Nothing I have read about Snowden indicates that he is actually some sort of uber-hacker

Except the stuff about how a 29 year old completely pwnd the NSA, probably the most technically sophisticated part of the US Government there is?

Sheesh. Your standards are high. What would it take, exactly?

Additionally, just because you have read nothing about his programming skills doesn't mean he has none. He once mentioned finding XSS holes in some CIA app so apparently he is good enough to do that.

There are already plenty of CA's in countries that are not under US jurisdiction. However, so far the CA's that issued bad certs were all outside the USA, and appear to have only done so because they got hacked and not because they were e.g. forced to by court order.

Unless you have a magical solution to hacking I don't think your new root CA would solve much.

Additionally, citation needed for "routine man in the middle". SSL MITM has been studied by academics at scale. They did not find evidence of much. Governments don't need to MITM SSL for as long as users browse non-SSLd sites like Slashdot and browser exploits exist.

Frankly, I think NASA should be working with SpaceX to get the DragonRider off the ground as fast as possible and work on the Falcon Heavylift. This is basically a pork project to keep the people who where making the solid rocket boosters in business.

It's a small part, but it's a part. I think Snowden has done his fair share of trying to inform laymen and stir up giving-a-fuck. If he wants to switch to working on tech, he could accomplish nothing and still come out far ahead of the rest of us. ;-)

The existence of a decent open-source router can't do much against a U.S. National Security Letter.

While we certain should care enough to force our government to stop being our adversary, there will always nevertheless be adversaries. You have to work on the tech, too. Even if you totally fixed the US government, Americans would still have to worry about other governments (and non-government parties, such as common criminals, nosey snoops, etc), where you have no vote at all. You will never, ever have a total social/civic solution which relies on, say, 4th Amendment enforcement to keep your privacy. I'm not saying your chances are slim; I'm saying they're literally 0%.

Furthermore, getting our tech more acceptable to layment acually would correct some of the problems inherent with NSLs, improving the situation even in a we-still-don't-give-a-fuck society. If you do things right, then the person they send the NSL to, is the surveillance target. The reason NSLs (coercion with silence) works is that people unnecessarily put too much trust into the wrong places.

For example, Bob sends plaintext love letters to Alice, so anyone who delivers or stores the love letters, can be coerced into giving up the contents. OTOH if they did email right, then if someone wanted to read the email Bob sent to Alice, they'd have to visit Bob or Alice. That squashes the most egregious part of NSLs, where the victim doesn't even get to know they're under attack.

That's true whether we're talking about email, or even if Bob and Alice get secure routers and VPN to each other. One of them gets the NSL ordering them to install malware on their router.

I hereby revoke my consent.

A nice step ahead would be the establishment of a new set of root certificates...

The lesson of CA failure is that there shouldn't be root authorities. Users (or the people who set things up for them, in the case of novices) should be deciding whom they trust and how much, and certificates should be signed by many different parties, in the hopes that some of them are trusted by the person who uses it.

If you want to catch up to ~1990 tech, then you need to remove the "A" in "CA."

Clicked (thought submitter screwed up the link and linked to a page that links to the article, rather than linking to the article), expecting to find a story about a forgotten A2000: maybe someone walked into an office in 2014 and saw that one was in use. Or someone knocked down a wall in 2014 and found one bricked up but still powered up. Instead, found a page telling everyone what A2000s are. Duh. Where's the "forgotten" part? All that I can tell that was forgotten, is that the writer forgot his elementary school spelling and punctuation lessons.

try googletranslating http://lb.ua/news/2014/07/20/2... [lb.ua] - ukrainian army detains 23 terrorists. somehow all 23 turn out to be citizens of the russian federation.

That page is merely reporting a press release from the Ukrainian government in Kiev. Are you suggesting we should treat everything they say as factually true?

let's bisect the other thing you said - "at most Russia is supplying weapons to them".
"at most". as if they were given bows and arrows. they get armoured vehicles. they get... tanks. they get bloody sam systems that can reach targets up to 25km.

Yes. That's what I said. Perhaps this is a language issue.

Whatever is happening in Ukraine it is not a full-blown invasion by Russia in the "classical" style that Iraq or Afghanistan were. That would be far more obvious. It seems to be much more similar to what's been happening in Syria where the west has been supplying weapons, training and expertise to anti-Assad groups there. If you were to say the west has "at most been supplying weapons and training to the Syrian rebels" you would be correct, given that (fortunately) Syria was not invaded by a foreign army.

Not exactly. There is a distinct difference between a soldier and a combatant. A soldier is trained and is a member of a standing military. The separatists can at best be described as "irregulars", or insurgents or rebels if you want to go with slightly more charged terminology.

Yes, really? With that definition it'd be impossible for a new military to ever be created, because anyone who joins and fights with one is not joining a standing army therefore cannot be soldiers. That is obviously nonsense, it must be possible for someone to be a soldier in a newly formed army, which is what it looks like is happening here.

Additionally, you claim that the fighters in Donetsk cannot be soldiers because soldiers are trained, and then immediately claim they're receiving training from Russia. So which is it?

And given the fact that the missiles were launched from inside territory controlled by the rebelsis a very important detail. Why would the Ukrainians have anti-air equipment deployed in an area they do not control, against an enemy with no air power?

You're quite right - it probably was the separatists. This does not change the accuracy of the Wikipedia edit that's being discussed, because unless/until the separatists win, they are still Ukrainians.

Although I'd note that given the amount of bullshit emanating from all sides in this conflict it's hard to really know anything about what's going on. The area of Ukraine that's in revolt is next to the Russian border, which is exactly where you'd expect the Ukrainian military to have had lots of soldiers and equipment stationed. Missiles might have been trucked over the Russian border, or they might simply have been there already. The separatists might be being trained by Russians (this would be unsurprising and not exactly unprecedented - see how the USA supported rebels in Syria), or alternatively they might be operating the equipment without really knowing what they're doing - indeed, having no clue what you're targeting would be rather indicative of not being properly trained, no? Or perhaps they're being trained by people who are ethnically Russian but lived in Ukraine at the time of the rebellion, or one of many other more complex cases that won't neatly fit into the "Putin fired the missiles himself" story the west is busy pushing.

All we can say for sure is that whatever you read about this incident is going to be full-blown propaganda, and should be treated as such.

I don't think Russian state media should be editing Wikipedia entries especially not on matters of current affairs.

But still, interpreted literally the new statement is far more factually correct and unbiased than what it replaced. Whoever shot down the plane, they were "soldiers" or fighters of some variety and almost certainly can be described as Ukrainian, given that everyone seems to agree that the fighters are actually eastern Ukrainians and at most Russia is supplying weapons to them.

The original text, on the other hand, more or less exactly sums up western/west Ukrainian line despite the obvious abuse of the word terrorist to mean "rebel fighter" and the [citation needed] assertion about who did it and the source of the weapons.

There is no need to get rid of Tor: in theory, Tor could have a "hidden service policy" mechanism not much different to the exit policy mechanism. HS Policies would allow a node operator to state that they aren't willing to act as an introduction point for a list of hidden services (or point to lists maintained elsewhere to stop fast-flux type behaviour).

Tor already accepts that not all relay operators will want to support all kinds of behaviour and that some kinds of traffic can be abusive, that's why they implement exit policies which allow exits to ban port and IP ranges. Taking this philosophy to hidden services seems like the next natural step. After all, Tor volunteers are ultimately acting as human shields for other people's anonymous behaviour. Requiring them to shield everything just restricts the number of people who would be willing to donate bandwidth to general privacy but are not interested in enabling botnets.

Not sure what you're getting at, but the Azul collector is well known for pulling off apparently magical GC performance. They do it with a lot of very clever computer science that involves, amongst other things, modifications to the kernel. I believe they also used to use custom chips with extended instruction sets designed to interop well with their custom JVM. Not sure if they still do that. The result is that they can do things like GC a 20 gigabyte heap in a handful of milliseconds. GC doesn't have to suck.

Take off every "zig"! You know what you doing. Move "zig". For great justice.

I think it's more likely that more people are becoming obese because of exactly one factor: age. They are living artificially prolonged lifetimes due to access to adequate food and to medicine. It's easier to get fat when you are 50 than when you are 30 because of the natural changes in your metabolism.

Ripple, before the name was bought by a Silicon Valley company and changed into something a bit different, was more or less exactly this.

There's a video on the original web page that explains this concept quite nicely. You could set up debt relationships between people and denominated in any currency, including ones you invent on the fly like hours of The Real Mike's time. However it never really took off in a big way, perhaps because it was rather complicated, and bootstrapping such a system from the internet (full of strangers who don't know each other, don't trust each other and may not even exist) is presumably very difficult.

However if the concept sounds interesting you could do worse than check out the original thinking by Ryan Fugger behind Ripple. Satoshi once told me that Ripple was interesting because it was the only system that does something with trust other than centralise it.