Back in the 90s I started playing with PGP. I created a private/public keypair and I started signing emails and newsgroup messages that I wrote. Of course, no one was trying to impersonate me, so this was a complete waste of time, but it was good clean fun.

What I really wanted to do, however, was send actual encrypted messages. This required someone else get involved in my little fantasy. I published my public key everywhere, but just like no one was interested in impersonating me, no one was interested in sending me encrypted messages either. There was, however, a girl that was interested in me for other reasons, and with a bit of fast talking, I was able to set up her computer so that she could send me actual encrypted messages.

It was a bit of a pain, and at least on two occasions I had to go over to her apartment and help her unlock her secret key so that she could actually read what I had sent her, but it did give me a chance to actually use military grade encryption! If you squinted hard enough this even seemed like something that normal people might do.

Except that they never did. Not even criminals ever switched to using encryption. More than anything this shows that criminals are idiots. I mean, honestly, it is not that hard. You really only need to exchange public keys, and you can do that in public.

What Signal (and other programs like it) have done, was remove that particular barrier to entry. When I use Signal to talk to my friends I don't have to worry about what their public key is. Signal handles that part. Nowadays that's not even just Signal. Google messages handles it for me for basically everyone using Android. And yes, because they handle it there are lots of ways that this can be abused. However, it is mostly good enough, and it is a way better default than just sending plain text. More importantly, it is easy enough to do that for the first time in my life people are using end to end encrypted communication by default.

Law enforcement can try and put that particular genie back in the bottle, but I don't think that is likely to work. It is simply too easy to pick a service that does mostly the right thing. Honestly, I think the real thing holding people up from using encryption before is that the cryptography nerds wanted webs of trust and other ridiculous strategies when something as simple as letting Signal handle matching public keys was good enough. With my hard core nerd friends I did verify their public key by hand (the first time I set it up). When they got a new phone I realized that ain't nobody got time for that. It still works way better than anything else I have ever used.

I am quite sure that someone at EVE Online could back out all of those transactions. However, what's the fun in that? A game with enough realism that you can use corporate law to hijack and entire company. That sounds amazing.

The problem in the U.K. isn't that they have too many doctors. It is that they have too few doctors. According to the BMA, England has fewer doctors per 1000 (2.9 the entire U.K. is slighly higher at just over 3.0) than anywhere in the EU but Poland. Nearly 6% of all jobs for doctors are currently vacant. It is not as bad as the need for nurses (over 10% of nursing posts are unfilled), but it is still terrible. The reality is that most of the EU has a third more doctors per thousand than the UK does.

If I lived in the U.K. I would be concerned. There's not much point to free health care if you can't actually find a doctor that is willing to see you.

I suppose that you could take lower your standards for being a medical doctor so that people who were previously unqualified could accept these well-paying job slots, but that is not likely to improve the quality of health care. You can't just take people that a week ago were asking if "you want fries with that?" and put them in a position where they ask "would you like a antibiotic with that?"

The people running the exchange always have the advantage, especially if you have insider knowledge as to what claims are most likely going to be worth money in the end. The opportunities for shilling worthless claims and driving their value up and then trading these inflated claims for claims that will actually pay out in the end are basically endless. Not to mention the fact that the exchange will probably get transaction fees. Even if all of the claims end up being losers the exchange trading these worthless claims will still end up making actual money.

You would probably be better taking your fiat currency, withdrawing it from the bank in the form of cash, and then feeding that cash into a wood chipper.

Exactly. The organization pre-paid for the vaccines. The pharmaceutical companies should not have to cover that. On the bright side $1.4 Billion dollars worth of vaccine doses should still be worth something on the open market. Some people are still updating their vaccinations, and I suspect that the pharmaceutical companies are still making money providing new doses. If the pharmaceutical companies don't want to give Covax back their money, then Covax should simply demand delivery of the vaccine doses. I suspect that if they sold those doses at current market value they would at least recoup some of their money.

More importantly, it would force the pharmaceutical companies in question to negotiate in good faith. They might be willing to give Covax some of their money back if the alternative is that the bottom drops out of the Covid-19 vaccination market entirely.

I have worked for a company where there was a real sense of camaraderie, and where I knew that my employer genuinely cared for his employees. He came to his employees with some hard financial facts about the company, and we made some sacrifices to try and keep the business solvent. In the end things didn't work out, and he helped me get my next job. Because of that I helped him with what was left of the company for years after I had left. After all, he was more than a former employer, he was a friend. I will always be grateful for him, and my life is better for having known him.

Unfortunately, that sort of thing really only works for relatively small teams. It is one thing to sacrifice for a friend that you know, it is another entirely to sacrifice for people that you don't know. Some of the people that are being saved from layoffs are almost certainly part of the reason why Intel is having financial difficulties in the first place. I've definitely worked with people where it would have made the company more money if they got paid to sit on their hands all day. Every keystroke they typed in made things harder for everyone else around them.

At the mass level paycuts and layoffs do the same thing. Intel's most valuable employees, the ones that can easily find a job elsewhere, the ones that are currently underpaid for the value that they provide, the ambitious hardworking people, and the ones with the really valuable connections and knowledge, are already looking for new jobs right now. In a few months they will be working for one of Intel's competitors, and they will be getting paid more money. The people that are still left a year from now will be those people that don't have the ambition, skills, contacts, and intelligence to get out of a bad situation on their own terms. At least with layoffs it gives management a chance to communicate to employees which people are the most important to their future plans. For some people critical people that might be enough to keep them around. Intel is going to lose employees. If they lay people off they at least get to choose who some of them are.

When I bought my newest stove I was actually quite excited about the idea of being able to turn it on remotely. I have had several times when I have prepared a roast, or something else that bakes in the oven for some time, and then had someone at home turn on the oven when I was sure about the time frame that we would be returning. On several occasions I have returned home from a party or other social gathering, just so that I could turn on the oven at a certain time. So I was excited about the idea of being able to do that from anywhere using my phone.

Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately now that I have had the oven for a while, this is not possible. It is possible to send instructions to the oven remotely. But you then have to push a button on the stove for the oven to actually follow the instructions. That makes a lot of sense from a security point of view, but it does mean that my new oven is basically the same; as my old oven (other than it has more complicated parts, and is harder to fix when it breaks).

I suppose I can still turn the oven off. That's something, but it isn't worth paying a premium for.

I also rock an old Thinkpad. I would gladly pay for a modern take on the T420. I would pay good money for a modern laptop with good Linux support out of the box and a battery that I can replace. Bonus points if I can replace or upgrade some of the other components without taking off the keyboard. I don't care how thin it is.

As someone that was a Teamster when I was young I suspect that the actual answer is quite different. People that have never been in a union think that they are a good idea. People that have been in a union, in this case, old people, know that they suck. They especially suck for young, ambitious people, or people who are exceptionally, skilled, intelligent, or experienced. Coincidentally these are exactly the sort of people that most businesses want to hire.

As an example, when I was a Teamster I paid a monthly due, that was the equivalent of one full days wages, that guaranteed that I would be the first to be laid off in case of a reduction in force. It also guaranteed that I would never be offered the cushy packaging jobs, because those jobs invariably went to people with more seniority. The only way for me to get ahead was to have someone die or quit.

The final straw was when we had the yearly collective bargaining and my "so-called" union representative negotiated a new wage package that just gave raises to those workers in the higher seniority tiers. They then congratulated themselves by raising union dues and changing to a flat dues structure so that my dues went up while the people getting paid more than me saw their dues go down. In essence they negotiated a net decrease in my wages. Since Washington wasn't a right to work state I couldn't even leave the union and keep my job.

Needless to say, I walked. Eventually, the plant closed down. They couldn't keep good new hires, and they couldn't fire terrible employees.

This pattern has surfaced again and again in private companies with union workforces. The only places where unions haven't lost significant amount of clout is in the public sector (think teachers). The primary reason for this is that the government can't go out of business.

This is absolutely coming. To some of you this even sounds scary. Heck, I grew up in a small town where everyone knew who I was all of the time. The chances of getting away with something were effectively nil, and I quickly learned that I could either be well-behaved, or my parents were going to get a phone call.

Now imagine a world in which your reputation follows you around everywhere you go. Cut someone off in traffic, and it gets recorded. Next thing you know you have a reputation of being an erratic driver and people with fancy new cars get alerts when you are in their vicinity. Like to eat out and then issue a charge back on your credit card? Pretty soon you are not welcome in any restaurants (I use this example because I have an acquaintance that actually does this). Routinely forget to clean up after your dog when it poops, next thing you know everyone's smart glasses alert them when they see you out walking your dog.

And yes, I suspect that employees of some businesses will be unfairly targeted. Of course, if you work for a terrible employer perhaps you should rethink your life choices. My experience in a small town tells me that what actually ends up happening is that people end spending more time worrying about their reputation. Most people are far more likely to be rude and inconsiderate if they feel like they are anonymous. I am an old man, but I still find myself tempering how I respond to someone because I think to myself that perhaps my mother will find out about what I said or did.

To a certain extent this is already happening. The amount of information that you can find out about any random person you meet is astounding. Glasses that provide a heads-up display and include a POV camera aren't even science fiction any more. It is really only a matter of time before someone hooks something like that up to facebook.

That's actually part of the reason that I use my actual name on /. I found I spent a lot of time arguing with people online. Using my actual name definitely cut down on the stuff that I was willing to put in writing. That feels like a win to me.

To some people this seems like a truly dystopian world. Personally, I am not particularly worried. Sure, I have some bad interactions with people, and there are probably people that don't like me. However, I am also very active in my community, and there are far more people that I am quite sure would be willing to vouch for me.

I was under the impression that they didn't steal all of the Bitcoin. Just enough to drive Mt. Gox into bankruptcy. Either way it is bad news for people that had their crypto on that exchange.

The withdrawal part is that people are taking their Bitcoin, which is currently stored in Binance's wallet, and they are moving it to a private wallet. The reason that they are doing this is simple. If the exchange goes bankrupt and your bitcoins are in their wallet then you lose your bitcoins. That's basically what happened to the people who had their Bitcoin at FTX, and Celsius, and even Mt. Gox.

This is basically just BlackRock saying that the future is going to require active money managing. This isn't a surprising take from a company that sells active money managing. Of course they say that. They definitely have money where their mouth is, it just isn't their money.

I suppose we will see. I would be surprised if they do better than the S&P 500 over the next 10 years, but it is possible.

Personally, I am a fan. I want to know when yet another Crypto exchange gets hacked or goes bankrupt. It is hard to argue that it isn't technology related. Heck, just a minute ago they were calling this Web 3.0. It sort of reminds me about being on /. during the dotcom crash.

I remember getting on /. back in the day and making fun of pets.com and the idea that people would order their dog food over the Internet. Fast forward 20 years and it turns out that pets.com was just ahead of its time.

Personally, I don't see many cases where blockchain makes more sense than some other technology, but I have definitely been wrong before.