wikipedia describes the situation here [0], but i think in general "literate" has a specific meaning here, that you need to know x amount of characters. Some cursory googling leads me to believe the rate for urban dwellers is 2000 characters, but for rural it's only 1500. According to a UNESCO study a few years ago, "11% of the world’s 800 million illiterate adults live in China."
I know it's comparing apples to oranges, but some of my friends in Hong Kong are perfectly fluent in Cantonese and Mandarin but really, really struggle with reading and writing.
But, no? I don't understand how you could possibly draw that conclusion. The "WMD" ISIS have discovered were decommissioned WMD from the 90s. They aren't capable of being deployed.
Yes, I have the 2013 model of the X1 carbon and it's about perfect for me (running Debian). But I have no idea why they ruined the keyboard on the latest model.
Feel free to not trust it, but it does indicate whether the message to be send will be encrypted or not: in the current version, a padlock will be locked or unlocked on the send button. If you receive an unencrypted message from another text secure user, it automatically detects the other party is using text secure and offers to initiate key exchange.
The billing criticism is fair and warranted; currently if your sending over SMS, the first message can only contain 60 chars due to protocol overhead, so you often end up with short messages costing multiple SMS.
There is a way to verify keys (manually!) but no indication that you have verified them.
I dunno, it's hard not find something to agree with, particularly the rather tone deaf "let them eat soylent".
I regularly read the Guardian, and it seems they are very tech positive in general, it's just the SV culture they (and it has to be said, many people outside of SV) find distasteful.
few days late, but thought I'd share my anecdote. several years ago now, I was on a road trip through the largest island of Japan, Honshu, and was staying at a cheap roadside motel in the middle of nowhere. My girlfriend was having a shower, and I walked out of the room without the keycard as you needed it to operate the lights etc in the room. off I went to grab a few cold drinks from the vending machine, and then suddenly realised I had no idea what room number or even what floor our room was on. Despite what she says, my girlfriend is fluent in Japanese and I'd always relied on her to do all the hard work, and spent maybe 3 months picking up a bit of the language a few years previously.
Well, I had no choice but to go to the front desk and explain the situation using the full range of my vocabulary. As a few people have already mentioned, native Japanese speakers tend to treat you with a mix of awe and pity when you clearly can't speak the language but nonetheless attempt it. But exactly as the article described, I concentrated on saying what I could, not what was necessarily correct. I actually surprised myself, and my girlfriend when I eventually returned to the room and explained why the cold drinks were now tepid.
I completely agree he shouldn't have been running this service in the first place. I also agree it's a bit late to find some principles when you've been happily complying with these requests in the past.
But! The period you describe as him stonewalling the DOJ, he claims he was talking to them every day while trying to find competent legal representation.
Now, this sounds like something I would want to do if the nature of the request were different from the previous ones. (whether it was technically different or just the fact he had a personal interest in the account as you suggest doesn't really matter, just that for whatever reason it wasn't to be handled in the previous manner)
I certainly believe it was difficult for him to find good representation when he was under a gag order.
So I have some limited sympathy here; the DOJ are forcing him to move to their timeline, and he's scrambling to find good lawyers.
I think we can say he was happy to sell out users or that he was fraudulently labelling his service as secure, while acknowledging the fact that he was trying to seek legal advice at the same time.