I'm a computer scientist. I do research in information security, although I am not particularly interested in the technicalities. Rather, I focus heavily on the economic, social and policy problems emerging from security practices, solutions, attacks and regulation.

I am particularly interested in markets for malware and attacks, and the externalities that the whole information security process has over society and at the international policy level.

It's not like they haven't. They are subject to the same security management costs as anybody else, including password complexity, vulnerability patching and file encryption.

Of course being a security firm puts them in the position of having a lot of know-how on how to manage and configure secure systems. But so does any CISO, including Target's, Kaspersky's, and many others.

They may have done a better job at defending their systems? Sure.

Should we have expected that from them? Not so sure.

this policy is obviously not oriented toward preventing secure technology to be developed and distributed. Rather, its effect is that it makes its use illegale, hence providing a way for law enforcement to act over its usage upon necessity. In the UK it already is illegal to not provide a password/encryption key upon request; my understanding is that in this case, the law enforcement need some ground to make the request (e.g. threat to national security) which may be hard to prove (being the content encrypted).

If you make the use of encryption itself illegal, you don't need the "national security" pretext anymore to demand access to the data.

I was of the same opinion. But I was worse than you. I believed that the rule was "each nth number is the nth power of the first one, with n=[1,2,3]".

Hence, 2^1, 2^2=4, 2^3=8.

I tried several. 3,9,27; 5;25;125; 128; 16384; 2097152. All yeses.

Then I tried 1,1,1. I got a "no". But the amount of positive evidence toward my hypothesis was overwhelming. I thought that was a bug.

| "ISLAM (or Christianity) is guilty of something, and all of it's followers need to express their guilt for me otherwise I will condemn them wholesale."

Where did I say that muslims must express their "guilt" (?!) "otherwise I will condemn them wholesale." ? This is not at all what I am "effectively saying"; maybe that's what you're more accustomed to interpret. I am not condemning anybody, nor expecting anybody to feel guilty for anybody else's actions.

What I'd however image is reasonable to expect is people taking distances from acts that happen within their society and that twist a shared condition (Islam) most of them identify with, to some degree. No, I would not expect muslim americans to protest against ISIS. I would expect muslim leaders worldwide to take a clear distance from extremist acts of terrorism. I would also expect the Pope to make a clear statement on Charleston's events. But why did you twist my question to a "christianity behaves better on average than islam" argumentation is totally unclear to me.

Also I am not american so I have no idea what Fox News does or say but I guarantee you that's not the only media available.

I've been on OSX for many years now, mostly because of the Unix backend and good support. MS is certainly moving in the right direction, I believe, with Win10. MS is doing what Apple hasn't been doing for a lot of time: taking himself seriously and move forward with their technology. Every year or so, Apple improves OSX by adding fancy "toys" to its interface, that can help from time to time with productivity (e.g. the continuity feature, that allows users to complete a task either on laptop/mac or on iOS device), but that's where it stops. Quality control also became an issue for many users, to the point that (finally) the next OSX will be a "stability-focussed" release. Hopefully they'll get this right this time.

MS is seriously trying to re-invent its software offering by refining and improving both interface and backend. Cortana and its searches is a clear example, even "Spartan" shows effects like these.

The one thing I can still appreciate Apple sw over is their actual dedication to user privacy, which is apparent not only from a business model perspective, but also technologically speaking. "Our money is not on user data" is their slogan.

Unfortunately, this also encompasses their, I believe, main problem with latest sw releases: their money is not on high quality OSs. They do not sell neither OSX nor iOS. Therefore, their main value switches from "direct revenue" to "self-advertisement revenue". Fancy, easy to understand, "cool" feature become central to their development as these are the features that will attract customers to their platforms (i.e. where the actual money is). This comes with all the minuses in terms of sw quality, stability, refinement and thoughtfulness that professional or "power" users (as the Apple community loves to call its more technical professionals) are, I believe, increasingly feeling the lack of.

p.s. Hi, I'm from Reddit, nice to meet you all.