rhblake

That's what Debian backports (https://backports.debian.org/) are for. Best of both worlds - run stable as your base distribution, use backports whenever you need a more recent version of something.

E.g. Debian stable comes with kernel 3.16, but 4.8 is available as an official backport, should you need the (almost) latest and greatest. Just add backports to sources.list && apt update && apt -t jessie-backports install linux-image-amd64.

In France it's 25 paid vacation days or 36 if you include paid public holidays. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_b.... 20 paid vacation days is the EU minimum [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Time_Directive_2003

It's essentially a myth [0]. According to the latest stats from the European Commission [1] the French work 40.4 hours/week on average (including paid/unpaid extra hours; excluding meal breaks and travel time), which is close to the EU average of 41.4 hours.

[0] http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20140312-frances-mythic-35-...

[1] http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/tgm/table.do?tab=table&init=1&l...

> Now that's a different question. While having access to the certificates is no problem at all, being able to create a new certificate for an arbitrary website allows one to pretend to be that website. The only defense against it is that, if a CA is caught issuing these certificates, it risks being removed from the browser's trust lists, which is a death penalty for a CA's business. Also, there is a new initiative (Certificate Transparency) to make it easier for these certificates to be caught.

There is a defense against rogue CAs: HTTP Public Key Pinning (HPKP) [0]. Chrome, Firefox et al use a HPKP preload list, but unlike with Strict Transport Security (HSTS) there currently appears to be no way to submit one's own site for inclusion in the preload lists. See e.g. Mozilla's policy [1].

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Public_Key...

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/SecurityEngineering/Public_Key_Pinn...

New ThinkPad keyboards can easily be found on eBay, too, for a bit less. Even ones for models that are many generations old. Very convenient.

> California, for example, has a huge population of Republicans and now their vote would matter.

And at the same time votes from Democrats in California would also matter more. I'd assume a number of people who'd vote Democrat in CA don't vote because they know the Democrats won't lose anyway.

Not merely a lot (in Sweden, anyway) - I'd say the vast majority of Swedes are fluent in English; of course more or less so but I don't think I've ever met a Swede who couldn't at the very least hold a basic conversation in English.

And that goes for authorities too. Had a non-Swedish partner for a few years who always communicated in English in all interactions with Sweden's governmental services - no problem. All important government websites are available in English. Knowing Swedish isn't even a requirement for citizenship.

So while knowing Swedish is certainly very beneficial and recommended, you can certainly get by without it, and work for many interesting companies (at least as a developer).

> France, Paris - visited it and that's a no-go zone for me. Couldn't buy a ticket at international train station in English and German as cashiers speak only French.

Huh. I've lived in Paris for two years, freelancing, and I'm still not fluent in French. I get by just fine. Train tickets: I've never had that problem with cashiers, but you can always use a machine or buy a ticket online - there's always an English option. Same with ATMs, public transportation, etc.

> City is a ruin after allowing all refugees live on a street.

You have no idea what you are talking about. Refugees were mainly around Stalingrad metro station in northeastern Paris. The camp was cleared out a few days ago and people were sent to more proper accommodation. Probably people will set up camp around there again. If seeing refugees bothers you, I suggest you simply avoid that particular little part of this massive city. It doesn't make Paris a "ruin".

It's perfectly possible to have suffered shitty hours/below minimum-wage pay/poor management/etc. and at the same time be sad to leave. (The sadness then being leaving a project you're proud of and the community that loves it.)

I'm waiting for more people to discover the next level - the "no slides at all" style of presentation. Cory Doctorow did a nice keynote at 28C3 completely without slides, and it worked very well ("The coming war on general computation", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYqkU1y0AYc). Not suitable for every type of talk, of course, but certainly there are many where the slides are a useless crutch or slides-for-the-sake-of-slides. If you're a good enough speaker you can hold people's attention without pointing at large words behind you.

(See Edward Tufte's "The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint" for good arguments about why slides are a bad idea most of the time)

That "remnant" is much larger than the handset division they sold. 114k employees after acquiring Alcatel-Lucent. Seems to be doing well. (I just learned that Bell Labs is now "Nokia Bell Labs".)

Well, this is the Baltic Sea we're talking about. The average European tourist wanting sea and sun prefers the Mediterranean (i.e. Spain, Greece, Italy, Cyprus, Turkey, ..) -- considerably warmer, plus cheaper/easier to get to for most people. For Germans there are plenty of other seaside resorts in the country. (Europe is only crowded in some places: large parts are not at all crowded - or even inhabited...)

Gone from the cell phone business, sure, but certainly not gone as a company. Big in telco equipment. After acquiring Alcatel-Lucent, I note that Nokia now has roughly the same amount of employees as Microsoft...

I agree that there are indeed many problems with the commission. (And I so wish that Viviane Reding had been president rather than Juncker.)

Just wanted to clarify how things work, as many have no idea. And for all its faults, I certainly don't think it's reason enough to leave the EU.

(Personally, as a Swede, I'm very happy to have the CJEU which is the only thing that can stand between Sweden and mass surveillance, as Sweden lacks a constitutional court, as - apparently - our local politicians cannot make bad laws.)

It should be noted that the president of the European Commission is proposed by the [democratically elected] heads of state of the member states, and that their proposed candidate has to be accepted by the [democratically elected] members of the European Parliament, and that each member state nominates a commissioner, and that this group of people as a whole have to be accepted, again, by the the European Parliament.

Also, it's not a simple "yes/no" ability for the parliament. They certainly can (and do) modify proposed legislation.

They have essentially described him as a sociopath. That's very different from merely being brash and clumsy...

> And other similar and very recent account of the US gov harassing Tor developers:

> https://blog.patternsinthevoid.net/fbi-harassment.html

It could be noted that the core Tor developer (@isislovecruft) who wrote that post has also spoken out against Appelbaum.

So a number of high-profile, veteran, respected, typically anti-authoritarian members of the hacking community - including multiple Tor project members - have spoken out against Applebaum in the past week. That it's all being orchestrated by some three-letter agency is theoretically possible, sure, but I think that's extremely unlikely. Applying some Occam I just end up with a tragic case of an abusive asshole.

(I don't personally know Appelbaum, nor his accusers, although I've spoken to several of them and seen them at conferences throughout the years. I thought Appelbaum was great at promoting Tor. I also remember my second conversation with him, at 26C3 in 2009: he bragged about how he'd stayed at a squat during his visit in Stockholm the month before and fucked some anarchist girl. Which, at the time, I thought was a bit odd bringing up in casual conversation with someone he didn't know.)

What short list? I know he's had access to some of them, along with other journalists, but I've never seen anything about him having all of them.

No, I didn't forget that he was one of three people involved in writing stories about the NSA ANT catalog, nor that he worked with Poitras (after she, Greenwald and MacAskill had done the most important part). I also did not forget that while he's been good at marketing Tor -- I've seen him at CCC in Berlin/Hamburg a bunch of times 2009-2015, he's become a good speaker -- he's never been important from a tech/operations point of view, from what I understand.

So, yeah, I maintain that there are plenty of juicier targets that Jacob Appelbaum. I'm also sure that he'd like you to think otherwise.

Re: NSA, state actors, billion dollar budgets... I think you're giving Appelbaum way too much credit here. While he's been splendid at marketing himself, consider that he might not actually be that important to the causes he's been championing. As others have pointed out: if said state actors wanted to hurt Tor and related projects, he'd be pretty far down the list of targets.

I think the first-person stories of @hypatiadotca [0] and @violetblue [1] suggest more than that.

[0] https://hypatia.ca/2016/06/07/he-said-they-said/

[1] https://twitter.com/violetblue/status/740446500891860992 / https://twitter.com/violetblue/status/740446782505779200 / etc. (argh twitter)

I've always liked https://mullvad.net/en/ (Swedish company, around since a number of years), especially from a privacy point of view. You never actually enter any personal information when creating an account - no name, no email, no password, no nothing; all you get is a random unique ID. They also claim to keep no logs, point being, "When Swedish law requires us to divulge information about our customers we make sure not to have that information stored, so that we have nothing to give out."

Various means of payment are accepted, including btc, and cash (of any(!) currency) sent by mail. OpenVPN, possible to choose from a number of countries, no limits on speed or data.

If there are other commercial VPN services that don't necessarily require you to give them any personal information (for account purposes), I'd be curious to know. Would be nice to have more alternatives.

Article seems to fail to mention that the majority of apartments in Stockholm (55% in 2014, more now) are in housing cooperatives ("bostadsrätt" -- in practice like a condo but not quite [Swedish compromise]).

For a lot of people it's the normal - and indeed only - way to get an apartment in Stockholm. And it's actually not difficult to get one in the city if you're a Swede with a decent salary (meaning you can get a mortgage loan). (I.e., just about any IT salary.)

"Like many foreigners, she’s reluctant to buy, following a price rise of 14% in the city in last year alone" -- another way of seeing it is of course that prices will probably continue to go up (they've certainly been doing that for the last decades, this is no temporary bubble), meaning buying your apartment can be a good investment.

People having been worrying about rising prices since... a long time.

If you were unlucky enough to buy your apartment in Stockholm city at the "peak" in 2007, right before the prices went down slightly during the financial meltdown of 2008, it'd still have increased in value with about 60% by now. Meaning if you sold it today, you would have essentially lived for free and quite possibly earned some money on top. Whereas had you rented, you would've paid say 864000 SEK (~92000 EUR) during those years for an 8000 SEK per month rental.

Apartments in the city have historically not been a a risky investment; I know which one of renting vs. buying that I'd choose.

Not saying that all is fine. There are many good reasons why one might not want to (or can't) buy an apartment, and in those cases the situation can be very tough indeed.

You're not, but it's up to you to deal with the administrativia (reporting it to the police, disputing the invoice).

On the other hand it's trivial to change someone's official address. Just send a certain form by mail to the tax agency. (Not sure if they send a confirmation to the old address; but if they do, the perpetrator only has to pick someone who's on vacation; hello Twitter & Facebook.)

The mentioned websites contain at least the full name, birthdate, registered address and marital status of every Swedish resident (at least above the age of ~16?), with the exception of a very small percentage of people with protected identity (which you can only get if you're under a "serious and concrete threat"). They get this data straight from the government - it's all public.

Go to e.g. http://www.ratsit.se/, write "Stockholm" under "Var" and hit "Sök" and click on a name for an example.

You won't see the personal identification number ("personnummer") that we use for absolutely everything, however as tednoob mentions you can get access to this by paying for premium access. Or you can call the Swedish Tax Authority. They don't have the right to ask who you are or why you want someone's number.

Generally speaking: what's legal and what's morally right sometimes diverge. Civil disobedience can be a necessity.

If being a professional means blindly following laws without thinking, I'm happy this place is not just for "professionals".

Having someone's personal identity nummer (personnummer) is in itself enough to do a lot of damage.

Many Swedish online shops will happily send you goods along with an invoice that you pay later. The invoice option is often only available if you provide your personnummer - which as I mentioned is public information, a phone call away - and have the goods sent to the address tied to that number. If you live in a house with a mailbox outdoors, a thief could order stuff to your address and empty the mailbox before you. "Stuff" could also be things like mobile phone subscriptions and whatnot.

Or, having your personnummer, someone could send a form to the tax agency to have your official address changed! I believe they do send a letter to the old address saying the address has been changed to <new address>. But there's time to do bad stuff in between the time of the change and your discovery of it. (If, indeed, you do discover it. You might be traveling somewhere, a fact that might've been gleaned from your social media activity.)

And, as breakingcups points out above, even if it were the case that sound security procedures were implemented in Sweden, that wouldn't matter much for the numerous non-Swedish services most Swedes use every day.

Anyway -- people being able to do stuff in your name is just one thing. I don't want the whole world to know my address, or marital status, or date of birth, etc - period. It's about privacy.

Ah... if you're a resident of Sweden, anybody can get your full name, address, date of birth, civil status, list of company engagements (e.g., board member, owner of a firm, etc.) and the make and year of any cars registered by going to one of several websites - http://www.ratsit.se/ being one of the most popular ones. No login needed. This information is public data straight from the government. (Exceptions: people < 16-18 years old (afaik), and people with protected identity (about 15K out of 9.8M)).

Call or visit the Swedish Tax Agency if you want further info, such as personal identity number ("personnummer" - think Social Security Number but used for absolutely everything), taxed income, identity and full info of parents (including mother's maiden name - so much for that), etc. You don't have to tell them who you are or why you want this information.

Enter a street address on a site like ratsit.se and you'll find all the people registered on that particular address. I could go on. When I talk about this with friends in countries like Germany and France they're often flabbergasted; in Sweden we're so used to it that we think it's natural. We're basically doxxed by our own government by default. A stalker or identity thief's paradise. It's messed up.