<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small">Given the many tales of the commercial Geek Squad snooping on computers under repair, I think the NSA already is the Govt Geek Squad!<br>
</div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br clear="all"><div>Pete Hardie<br>--------<br>Better Living Through Bitmaps</div>
<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 10:24 AM, JD <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:jdp@algoloma.com" target="_blank">jdp@algoloma.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
I think the NSA should be the Geek-Squad for other government agencies, nothing<br>
more. Clearly the Commerce Department could use the help removing viruses<br>
instead of destroying perfectly fine hardware.<br>
<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/at-commerce-dept-false-alarm-on-cyberattack-cost-almost-3-million/2013/07/13/11b92690-ea41-11e2-aa9f-c03a72e2d342_story.html" target="_blank">http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/at-commerce-dept-false-alarm-on-cyberattack-cost-almost-3-million/2013/07/13/11b92690-ea41-11e2-aa9f-c03a72e2d342_story.html</a><br>
<br>
Yep - Govt-Geek-Squad.gov would be a start.<br>
<br>
Then, if the CIA and/or FBI want to engage the NSA for specific, limited, legal,<br>
needs, fine.<br>
<br>
<br>
On 07/15/2013 10:10 AM, Jay Lozier wrote:<br>
> John Dvorak on <a href="http://pcmag.com" target="_blank">pcmag.com</a> has a post were he argues the MS-NSA joint venture<br>
> should make countries and companies rethink their reliance on proprietary<br>
> software especially OSes. Apparently Windows has had numerous backdoors and<br>
> slowly fixed zero-exploits so the NSA could "monitor" users. His comment was the<br>
> US Department of Commerce should be very upset over the NSA scandal. He did come<br>
> out and directly say switch to Linux or BSD but if you are not use a proprietary<br>
> OS what are your options? Particularly since some industries have legal<br>
> responsibilities to their clients not to share this information without express<br>
> approval of the client or a valid court order.<br>
><br>
> On Mon, 15 Jul 2013 09:50:12 -0400, JD <<a href="mailto:jdp@algoloma.com">jdp@algoloma.com</a>> wrote:<br>
><br>
>> Netflix and 86-Linux support isn't a technical issue.<br>
>> It is a cost-of-support, business decision, and perhaps contractual issue.<br>
>><br>
>> Linux on the desktop has never taken off with the numbers desired to have a<br>
>> thriving business profit center for Adobe. It is hard to justify spending<br>
>> thousands of hours creating, distributing and supporting a platform where there<br>
>> doesn't appear to be a future payback. iOS/Apple's decision to end Flash<br>
>> support was the initial nail in the coffin. The fact that Android is Linux is<br>
>> the other, though a business case could be made to sell support for the 200M<br>
>> Android devices. I think internally, Adobe management wants Flash to die.<br>
>><br>
>> Then there are the contracts around commercial media offerings. There are a few<br>
>> Linux-based devices that support Netflix, but these have DRM built-into the<br>
>> chip. Look at the "WD-TV Live HD Plus" as a start. I suspect Roku does too.<br>
>><br>
>> Heck, Netflix servers are all Linux-based, so I'm fairly positive that the<br>
>> Netflix engineers WANT to support Linux desktops, but again, it is a business<br>
>> decision.<br>
>><br>
>> I can't blame any business for believing that the Linux market is small. We are<br>
>> a noisy group, but not in the normal ways. We don't advertise like Apple or<br>
>> Microsoft. 90% of the world has never seen or heard "Linux" before. Until that<br>
>> changes, support for Linux will really be limited to niche users, fed-up<br>
>> businesses and servers.<br>
>><br>
>> I've been thinking of an easy way to let people know how many Linux users and<br>
>> machines running Linux there are in the world .... perhaps the ALE group can be<br>
>> the starting point? I'll make another post about this idea soon to let all of<br>
>> ALE see it better - not buried in another thread. Basically, it is an<br>
>> email-footer with a count of machines/devices running Linux. It needs to be<br>
>> simple, short, to the point. I've had this footer for about 5 yrs myself:<br>
>><br>
><br>
><br>
<br>
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