Free Republic

Microsoft announced a new effort to "[protect] customer data from government snooping." FSF executive director John Sullivan issued the following statement on Thursday, December 5th: "Microsoft has made renewed security promises before. In the end, these promises are meaningless. Proprietary software like Windows is fundamentally insecure not because of Microsoft's privacy policies but because its code is hidden from the very users whose interests it is supposed to secure. A lock on your own house to which you do not have the master key is not a security system, it is a jail. Even on proprietary operating systems like Windows,...

Since its October 24th release, Apple's latest iteration of its BSD-based OS X software, version 10.3 or "Panther," has received more plaudits than pans throughout the high-tech community Indeed, aside from a couple of initial glitches, including a hard drive-damaging flaw that has since been fixed, the launch has been seen as a highly positive development. BusinessWeek technology columnist Stephen Wildstrom called Panther "the best operating system available to consumers." And on the eve of Panther's release, The Wall Street Journal tech columnist Walter Mossberg wrote that Panther "can network easily with Windows computers and is packed with lots of...