You make an excellent point. A corollary is a bit of a counter-point. Sometimes you DON'T need to decrypt it, and in those cases you shouldn't be able to.

The most obvious example is passwords. You store those as salted hashes which can't be decrypted. You don't need to know what their password is, you only need to know if it's the same as what they entered or not . We can apply the same principle to data we use for fraud prevention. We want to know if this transaction attempt is coming from the same device / os / ip / location that the legitimate user normally uses. We don't have to store their previous data, only a hash so we can see if the new attempt matches or not.

The OPM didn't need to store details of the applicants' past indiscretions. They could have simply encoded it as a risk score, 1-5. That's like a hash of the narrative, in a aay, irreversible but still useful. Then people couldn't be blackmailed or outed with the information.

The navy has been doing signals intelligence for a very long time. Ships communicate with their allied forces via radio using giant antennae, and they loiter close to enemy territory, and therefore enemy communications. It's only natural that they would point their large antennae at the enemy, and they've been doing so since just after radio was invented.

The navy also legitimately brings large numbers of personnel into foreign ports on a regular basis. It's only natural to give some of those sailors varying degrees of training in keeping your eyes and ears open while on foreign soil. Thus, the Office of Naval Intelligence has long been a significant part of our foreign intelligence capability.

The navy has been doing signals intelligence for a hundred years or so. Ships do two interesting things - they communicate with their allied forces via radio using giant antennae, and they loiter close to enemy territory, and therefore enemy communications. It's only natural that they would point their large antennae at the enemy, and they've been doing so since just after radio was invented.

The navy also legitimately brings large numbers of personnel into foreign ports on a regular basis. It's only natural to give some of those sailors varying degrees of training in keeping your eyes and ears open while on foreign soil. Thus, the Office of Naval Intelligence has long been a significant part of our foreign intelligence capability.

If you're underground or deep in a building, you're probably on wifi (or plugged in). That means we can geoip to within a 20 or 30 miles at worst, within a block in the best case (company IPs). That's far more accurate than we need to,know whether the acount holder COULD be there. What we're looking for is a transaction in southern California, folllowed 30 minutes later by one in South Carolina, then one in Mexico an hour later. We're computing whether it's possible for the account holder to travel that fast.

We then combine that other data points to score the likelihood of fraud. If it's card-present (swiped) that's lower risk than an internet transaction where they only have the card NUMBER, for example.

Many, possibly most, ecommerce sites do at least basic location checks for fraud protection and have for many years. The 20,000 or so sites which use our software have done so for at least ten years. If you're on the site from Comcast San Francisco at 10:00, then an hour later someone claiming to be you tries to initiate a transaction while in Russia, that's suspicious.

That red flag is then combined with other available information to choose from one of four possible outcomes:
The transaction is approved.
The transaction is declined.
The customer gets a call / text asking them to confirm the transaction.
Verified by Visa (tm) or the cashier calls in for manual approval.

The system works pretty well.

Note "tracking" is slightly overstating it for two reasons. First, the bank or processor checks only the location of the transaction- we don't know or care where you are if you're not attempting a transaction against an account holder's funds at the moment. Secondly, the "location" is strictly numerical longitude and latitude to see how far you are from the last location. Is it physically possible that you traveled that fast? We don't know or care if you're in a grocery store or a strip club. We only care if "you" are 4,000 miles from where you were two hours ago.

Sorry, I forgot fracking was invented for geothermal. That's how geothermal is done, and was done before fracking was applied to petroleum too. So I guess it's not ether / or, if you have geothermal, that means you have deep fracking.

Which would you rather have, fracking, or geothermal?

> brats who think writing a crappy web page is the same thing as writing a desktop application.

Yeah unlike desktop developers, any decent web developer KNOWS that their code will be attacked all the time, and designs it appropriately. Unlike desktop developers who throw shit on the internet (like Skype) without considering the fact that it's accepting input from unknown sources, including malicious sources.

Oh wait, you were saying that desktop developers who have never had any reason to think about security are better somehow, weren't you?

On the other hand, Rand Paul just killed the worst parts of the Patriot Act. Hopefully it'll stay dead, or at least maimed. I don't know too much about Paul, but I think I'm going to find out more about him, from the most objective and reliable sources I can find.

A dual socket mobo with 16-core AMD CPUs in each socket will probably spank your current Intel system. That's one area AMD excels at, they sell 8 and 12 core CPUs cheap, 16-core if you're serious.

I can certainly see why he runs as a Republican- the current fight is between the libertarian side of the party and the remnants of the Moral Majority faction and the establishment power base. The unfortunate fact is that libertarian party candidates don't get elected to the presidency and the senate, republicans do. He therefore can accomplish a lot more by getting elected as a Republican than he could by losing a Libertarian. President Reagan largely redefined the republican party in his own image, so there's no reason Rand Paul couldn't do the same.

Of course Reagan also developed an alliance with the Moral Majority crowd in order to get elected, and that alliance affected the party platform. Moral Majority officially shut down many years ago and people are fed up with the establishment power base, so the party is ripe to be redefined again.

A single senator can filibuster a bill. Senator Rand Paul said he'd prevent it from passing before the Senate went on break, and he did so. Rand Paul is now saying he'll make sure it isn't passed on Sunday, and there's every reason to think he'll do so again, just like he did before.

I'll be considering him carefully when I choose my presidential vote.

20 Mbps isn't broadband, under the administrations new rules. The subsidies start at 25 Mbps in rural areas and the plan is to require at least 100 Mbps. Can you get 100 Mbps for $20? Probably not, but if you you slacked off in high school, you'll be able to get it and have someone else pay for it now.

> And if broadband allows one in a thousand to take online classes

Let's takea look at your "if". As you recall, the FCC also just redefined the word "broadband" to mean service which costs $85-$105 per month. So about $1,000 per year, per person. You say "if one in a thousand" recipients, so 1,000 recipients at $1,000 per year each is $1 million per year. You think it's a good deal if you spend $1 million per year to encourage one guy to do online classes. Note that doesn't actually pay for the classes, you just hope that with faster internet he might take classes.

Did it occur to you that it would be cheaper to pay full tuition for TEN people who actually worked hard at school, proving that they want to be educated and they'll do the work in college? Certainly it didn't occur to you that the million bucks you want to spend is coming from my family, whre I AM struggling to pay for my own college while supporting the family, while my wife waits for her turn to go to school when we can afford it. Then we hope to save up for our daughter to go to school. No, you wouldn't want us, who work to pay for school, to be able to finish college. Much better that you take my paycheck and use it to pay for someone who doesn't work to stream multiple Netflix shows rather than the one they're watching right now.

Damn you guys are bad at math and logic. Friggin think about the costs and consequences of your decisions omce in a while.

According to half the people here on Slashdot, the solution to any and all problems is to have another federal government department do _something_. Do what? Anything, really, as long as they do _something_. These guys are their great hope, people so dense they mail out live anthrax all over the place. Good luck getting them to solve all of your problems.