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The FBI and other government agencies have a long history of abusive conduct against businesses (which doesn't get addressed much in relevant current events). Thorough and logical conversations about the issue take a long time (too long for both forum posts and TV interviews, unfortunately).
If you'd like to research the issue yourself, you'd probably come up with the same conclusion as my original post. The fact that the FBI waited so long before demanding the backdoor and the fact that other major technology companies so strongly sided with Apple tells us enough to understand the situation.
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And what about business with a history of abusing their customers? Apple's rather high on this list. The current death-dealing automobile airbags also show how you can trust business to do the right thing. And, of course, big tobacco! My own personal despising of GM for the OnStar they integrated into my Mrs.'s car - which actually is monitoring the vehicle and could be used to stop it at any time - and the microphone can pick up conversations. And their decision (1977 Ford Pinto) to calculate how many dead burned drivers was cheaper, legally, than fixing the deadly flaw. Oh Yes! Business can be trusted to do the right thing if asked nicely!
How long they have demanded the data vs. how long before Apple's denial finally became a court case (and thus Apples source of free publicity)? I can't say I know - but the request probably preceded the publicity. And - had it been complied with quietly, it would mean that the terrorists would still feel secure (mine more of their data) and Apple's secret would still be considered secret.
| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error." - Weisert | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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The FBI request was made publicly two months after the initial incident (on record). Apple's public press release happened after the FBI already took the situation public.
If you don't like a business like Apple, you can usually avoid them / sue them / say bad things about them. It's a lot harder to deal with a misbehaving government agency: Nobody can avoid them, nobody can bankrupt them, and bad press usually accomplishes nothing.
Since the public has a chance to push Congress and/or federal courts to reign in a misbehaving government agency, we should take advantage of it, as these opportunities don't come along often (and disappear fast).
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A while back I did a post called Proper benchmarking to diagnose and solve a .NET serialization bottleneck. "Prepare ship for ludicrous speed!"
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Code execution exploit for just-fixed bug makes encore appearance in Angler. See, Microsoft: people are still developing with Silverlight
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mjg59 | I bought some awful light bulbs so you don't have to[^]
Quote: I maintain an application for bridging various non-Hue lighting systems to something that looks enough like a Hue that an Amazon Echo will still control them. One thing I hadn't really worked on was colour support, so I picked up some cheap bulbs and a bridge. The kit is badged as an iSuper iRainbow001, and it's terrible.
...
Anyway. Next step was to start playing with the protocol, which meant finding the device on my network. I checked anything that had picked up a DHCP lease recently and nmapped them. The OS detection reported Linux, which wasn't hugely surprising - there was no GPL notice or source code included with the box, but I'm way past the point of shock at that. It also reported that there was a telnet daemon running. I connected and got a login prompt. And then I typed admin as the username and admin as the password and got a root prompt. So, there's that.
It doesn't get any better from there. This turned out to not just be an Internet of Pwnd Things product, but something capable of Pwning all your other stuff as well. 
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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IoT now reminds me of Internet websites in 90's.. arbitrary "standards", bad implementations and no security.. and animated GIFs, 3D fonts and MIDI music. Because why not? 
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All Software is Legacy[^]
I'm not sure what to pull as a quote, but this is an interesting article from the person crazy enough to take over maintenance of Perl's CGI module two years ago.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Companies have paid up to $1 million to data thieves to keep them from spilling data.
With few options, companies pay hush money to data thieves | Computerworld[^]
From the article:
[ --
"What we need is proof that someone actually has access to data," Carmakal said. "We get them to send a sample, or we do as quick an investigation as we can."
If forensic artifacts reveal that someone has been sneaking around, next comes a very hard decision: even if a company pays, there's no guarantee that the attackers won't release the data anyway.
--]
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Microsoft to acquire Xamarin and empower more developers to build apps on any device - The Official Microsoft Blog[^]
As the role of mobile devices in people’s lives expands even further, mobile app developers have become a driving force for software innovation. At Microsoft, we are working to enable even greater developer opportunity and innovation by providing the best experiences to all developers, on any device, with powerful tools, an open platform and a global cloud.
As part of this commitment I am pleased to announce today that Microsoft has signed an agreement to acquire Xamarin, a leading platform provider for mobile app development.
- Scott Guthrie
Executive vice president of the Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise Group
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Microsoft has lost grip and so they buy companies to regain it.
The trouble with the problematic Windows 10 shows that this company is in turmoil.
Press F1 for help or google it.
Greetings from Germany
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For the past 15 years or so, astronomers have been collectively scratching their heads over Fast Radio Bursts, or FRBs: incredibly intense but also incredibly brief flashes of radio energy coming from seemingly random spots in the sky. Yup, between the sofa cushions
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They’re there, like a flashbulb going off, then they’re gone.
Darn, and here I was hoping it was the starship Enterprise going into warp!
Marc
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What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?
The metaphorical solid rear-end expulsions have impacted the metaphorical motorized bladed rotating air movement mechanism.
Do questions with multiple question marks annoy you???
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Teasers. 
![Badger | [badger,badger,badger,badger...]](https://www.codeproject.com/script/Forums/Images/badger.gif)
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I’ve been working at a product company, focused mainly on specific, entrenched database technologies. This is causing me to lose touch with current languages and trends, and I’m worried that I’m getting stuck. "Beautiful objects are wrought by study through effort, but ugly things are reaped automatically without toil."
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Engineering is not a matter of trend, it's a matter of what works, what doesn't and what works best for a specific situation given cost constraints. I see no problem in losing track of the new trends.
Think if medicine and surgery were expected to follow trends as much as software engineering...
GCS d--- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L- E-- W++ N++ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t++ 5? X R++ tv-- b+ DI+++ D++ G e++>+++ h--- ++>+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP. -- TNCaver
"When you have eliminated the JavaScript, whatever remains must be an empty page." -- Mike Hankey
If a coffee bean is between the Earth and the Sun, is it a Java Eclipse? -- Sascha Lefèvre
/xml>
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den2k88 wrote: Think if medicine and surgery were expected to follow trends as much as software engineering...
But they are? New forms of cancer treatment are happening at a rapid pace. In fact I just read about a new process called "molecular scissors" that they are using to treat AIDS, and it looks quite promising. The only difference is that the medical industry has many dedicated Research and Development groups.
How many dedicated R&D groups does the software industry have? None that I'm allowed to participate in, so I have to do my own.
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COBOL has been our core business for nearly 40 years and bridging the gap between older and new technologies remains our primary mission. If you’re ready to derive more business value from your business applications, take a look at our COBOL to Mobile solutions. For when your code base is larger than the device it runs on
I can't believe I missed this back in August. Apologies to anyone who's projects I delayed.
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A survey of API developers claims security, customer satisfaction, and speed of deployment are among the biggest challenges. string someCall(string) - Done!
Oh sure, some will say, "what kind of string?", or, "ANSI or Unicode?". fussypants!
(Management does not approve of this message)
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Microsoft released a PSA of sorts on its Malware Protection Center blog about programs that promise to clean up or optimize your system in the hopes of making it run a little smoother. Because they would never use fear to make you install anything
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Agile has been around for more than a decade now. It has proven itself at the team level and has scaled to the enterprise, but where does the methodology go from here in today’s modern software development world? "Try to find a better place, but soon it's all the same"
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Well, in youth one is agile and athletic. In old age, one is arthritic and hobbled. Did agile ever actually have a youth? Infancy, yes, but like old age, both exhibit a kind of senility, and that's probably the best description of agile that I've ever encountered.
Marc
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Google outlines its wish list for hard disk drives that don't exist today but which would be better suited to its needs in the cloud. "Third gear, hang on tight"
"YouTube users are uploading one petabyte of new storage every day and at current growth rates that they should be uploading 10 petabytes per day by 2021." Yow.
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