I'll take mpd tyvm. Headless, can stream to icecast, great cataloging, controllable through various cli, gui, or other plugin based clients (irssi and firefox come to mind).

foobar is nice though...just not what I'd go with for usefulness over mpd

A transaction history isn't as useful as it necessarily sounds. I use a $20 to buy scratch tickets at a convenience store, someone else cashes in their tickets, ends up with my $20, and then subsequently uses it to buy crack in a sting operation, and they see that I was formerly in possession of that $20. So? At most, the concern here is that it may get you some unwanted attention, but it's hardly solid evidence if you have the thought to just move it between a wallets on tor exit nodes. Not to mention that "Satoshi Square Meetups" happen in a variety of cities around the world, where people meet in person to relatively anonymously buy and sell bitcoin without going through an exchange at all.

So yes, bitcoin is quite traceable. That doesn't necessarily mean it can't be used as a method of exchange with fairly solid privacy when that is one's planned for goal.

The exchanges I know of thus far provide no shorts yet, but Kraken has the code laid for it (they're brand new and are waiting for volume to increase before they add that along with some other advanced trade options). And yes, this would add market stability, which is part of the reason they're adding it.

Unfortunately, they're only available in a few states as of yet. The regulations in the US that apply to them unfortunately are on a state by state basis, and have significantly slowed the rollout of the exchange (unlike some of the prior exchanges that's gone up, they're A) operating in the US and B) being now scrutinized enough to really need to be fully compliant).

Hey, look, you found a better use for the NSA's facilities. Embrace a more technologically sound method of easily moving money around (if not a stable currency) while in the meantime save face by shutting down the NSA's current agenda while replacing it with something far more profitable in the first place (ooh, you could use all that money to go build NEW facilities with MORE op-sec in mind with TWICE the floorspace!). And provided you regulate the exchanges with KYC laws, the taxes are an added bonus.

That anyone was worried they'd be really cracking down on bitcoin after the events in the EU and China was a little amusing.

Teenagers don't question authority, by and large. They yell, throw tantrums, stomp their feet, and make a lot of noise, and then once that angst is out of their system, they promptly tend to get to doing whatever it is that the authorities have told them they should do to "get ahead".

In any case, it's not about authority here...the real issue is that to most teenagers, or most people in general, a computer is merely an entertainment device, rather than a powerful tool that can be tailored to one's own needs. It doesn't matter how easy the latest user-friendly scripting language gets, "programming" remains something they envision as involving binary and machine code, purely there for autistic folks and aliens.

What we really need is to integrate programming of SOME kind into the general curriculum of our schoolchildren. And for Christ's sake, leave enough holes open on the local school network for kids to have fun learning to poke holes in the restrictive environment you've set them up in. The classes teach them HOW to do things, and the rebelliousness of getting around the restrictions gets them interested in doing them (and then the combination of heavy handed laws and bug bounty programs bring them back into societal correctness once they enter adulthood...hopefully).

The absolute LAST thing kids need is a user friendly interface. Save those for grandma, give the kid a raspberry pi, a book on Python, and then put them up behind a firewall that blocks most anything their friends will be wasting their time with. Not because you want to keep the kid OFF of such sites, but to make them at least learn a thing or two from time to time in their attempts to waste time in an otherwise purely wasteful manner.

I'm sure it's actually a set of logic trees so elaborately woven together as to monitor the news and manipulate people into carrying out it's programmed goals, put in place by a disgruntled brain cancer ridden game developer, coordinating these "cyber arms dealer" groups. Naturally, bitcoins are the darknet credits...

Tahoe-LAFS (https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs) may be exactly what you're looking for. Redundancy, privacy, AND it's DIY. Grab a few VPS's (and perhaps an actual box your control or two), and have your own encrypted, private cloud.

With how cheap VPS's are getting, this may very well be your best option.

Failing that, use Truecrypt inside a Dropbox or and go nuts.

So, this is true, and is perhaps a major problem for some (though it's worth noting that most things the average person has that are sensitive enough to require strong encryption have a time period after which they're no longer that sensitive). The technically feasible, though slow, and perhaps difficult, solution is to use One Time Pad cryptography. When used correctly, it is mathematically unbreakable, as instead of using an algorithm at all, it uses an absolutely random one time use key. Brute forcing at that point becomes entirely impossible, as any message of a given length could be literally ANY other message of that length (or, if you're combining some other form of crypto or simply padding, even the length may be wrong). It's what sleeper cells have long used (if you're not familiar, do yourself a favor and google "number stations" for some interesting reading).

The big inconvenience with OTP crypto is that it is symmetric. You need to preshare the keys with anyone you're communicating with (and to boot, each key is only to be used for a single message, and then destroyed). So it's not really being posed as a general solution to the situation we find ourselves facing, but at the same time, seems like it may have SOME use, and is worth spreading awareness about. Just don't half-ass the key generation using rand() or anything equally foolish.

Heh, you're nicer than I would be. Replace all image requests with Goatse and Meatspin, and maybe ALSO upside-down-ternet, just for good measure. This would actually be quite amusing to set up on a honeypot router with WEP or WPS pin authentication enabled, just to let the would-be intruder know that they just got fooled :-P.

If you think that setting your router's dns to OpenDNS means that people connecting can't use a completely independent DNS server, I have some networking configuration settings to introduce you to...

Could have just blacklisted the kids' mac addresses. And once they figured out MAC spoofing, turned on WEP. May as well make the whole experience educational for them :-P

Most home routers with default firmware handle some degree of QoS. It might be worth looking into on your router.

And sorry to hear about your woes with DD-WRT. It can be a bit of a navigational hazard to figure out how to do exactly what with your specific hardware, but proved worth it in my case anyway. Best of luck in the future.

I would think that anything that has iptables available would work for that. That would include DD-WRT, OpenWRT, Tomato, and a number of others. PFsense I'm sure can do it too, though I'm not familiar with the BSD equivalent of iptables (hell, they may use iptables...). For a great OpenWRT router for under $100, I can say my netgear WNDR3700v2 works wonders, and the usb port built into it makes for handy storage space for installing various programs on the router (I've seen out of date packages for snort and tor, which both seemed of interest. You'd obviously want to self-compile the up to date versions to bother deploying it though). In addition, this setup will also allow you to open a SPAN port, to throw up wireshark or tcpdump or snort, and do packet logging, which may prove VERY handy if you were to be running a Tor Exit node, or just allowing wifi through on it's own, as the logs being handed over (if you were to choose to do so) would be seen as cooperative, and likely look quite good in any possible legal proceedings that may develop.

Anyway, I'm beginning to rant. Point is, OpenWRT/DD-WRT are awesome.

https://www.xkcd.com/5/

I'm going to have to concur on Minecraft as an option (though I'm not sure how well it'll work for your 3 year old...it may take a year or two, kind of depends on the kid). Part of the benefit here is just how extensible Minecraft is, what with things like the Tekkit or Technic mod packs, or the thousands of individual mods out there. At the very core, Minecraft can be played with much like blocks, working all the way up to actual computer programming (the ComputerCraft mod allows programming in Lua, as well as programmable "Turtles", which are essentially robots), and other exercises in logic. Combine that with the artistic design elements (art critics, spare me), and it really strikes me as perhaps the perfect game to give to a small child, at least among those I've seen. Couple that with it being playable on any platform, and even in a web browser, and you've now given your kid a game they can play at a friend's house on their OS X/Windows setup, or whatever else they may encounter (hey, for all its downfalls, Java is still good for SOMETHING...Flash, not so much).

And best of all, it does provide you with an activity you can do WITH your kid, rather than just sitting them in front of a computer and telling them to go be entertained. This in itself seems worthwhile, even if many other aspects are taken away, as most games geared for young kids (or hell, kids that are under 13 anyway) are anything but engaging for adults... Minecraft bridges that gap nicely, and you may even find yourself in a world in which your kid's minecraft contraptions show yours up...