And someone probably forced her to buy a sports car. Sorry, sympathy for losing his daughter, but there really is only one person to blame and we all know who it is.

The article states = 'Your computer is now only as secure as that database of keys held by Microsoft, which means it may be vulnerable to hackers, foreign governments, and people who can extort Microsoft employees.'

Yes, because your everyday user's are so much more capable of protecting their data on their computers.

Silliness...

People can't really be so naive that they think other countries, even allies, are not also spying on us. Really?

Anyone with half a brain also already knew what they revealed. Our major short-fall was immediately after 9-11 the majority of Americans decided that it was okay for the government to impose a much more comprehensive surveillance program. Not only was it allowed to move forward, most actually welcomed it. Now, we realize what we have freely given the government permission to do and we're not happy about; big surprise.

Snowden wasted his time, put people at risk and didn't actually achieve squat that couldn't have been done in a safer and more reasonable way; but hey, there are a bunch of over-privileged impressionable kids that will hold him up on a pedestal.

Manning was a poser that was used by an organization and threw him under the bus; they got what they wanted and Manning paid the price.

Holding either of these children up as examples of 'standing up to the machine' is just ridiculous; they both fell on their swords for absolutely nothing.

Your kidding you had to wait a whole 60 minutes, that's almost an entire hour. Well, I hope you recover from your trauma.

How many nurses do you need for your flu shot? One to hold your hand, one to process your insurance paperwork, one to tell you everything will be okay and then one to give you the shot?

TWP

Yeah, terrible that 99.99% of the country isn't have problems. I guess we should throw the whole thing in the trash for the .01% of idiots that can't press a button or show up to work on time.

Come on, don't fall for the press' coverage of only negative news and then paint the entire picture that color.

That is just plain silly. How many support calls do you think they dev would get when a paranoid user denies access to the internet for a twitter client. Come on, this is nothing but FUD; all operating systems access stuff; most mobile OS will tell you what it is going to do. If you don't like the permissions it is request, then don't install the app.

Most of your 'free' software, even the apps that don't use the internet, are ad-supported, which does need the internet. If you don't like that, then purchase the full app or again, don't install it.

Finally, I have to agree with the statement in the article that many of the permissions that are used are just poor development practices. For example; maybe the dev was testing storing data on the SD card, decided not to do it, but failed to remove the permissions from the manifest. The app would show that it still needs access to the SD card, but the program never actually uses.

Another way to help protect yourself; don't always run as root -- amazing how many of the people here complain about the permissions, then essentially give every app full permissions to their phone. These are the same people that use the same password on every site and run their PC OS as root too.

Excellent, run your phone rooted so when you do sideload a malicious app it will have full access to your phone.

I agree, unions are awesome. I allows mediocre employees to receive the same compensation as the excellent employees.

Most Americans are afraid of whatever is in the news the most. If they researched either topic even a little bit they wouldn't be afraid of either.

Free? You are paying for it, they just tell you it is free. If it were free, then you would pay zero taxes and they would still provide those services to you. Oh wait, you mean like low-income families in America.

Nothing worth anything is free......

You can't use that strategy in two cases. First, if it is a manned mission, you can't just 'hope' it doesn't fail. It must NOT fail. Second, when you invest in a program to send a spacecraft on a ten year mission (ie. surveying Pluto) you can't have it fail when it arrives. What, then start over and wait another ten years? The strategy that you are advocating is due to a lack of two things; the lack of engineering expertise and lack of funding to properly execute a space program. Don't mistake those shortfalls for a better engineer program.

The URL is not encrypted when it travels over SSL (https), nether is anything on the request string. So, if you ever see something https://myfavoritebankingsite.com?username=sillyperson&password=1234 then you need to know that the username and password are sent in the 'clear'. Just to be clear, I mean unencrypted.

If the URL was encrypted then the packet would have to wander across the entire network hoping to find its destination.

Do you really think that the carrier doesn't already know that information? Your ISP does get that information; it has to route your packets using something other than magic fairy dust. They even use that information to shape their traffic and optimize their proxy servers.

So do those 3rd party SMS apps, email clients, dialers, etc. This is strange or unusual; it just got a lot of press.