"Plain old tech" people get paid conference passes all the time. Your company buys X amount of stuff from Y vendor (or a business partner), the vendor account rep provides your company with Z full conference passes gratis, and most of those passes end up in the hand of front-line IT grunts (they are the ones most of the education classes are targeted for.) These grunts are no more likely to be familiar with the particular facts of what they were getting interrogated on than any other geek.

Also, it IS a tech conference; RSA just happens to be a security vendor; pretty much every single large tech vendor runs one of these conferences. A "security conference" would be something like DEFCON, one of the several conferences the IEEE runs on security, etc.

And quit with your paranoia about how much RSA is bribing me. I work from home, so it'd be pretty tough for RSA to buy me lunch. The organization I work for (part of a larger IT company) is not an RSA customer. Not everyone that voices vocal disagreement is a sock-puppet; I thought the whole point of the Slashdot comment section was to comment.

All my so-called "pro-RSA" talk on this topic has been motivated by the obnoxious tactics of these protestors, and the knee-jerk silence-equals-guilty attitude. You'd get the same reaction from me if this was a story about PETA sticking microphones in the face of somebody trying to buy some chicken for dinner.

Tim Cook told a single owner to go *bleep!* himself. The shareholders as a whole voted specifically on this resolution, and rejected it.

$0.5B in BtC's are missing (not all deposits), but they only have liabilities of $60M?

Cute. Are they somehow magically not on the hook for all that missing dough?

If they were a bank, deposits are supposed to be counted as part of your liabilities.

The defense and intelligence parts of the budget have very large parts that are a "black box". As well they should be. It's a bit difficult to carry out secret projects if all your contracts are open to anybody that wants to read them.

Yes, such contracts are vulnerable to abuse and oversight problems. But that doesn't mean that the RSA even has the ability to release the contract if they wanted to.

Giving pure placebos works for some mental health drugs, OTC-dose pain relievers, cholesterol meds, sexual dysfunction drugs, etc. Basically, if the problem could be "in your head", or the drug is intended to be taken by healthy people on a prophylactic basis, the control in a drug trial can safely be a sugar pill. Also eligible for sugar-pill placebos are conditions for which there is no current treatment.

For conditions in which there IS an effective treatment, it is considered unethical to give a placebo during a trial (as in, you'd never give sterile water to a diabetic taking insulin in a trial for a new form of insulin.) And giving a placebo to somebody where going off their current med would be blindingly obvious is simply ineffective. Nobody currently on high-dose opiates is going to somehow not notice they are not receiving a sugar-pill. The withdrawl symptoms are obvious, painful, and aren't going to go away with sheer willpower thinking you are receiving a different opiate.

Most of the attendees at a tech conference are front-line IT grunts (and their managers) sent their by their boss to learn about new products, techniques, etc. Most of them don't work for RSA, nor will most have been in charge of the buying decision to purchase RSA products.

This isn't a "veil of contractual secrecy" being thrown... this is some more-or-less random schmoe having a complete stranger asking him questions on camera on something on which he doesn't have enough information to make an intelligent reply.

They were accused of taking a $10M bribe to backdoor an encryption algorithm. RSA says it's not true. There's zero evidence that RSA knew about the weakness when accepting the money to include the algorithm in their products.

If they truly were going to compromise the security of every one of their customers, why would they have agreed to accept a paltry $10M?

The RSA has already explicitly said the contract doesn't say what they are accused of it saying. What else do you want them to do? They can't go and release the details of a confidential contract simply because somebody thinks it contains something it doesn't have.

Now, I'm not saying that RSA isn't lying, but if they were, would you believe that any contract they produced was an accurate one? Probably not. Talk about "Damned if you do, damned if you don't."

The essence of a Ponzi scheme involves outsize returns. A business getting themselves in a cash crunch because they have no clue what they are doing is just a poorly-run business. Indeed, exactly what you described is how most businesses that collect payment prior to service being rendered (contractors, airlines, furniture stores, etc.) go bankrupt.

One of these (a Ponzi scheme) is fraud; the other is just incompetence. There isn't enough room in the jails to lock up every business that gets over their head and leaves customers in the lurch when they go under.

I don't think this little stunt has anything to say about a "problem with a surveillance society"; they have something to say about a problem with some a$$hole ambushing some geeks at a tech conference that just want to get their lunch and get back to the conference sessions.

And the RSA did go on record. They said it wasn't true. As far as going into the gory details of the contract? Contract details of any contract, with any customer, are generally not something a security company is ever going to disclose. That's not surveillance-state paranoia or evidence of evildoing; it's routine business practice.

BitCoins aren't a Ponzi scheme, they are an asset bubble. A Ponzi scheme would be Mt. Gox promising crazy interest rates on BitCoins and absconding with the deposits.

Instead, BitCoins are today's Beanie Babies.

AOL/TW was, by far, much larger than HP/CPQ.

Firstly, I'm not "offended" that the EU would like control of the ICANN contract. I'm simply stating diplomatic realities that simply demanding something when you offer no good reason for the other party to comply is empty grandstanding.

What, specifically, has the US Dept. of Commerce made ICANN do that it would no longer do if it's contract was turned over to another political body? What problem, specifically, with the US owning the ICANN contract are you trying to solve?

And again, why would the US agree to this? All I see is a bunch of whining about how unfair the situation is. What I don't see are any credible threats or inducements for the US to go along. The EU would have just as much luck asking the Russians to pretty please hand over some natural gas for free because it's so unfair that Siberia has such rich petrochemcial resources and Europe does not.

Once there IS a credible counter-proposal, (i.e. "If the US maintains control of ICANN, we'll set up something different", or "If the US gives up control of ICANN, we'll give the US control of...") I imagine the US might come to the bargaining table. But simply complaining about the status quo changes nothing.

I didn't say there were no reasons that it might be nice if ICANN was not under a US contract.

What I said was that there aren't any reasons for the US to go along with this plan. No national government is in the business of giving away power to other countries simply because those other countries want it.

The US "must" do this? I do not think that word means what you think it means.

I can see why the EU and/or UN would want the US to give up control over the ICANN contract, but every time this comes up, I have yet to see a single reason presented as to why the US would agree to do it.

Diplomacy involves the practical application of either the proverbial Carrot or Stick or Both. "Do this or I'll write further Official Letters demanding it" is not much of a stick, and it certainly isn't a carrot.