understood the hype of the Raspberry Pi because the Pi is only a computer, not a full computer system. After you buy all the other components you need and piece them all together, you've spent way over $25! If you want a cheap, easy to learn computer system, make it a ZX80-type system with everything included but a monitor, then provide a TV connection. It would suck on an old low-definition TV, but on a typical TV these days it could look great.

One of my favorite wiki feebles is when they told Philip Roth he’s not “credible source” on book he wrote

Absolutely correct! People cannot be sources for Wikipedia. Previously published material is the only allowed source for Wikipedia. And you can't just write a web page yourself and use that for your source. Now if Philip Roth wrote an article about his life and published it in a reliable periodical, that article could be used as a source, just as if I wrote an article about Philip Roth and had it published that article could be used as a source, too.