In your Step 5, only the first sentence is valid. Chilling Effects is never given a copy of your copyrighted material, they do not post a copy of your copyrighted material. They post a copy of the DMCA notice that you sent to Google. If that DMCA notice contains a list of 100 URLs where I can download your copyrighted material, I'm afraid that's too bad. Maybe you should be filing your DMCA notices against the places actually hosting your copyrighted material, so that those URLs no longer function, instead of filing your complaints against a search engine.

Allow traffic from RFC1918 addresses to the router and vice versa, and refuse to pass any other packets.

I'm putting you on notice!

So, you realize that releasing information could give away the techniques used to gather said data.

These days it's not an unreasonable assumption that the NSA intercepts, collects, and stores every frame of IP data routed through any publicly addressable router on planet Earth. I don't think it would really be giving anything away to disclose some packet logs.

I don't believe the North Korea story, but lack of transit is not (IMO) a solid argument against their involvement. I don't think anyone has accused them of downloading everything into their country and sending it back out. If I were a North Korean cyber warrior tasked with exfiltrating terabytes of data out of Great Satan's companies, I'd compromise some vulnerable servers in a country with fat pipes, and direct the attacks from there. A few kbps is plenty to sustain a control channel via ssh/RDP/LogMeIn to some rooted servers in, say, China.

GOP in this context refers to "Guardians of Peace," the supposed North Korean hacking group; the acronym as used here has nothing to do with American politics.

Nah, different guy. This is James Comey, the FBI director. The one who's spent the last couple of months heavily pushing the narrative that if Apple and Google allow encryption on their devices, a child will die. Which isn't false, anymore than it's false to say that if Americans are allowed to drive, a child will die. It's weird, though, I can't seem to recall any government officials lobbying to outlaw cars.

I'll give Comey credit for one thing, he's kept a low enough profile that the Nigerians don't yet seem to know he exists! I still get scam emails from "Robert Mueller FBI Director" almost every damned day...

Sounds like a deuce-dropper chopper. A pooey huey. Whirlybirds full of turds.

wParam's at VT, those were the days...

Hasn't he shown a propensity to do just that? He got caught carding food at DEF CON in 2013. More recently he spent three months in a detention facility for that bomb threat against a Sony executive's airplane; he even joked about his haircut looking bad because they shaved it for him in jail. He got out, went home, and proceeded to step up his game by DDOSing the hell out of PSN and XBL. There does seem to be a pattern of continuing and escalating criminal activity.

I'm not arguing that he's dangerous or that he needs to be locked up for 5 years, but if he's guilty, I do believe there has to be some sort of punishment. Make him pick up litter every weekend until he's 18, or something productive that benefits society.

Lack of partitions is a dealbreaker for me. I will not work in a space where everyone sees everyone all the time and there is no private space. Period. I will not work on an open floor plan.

I'm not asking for my own office with a door that closes. I've never had that, and I don't expect it. I understand that I'm at work and that I have no real expectation of privacy. But we're all human, and I'm not comfortable sitting around where anyone can see what I'm doing at all times. Maybe I'm reading Slashdot for a few minutes, maybe I'm on StackExchange asking or answering something work-related, maybe I'm checking my personal email. Maybe I'm reading a white paper from a vendor, with my arm propped up on the desk while I gradually scroll through. As long as my work is being done and my employer is happy, there's no reason the rest of the floor should have a view of me, or vice versa.

Believe it or not, there's a happy medium. Partitions. Cubicles. They were implemented for a reason. I need some walls that extend several feet above my seated position and on all sides, which give me enough privacy to disregard the rest of the office for awhile. I'm never going to absorb a 30-page protocol spec if I'm exposed to every motion of everyone else around me. That's distracting. I have to have a bit of isolation in order to concentrate. I can mentally tune out things like telephones ringing, coworkers talking, etc. but in order to be truly productive, I need my cube partitions. I don't work in a restaurant, I don't want my workplace to resemble a restaurant.

This isn't about browsing porn at work, or spending all day on social media. I have no trouble with my company logging everything I do; I'm at work, after all. I just need some personal space to do what I'm paid for. I will not work on a big glass floor.

Is there any reason to believe that Pidgin with OTR is not reasonably secure? Competition is always a good thing, so the more services the merrier, but I'm curious what others think about existing offerings.