A Facebook Challenger Appears

from here and here

It's hard to believe anyone could give Facebook a run for their money, but it sounds like Oracle is doing just that. Not in the context of social networking, however, but rather in the context of global surveillance.

It's difficult to imagine why Oracle would be interested in my political views and physical location, but I suppose those are details an authoritarian regime could use about it's citizens. 

Only America gets to have backdoors

from here

I may be dating myself here, but back in the day Oracle tried to market their software as "unbreakable". I don't think I need to tell you how that worked out for them. Now they're going to be looking for problems in someone else's code - good luck with that. Hopefully it works out better this time.

Of course the aim is to prevent Chinese backdoors, and this was all prompted by a government that keeps trying to add backdoors to things (they're obsessed with the back door, it seems). It all seems very self-serving, to be honest.