JorgeA

Exactly like the Tiles crap is just the sucker bait to force us into the MS store. "All sheep proceed inmediately into the walled gardens. It's for your own good and protection. Resistance is futile - you will be assimilated". --JorgeA

@ROTS: Whoa! @jaclaz: Half (if not more) of the point is the sheer fun of speculating. "The truth is out there" and it will (may) come out in due course. --JorgeA

Believe nothing. Even if one doesn't like Steve Gibson, the extended discussion that follows his blog posts makes for interesting reading. At this point everyone (except the developers themselves) is merely in a position to speculate, a point that came out clearly in those discussions. I was simply offering food for thought in response to the OP's questions. BTW, the third link has little or nothing to do with Gibson. --JorgeA ADDENDUM I: Cory Doctorow's take on the situation, and (perhaps surprisingly) somewhat of an endorsement of BitLocker. ADDENDUM II: Steve Gibson has a new page on his website with additional information, including updates on a possible fork by the Linux Foundation, download links for various versions of the software, and a report on (apparent) communications from a TC developer regarding their decision.

Extended discussions of this news here, here, and here. After reading all that, I'm not really sure what to believe. --JorgeA

One reason for user resistance (besides all the well-known ones) could be that the interface of every version of IE since 7 has become progressively plainer (uglier) and less useful. IE7 had nice gradient sections up at the top, with "etched" dividers between each line; the gradients started to disappear with IE8 (such as on the menu bar and the tab line) and by IE9 had become one big, undifferentiated blue area. The status bar with all its informative icons has disappeared (and Classic Shell only recovers a few of them). The scrollbar button has gone from an easy-to-see 3D image to a faint gray blob; change it to black and it's still a flat rectangle that hardly stands out from the background. --JorgeA

Good news: Mary Jo Foley reports... Windows 365: Not coming to a PC near you [emphasis in original] That's a relief! Another (apparent) victory on the multi-front war that we (and so many others) have been fighting for more than two years. We seem to have won substantially over the public's reaction to Windows 8, over the Start Button and Menu, over the ability to boot directly to the Desktop and to banish Metro (almost completely) from our monitor screens, and now on whether we will be expected to pay eternal tribute to the OS lords. By my count, this leaves two major undecided fronts: whether users will be given an official choice to use Aero Glass on machines that are capable of it; and whether Windows will eventually become a "cloud OS" that turns our PCs into dumb terminals. Is that second one covered by the announcement above? Any other battle zones left unresolved? --JorgeA

That was pretty good, and thanks for linking to it. A couple of quibbles: (1) the process of mass encroachment on communications privacy didn't start with the previous administration, but rather with the one before it (recall the Echelon and Carnivore programs). I remember being astonished in October 2001 how quickly the provisions of the Patriot Act seemed to have been put together, and concluding that these ideas must have been cooking for some time previously. (Note that I'm not suggesting some sort of conspiracy to create a crisis in order to pass this legislation; I think it was more a case of seizing an opportunity to enact something that some people had desired for a while.) And (2) given that telecommunications companies are forced by authorities to hand over their data (when not having it stolen from them without even their involvement), it would put them in an impossible position to at the same time be subjected to privacy lawsuits from the opposite direction. Guns pointed at you from all sides making mutually exclusive demands, what are you supposed to do? In my view, a more constructive approach would be to foster an alliance between private-sector actors (individuals and the services they use) over and against the state-level actors who threaten them both. I do like the call for developing user-friendly ways to implement security and privacy technologies. However, we need to find some way to ensure that these technologies are not themselves compromised during creation or delivery. --JorgeA

I love it!!! --JorgeA

LOL, what would THAT look like? If you (or anyone else reading this) comes across funny image mistakes like this, please share... --JorgeA

A search on Amazon.com for a small external USB drive turned up the following item (marked with the red arrow): This gives new meaning to the phrase, "build your own PC"... --JorgeA

Dencorso is right, unplugging the internal HDD is the surest (and easiest) way to avoid having it interfere with the boot process. --JorgeA

Update on a post upthread about the NSA installing spying devices on hardware for export: Angry Cisco CEO calls on Obama to rein in surveillance --JorgeA

Thanks again, Flasche. I'll have to get VirtualBox. Some years ago when my Windows 98 PC got sick and I had to move to Vista, I looked into using a VM in order to be able to keep using certain programs that wouldn't run on the newer OS. I steered away from VMWare products as the EULA gave them the right to come into my home and audit my use of the software (even though it's a free product). Scr3w that. In the end, Microsoft issued updates that made Vista compatible with a wider range of older software, so it became unnecessary to use a VM and I never did get that far. --JorgeA

Do you want to boot from the USB, or do you want the system not to see the internal hard drive at all? If it's booting from the USB drive that you want, you might be able to go into the BIOS/UEFI and rearrange the boot order so that it looks for the external drive first, before the internal drive. --JorgeA

More about the tablet market and prospects for the Surface hybrid: What Microsoft gets wrong about the tablet-laptop redundancy --JorgeA

Microsoft unveils Windows 8.1 with Bing for lower cost devices Microsoft’s Free Windows To Come With Bings Attached We had talked about this before; these posts add some new details. --JorgeA

I find them similar. Though if your wondering about which one to use, I'd use Whonix unless you need a portable live OS, for Whonix is more secure. Thanks, Flasche. It's too bad Whonix doesn't have a live DVD or demo version, as it requires a full installation before you can try it, but I'll see if I can fit in the space (and time) to play with it. --JorgeA

They now seem to have changed their mind: Microsoft will patch IE zero day but doesn't give timeline Microsoft to fix critical IE bug that has gone unpatched for 6 months Or maybe the initial reports misinterpreted Microsoft's stance on this bug. --JorgeA

Could you have imagined, just ten years ago, that we'd someday need institute directors to explain us that we need serious computers to do serious computing? No, I could not have imagined that. The spoiler is fantastic -- and totally to the point! --JorgeA

Thanks, that was helpful! Which one (Tails or Whonix) do you find easier to use? --JorgeA

Data Pirates of the Caribbean: The NSA Is Recording Every Cell Phone Call in the Bahamas . A long but informative read. --JorgeA

Why tablets are failing miserably in higher education The writer has an odd take on the Surface, claiming that it's somehow superior to the iPad and Android tablets thanks to its mouse and keyboard possibilities, yet he pooh-poohs the use of mice and keyboards on these other tablets. Whether Surface or iPad, a tablet with a keyboard attached is a tablet with a keyboard attached, no? Anyway, he performs a service by pointing out that tablets (the source of all Win8 evil) may have reached their high-water mark. --JorgeA

I checked out Whonix and it sounds interesting, if a bit of a challenge to get up and running. Thanks for the scoop. Have you tried Tails, and if so, how does the experience compare to Whonix? --JorgeA

Sounds like a less-than subtle way to force people to move off IE8 (the last version that works on XP -- hint, hint). Telling people to change their IE settings to alert for ActiveX controls isn't going to help anything if the user has no way of knowing beforehand whether the ActiveX control he's being asked to allow or refuse is actually a threat. And to install and properly use EMET requires a combination of (1) patience, (2) computing expertise, and (3) sheer luck that countless people will lack. As someone points out in the comments, Microsoft is (perhaps for the first time) choosing to break a promise to support a given product on a current OS: IE8 works on Vista and Win7, neither of which is anywhere near EOS. That's potentially very bad news as it could become a habit, unless they get taken to task by their customers. --JorgeA

Thanks jaclaz, you explain it very well. I guess that in your situation it's out of the question to keep using that program after it goes EOS? (What can there be left to fix in a program that's already been out for two decades?) Anyway, it's remarkable that they supported a DOS-type application this far into the 21st century. We (you) would definitely prefer to have it supported forever, and that would be ideal. But to use operating systems as an example, in practice I observe that it's the proprietary (Windows) OSes that get maintained and supported for a decade or longer, whereas in the case of the "FOSS" OSes (Linux) users get pushed out the door after a couple of years. So in that sense I get to use what I like -- and enjoy support for it -- for longer by using the commercial OS. Not forever, of course, but for a longer time, which makes my work environment that much more stable, running with fewer major disruptions. I don't have direct experience with how this works with particular applications (OpenOffice/LibreOffice vs. Microsoft Office, for example), but I wouldn't be surprised to find out that it works much the same as with OSes: older versions of the "free" suites enjoy no support at all from the developers and users are on their own. In contrast, Microsoft supported Office 2003 until just last month. LibreOffice releases are supported for a whopping nine months and then you have to either go searching for someone who will maintain it afterward, or else install the new release. Talk about the upgrade treadmill!! To my mind, that's not freedom, but actually a heavier bondage to the developers' desires. --JorgeA