Calling China's online censorship system a 'Great Firewall' is increasingly trendy, but misleading. All walls, being the creation of engineers, can be breached with the right tools.

Simply getting a country's population online is not going to trigger a revolution in critical thinking.

Free open-source software, by its nature, is unlikely to feature secret back doors that lead directly to Langley, Va.

Steve Jobs was notoriously blunt about products he found wanting, but his attack on Flash - Adobe's popular technology for playing multimedia content inside a browser - was particularly vicious. Claiming it was buggy and insecure, Jobs banned it from the iPad.

If you want to plan a revolution, you never do it in public - the authorities show up and arrest everyone.

It is easy to be seen as either a genius or a crank. If you have a Ph.D., at least you somewhat lower the chances that you will be seen as a crank.

Much of the real computer talent today is concentrated in the private sector.