What about hardware backdoor activation? There had been rumors of intel putting 3G radios in vPro cpus, and there had been backdoors in FPGAs. There had been a nice presentation in DEFCON17 around this topic.

For starters, SMIME don't hide metadata, with SMIME you encrypt the content, not headers. And if well there is TLS for securing the communication between servers, afaik is not very strong as protection or avoiding MITM attacks. But using SMIME and TLS is a start that should be used while no better solution is implemented.

I recall MySQL having a wrapper that used to take care of this

Did they name it "daemontools"?

There is a "respawn" option, which one can use in inittab.

You would never use inittab to start services, and inittab doesn't even exist anymore.

For other critical services, one can choose among wrappers, cron jobs, monitoring via syslog or SNMP, inter-process communication, and more. Do you argue we should stop using such techniques and go for a one-size-fits-all, infallible system?

Writing a second cron-job to respawn your service is a laborious mess, with unnecessary overhead. SNMP or other monitoring is what we've been reduced to, but who the hell wants to pay for around-the-clock employees, or get paged in the middle of the night, just because a few services might need to be restarted? And let's not forget, CROND CRASHES, TOO. What's monitoring cron and keeping it running?

Do you argue we should stop using such techniques and go for a one-size-fits-all, infallible system?

Yes, we should stop using such *hacks*, and get an init replacement that will start services properly, and keep them running. It's not a complex concept. Windows NT has been doing that since inception, and Linux is seriously missing out. It won't eliminate the utility of SNMP, cron, etc., but they will see less abuse.

If you'd like to start hacking on init... more power to you. Get it to monitor and respawn services in a sane way, and yours can be a competitor right up there with upstart and systemd.

Yes but does the blood taste of chicken

Actually I think it's more to do with the fact that old PCN & GSM phones gave off quite a bit of interference (I remember my first GSM phone would cause the fire alarm bell mechanism to ring when it was finding the network or someone rang me). Most phones these days hardly use those spectrums and anyway you've still got keep the phone in flight mode.

Obviously the organization was Hooters!

If is standard and interception proof will be the required "mail" protocol in a lot of governments, organizations and companies. If the first implementation is not easy enough to use it will be shortly improved.

The US plugged the leak, no new documents has been leaked lately, just been releasing the June documents in a timely rate. And while there are no new leakers, the government keep promising that they did not ever, is not doing, and will stop doing whatever is in this leaks, hoping that there are people with lower IQ than body temperature (in celsius) that believes them, while now there is no way to truly verify that (they probably will even release their own "leaks" to keep the illusion of that all will be legal from now on).

Anyway, for what Snowden did, (if i owned a big enough company) i would give him a good salary even for doing nothing. And if can do something useful, something that he would enjoy doing, the better.

Knowing that there is a ticking bomb under your feet don't automatically disable it, you are not safer than before. But let you take measures to try to be safe in the future, before it explodes in your face. For making the world better you must know where it is broken.

This one with security/encryption built in from the ground up this time. Would be more interesting that instead of the comments of Microsoft (with deep ties with the NSA), yahoo and google (both may not be very happy with the NSA, but still must give them their users accounts info by law) the article focused on comments from people from i.e. the IETF for implementing it as an standard in a more worldwide (even personal) way.

What's James Blunt going to do now?????

What you don't understand is that the government can see in the dark. Even if you invent a new kind of dark, they'll just respond by making sure they can see in that, too.

Silence and secrecy are the wrong answers.

I understand the desire for local control and have no problem with it, I'm just trying to understand why it's believed that that's always best, when I can't think of a reason why except for "ideologically it's what I want".

Here it is: When you have local control, two things obtain: (1), the number of people affected by the control being exerted is minimal, and (2) the people being affected (or afflicted) have a much larger input as to change or continuation, so that if said control turns out to be onerous (as many of the FCC's radio-related controls are), the locals can actually change them -- or, likewise, if they prefer the current state of affairs, they are considerably more empowered to maintain the status quo.

On the other side of the coin, control exerted at the national level, as the FCC is currently a poster child for, is completely resistant to local control, circumstance, or intent, without some unusual input channel (bribery, corporate shill, real estate slinging, etc.)

The FCC used to matter in that the communications below 30 mhz -- AM radio, etc. -- were critical to the system, and said communications go all over the place depending on the time of day. We no longer depend significantly on these communications, and the FCC's relevance at a national level is therefore in some doubt.

Understand now?

my brain decides that we are listening to music now, and nothing else

Try a white-noise generator for a while, instead.

Android phone?

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mizusoft.relaxandsleep