Quiz: The week in quotes

September 19, 2008 —

This week we saw first-hand that Sarah Palin's personal email is as boring as our own, discovered that in-flight Internet access means in-flight porn, were shocked to learn that Ubuntu users aren't big fans of license agreements, and got confirmation that we're killing foreign kids with our ewaste. But do you know who said these things? Match the quote to the quoted. Then check your answers in the answer-key.

The quotes

1. "It's not constructive to say 'WTF?', nor is it constructive to rant and rave in allcaps. Your software freedoms are built on legal grounds, as are Mozilla's rights in the Firefox trademark. To act as though your rights are being infringed misses the point of free software by a mile."

2. "We have a serious problem in this country. Much of our exported electronic waste is harming individuals, often children, overseas."

3. "Governor Palin has come under criticism for using private e-mail accounts to conduct government business and in the process avoid transparency laws. The list of correspondence, together with the account name, appears to re-enforce the criticism."

4. "Customers viewing inappropriate material on board a flight is not a new scenario for our crews, who have always managed this issue with great success."

5. "The traditional operating system has all but disappeared."

6. "When we finally built it and got the proof of concept it was quite nasty. If I control what you click on, how much bad can I do? It turns out you can do a number of really, really bad things."

The quoted

A. Tim Smith, a spokesman for American Airlines, in response to reports that flight attendants asked their employer to block passengers from using inflight Internet access to view porn

B. Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth to Ubuntu users regarding a Firefox 3.0.1 license agreement

C. VMware CEO and President Paul Maritz speaking at the VMworld conference in Las Vegas

D. White Hat Security CTO Jeremiah Grossman regarding a clickjacking attack that divulged a bug in one of Adobe's products.

E. John Stephenson, co-author of a GAO report on electronic waste, speaking at a congressional hearing

F. Wikileaks in a note accompanying screen shots of Sarah Palin's Yahoo e-mail

Answer key

Rollover the ??? to reveal the answers

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So how'd you do? Was it way too easy? Anything surprising? Tell me about it in the comments. And while you're at it, why not toss in an idea for the next quiz.