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Actually, looks like they took away the ability to use Twitter and it's Facebook exclusive.

Citation please.

I agree with Mark that it's not worth beating up Canonical over a bureaucratic slip up. Latching on to simple mistakes that are the result of internal miscommunication and misinterpretations of policy is foolish. And ideologues (especially in the software world) love to do that blindly, but it's not intelligent discourse.

That being said, I don't think that absolves Canonical of the underlying criticism: your company is active pushing a product, despite its open-source-ness, that betrays the trust and privacy of your users unless they're informed enough about the situation to opt-out.

I know Canonical is a corporation and has to generate revenue. I won't sit and pretend like I know how to solve that problem for your company. It doesn't change the dilemma, however. I'd like to recommend a user-friendly Linux to my friends and family. I won't recommend Ubuntu until the privacy issue is opt-in instead of opt-out. In fact, if they're less-technical, I recommend iPads and Macs. At least Apple doesn't ship off desktop search results to a third party that we're aware of. I hold enough trust with Apple to believe that they are not. It's unfortunate that I can't say the same for Canonical.

You mean, the illusion of the latest high-tech gear.

It's just that they're... (god, that's embarrassing)

I think people are glad, sure. It's just that their highly skeptical of anything the government does anymore. With good reason.

It's just a bunch of bureaucrats in a room. They've got their Standard Operating Procedures, and react accordingly. They're just cogs, and all the real decisions come from the higher ups. All the hardware in that room is procured and maintained through IT contractors and there is no software on those machines that wasn't listed when they wrote those ~5 year long contracts.

Impressive presentation, if you're trying to show off. Terrible otherwise, and the content is just dumb. David Kushner has always struck me as one of those superficial tech journalists who writes about it all the time, but largely avoids attempting to explain the important technical details to the audience well. He's either dumbing it down on purpose because he thinks his audience will be easily confused, or he really has a meager understanding himself. Regardless, I don't think he's doing his audience a service when he puts this 'Hackerz-are-l33t' theme on this article like he's submitting a screenplay to Hollywood.

He's basically like the 'Smykowski' character from Office Space; trying to justify his job ("I talk to the engineers so you don't have to!"), but in the end, he's not really doing anything.

This is an important topic and it deserves to be treated much more seriously. I feel embarrassed for Rolling Stone here. It's style over content and the fancy animations are just compensating for an otherwise shallow article.

Can't wait for all the wannabe-startup-bros to start throwing those terms around now when they're looking for coders. "Hey man, wanna come forked on my awesome new idea? Send me your pull request and let's get started!"

Kettle, meet pot.

The NSA can't trust 'brilliant' people huh? Worried that they might be acting against the NSA's best interest? Weird! I can't possibly imagine how they feel! Nope, not at all! It's not like I have a secretive government agency stockpiling of much of communications as they can get their hands on that could one day be taken out of context and used against me or something. Crazy!

It's all relative. Ever seen Idiocracy?

Technology doesn't wreck the middle class, but it certainly enables America's corporate bureaucracy to cut as many costly human labor positions as it can.

We could counteract that if invested in our educational system, and I mean really invested in it. Don't just throw money at the problem, but strengthen and expand public institutions of learning. No more student loans and no more financial aid. I'm not necessarily against private schools and universities, but all our current system does for lower-middle-class people is straddle vulnerable people with mountains of debt for a educational experience of questionable quality.

It's obviously meant as an approximation.

Look, you can believe it or not, but that's just your opinion. Everybody gets to make up their mind for themselves.

How are they well-positioned? I don't mean to sound crass, but what has Facebook ever done that makes you think they're well-positioned? They're pretty much a software/advertising company. Sure, they have their Open Compute project, but besides that, what significant contribution to technical engineering have they contributed to that suggest they have the know-how and ability to scale such a massive infrastructure project.