Ars Technica
New York Times
rt.com

It's worse than that. As an artist friend of mine told me recently: "Ten years ago I used to wonder how people would respond to the massive loss of privacy represented by social media. Now we know: the only thing people actually worry about is that nobody is watching."

TFA is correct that simply thinking that, because there is a zillion-bit crypto algorithm thrown into the communication stream, that everything is good and security is guaranteed. There are many, many attack channels that do not involve brute-forcing the crypto. Keyloggers, for example.

But this is silly:

In actuality, the crypto implementations promoted by cypherpunks were exactly those that made it difficult or impossible for such a program of mass subversion to take place. Remember that the height of the cypherpunk movement was when the Clinton administration was pushing hard, really hard, for the NSA-sponsored Clipper Chip, which was, in a nutshell, crypto subverted by design and mandated by law. We now know that when the spooks found that was politically impossible, they went ahead and did it anyway, in secret. But the cypherpunk tools, most notably PGP (and later GPG, when PGP sold out and went corporate). Hell, even look at /dev/random: when it was revealed that the NSA had actually, and pretty amazingly, undermined hardware random number generators on widely available chips, /dev/random was still just fine, because it treats all sources of entropy as potentially untrustworthy, including the chip.

The first lesson we should learn from the history of the cypherpunks is that trusting your crypto to a closed product is always, always a bad idea. That was the lesson then, and it is still the lesson now.

The second lesson is that crypto, like any security, is all about the threat model. In that light, should we reject the widespread adoption of end-to-end crypto in commercial products? Of course not. If Apple and Google implement crypto by default, it will make efforts to dragnet information exponentially harder, even if the crypto is imperfect. This is why the spooks are beating the drum against it: it closes off that one particular threat model, which they have come to rely on. It doesn't close off other kinds of attack, but so what?

The third lesson is that crypto, by itself, is not a panacea. Nobody ever said it was. The cypherpunk message was not that we can write PGP, declare victory, and walk away. The message was that privacy changes the relationship between the citizen and the state in beneficial ways, and that, in a technological society, we need to embrace technological means of increasing our privacy, in ways that cannot be controlled by the state.

The Earth will be destroyed by the sun five billion years from now, which is a span of deep time longer than it took single-celled organisms to evolve into us. What makes you think that the human race will be in existence for even a tiny fraction of that time? Even if we don't go extinct outright (which is the most probable outcome), our descendants will probably bear no resemblance to us whatsoever. If technological progress continues at anything near the current rate, they will be godlike beings in comparison to us. Why would they give a fuck about living on Mars?

Walter Cronkite's live description of the launch ofApollo 4: "...our building's shaking here. Our building's shaking! Oh it's terrific, the building's shaking! This big blast window is shaking! We're holding it with our hands! Look at that rocket go into the clouds at 3000 feet!...you can see it...you can see it...oh the roar is terrific!...".

If I couldn't see your user ID, I would think that you must be new here.

On both counts you mention, I guess I disagree. The faster-than-light neutrino people were very clear that they expected it to eventually be resolved by something mundane, which it of course eventually was. The jury is still out on BICEP2, although it sure isn't looking good. If you believe the tweets, Planck puts an upper limit on tensors that would be strongly incompatible with the BICEP2 claim.

In any case, isn't it a good thing for the press to show scientists getting really excited about a potential new discovery, and then eventually finding out that it was a false alarm? This gives a much better picture of how science actually progresses than portraying it as an unbroken series of perfect truths. And if the scientists themselves are a little vain, a little hungry for fame, a little fractious with one another, that reflects the fact that science is done by actual people, and manages to arrive at the truth despite that. I wish more science reporting made the sausage making more evident to the general public. I think scientists tend to be a little too afraid that if scientists as a group are portrayed as anything less than heroic examples of a detached and objective stereotype, that somehow public perception of science will suffer, when in reality what that does is project a false image and create unrealistic expectations.

Climatology has only been politicized by people who aren't climatologists. The actual scientists get along just fine.

What you're describing as the "reason they're no longer trusted" is called the scientific method: science is trustworthy precisely because when people are wrong, they admit it. Either that, somebody else proves them wrong.

Do you expect this shit to sprout from the head of Zeus or something?

The funny thing is that there is a meeting in Italy this week to discuss the Planck polarization result. Except that the Planck team doesn't have the result ready yet, for reasons they are not explaining. To make matters worse, there is no internet access at the venue, so the rest of the world is hearing about it primarily through Twitter feeds. The Planck team should be seriously embarrassed to cock up a major announcement as badly as they have.

Regardles, Planck is releasing its polarization measurements in three weeks, on December 22. Get back to us then.

That's right. All those fancy-pants "scientists" are actually idiots and frauds. Nothing they say can be trusted.

More fucking popup menus.

Which is apparently necessary.

The overhead we accept because we have to store, maintain, and insure our own vehicles is enormous. Likewise with parking them at our destination. Imagine an Uber-like app which allows you to request a car, which comes to your doorstep, takes you where you want to go, and then leaves. No parking fees, no speeding tickets, no insurance costs. Why would anybody want to own a car if they don't have to?

If they'd included the option to zap Bennett Haselton, I'm sure it would have swamped all the other possibilities.