The fact that the content of every bank account and every transaction is public makes bitcoin a very bad tool for money laundering.

It would give you a pseudonymous social network of criminals. A law enforcement firm then just has to play crosswords and make some honey pots to get the big picture.

Bitcoin suppresses the need for extorsion fees during international wire transfers, not the need for suitcases full of cash during shady transactions.

Sell it? Hammond did this? I think he just published them.

And if you run a private spy company, complaining about getting your data stolen is just hypocrisy.

Slavery had to be replaced by something.

The problem is that the movie director claims to make fun of the serious views of the novels the movie is based on. That's an interesting but risky take, and he can't really blame anyone for getting the wrong message.

Dor what it is worth, the version 6.0a of Truecrypt has been found clean by the ANSSI, the French public agency of computer security (which have a good reputation in cryptography, but who may set the paranoia cursor a bit too low) in 2009.

It was considered adequate for military use. Depending on your political opinions, this may be a laughable audit or a solid claim.

A famous French blogger made a binary comparison between the sources and the windows binaries given by Truecrypt and deduced that (unless the compiler itself adds backdoors automatically, as improbable as it is, we cannot totally dismiss that possibility nowadays) no backdoors have been hidden in the binary. So if the code is clean, the binary is clean.

As a French, I would endorse this action. Either we finally get an update of these laws (which date back from the WWII aftermath and the denazification period) or an alternative to Google pops up. Win-win.

You can't imagine, being a developer in a country where software patents do not exist, how happy I am to see US firms shoot themselves in the foot and spend billions over an imaginary property issue.

I agree that a chip factory does not want a machine that takes hours to print a single chip but fablabs do want a possibility to make only one or two chips of a custom design. It makes sense for this niche.

I was shocked in 2008 when I read that Sarkozy and Merkel talked to each other about EU policies through SMS. Apparently, both French and German leaders do think that spying does not happen, that cell phones are secure, and are genuinely surprised by what happened.

The only thing Snowden has really revealed was the degree of incompetence of the politicians in my country (France)

I know better than to laugh at Fortran developpers.

That's what Aaron Swartz gave his life for.

The source is not stated. I guess it is a Japanese governmental source. So the government anonymously says it did nothing wrong? Astounding.

The article is very light on details. I wonder if that could make it possible to produce small series of microchips. It would be an incredible tool for your local fablab...

My favorite feature of markdown is that it can easily be used to collaborate with people without having them learn a complicated syntax. "Use the same formatting as I did" is all they need to know.

Switching sides when comfronted to new data is a desirable behavior.