Still trust Microsoft to safeguard your privacy, idiot Americans?

Microsoft has collaborated closely with US intelligence services to allow users’ communications to be intercepted, including helping the National Security Agency to circumvent the company’s own encryption, according to top-secret documents obtained by the Guardian.

That Ars Technica piece about SkyDrive the other day where people scoffed at the idea of the NSA having access? Well, being wrong is what those infected with engineeritis and/or geek arrogance do best.

The company worked with the FBI this year to allow the NSA easier access via Prism to its cloud storage service SkyDrive, which now has more than 250 million users worldwide.

If you aren’t using something open source to encrypt your data, it’s not safe. And if it’s stored in the cloud, it’s doubly unsafe.

Of course, nothing is completely secure and verifiable as very smart people can embed an undetectable backdoor in the compiler itself, but there’s only so much you can do.

Back in the BBS days, I remember being able to type faster than my computer’s extremely slow modem could send text to the remote console and then echo it back to me.

Struggling to get anything useful done on terribly slow, bad hardware. Wishing for the sweet release of death while waiting five hours for that 300KB text document to download, and hoping you didn’t get disconnected.

Tablets feel like that to me, scaled at least to what is possible now – using them for anything other than reading books, that is.

It’s interesting to me that due to smartphones and tablets, the average person is going to lose the ability to type again, as was once the case.

Many people are now too young to recall, but back in the early and mid 1980s, knowing how to type was a relatively rare and valued skill.

Then PCs became common, and typing become a lot more widely-known.

Since real keyboards will always be used for work, the ending of the era of the PC (for most people) will mean there will be future generations nearly completely unsuited for corporate office work without more training than is now necessary.

I was looking for some Wimbledon matches to watch on a website that slant-rhymes with The Ferret Way, and saw something like this:

SABINE LISICKI (GER, 23) – AGNIESZKA RADWANSKA (POL, 4)

It took me a moment to figure out that the number was their world ranking, not their ages. I don’t really follow tennis, but do have a few players that I enjoy watching play, so age is what occurred to me first.

I’m glad they are not letting four-year-olds play in Wimbledon.