They have shown that they can not be trusted. They must lose the power to do this.

Pull someones certificates or kill some CA. Someone needs to suffer because of this.

What happens now is that there's an investigation. Depending on the outcome the CA may be revoked for good, or merely forced to reissue lots of certificates. The deciding factor is the reason for the screwup - for instance they may have got hacked, rather than been actively corrupt. In that case Microsoft will have to decide if they have patched things up enough to continue as part of their root store program or whether to pull the plug. I doubt many people have certs issued by this CA so the damage would be relatively minimal.

Unfortunately you can't just kill any CA that screws up. For one, if the CA was widely used it'd be disrupted. For another, nothing is unhackable, especially when you get the NSA involved. Expecting CA's to be able to reliably fight off professional hackers from dozens of governments and never ever fail is likely an impossible standard to ever meet.

Hard decisions ahead for browser and OS makers for sure ...

We are talking about something "regular" people can do.

This seems to be quite typical for government consultations. There's very little in the way of rigorous process. I remember years ago in the UK there was some poll that showed people were worried about anti-money laundering laws and their effect on freedom and civil liberties (it was a poll about risks to civil liberties, Ithink). So the British government said they'd respond to this by ordering a consultation on how best to improve Britain's AML laws. They invited public comments, etc. 6 months later the consultation was published and it recommended making the laws even stricter. There was absolutely no evidence-based approach used at all.

Regular people can build web apps. It's called "Microsoft Sharepoint."

Haters gonna hate.

I remember people said the same about smartphones. Waah, the battery only lasts a day, I'll never use one of those. Somehow smartphones still took over the world. People do go to sleep every night - a nice cordless charging stand seems like a relatively small issue if the devices are genuinely useful.

That's not quite how I remember Manna.

The reason the American economy is trashed in the world Manna envisions is not because it's run by an AI but because America failed to adjust to a post-work society. Everyone is on social security/benefits, because hardly anyone has a job as it was all automated away or pirated. So people have a kind of futuristic subsistence lifestyle in which robots attend to their basic needs but they can never get anything more.

The Australia project, on the other hand, is not meant to be communist. It's meant to be a society where your having a job was disconnected from you having social value. It's a society that prioritises leisure time and finds other ways to allocate the few scarce resources that are left in ways that aren't money. Communism as a term is too heavily linked with the real-world implementations in the Soviet union to be useful for describing this state of affairs.

IIRC at the end the story goes off on a bit of a tangent and all the Australians just end up having VR sex all day or something. Not a great ending. But I remember Manna kind of blew my mind when I first read it, and its prediction that robots/computers would replace middle management before the toilet cleaners was (to me) very new and obviously correct. Indeed that's what this story is about.

I was going to say wake me up when he has a production-grade model that's still the most reliable, most advanced, and faster than any 3D printer but the kid gets major style points for the Bustin Jeiber game.

I think you massively overestimate how bad Russia is, especially compared to the USA.

Snowden is 30 and newly single. Russia is a large country that is notorious for its abundance of highly educated and attractive women. It has quite a few famous and sophisticated software companies, especially in the security realm that Snowden likes. 143 million people manage to live there without going crazy.

Of all the places in the world to have landed, Russia is definitely not the worst. Heck it's probably the best place he could have landed. I guess he was trying to get to Ecuador but they don't have the stones Putin does, nor is it a large country, nor does it have any noted IT firms.

Probably nothing can be done to stop it in the short to medium term. I suspect that many years from now historians will look back and see this as just a phase humanity had to go through, kind of like the evolution from monarchy to democracy.

It's clear that the power to know everything about everyone has gone to the heads of the political class so badly that they'll never give it up. They'll always find a justification and any "reasonable compromise" that is arrived at won't be what we had 40-50 years ago (i.e. no total surveillance) even though that seemed to work OK, it'll be "slightly less than totalitarian surveillance, sorta, unless there's a good reason for it".

So for now we're stuck with it. The geek in me wants to believe that what starts with Snowden is an epic and very long struggle to design technology to make it surveillance-proof, which will inevitably result in some kind of (hopefully mostly non-violent) quasi civil war a la the monarchists vs parliamentarians. Governments will fight back hard and eventually the fact that technology needs to be government-proof will become as widely accepted a principle as the free press being government-proof. But it will take a loooooong time. Probably longer than any of us will be alive.

The cynic in me says we're all boned and 1984 has arrived.

Yes and yes. But I would suggest that those who fall into the latter category generally also fall into the former.

A theory has to coherently explain all of the evidence and make correct predictions about experiments not yet performed. Epicycles had no contenders for quite a while. But anyone who considered the orbits of the planets a settled matter was a fool -- each time data collection improved, epicycles' prediction was a little bit off yet again.

Put another way: I don't have to know the truth to know when someone is full of bull. I merely need recognize the characteristics of BS. It could still be the truth, but the guy BSing me is ruled out as a credible source for that knowledge.

Go right ahead. This should be entertaining. Or was that the limit of your analysis?

Before you get too worked up, allow me to point out that the phrase, "In my opinion" encourages critical thinking but pretty much precludes offering the statement which follows as a scientific result.

How do you make other people do what you think they should do? You don't.

You tell them what you're sure is true with a simplified explanation of why using the language of certainty. Then you tell them what you believe to be true and why, using the language of uncertainty. Then you acknowledge any competing theories that haven't been strictly disproven, again with the language of uncertainty, and briefly discuss the merits behind those points of view.

Anyone who needs to make a decision on that information will then ask their personal subject matter expert to spot check you -- do any of your certain claims appear questionable? Does any of the uncertainty in your beliefs appear to be mere wishful thinking? Did you deliberately omit the competition?

Folks won't make their decision on the facts. They'll make their decision based on whether they believe you're honest. Behaving like a used car salesman, using the language of certainty for everything you believe and ridiculing that which you don't, dissuades folks from finding you credible. The hard sell sometimes achieves a single result but it never achieves sustainable results over time.

I think it's smart. Lots and lots of people don't respond to stories that are technical and abstract. OK so they spy on people using "tor" with "selectors" yawn change channel *zap*.

Human interest stories are different. This story might reach a whole audience who just couldn't find it in themselves to care until now. But ooooh juicy details about someone's romance with a jihadist, interesting, and huh .... wait. They could get that stuff on anyone, couldn't they. They could get that on me.

So this story could prompt the housewives of America to care more than perhaps they have so far.

I don't suggest doing nothing. I suggest more research and more experimentation. I suggest public policy that encourages more nuclear power and addresses the dangerous build up of temporary storage for spent nuclear fuel, trading a risk of local toxicity for the proven regional air pollution and possible global impact.

What I -don't- suggest is that we rush it. Let change evolve slowly on a low-cost vector until the science is good enough to support more radical action.