#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
I occassionally receive requests for appearances from various organizations and conferences. While I appreciate the interest, I only accept speaking engagements in continental Europe and the United Kingdom. I do not accept speaking engagements in Asia or the Americas.
I should probably mention that I do not do book signings anywhere.
The NSA appears to have been bent on destroying the ability of American companies to export hardware as well as sell software services internationally:
They claim the performance of the company’s special computers is “unmatched” and their firewalls are the “best-in-class.” Despite these assurances, though, there is one attacker none of these products can fend off — the United States’ National Security Agency.
Specialists at the intelligence organization succeeded years ago in penetrating the company’s digital firewalls. A document viewed by SPIEGEL resembling a product catalog reveals that an NSA division called ANT has burrowed its way into nearly all the security architecture made by the major players in the industry — including American global market leader Cisco and its Chinese competitor Huawei, but also producers of mass-market goods, such as US computer-maker Dell.
These NSA agents, who specialize in secret back doors, are able to keep an eye on all levels of our digital lives — from computing centers to individual computers, and from laptops to mobile phones. For nearly every lock, ANT seems to have a key in its toolbox. And no matter what walls companies erect, the NSA’s specialists seem already to have gotten past them….
The ANT division doesn’t just manufacture surveillance hardware. It
also develops software for special tasks. The ANT developers have a
clear preference for planting their malicious code in so-called BIOS,
software located on a computer’s motherboard that is the first thing to
load when a computer is turned on. This has a number of valuable advantages: an infected PC or server
appears to be functioning normally, so the infection remains invisible
to virus protection and other security programs. And even if the hard
drive of an infected computer has been completely erased and a new
operating system is installed, the ANT malware can continue to function
and ensures that new spyware can once again be loaded onto what is
presumed to be a clean computer. The ANT developers call this
“Persistence” and believe this approach has provided them with the
possibility of permanent access.Another program attacks the firmware in hard drives manufactured by
Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor and Samsung, all of which, with the
exception of the latter, are American companies. Here, too, it appears
the US intelligence agency is compromising the technology and products
of American companies.
At this point, why would any European or Asian company buy products from an American company? The NSA is totally out of control and it has to be dismantled as soon as possible before the American tech sector is devastated.
And what are they doing with all this access? Stopping terrorists? Interdicting drug smugglers? Preventing bank fraud? No, they’re listening to American soldiers have phone sex with their wives back home.
The NSA has zero credibility at this point. Zero.
The unanticipated consequences of the NSA’s insane global spying are beginning to bite US corporations in the backside:
Some companies are apparently so concerned about the NSA snooping on their data that they’re requiring – in writing – that their technology suppliers store their data outside the U.S.
In Canada, a pharmaceutical company and government agency have now both added language to that effect to their contracts with suppliers, as did a grocery chain in the U.K., according to J.J. Thompson, chief executive officer of Rook Consulting, an Indianapolis, Indiana-based security-consulting firm. He declined to name the companies, which are using Rook to manage the segmentation and keep the data out of the U.S.
Thompson said the language began appearing in contracts over the past couple weeks, and could be an early indicator of things to come as businesses adapt to a landscape altered by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s leaks. Documents leaked by Snowden indicate that the NSA has tapped fiber-optic cables abroad, circumvented or cracked encryption and is massively collecting telephone records and Internet traffic. Facebook, Google, Apple and Yahoo were among 15 technology companies that asked President Barack Obama Dec. 17 to restrain the spy programs. Cisco said Nov. 13 that NSA spying has caused delays to networking equipment orders.
U.S.-based technology companies face a serious threat. The NSA disclosures may reduce U.S. technology sales overseas by as much as $180 billion, or 25 percent of information technology services, by 2016, according to Forrester Research Inc., a group in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
This isn’t a hypothetical threat. Already funds are indicating that they disdain US owners and startups are building their business models around the assumption that no one outside the USA will want to use software services beholden to the US government. The USA is in the ironic state of professing free trade in goods while laboring hard to ensure that no one wants to utilize its services.
The extent of the effects will take some time to become apparent, but the problem is that once they become clear, there will be no returning from them. I suspect the revelation of the NSA spying, and not the Iraq or Afghanistan invations will one day be seen as the Peak Empire point for the USA.
It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything about Linux. This is mostly because I haven’t been using it. Due to some development projects over the past few years, I’ve been stuck using Windows, so I’ve been using XP and resolutely ignoring every new operating system introduced by Microsoft in the meantime. Everything works fine, although I have not been able to update Skype since not long after Microsoft bought them.
This has actually been a material benefit to me, not an irritation. It works fine, and in addition to reasons that shall presently be made clear, I still enjoy all the old functionality of certain third-party programs that Microsoft has intentionally broken with its helpful newer releases. The lesson, as always: never, ever, trust Microsoft to do the sensible thing.
Apple pens in its users, domesticates them, and milks them, but at least it treats them nicely and makes them feel good about themselves. Microsoft is like a big, fat ex-boyfriend who shows up at his former girlfriend’s apartment drunk and unannounced, insists on having sex, then throws up in her bed after passing out. It’s more than just the regret one feels after being forced to deal with Windows, it’s the time one has to spend to clean everything up afterwards.
Now, Spacebunny runs Windows 7, and in the course of daily events she made the rookie mistake of allowing Skype to update itself. Naturally, the update immediately caused Skype to stop working on her machine. She tried a few things and then turned the matter over to me because I so enjoy trying to work around Microsoft’s idea of making the interface easier. The problem is a fairly common one and is described here by one of the many people who have run into this problem:
“Every time I try to download the newest version of Flash Player, I get
an error message stating that I have insufficient user permissions. I
am using Windows 7, it’s my home computer, I am the administrator (I
know because I checked) and no one else uses my computer. I’ve done
everything I can (including creating a new Admin account – still didn’t
work).”
None of the suggested fixes worked. So, I went through all the various suggestions I could find online, including those on the Microsoft Forum. Most of them were entirely worthless. Seriously, I want to punch the fat, self-satisfied power users who that telling people how to click through the relevant dialogue boxes is a legitimate answer. But the problem obviously isn’t people not knowing how to use the operating system, since many of the messages clearly indicate we’re dealing with people who know what administrator status is, the problem is that clicking through the obvious dialogue boxes doesn’t freaking work!
I did all the obvious things. I even downloaded a special program to unlock the folder, which unlocked the folder but still didn’t grant whatever privileges were deemed necessary to simply delete the damned file. Logging in as an administrator didn’t work, creating a new administrator didn’t work, running the installer as an administrator didn’t work, unlocking the folder didn’t work, absolutely nothing worked. Even Markku couldn’t figure out how to fix the problem within a Microsoft paradigm short of reinstalling Windows. That being said, he did come up with the ultimate answer from the start, which is often apt when one is dealing with a Microsoft product: the first step is to tell Microsoft to fuck off.
Let me explain. The core problem is that the newer Microsoft operating systems do something incredibly stupid. In order to navigate all the complex crap that now surrounds diverse aspects of the increasingly crufty operating system, many installation programs now create a virtual administrator that has control over the various files and directories being used during the installation process. This virtual administrator does not exist, and by virtue of not existing, is not synonymous with any of the actual human administrators who actually use the computer.
Perhaps you already see the intrinsic problem there. If something goes wrong during the installation or update process, the real administrators do not have access to the files that were under the control of this nonexistent administrator. The real admin can see what’s there, but he can’t do anything about it. He doesn’t have access and he can’t give himself access. And if that protected file or folder is one that is required by an application installer that has somehow gone haywire, the user is screwed and will not be able to reinstall or use that application without either restoring a previous OS state or completely reinstalling Windows.
Nice work, Microsoft. Very helpful. It’s just a brilliant system. Honestly, it’s enough to make me want to go back to DOS and stay there. Sure, point-and-click is nice, but it’s just not worth putting up with this sort of insane and totally unnecessary crap. The First Rule of Operating Systems should be this: stay the fuck out of the advanced user’s way!
Fortunately, as Markku pointed out, Linux doesn’t give a damn about all of Microsoft’s increasingly lunatic complexities. And thanks to the Ubuntu Live option, it is possible to boot the machine into Linux off a USB stick, then delete the directory reserved to the nonexistent administrator without otherwise affecting the machine or the operating system. The entire process was very easy:
The whole process took about 15 minutes, most of which involved downloading the Ubuntu ISO and installing it on the USB stick. I’m posting this here because I haven’t seen this solution anywhere on the Internet, and despite involving a second operating system, it is the cleanest, fastest, and most effective way I’ve seen to completely resolve an extraordinarily annoying situation.
Of course, you won’t find this solution on any Microsoft forum. Why not? It appears that they would rather force their users to reinstall their operating system than let them know about a fast and easy fix for a common problem they created.
Rocean appears to have forgotten that I am far from the only critic of McRapey:
Scazli has a new response to VD up. In essence, he’s smart, he’s honest, and gosh-darn it people like him. Or more accurately, just more adolescent snark and word games.
I checked it out and I don’t believe the post to be a response to anything I wrote. I suspect his cryptic meandering may have been intended as a response to Heartiste, given the references to a “stupidsphere”. I don’t question for a moment that an effete young lad, abandoned by his father and desperately seeking both attention and approval from the women upon whom his path to a better life depends, would genuinely subscribe to the equalitarian claptrap he has espoused in public for years. That doing so would tend to put him in good odor with the gatekeepers and shambling shoggoths of Pink SF/F is mostly a matter of positive happenstance.
UPDATE: Or perhaps he is addressing Ed Trimnell, who recently wrote:
John Scalzi is a pure, coldly calculating opportunist who knows exactly what he’s doing when he writes blogs posts like “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is”. I suspect that Scalzi believes only a fraction of what he writes.
Regardless, I found this admission from December 19th to be of more interest:
[T]his year, by blog readership looks like it end up lower than it was last year — about 7.5 million recorded visits for the year, as opposed to 8.1 million in 2012. I attribute this to a couple of month-long “semi-hiatuses,” during which I posted less while I was writing books or on tour, a theory borne out by looking at the monthly numbers (November, which was one of those months, had the lowest visitorship of any month in two years). However, this year I also added 15,000 Twitter followers, most of whom (so far as I can tell) are actual real live people and not Twitter bots, and my Facebook and Google Plus public pages also saw growth. (I should note 7.5 million visits still means 2013 is Whatever’s second best year ever, so I’m not exactly panicking over here in that regard. But again, the fact that my other online presences showed substantial growth works as an offset in any event.)
Those of you who previously doubted me concerning my observations about Whatever’s declining traffic may recall the following statement, which I made here on December 10th.
McRapey is unlikely to even hit 7.5 million Google pageviews this year; imagine how much more his readership would have declined if “those two sites” hadn’t mentioned him 145 times, to say nothing of the copious references on Heartiste and other sites.
As before, Scalzi is using “recorded visits” when a more accurate term would be “WordPress pageviews”. Translating the numbers into Google pageviews, he had 7.897 million pageviews in 2012 and he’s anticipating about 7.155 million in 2013. You knew he’d have an excuse for the decline and I was pretty sure “other online presences” would be one of them. But it’s not merely an excuse, it is a legitimate reason as well. Keep in mind that I’ve never once claimed that Mr. Scalzi is not influential in SF/F circles; he was able to arrange my expulsion from SFWA by threatening to quit, after all. My contentions have been limited to pointing out that McRapey is nowhere nearly as “huge” as he would have his fans believe, that Whatever averages less than one-twelfth of the claimed 50,000 DAILY READERS, and that his blog is in fact is considerably less popular than most of us thought until the end of last year.
Those who have mastered division will surely note that 7.155 million divided by 365 is 19,603, which would be considerably short of 50,000 even if Whatever had a 1/1 pageview/reader ratio. Which it obviously doesn’t.
That being said, I’m not surprised that Scalzi has done well on Twitter. Whatever will likely continue to decline in large part because Twitter is a medium much better suited to an approval-seeking narcissist with snarky little thoughts who is more interest in talking than listening, and whose primary interest in dialogue is receiving praise.
Technologies change. And one no longer requires a blog to post pictures of cats and repeatedly be told how awesome one is.
UPDATE: Sometimes, Johnny just can’t wait for the next back-pat and has to do it himself. “I’m pretty smart”, he declares. Sure, not National Merit smart. Or even Mensa smart. But pretty smart. So he’s got that going for him, which is nice. Cocoa?
As the rape of science fiction was apparently not enough for the pinkshirts, some of them are now attempting to destroy programming in the name of sex equity as well:
One of the node.js core contributors, Ben Noordhuis, rejected a pull request that eliminated the use of a gendered pronoun in libuv. Now, this was quickly reversed by node.js project lead Isaac Schlueter (that is, Isaac accepted the patch eliminating the gendered pronoun), but because this is a Joyent-sponsored project, many made the reasonable inference that Ben is a Joyent employee—and have called Joyent to task for tolerating such poor behavior. (Especially when that poor behavior transcended into the gobsmackingly inappropriate as Ben tried to revert Isaac’s commit.)
But while Isaac is a Joyent employee, Ben is not—and if he had been, he wouldn’t be as of this morning: to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense for me and for Joyent. On the one hand, it seems ridiculous (absurd, perhaps) to fire someone over a pronoun — but to characterize it that way would be a gross oversimplification: it’s not the use of the gendered pronoun that’s at issue (that’s just sloppy), but rather the insistence that pronouns should in fact be gendered. To me, that insistence can only come from one place: that gender—specifically, masculinity—is inextricably linked to software, and that’s not an attitude that Joyent tolerates. This isn’t merely a legalistic concern (though that too, certainly), but also a technical one: we believe that empathy is a core engineering value—and that an engineer that has so little empathy as to not understand why the use of gendered pronouns is a concern almost certainly makes poor technical decisions as well….
But just so you heard it from
us: if this were the act of a Joyent employee, we would—to
deliberately use a gender-neutral pronoun—fire them.
I would avoid using any of Joyent’s products, given that it is clear that as a company, they are far more concerned about ideological correctness than with working code or the abilities of their programmers. They are actually insisting upon the use of grammatically incorrect language and threatening to fire those who are unwilling to use the improper form. It would be fascinating to investigate their employment practices and determine if they have 50 percent female programmers, and if not, to learn why they are operating in such an overtly sexist manner.
As a game developer, I am a potential customer of “high-performance cloud infrastructure and big data analytics company”. And I certainly will not be using, or recommending, Joyent.
It’s also informative to learn it has now been established that the deliberate choice of pronouns is a fireable offense. This means those of us who speak proper English and understand, as Churchill used to say, that the masculine embraces the feminine in English grammar, are now free to fire anyone who deliberately uses a gender-neutral pronoun such as “he or she” or “them”.
This gender-policing of the language is such a stupid, left-wing, and above all, parochial attitude. It should be amusing to see them clumsily attempt to covert all gendered articles to “das” in German and to attempt to impose gender neutrality upon la lingua bella and le français.
Apple, the Computer History Museum, and the immortal Paul Laughton have made the source code for the original Apple II DOS available for public use:
Apple only had about 15 employees, and none of them had both the skills and the time to work on it. The magician who pulled that rabbit out of the hat was Paul Laughton, a contract programmer for Shepardson Microsystems, which was located in the same Cupertino office park as Apple.
On April 10, 1978 Bob Shepardson and Steve Jobs signed a $13,000 one-page contract for a file manager, a BASIC interface, and utilities. It specified that “Delivery will be May 15″, which was incredibly aggressive. But, amazingly, “Apple II DOS version 3.1″ was released in June 1978.
With thanks to Paul Laughton, in collaboration with Dr. Bruce Damer, founder and curator of the DigiBarn Computer Museum, and with the permission of Apple Inc., we are pleased to make available the 1978 source code of Apple II DOS for non-commercial use.
In these days of 36-month development programs with teams in the triple digits, it is incredible to think of an operating system being delivered in months. It’s great to see that some of the early computing world’s history is being saved. I would encourage anyone who has an interest in technology to save these documents and thereby increase the chances they will survive for the perusal of future generations.
I spent hours at the Radio Shack playing Akalabeth. I spent more time than I can possibly estimate in the chilly, otherwise empty room down in the basement playing everything from Wizardry to Ultima to Seven Cities of Gold and Alpine Adventure on the Apple //e that my father later bought me. I never really learned to program anything serious, much to my later regret, but I did acquire a near-encyclopedic knowledge of games, and more importantly, the mechanics that underlie them.
So I ended up becoming a sophisticated user and designer rather than a programmer. There are worse fates. And despite my loathing for what Apple became, I still have great affection for the Apple II and all those early games. In fact, I have CandyApple installed on all of my various Android devices and was showing Swashbuckler to Ender just the other day when we were waiting for an appointment.
Nearly a year ago, I observed that this blog appeared to be the verge of catching up to McRapey’s Magnum Opus, The Most Popular Blog in Science Fiction with 50,000 DAILY READERS, in terms of its pageview traffic. This was very surprising to me, as for some time before then, various trolls and rabbits had been insistent that my views were irrelevant because no one was interested in them. They were forthright in declaring that only a few thousand extremist right-wing outliers read VP, which couldn’t possibly bear comparison with a massively popular blog like Whatever.
As recently as 26 December, 2012, I still believed the hype. I honestly thought McRapey must have meant “visits” rather than “views” when he reported 8 million views for Whatever in 2012. After all, I knew my own blogs had nearly 7.8 million views.
“Is it credible that the readership for VP+AG is actually that close to
the Whatever readership? No, I don’t think so. I think Scalzi is using
the term “view” improperly and should be using “visit”.”
Ah, how innocent we were! Despite being John Scalzi’s bête noire, I didn’t have a proper grasp of what a lying, self-promoting little snake he is. These days, thanks to Anonymous Conservative, we now understand exactly what McRapey and the other rabbits were doing. They’re like demons constantly whispering “you don’t matter, nobody loves you, why don’t you just give up” into the ears of bullied teenagers.
There were some readers who were skeptical of my observations concerning traffic, pointing, not unreasonably, to Alexa. I readily admitted that VP was still considerably behind Whatever in the Alexa rankings, although I was starting to understand that this was merely an artifact of the ranking system being less reliable than Google Analytics: “For what it’s worth, Alexa has scalzi.com, which hosts Whatever, at 12,996 in the USA. Vox Popoli is 29,426. Alpha Game is 73,183.”
So, in light of that, perhaps you can understand that I was a little amused when, after having exposed McRapey’s false claims of popularity earlier this fall, I observed this in the Alexa rankings today.
scalzi.com
109,589 Global rank
44,648 USA rank
4,857 sites linking in
voxday.blogspot.com
108,511 Global rank
22,967 USA rank
920 sites linking in
alphagameplan.blogspot.com
179,597 Global rank
53,907 USA rank
311 sites linking in
There are one or two interesting details one can observe there beyond the fact that Vox Popoli has now passed up a declining Whatever in Alexa terms, both globally and in the USA. McRapey’s self-promotion appears to be considerable, but inefficient, as he requires thousands more site links, and tens of thousands more Twitter followers to produce fewer, less-engaged blog readers. Despite the Chief Gamma Rabbit’s occasional attempts to denigrate Game, one can’t help but notice that Alpha Game is also rapidly catching up to the warren.
John Scalzi is a big fat fraud. He’s the Bernie Madoff of science fiction, having built his Hubbardesque SF career with smoke, mirrors, and sleight of hand. The fact is that leftists are seldom as popular, as influential, or as inevitable as they claim themselves to be. They readily resort to The Big Lie whenever it serves their interests, and their interest is usually focused on exaggerating their importance and their numbers. What I have learned from this is to never, EVER take a Leftist’s claims on faith. Always verify them, and quite often you will be surprised to discover in the process how brazenly they tried to slip one past you.
Now, I have no doubt that Scalzi’s remaining rabbits will hasten to move the goalposts yet again and point out that he sells more books than I do. And that, at least, is true. For now. Of course, in light of how the other metrics to which they previously appealed have tumbled one by one, how long can they be certain the final one will last? Winter is coming… and so is Quantum Mortis.
On a tangential note, I also discovered Alexa has a custom toolbar that is in beta, played around with it, and was a little shocked to find out that it is rather useful. In addition to giving an easy way to search this blog from anywhere and providing access to my updated game links and book recommendations, one can navigate more rapidly between the various comment threads by using the RSS feed pull-down menu. Anyhow, if you want to check it out and help me promote VP, click on the graphic to the left.
And if you have any ideas for improving the toolbar within the framework of what Alexa permits, please let me know. I have no idea why the text doesn’t always display the most recent post instead of a randomly selected one, but it is in beta and I suspect it might be a Feedburner thing anyway since Feedburner doesn’t always pick up the new posts right away.
The quarterly report on the Top 10 Game blogs for the third
quarter of 2013 is now up on Alpha Game. What is most interesting about it is the way it shows
considerable growth across the board, in line with the widespread
expectations that the Androsphere would begin garnering more mainstream
attention this year.
See the rest of the list there. I found two things to be interesting. First was the fact that every single top Game blog significantly increased its Alexa ranking in the third quarter. Second was the observation that the Androsphere’s gamma male critics, who frequently try to claim that no one reads the Game bloggers, happen to have considerably less traffic than the leading Game bloggers do.
This means we can expect more hysteria and more nonsensical attacks on the Androsphere as it becomes increasingly evident that more and more men are breaking their cultural conditioning and coming to terms with at least some aspects of the Game perspective on intersexual relations.
And on a tangential note, I was reminded of a previous question from a reader concerning the apparent dichotomy between my claim of more Google pageviews than McRapey and Whatever’s higher Alexa ranking.
You may recall this McRapey tweet: “All the dudebros who adamantly maintain I don’t get 50K visitors a day are totally right. #HaHaHa”
It is little ironic, but as it happens, Whatever’s global Alexa ranking is still slightly higher than VP’s despite the US rankings now falling in line with the actual pageview traffic. Despite the big day in August that McRapey cited in a futile attempt to support his wildly exaggerated readership claims, not only has VP surpassed Whatever, but Alpha Game is fast catching up as well.
Alexa Rank in USA
23,846 Vox Popoli
47,018 Whatever
58,514 Alpha Game
Hey, at least he still has the most popular blog in SFWA, right? To say nothing of his Participation Hugo. Anyhow, given the way in which the mainstream media has barely begun to become aware of Game, I wouldn’t be surprised if Alpha Game also passed up Whatever in the USA by this time next year.
It’s completely understandable why average Europeans are beginning to turn anti-American:
US intelligence has been operating a global network of 80 eavesdropping centres, including 19 European listening posts in cities such as Paris, Berlin, Rome and Madrid, the German magazine Spiegel has reported.
The new revelations, which Spiegel said were based on leaked American intelligence documents, are certain to fuel international outrage at the sweeping scale of US international surveillance operations.
Spiegel also reported that the telephone number of Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has been a target of US surveillance since 2002, when she was leader of the opposition.
Mrs Merkel, who telephoned President Barack Obama on Wednesday to express her anger at reports that her phone had been hacked, was still under surveillance until a few weeks before the US leader Berlin in June, Spiegel said.
Even before the latest reports, Germany said that it would send a high-level delegation to the US this week to demand answer s at the White House and National Security Agency (NSA) about the reports that Mrs Merkel’s phone was tapped. The team will include spy chiefs, German media reported.
I had an interesting experience this weekend that exposed how many Europeans feel about the NSA revelations. My team was playing an away game and I got a little lost trying to find a soccer field. Most villages have signs clearly marking where their main field is, but this one didn’t, so I stopped at a small restaurant where several people were hanging out on the deck, smoking and drinking.
They were obviously locals, so I parked the car, got out, and asked them where the field was. I was wearing my team’s jacket, and as we are known to have a few Portuguese players, one of the men asked me if I was Portuguese, most likely because of my accent. The two women both laughed at that and said: “but come on, look at him, he’s clearly not Portuguese.”
When I explained I was originally from America, the man made a face, held his hand up to his ear like a telephone, and said, “USA? Why are you listening to my mobile phone? Why are you listening to my phone calls?” He was joking, of course, as he promptly laughed, slapped me on the shoulder, and provided directions to the field, but it really startled me to discover that in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere, the immediate reaction to an American would be to bring up the NSA.
And the more elite Europeans aren’t blind to the opportunities presented by the scandal either. I spoke to several high-level investment executives over the last few weeks, and to a man, they see the scandal as being a reason for Europe to make a serious effort to break away from the technology chains of Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Twitter, Facebook, and other American companies that have dominated the world. The larger the corporation, the more determined they are to keep the US out of their emails and servers.
As more and more revelations of tech-enabled spying come out, it wouldn’t surprise me to see nations deciding to subsidize national alternatives and perhaps even eventually banning the use of American software. And why shouldn’t they? How can they possibly accept the status quo? It’s not inconceivable that the long-term result of using the NSA to spy on everyone through international business and the consequential shattering of trust may be a factor in the material reduction of transnational trade.
This isn’t merely a diplomatic or political scandal, it is probably an economic one as well.