This response sums of much of what I would have said, and I'll augment it with a note that your perspective on what has been long known versus what is acknowledged in public is exceptionally naive. The only treason happening here is that of our government against its own people, and therefore against itself. As for the United States doing anything to significantly reduce the headcount for private contractors acting in intelligence roles, you're once again demonstrating your ignorance of reality; the majority of this nation's intelligence apparatus is indeed made up of private contractors these days. Welcome to the 90s.

Russia and China have plenty of secrets, just like every other sizable nation on the planet. Nations don't tend to be willing to give their secrets to anyone. That's not how it works. Please do try to grow up and enhance your knowledge of these concerns before accusing others of lack of sophistication in their views. Have a great day in the meantime.

In Atlassian's case, usage of their products is actually about as widespread as it appears. I say this from a lot of firsthand knowledge with installing, configuring, and managing their products in a lot of environments.

What exactly do you mean when you say "locked down server?" Unless you mean "disconnected from the Internet and/or sitting behind a NAT gateway that requires additional authentication via a VPN or other means to traverse," this sort of vulnerability doesn't depend on anything more than having the product(s) accessible to an attacker over a network connection.

Windows is absolutely not VMS. They share a common founding father, but (Open)VMS is still easily considered far more capable and forward thinking in many respects than Windows ever has been.

What they're referring to is blocking of site access on NIPRNet, which is the "unclass" side of US military network operations, but is still subject to additional scrutiny and a strict requirement that no information that has been classified be stored on connected systems. This is standard protocol bordering on the boring for office communications in the military, and is absolute non-news.

Nobody is actively working (well, okay, not openly working) to restrict communications viewed by active duty DoD personnel on their personal computers while utilizing Internet connections not-uplinked-in-the-barracks-or-other-stupid-places-where-you-know-your-traffic-is-being-logged-shipmate. Military personnel are keenly aware that they face serious legal penalties for improperly accessing and or disseminating classified materials. This is not difficult to understand.

It's worth noting that in this particular case, I firmly believe Snowden acted as a patriot and is absolutely not the traitor he's being painted as by the administration and various members of Congress. I say this as a former service member myself (Navy) who also held a TS/SCI clearance. This young man exposed wholesale disregard for our Constitution on a massive scale, and it's been happening at an increasing pace for about twenty years. I ardently hope he finds asylum somewhere safe.

In most such cases he will soon run out of money, either his own or that of VCs, and the problem will be resolved.

Bieber is a lesbian, not a pedophile, at least not that we know of.

The parent post is an outstanding example of mods failing to read more than a handful of words into a post before modding it "+1 Insightful." In fact, the parent post is breathtakingly stupid in its utter failure to even demonstrate an understanding of which organization was responsible for the textual change at hand. To mods active now who are endowed with reading comprehension skills, please mod the parent post down.

I think you've reacted a bit harshly, and certainly with a high degree of ego, to the GP. My reading of the post chain doesn't actually accuse you of being a troll, but points out how someone might draw that conclusion in haste. Perhaps you should slow down a tad and engage that self-touted ability to think on your own before replying again.

I think you took my post entirely too fucking seriously.

I must object to this fucking view, on the grounds that the F-word is very versatile.

Listen here meow.

I'm willing to bet the number of women who give birth greatly exceeds the number of men who give birth, and given the fact that the world's population continues to grow, a phenomenal number of babies are being created every day. Why are you angry about this?

You know what? I've got my convictions for sure, but to hell with the original disagreement. I've been up all night watching over my youngest daughter; she spiked a 103F fever about 12 hours ago out of nowhere, and I rushed her to the ER with my wife as soon as she called me at the office. Your last comment hits home with me in terms of examining where I can do better on some things, and I apologize for my original profanity. Email sometime if you like.

The extrajudicial killing of an American citizen is absolutely an impeachable offense. I don't care if you don't like that, it doesn't change reality. Reference previous notes regarding our political climate for why nothing is likely to be done about it in the near future. Republicans are just as much to blame for this as any Democrat.

That's hilarious. First off, Big Oil is a big problem. The practice (and it is very real) of essentially handing petroleum interests billions of USD worth of tax breaks/incentives/whatever-people-want-to-call-it-these-days is phenomenally poor policy. Second, global warming is a fact. I've never said it isn't, merely asked people running around screaming about whatever the flavor of the week pulp media talking heads are spouting off about to slow down and examine all available sources of information before adopting alarmist positions concerning outcomes and what's needed over say the next decade. That's a pretty far cry from being a global warming denier. I'd also be delighted if people would spend a little more time talking about kids starving under bridges instead of cozying up to debates on things they somehow find easier to talk about. I suppose you'd have to have reading comprehension skills to understand this, though. By the way, what's your carbon footprint, big guy?

Bitcoin, along with other novel developments in cryptocurrencies, is an interesting thing to think about and play with. I certainly do. I also care about other currencies, namely several examples that are by definition fiat. Again, you're probably just skimming some text and thinking "oh boy, I bet I can use this against him!" It didn't work out for you.

Actually, my favorite language as a kid was C. Naturally, I played around with various BASIC dialects as well, but even with those there were things you simply couldn't do without what amounted to ASM routines expressed in hex, so I had to deal with that as well. It's amazing what kids can do when their parents don't artificially limit them. Speaking of kids...

I moved out of my dad's house at 17. We couldn't get along back then, partially due to some older family history and partially due to problems between my stepmother and I at the time. Long story short, I've been working since then, and took my first professional programming position in Atlanta doing telecommunications coding for the platforms that drove VRU/IVR systems for BofA, SunTrust, etc when I was 18. It paid about 70K at the time. You're correct that I'm 32 now, and I'm happily married with a couple of beautiful kids. My total personal income is six figures, which permits my wife to stay at home with our children without us having to worry about money, which is nice. Incidentally, my military service was in the Navy, where I decided to walk away from a nice paying IT career and cut my income by about 60% in my mid twenties to serve my nation. What would you know about that?

For that matter, and I guess this goes back to the earlier points regarding the fossil fuels bit, I've spent quite a bit of time trying to help in local communities with things like volunteering at homeless shelters and other work. We have millions of people living in poverty in this nation, but folks like you are absolutely okay with yammering on about things that may or may not be an immediate issue for a hundred years. Have you ever held an infant that hadn't eaten for three days because his mom was homeless? I have, and it's not pretty. I guess it's too much to ask that people put some serious effort into looking at the problems we have right now in our society. It requires work and genuinely giving a shit about others instead of just saying you do, and many people don't generally seem terribly interested in either.

I know your type. You like to try to put people into nice little cliche boxes when they stand up to your idiocy. You're having serious trouble understanding how someone can possibly fail to view politics as the usual "favorite sports team" deal, and you're having an awfully hard time dealing with being called out on your games and cowardice. In the grand scheme of things, does it really matter if you carry on being an idiot? I suppose it doesn't. The bigger problem hits when it's a hundred million people walking around in virtually complete apathy, happy with their little notions about how simple things are and becoming increasingly willing to ignore massive civil liberties abuses because it isn't affecting them at the moment. You have a choice in that. Maybe you'll change.

If you're still interested in continuing this discussion, let's take it off list, since it's already horribly offtopic. You can reach me at philip.paradis@gmail.com.