I'm not going to pretend I know the US law. Or even UK law, for that matter. IANAL

I'm fine with "no laptops allowed past this point" policy. Heck, I'm fine even with monitoring the traffic, assuming it's publicly announced. What I'm not OK with is when this happens in secret, without telling anyone.

There may be differences between US/UK, and the part of Europe where I live. Here we have "privacy of correspondence" which applies even when I (for example) access my personal email while at work. Or whatever. So no, it's not just about physical person - at least not universally.

Well, so how do certificates work? Root CA basically gives you the right to issue certificates for whatever website you want. It's unclear whether that happened in this case, other posts (supposedly from people working at schools in the UK) suggest that's how it works.

I agree that there are cases when accepting a certificate authority specific for the organization is a good solution. However it needs to be done openly, not secretly by installing it in the background. Installing root CA in the background is essentially what rootkits do.

Yes, I have my doubts about how much we can trust to the CAs, but I don't really understand how's that related to the issue here. Need to secure access to some school websites? Issue a regular SSL certificate and ask everyone to accept it (or install it in the background, I have no problem with that). Installing a root CA in a shady way is not the right solution.

Really? Shall we apply the same approach to the physical world? For example "The school can set arbitrary rules for people entering the building?"

Sure, there are things that may be tweaked by the school, but the are laws setting the basic boundaries for such modifications. IANAL, but installing root CAs is clearly unacceptable for me, especially when the users are minors (which, on secondary schools, most likely are).

I suppose he meant that while they might have the right to "wiretap" communications on their own equipment (which I doubt is true), they don't have that if some of the equipment is owned by the user. For example the laptop.

I wonder what he means by "Law enforcement agencies in the United States have recently taken action to address this issue” - I'm not really aware of any actions against "open source internet browsers" (although they're certainly thinking hard about tor and tor browsers). Or is he talking about the internet dragnet that became common knowledge last year?

The question is who is Valgrind. Sounds like a code name of an NSA operative to me ...

I see nothing about elliptic-curve crypto in that article.

That's bullshit, especially in this case. State-owned monopoly has no reason to compete with anyone. There might be some exceptions, but I live in Prague and the services used to be absolutely terrible until other companies started to offer these services around 2000 - cable, ADSL, wifi etc. It's much better now and most people have multiple choices. Btw the telco is not owned by state anymore, it was sold to Telefonica a few years ago.

Meh, should have read the tripadvisor page more carefully - it's not the original review. Nevertheless, the article states it was not removed.

... and when he refused to take it down, the chain of hotels sued him for $95,000. [quoted from the very first sentence of http://blog.sweetiq.com/2013/08/hotel-sues-guest-for-95k-over-bad-review/%5D

So the review is still there http://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowTopic-g155033-i134-k6703172-Bed_bugs_lawsuit_by_hotel_as_a_result_of_bad_review-Quebec_City_Quebec.html

Anyway, good job Hotel Quebec! Streisand effect at it's best ...

nationalism - ideology based on the premise that the individual’s loyalty and devotion to the nation-state surpass other individual or group interests. [http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/405644/nationalism]

I don't see how a statement that there are significant cultural and value differences between nations (or even within nations), rendering "Europeanism" so vague it has almost no meaning, makes it nationalist. No one said that one nation's culture or values are somehow better that the others', or anything like that. So what exactly do you consider nationalist?

It's true that a lot of people in the Europe share a lot of the basic values, no doubt about that, but OTOH that does not make us a nation.

Anyway, I've merely pointed out that the statement "You must be European. Europeans tend to be so smug about themselves that they miss the irony in their own statements." is rather annoying because it applies the same overly generalized statement to all people living in Europe. Heck, I can't even think of a European nation that is somehow exceptionally smug about themselves ...

Well, he only said that Israel is "EU Associated Country", which is true. Then he said that when people say 'European' they don't really think about Israelis because it's so far away, yet I'd say that Israel shares a lot of European values because a lot of the people actually came from Europe.

Not really true. Both Azerbaijan and Georgia have (small) areas in Europe, north of Greater Caucasus Mountains.

Check this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territories_in_Europe

I haven't said EU denies the diversity of Europe and I certainly agree that most people living in Europe share a lot of the values you mentioned.

I objected against something like "European nation" that EU attempts to establish (feel free to disagree with my impression).