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.
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!"
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!
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.
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.
You're right. I pretty much just blurted out the first thing that came to my mind when I read about it, and what I said was equivalent to garbage. It was completely uncalled for and I apologize to everybody in this forum for lowering the level of discourse, much less crapping over someone's hard work and pride.
It's mission creep. Law enforcement will always demand more power in pursuit of what they see as their goal of stopping the bad guys. Trampling all over innocent peoples' civil liberties is unfortunate to them, but they will never cease their pursuit for more power. Have you heard Ray Kelly's argument in defense of stop-and-frisk? "We do this to protect minorities! It's for their own good!" without any mention or even a passing courtesy to said minority's civil rights.
Actually, I can think of one area that probably won't be receiving all the extra scrutiny that the rest of us have been enjoying in new found police state, and that's Wall Street. Someone's gotta pay for all those toys cops have been buying lately.