"the spy service was provided with information captured from unsuspecting travellers' wireless devices by the airport's free Wi-Fi system over a two-week period."

Like what? Mac addresses? Mac address + IPs it connected to?

"The document shows the federal intelligence agency was then able to track the travellers for a week or more as they — and their wireless devices — showed up in other Wi-Fi "hot spots" in cities across Canada and even at U.S. airports."

How? Did CSEC have a deal with companies providing wifi?

I guess that depends. I have a 7 year old Mac mini. It was a Core Duo. Over the years, i've put in more ram, an SSD and even found a Core 2 Duo cpu that works in it. I just ordered a newish mac mini, not because the hardware isn't good enough but because it'll only run 10.6 (10.7 with some haxing). It will however make a fine linux box.

Newer macs though aren't nearly as upgradable unfortunately.

I find it somewhat disappointing that despite the connectivity options we have today, we still so far from being able to access our own data in a secure and consistent manner that's easy for everyone. It's even more disappointing to see a company like Dropbox solving only the "consistent" and "easy" parts of it. I say it's disappointing because I have problems with the encryption scheme [1] and non-decentralized way they're currently doing things.

As it's been pointed out [2] and essentially beaten to death recently, these things may not matter a whole lot to most people now, I think you have be pretty optimistic to think they won't matter in the future.

[1] https://www.dropbox.com/help/28/en
[2] https://medium.com/surveillance-state/b804de3b5b

I don't think anyone could argue that having skills in both areas isn't a good thing. I've been a sysadmin for 20 years and i've had to do basic development over the years (apache modules, ldap-ifying applications, etc). When it comes to troubleshooting complex problems as a sysadmin and the whole team is whiteboarding, you can tell pretty quickly who understands how systems work below the user interface. This is often only learned through writing code.

The opposite is true for coders too. With a few execeptions, the most competent developers I've worked with have had sysadmin duties at some point in their career. Not that long ago, I had to sit down with a Sr. (Java) developer and explain load balancers and TCP session state.

I understand that wikipedia is a non-profit and has limited resources, but why not just do it? This doesn't seem like a radical stance at all. This should be on their roadmap. Given wikipedia history of taking sides on issues like this, they should be pioneers in doing this sort of thing.

Plain text HTTP is on its way to becoming a legacy protocol.

I couldn't agree more. I've never experienced support like we get from MS. Just recently we had a 12GB .dmp file analyzed and in less than 36 hours they were able to tell us which shitty 3rd party driver was causing our boxes to BSOD. The vendor that shipped this driver (mentioned in the parent above) is so far, completely useless.

"Judge Gerald Bruce Lee of U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia [...] also stripped Zhao, from China, of her U.S. citizenship"

What the hell? I was unaware that there are different classes of citizenship. What if a person born as an American did this?