I'm not angry with Snowden. He's like a kid. He doesn't know any better. I'm not angry that the NSA collects information on everyone. They are spies. It's their nature to spy.

I'm angry because the CIA collected the SSL keys to the internet. How on earth did they think it wouldn't be stolen??? As if they hadn't watched the news or looked in out prisons which are full of thieves.

If they had used software bugs to read people's encrypted email that would be ok. That's the vendors fault. But putting a backdoor in is not OK. That's the government actively making life worse for everyone. Some of these systems will be very hard to fix.

What I'm trying to say is that there is a fine line between using existing exploits and deliberately introducing bugs. I would prefer if the government helped fix bugs. I am fine if they use bugs. I get very very angry if they introduce bugs.

Some secrets are not yours to release.

The NSA doesn't do stuff, it just sits there listening and writing down the information. It knows you have contacted an STD from your nieghbor's wife. It knows the password to your facebook account.

It knows the secret things because it sent men in dark suits around to collect the SSL keys. Those men in dark suits answer to a secret court which meets in a dark place. And how are you going to say no to them?

And now Snowden has the keys and the passwords and the secret information about your STD.

I'm not saying that it was a smart thing to:
1) collect SSL keys.
2) collect passwords.
3) track everyone online and collect blackmail material.
4) build back doors into networking gear.
5) install back doors on corporate networks.

But we all know now that the NSA did this. If Snowden releases the information it will shutdown large parts of the internet for weeks. It will cause the stock market to collapse. Government ministers in many countries will be forced to resign. New coalition governments will have to be formed. The anti-terrorism programs in a lot of countries will be disrupted. Undercover agents will be exposed. Chinese dissidents will be exposed. Secure networks and important networks for managing water and electricity plants will be in danger.

Any government would be totally justified in panicking. We should all be panicking. We should all be demanding answers.

The MPs should really be asking what is in Snowden's files? If they knew what it was they probably would be think the anti-terrorism laws should apply. It could easily cost a trillion dollars if the information is released.

It could be SSL keys. It could be everyone's user account details. It could be back doors into every router. People should be demanding that they know what is on the disks so they can prepare in advance.

It's probably not documents, it's probably SSL keys.

We know the NSA has been collecting passwords. Probably using the SSL keys, but also we know they are collecting them directly by sending men in dark suits to visit site admins. Maybe it's all the user accounts for every senator. It's not really a wikileaks thing to post what porn senators are into, but it could be there in the insurance file.

The cost really depends on who Snowden leaks the SSL keys to doesn't it?

Probably Snowden stole everyone's SSL key and password. It explains a lot.

Also they are presumably using the keys to store passwords for later.

So probably Snowden has hundreds of SSL private keys and millions of passwords and account details.

It would explain a lot.

I get paid to audit code, so I'm biased.

The article says that no one employee could find hundreds of bugs and that's true. But when you hire employees you are building a process. Improving the process by writing a new QC script can eliminate hundreds of bugs over a couple years. These are not attributed to one employee and since the offending code is not committed then they aren't even counted as bug fixes.

Offering a bug bounty, on the other hand, is a unpredictable thing and you'll get random fixes. It is valuable because it provides a fresh perspective.

My guess is that if you collect a few bug bounties then Google will send you a recruiting email. It might be more expensive to hire you to work full time it's still a worthwhile thing.

In all fairness, Washington Post opinion pages are normally very stupid so this is not out of line with what's expected.

I am a fairly active linux contributor. I have patches all over the kernel tree. I also review drivers/staging code.

Most of the patches that I send are things that I cannot test because I don't have the hardware. Even though I'm careful, there are still a few times where I have introduced bugs. The most recent example was code like this "if (!attributes & 0x4000)". That has a precedence bug so the condition is always false. Unfortunately changing it to "if (!(attributes & 0x4000))" disabled certain graphics card. The correct thing was to delete the condition.

Breaking stuff is just a part of development, you try your best but don't let fear of breaking things stop you from applying patches.

Probably over 5% of the 10,000 patches in every new kernel are cleanups. We're always merging API changes and unlike Microsoft we don't care if it affects out of tree drivers. There isn't any subsystem where the owner says, "This code is stable now and I'm only accepting actual bug fixes."

The other thing that helps is the short release cycle. If something does break, it's easy to fix.

Some people find linux development frustrating. One developer told me, "Ever since XXX took over the YYY subsystem he has been constantly changing the API and re-writing my code. Does he ever sleep? I don't know how anything works any more."

It's hard on reviewers as well. I have reviewed literally over 3000 cleanup patches to the comedi subsystem. I have mornings when I feel lazy and it doesn't fill me with joy to see 40 new cleanup patches in my inbox. The process is expensive.

But I do feel a great deal of pride in the work.

I set up a computer lab in Uganda 3-4 years ago.

We bought second hand computers locally. They came with 256 MB of RAM and we upgraded them to 512. It was good enough to run Gimp and Firefox. That's what most of the internet cafes do too.

The computers were networked so we set up apt-cacher on the teacher's computer. The other software tip is that you will want to be able to block high traffic websites because internet access is so expensive and bad.

One thing which you might want to think about is if you'll have to pay tax bringing computers into the country. Uganda allows computers to be imported duty free. But for a while Uganda started banning people from bringing used computers into the country.

My sister-in-law's NGO is setting up a computer lab as well. They are bringing laptops from the US. Laptops are good because they have a battery built in so power fluctuations aren't such a big deal. The problem with laptops is that they can be stolen easily.

If you're bringing stuff from the US then bring a bunch of cheap USB keys for the kids. They will be very expensive locally.

> 1) What does promoting domestic energy entail?

One thing it entails is using the Canada oil sands. A lot of people don't realize how much oil there is right here in Canada... The only bad thing Romney doesn't realize is that Canada is still claiming to be an independent country.