He is just curious at the specific definition the court is going to come up with. Were do they draw the line and how would they capture that in words?

How much privacy with phone calls is there, when The Netherlands are known for having the most phone taps in the world? The formal privacy looks pretty strong indeed, government needs a warrant, etc., but at the end of the day they can do whatever they want.

From what I hear, police here can also freely access and query all phone metadata, without the need for a warrant.

Words of wisdom, especially your first and last paragraph. Besides upvoting your comment, I wanted to tell you that.

It's easy to get involved in the ratrace of using the whole shebang for your projects, how big or small these projects may be. I've used some frameworks in the past, but I eventually found out they added more distraction, took forever to learn and they crippled my flexibility. Good old HTML, CSS, PHP (I'm very afraid of saying this here out loud), Javascript and XML worked for me. And programming without a framework was more fun, like a completely blank canvas that makes it very clear that you are the one who has to do it.

Even with numbers, a whole lot of things in this world are nothing more than educated guesses. Or did you already find the meaning of life?

Just a question. You say the following is obvious. How is that obvious? "Don't make mobile apps only for one region" then you'd be getting a lot of comments saying "Well, obviously"

"If you want mass adoption, don't build apps with a max penetration of 1% of the global population" seems pretty obvious. Other variations: "If you want mass adoption, don't build apps only usable on Blackberry".

France is a massive homogenous market with high penetration of their target platform, and large comfortable middle class. It's probably easier to pilot in France than it is in most other markets. And launching globally has non-trivial implications for cashflow & risk.

I'm sure there are some strategic advantages. But when a French-only mobile app languishes, the lesson isn't necessarily "don't make a mobile app".

And it's not something you casually forget to mention in your postmortem (ctrl+f for "France" and "French" in the original article).

I was thinking the same. The text was pretty gray without any questions or comments on the content. I thought it was a good story, with solid arguments.

Last time I saw Basecamp (then 37signals) working on a rich text editor is a long time ago. What happened to WysiHat? I know it had another developer than the two guys who made Trix. What I especially liked about WysiHat was the complete bareness of the toolbar, just plain HTMl links. Is that also possible with Trix?

I was involved with the Wysihat project too. What we found is that its approach, like most other editors', is fundamentally broken. We created Trix to solve the problem. https://github.com/basecamp/trix#different-by-design

I think you'll find Trix's toolbar easy to style however you'd like, but if not, it ought to be straightforward to implement your own using the API.

Cool, and great work! I had a small e-mail conversation with Josh (forgot his last name) a couple of years back, I thought he worked on Wysihat alone. I have seen and tested some RTEs for the web, and I can only imagine how hard it is to come up with a durable solution. So thanks for Trix and good luck! P.S. Trix also has a 'royal' connotation to me, because it's short for Beatrix in The Netherlands. Beatrix being the former queen.

I use NoScript, a free plugin for Firefox. It's a little more technical than I was used to, but since this is HN, that shouldn't be a problem for most readers. When I say "a little more technical", I don't mean it's not usable. It's very user-friendly and works like a charm.

I can't help to see dinosaurs/velociraptors when I'm looking at the magpies here. Probably because the creators of Jurassic Park took their inspiration from these kind of birds as well, and JP is my only reference. But anyhow, I think that's scary enough, and not as cute as a giant chicken.

This company states that privacy is very important to them. It's also to me.

But now I'm wondering, what's the purpose of the killswitch besides having no wifi-connection for a certain period of time?

I mean, when you switch back to enable wifi again, everything you did on your computer during 'airgap-time' is still there, waiting to be compromised by corps/govs? Isn't it?

Please correct me if I'm wrong. I'm really curious to this concept.

P.S. I really dig the design of their laptops.

edit: Changed markup and added P.S.

A couple of possible ideas:

* Heightened risk of compromise in particular physical locations?

* Use in conjunction with something like TAILS so it's harder for someone who breaks into your computer to achieve persistence?

* Decreased risk of compromises that involve multiple machines attacking each other?

* Attackers may be wary of storing huge amounts of data persistently because the associated changes in storage media could be detected by forensic spot-checks?

(The third one probably requires that the forensic examination can get access to everywhere that the data could be stashed ... like nonvolatile memory inside onboard devices, not just the hard drive and main RAM contents.)

Wi-Fi can, and will, send data behind your back even if you're not connected to any network. Some of it is a part of normal protocol operation (and can be used to track you). Malware on your system could initiate connection without you knowing. And then a malicious actor targeting you personally may spoof a network you often connect to (e.g. local coffee shop) and exploit the default autoconnect to known networks behaviour. Hardware switches protect you from all the above.

You could be booting off a USB running something like Privatix during the time you have wifi killed - so that system would be air gapped whenever it is running. But if you trust Privatix you don't really need a HW switch.

Do you trust the wifi firmware though?