Possibly, this may actually be a good thing, at least as far as the internet is concerned. When governments realise that they can't get any "special exemptions" put in for them, the only real option left open is to throw their weight behind measures to secure the internet for everybody.
Problem here is: the german intelligence agencies rely on the US. So we may see some political show on the surface but beneath that, nothing will happen. If we (the Germans) are unlucky, it may even end up in a show where the politicians tell us that we need more secret agency involvement to "protect us from the US" which of course will only end up as another excuse to collect even more data. Same thing they tried to sell us with the "Schlandnet" where T-Online would take over the control within Germany. There was a interesting show on the 30C3 on this.
Hmm.. that's nice, but I don't care, this NSA/GCHQ nonsense has burnt me for cloud computing, sorry.
What needs to happen is that the market heavily punish, and legal teams sue back into the stone age, those companies that collaborated. Then we need some legal structure in place that is a little more than "we promise we won't screw you".
It doesn't matter that this lot are based in Finland, because unless there is a heavy price for collaboration, the second they get big, the government of [insert jurisdiction here] will pressure them to turn data over and there will be little incentive to push back.
We need cloud-like tools, but we need them to be open source and secure. The question is, can you trust that data stored on an online service is as secure as you're led to believe?
There is a perfectly legal and effective way of punishing NSA-collaborating companies: don't use their products.
I have a server with OwnCloud which I use for file and calendar sharing. Don't pay for the server and don't have my info stored at the NSA. Problem solved.
Now please don't tell me that you want to punish NSA-collaborators... and yet use a Microsoft or Apple box.
I've said this elsewhere; but this is all part of an attempt (or at least an institutional belief) that equates opposition and protest, which is part of a healthy democracy, with terrorism.
At home, and everywhere I've had a say on how the network is laid out during working hours, I treat wifi as external. They get internet access, and there's a password to prevent the neighbours kids downloading GBs of pr0n, access to internal resources require connection over the vpn.
This has the side benefit that all my devices can connect securely to home resources wherever I am in the world.
At the risk of not contributing anything but a negative comment, I feel like saying the latter is as damaging if not more so than the former. Broad generalizations which assume something which I think is fundamentally untrue (aside from whatever the core causes of the gender discrepancies are) do not serve to assist the situation. I've met plenty of nice guys in tech (more than assholes) and plenty of asshole women in tech. I think the problem (And, to be frank, I'm not sure calling it a problem is the best term, at the risk of attracting some ire) is far more complex than that.
> The question is not "Why are there so few women in IT?", it's "Why are so many men in IT such jerks?"
Both are questions, neither is the question, and the second is an important question in large part because its premise is part of (but not all of) the answer to the first.
