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Comment Re:For-Profit Correctional Facilities (Score 1) 135

I am. This has led to many miscarriages of justice.

Prosecutor: "The DNA test shows there is a 1 in 10 million change that this person is not guilty"
Truth: "The DNA test shows that this person is one of around 35 people in the USA who could have deposited this DNA, I.E. 1 person in 10 million of the US population (assuming the US population to be 350 million)"

There needs to be something else to make it that person and not someone else. Scouring a DNA database of the whole US is going to throw up many false positives.

Comment Re:Ciphersuite Negotiation (Score 1) 89

I mean like crypto algorithms with lots of security headroom. 256 bit keys and no known attacks, or equivalent security. DJBsque Edwards curve ECC to minimize the implementation errors that keep cropping up. No X.509 because it's seems impossible to implement securely. And on an on.

TLS is not fit for purposes. We should stop pretending and replace it. That's what I'm working on.

Comment Ciphersuite Negotiation (Score 1) 89

Ciphersuite Negotiation is a liability. A good security protocol will not have it. It is empirically impossible to get right.

Pick one set of algorithms, good enough for the lifetime of the device or system and any changes are done by replacing the single static suite on both ends, say once per decade. Make the whole thing so utterly simple to implement that it would be hard to get wrong.

Comment Re:As the majority pointed out (Score 1) 135

Great. Now you have an unknown sample of DNA. You can now compare it to... right. There is the problem. You need a database to compare it to. Can police just catalog everyone's DNA?...

  Wow! a match! now we know what? That this person's DNA was at the crime scene. Does that mean they definitely did it, no other proof necessary?

DNA matching is statistical. With a 1 in 10 million false positive rate, there are about 800 people in the world who would match. About 35 of them in the USA.
You cannot use DNA alone to place someone at the scene of a crime unless you have some other way to reduce the population of people with whom you are comparing, like presence in the town, knowing the victim, other physical evidence, etc.

Comment Re:Politics aside for a moment. (Score 5, Informative) 538

The different is Hillary Clinton is a very bright woman, at the top of her game, recognisable around the world; she knew what she was doing.

I remember an interview from years back where she was asked if she used email and her response was along the lines of " Oh no. Emails are discoverable".
So yes, she knew exactly what she was doing and why she was doing it.

Comment Re:The real morale of the story (Score 4, Insightful) 217

I've signed up for a few hardware kickstarters and they've worked out fine. Maybe because I've had 30 years of product design and I can spot the naive ones a mile off. Generally, if it involves wireless interfaces or software that requires and operating system, avoid - the risks are significant.

The reflowster toaster oven reflow soldering controller is a classic. Simple, useful and you know you could do it yourself if you weren't so lazy. You're paying them to be less lazy that you.

Comment New News: Product Design is Hard! (Score 4, Insightful) 217

If you think it's going to be easy to put together a real techy product with software and circuits and PCBs and enclosures and EM certification and patent minefields and manufacturing and packaging and distributors and competition, you might want to examine why you think that.

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