This is a journalist "joke" distortion of a serious issue.
This has nothing to do with Lucas' ego, whatever the slashdot lemmings say.
The thing is the company sells pretty powerful lasers, and THE TOTALITARIAN US wants to prevent people from having them.
For one reason or another they cannot "forbid" the lasers -- therefore the old fart Lucas and the fake 'intellectual property' argument.
Clear as day. Although the great brainwashed just refuses to see the issue for what it is.

Slashdot never stops amazing me.
First, it's the absolute uncritical admission by the commenting lemmings of the premises of hte title text. Very few, usually down the discussion even come to questioning the author's spin. And they are never voted up.
Secondly, amazing is the incredible rate at which supposedly "independent" Slashdot spews government propaganda. Prime example is "crimes" of the countries the US ruling elite is working hard to colonize and destroy. Therefore China is perennially guilty of limiting Internet access for its citizens. The fact that US funds groups working for subverting its government (against which the said government tries to protect itself) is never even mentioned.
Both points are clear in this stupid post on the "Russian spies". The whole story is A PROPAGANDA LIE. These people have never been a "spy ring" on the first place, the sensation is CREATED from thin air.
And the lemmings are so eager to "discuss IT deficiencies in the spy ring", never questioning the original lie, nor the spurious, empty "information" about those people's computing habits.
How sadly typical for americans.

Slashdot is a "corporate medium" in the sense that, in spite of its pretence, it constantly peddles lies and disinformation along the lines needed by the rulers of its country.

1. One most persistent lie is about Chinese censorship. Google, a central spying and censorship hub for large masses of users across the Globe, have consistently censored information. For example, it routinely denies some information from some countries (e.g. Germany about WWII and geopolitics around it), which is available in other (e.g. USA). However, the propaganda has it that it's the Chinese that censor, and that the big, big, absolutely unforgivable shame must be placed on Google when it censors in accordance with the agreements with the Chinese government.

The truth behind the latter case us that the USA is waging a propaganda war against China and is attempting internal subversion (similar to what it did with radio-war and dissident war in the USSR in the pre-Internet era). Therefore some amply funded "funds" and "societies" develop Tor-like schemes to allow the Chinese internal subverters to jump over the Great Chinese Firewall.
So in US propaganda Google (of all places, the corporate mega-spy Google!) is "guilty" in "appeasing the Chinese".

Let me repeat: while routinely censoring Germany etc. etc.

2. Now the current article is as much of a lie, as the previous one.
Not only backdoors are built in US-deloped software (Microsoft OS, Checkpoint firewall, etc. etc. etc.), but the US is actively pursuing the docrtine of "Total Information Awareness", not passed a while ago, and split into sub-doctrines now being introduced quite successfully.
Current corporate coordinate policy is towards what Stallman correctly identifies as "treacherous computing".

And Slashdot peddles war disinfo - maybe designed to cover the US agencies forcing hardware backdoors - that it is not US, but China is the big, big villain of the piece.

3. The most amazing part of Slashdot discussions, of course, is that lemmings NEVER QUESTION THE PREMISES of the title post and happily twitter further developing the points of the launched propaganda piece

How utterly disgusting

My idea, in answer to your question, would be modernized Literate Programming combined with outlining.

Traditional-style lit.prog. is done in flat files, and one has to keep the structure in one's memory.

Combination of lit.prog with outlining or folding will relieve short-term memory, eliminate switching between "housekeeping" and navigating and programming, and will scale literate programs.

Secondly, traditional lit prog erects an unsurmountable PSYCHOLOGICAL BLOCK before a programmer demanding that he produced a "polished essay" of a program.

Lit Prog must be used as PROGRAMMING FROM SPECIFICATIONS IN HUMAN language, as programming in pseudocode which becomes precise new meta-operators, and be free from the demand of nice exposition.

Rather, if practised as a tool to help keep notes, ideas, lists, references alongside your code snippets, it becomes an accelerator, rather than a drag on your feet.

And thirdly, lit prog must be - on 90% of uses, which are by practicing programmers rather than paper-producing academics - rid of its dependence on TeX or LaTeX.
The most ubiquitous markup today is HTML.

I wrote a script which implements these ideas, and called it Molly for "MO-dule for LI-terate programming":
http://github.com/unixtechie/Literate-Molly

Looking at the top comments, no one even remembered of the concept explained by Richard Stollman a while back, that of TREACHEROUS COMPUTING. There is a concerted strategy by big corporations to take away the "local" nature of most people's and companies' computing substituting for that some huge externally controlled depositories and services. This is sold with a big imbecile smile of "But this is soooo convenient!! You can get to your data from wherever you are!" to the public One more part of the strategy is to make documents time-destructable, or unreadable to any third parties, by default, by building it into software. Plus add spying on each and every personal computer in the land: it won't be a self-contained piece of equipment any more. MS Vista and successors already implemented (in a crooked and buggy way, as we've seen) most of this functionality. The net result is that it's A BIG CENTRAL CORPORATION that is now in control of a company's information resources, a critical part: try not to comply, and someone there will close the faucet based on some extrajudicial and vague "request" from some unknown being. That is what this drive and "google clouds" are about, my dear friends. Wake up to it.

"Ian Clark of the Freenet fame".. Actually, practically no claim about Freenet came true. The authors advertised "anonymity" etc. etc. at the same time as university professors published studies of statistics about the snooped connections: to any node present on the network for some time it is elementary to collect IPs.
It was painful to see so many users completely duped by the untrue claims, which their authors knew pretty well were untrue (and of which fact one-word admissions can be found buried somewhere in the wiki on their site).

Ian Clark and his collaborator knew nothing of the concept of the Small World (a type of graph that naturally grows in case of such networks), and therefore were not aware of the conditions (i.e. parameters that have to get set for the connecting nodes in their network) needed to make this network self-sustaining, and when pointed to the concept, they chose models by Newman, a prolific publisher of those arising from computer-simulated abstractions, rather than Barabashi (I'm afraid I misspelt his name), who offers much more realistic and practical ideas about this kind of topological network structure.

People do not change, really.
So what I'd expect from this announcement is a repetition of the story with Freenet: a real and interesting problem, inflated claims, and no actual solution, just claims and "development" for years to come.

So I remain a pessimist.

Sooo much empty talk - attempts to appeals to morality, ot to solve this social problem with threats ("make them sign NDA"), albeit legalized, "allowed" threats -- and no one, just no one tried to solve the problem on the TECHNICAL LEVEL.

If you are worried, make sure one of the schemes for transparent (for users) strong encryption is enabled for the data you wish to conceal.

Just the way you work with SSL over the network - and do not think about it twice. Even backups, heavy and processing-intensive, are now routinely done with SSL.

In the same way, enable the storage of data itself in encrypted format. The current approach is to use (slow) public key cryptography for key exchanges, then (fast) symmetric key cryptography for actual encryption.

And that is the simple solution. Period.

You check the integrity of your data with cryptographic hashes, also a routine operation.

You do this only to the critical files if you are worried about the CPU load on your machines.

Here's what you do:

• (1) The main method: you simply lie. Recruiters do not ask about your last place of work (as it might endanger your position), so you simply lie about it. You invent job duties RELEVANT to your desired job knowing noone can check, really. Of course, you review necessary things not to sound absolutely stupid in the interview, but that is as simple as another exam, you passed scores of them when studying

  (2) You talk to your friends and create fake references. Generally your employer (or rather a "security" firm that checks references, or the HR department) check them not to find out your qualifications. Nope, what they need is (a) to confirm the story you presented in your papers and the interview, they do not wish to see contradictions, and (b) the main thing, to find out if you tend to get into conflicts, or sue, or have other character traits that would make you an inconvenient slave in their well-run stable of insipid corporate serfs. (that, by the way, is why you never talk about any conflicts during your interviews). So cheating with fake references is not that hard. Your reference should simply tell them in a good-humoured tone that you haha were sleeping in the office when a manager pressed all of you guys with some managerially invented deadlines and came up as a "winner" finishing just in time. And that you are a great guy in general.

  (3) You should not hesitate to do as described or be ashamed of that because EVERYONE IN AMERICA LIES. When they advertised for a person with experience and spruced up the job description THEY LIED, because in reality they will be content with much less, it's simply a hiring tactic to scare off complete tyroes. When Java was just beginning to make it, I saw them advertise for Java developers with 10 years of experience in big projects, I laughed until my stomack began to hurt. You do sound so young exactly because you take the words of corporate whores at their face value. They are not nice people, they are there to run you as a workhorse for God's sake.

  (4) and, well, after this stream of cynicism (and trust me, it's fully justified by my own experience and by many other people's - we gave references to each other, embellished and invented work histories to then, after getting the job continue working successfully and becoming first-class engineers), so after this wave of cynical reasoning I can also give you a way how to get real experience and real respected reference/qualifications for a better job in development. WORK ON AN OPEN SOURCE PROJECT and then legitimately use your contributions to support your resume.

Good luck to you (from an IT guy with about 15 years of experience in the field)