but be sure to write down google's ssl fingerprint... and check it every now and then yourself. You never know when your place of work decides to start intercepting https! Mine did recently until I pointed out issues with HIPAA compliance in conjunction with our limited personal use policy! They (work) installed their own certificate on everyone's computers (but they didn't do Firefox which is why i noticed)... and then they modified the proxy servers to start taking a peek before re-encrypting and sending it along :(

Also, read this: http://samizdat.mines.edu/howto/HowToBeAProgrammer.html

Use notepad or nano and write down everything. This way you won't have to ask more than once for something.

you, sir, have just preached to the choir ;)

but... Linux doesn't have bugs!!

even inbound it's true, but in a different way. My ISP blocks port 80, but not 443 :) So I run my webserver on 443 with a self signed cert which is quite hard to spoof ;) Luckily they don't block 22... though maybe they should given how much work my DenyHosts is doing for me......

At work, I use a tunnel to bypass the special filtering they do, 443 (cgi-proxy) and 22 (ssh) are my friends...

In the end they haven't prevented anything, just made me go through a couple of extra hops - both at work and at home.

And it took you how long to figure this out? Anyone with real security in mind would create their own certificates and sign them. What's always been missing is a convenient way to verify the identify of the person you're communicating with. CAs only help in certain situations. SSL has always been more about encrypted content than identification no matter what people try to tell you.

ad hominem arguments do not help the debate

No they don't have a better resume, but you can switch from one bad insurance company to another. You still have that choice (some might call it a freedom).

With the government as your provider, you're stuck if you don't like how things are working. You can't just switch to another provider. Allowing many providers and promoting competition is democracy at work. People switch to the ones that are best meeting their needs. You might have to pick between several providers that are not perfect fits for what you need, but at least you have that freedom. This is the whole idea of democracy.

I do software.... all software has bugs. Bills are a lot like software that is interpreted by people. I'm a little bit skeptical of something this large being thrown into production all at once with almost no testing to replace an aging program that has worked (albeit with flaws) for decades. This has all the feel of a Dilbert comic, but with a completely new level of pointy haired bossedness (Ph. B.)... we tried this once where I work on a $20millon project, and it ended up costing over $75M to fix!

the problem is actually worse than you think... especially if the library of congress keeps on site backups in the form of hard disks.... that contain the "entire" library of congress...

since when can't lasers pass through walls!? :) Use a BIGGER lazer!