Democracy protests in Hong Kong have resumed and thugs arrested dozens.

A public hospital in Alabama makes patients waive their legal right not to be sued for hospital bills.

I don't think poor indebted Americans should feel the slightest shame about using bankruptcy to escape the medical bills that a civilized country would never have tried to impose on them.

Meanwhile, I wonder whether the hospital's contract with these patients is valid. If the law says hospitals can't do something to their patients, can the hospitals set it aside just by getting the patient to say yes?

Obama continues to claim that the war in Afghanistan made the US safer.

Life and business in occupied Palestine are tangled in hundreds of absurd Israeli regulations, each with its own excuse, but all designed simply to make life poor and difficult.

How the nebulous idea of "cloud computing" led millions of internet users to lose their privacy.

The one flaw in the article is that it presumes we have all fallen for the trap. For example, "When the technology industry embraced 'cloud computing' and made it part of our daily lives, we all made a Faustian bargain." Maybe you made that bargain — I never did. I hope you will join me in rejecting it now.

Some kinds of services are acceptable to use in specific ways. But if you adopt a policy of trusting a service without first carefully checking who you would be trusting with what, you'll be mistreated over and over. This is why I have adopted the policy of not identifying myself to businesses I deal with except under very narrow conditions (for instance, the company that hosts stallman.org knows it's mine).

In other words, you've got to stop thinking that there is a "cloud", and start thinking about each particular service.