> Another thing troubling me is whether to reply yes or no on questions like "didn't you agree?"
Native English speakers often get confused by this one too. You can respond either yes or no in those situations as long as you specify the one you wanted afterwards.
e.g. "Don't you agree?"
"Yes, I agree" and "No, I agree" would both be acceptable.
I've heard of many situations where East Asian students of English cause confusion by answering "Yes. Yes, I don't agree." — which doesn't sound natural in English.
They should have killed the Snowden interview anyway because of all the stuff going on with Russia and Ukraine right now. Snowden's voluntary exile to Russia looks even worse to the general public and will overshadow anything he actually says during the interview.
Snowden is not in Russia by choice. He is there because the US government cancelled his passport, and demonstrated what would happen if he tried to go elsewhere by forcing the landing of the Bolivian president's jet based just on a suspicion he might be on board.
I think it's pretty likely this was deliberately done just so they could say "Look! He's in Russia, what a hypocrite!"
The fact that Snowden has to go to Putin's Russia to escape the US and find freedom of speech should make people realise just how weird the situation is and iust how terribly the US and EU have behaved.
The UK detaining the spouse of a journalist for 9 hours, and the courts saying that was fine, was appalling.
You missed the worst bit, not only did they detain him they did so under terrorism legislation on the basis that the information he might have been carrying might be useful to terrorists.
The fact that the courts backed this interpretation brings all the terrorism legislation into (further?) disrepute.
Obfuscated code is surely harder to understand and work with than original code with descriptive variable names, comments, formatting, etc. Wouldn't this make it more difficult to find vulnerabilities?
It makes it just as easy for the whitehats and for the blackhats so it makes no difference. It may give some people a false sense of security that they would have not had if they were able to look at the code.
Presumably dropbox is through its enormous distribution a very fat target and I find it hard to believe that this published effort would be the first instance of such an undertaking. You're average blackhat isn't going to publish his hack but will market it for all it is worth.
I don't think the dropbox team obfuscates their code as a security measure, they more likely do it to increase the depth of their moat by a little bit and to make it a bit harder to write third party clients against their non-published api's.
My favorite experience with it was trying to deal with a zip file of "C:\Documents and Settings\" from an old computer that happened to contain multiple files whose paths were 255 characters long or so. You couldn't unzip it in a subdirectory of "C:\" because one of the resulting paths would be too long and cause the built-in zip program to crash/fail entirely. Using 7zip was the eventual solution.
On a related topic, do you know how difficult it is to search for files whose path are above a certain length on a fresh/default Windows setup? I eventually resorted to installing Python on it just to write a script to do it.
