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Comment Doesn't mean what is measured won't be useful (Score 1) 162

to them. If they can detect the sort of brain activity that correlates with intelligence, certainly this can be expanded to other brain activity. Throw a Union Jack on their screens and see how they respond. Boom, state loyalty tester. Throw two naked guys on their screen, boom, sexual orientation test. Throw scenes of snipers shooting civilians, boom, black ops aptitude test.

The cover story, as usual, doesn't matter.

Comment Re:relevant to national security? (Score 1) 162

It's what they did with Tor, isn't it? Separate the sheep from the goats (i.e. those who have no interest in hiding anything vs. those who do) and watch the hell out of the sheep?

The sheep are more responsive to mass propaganda. There's no need to watch them until they prove themselves goats.

Comment If you're an Ardweenie, maybe (Score 1) 273

Those of us who actually make boards are quite happy to have scopes. Or those of us who work with analog circuits (YES! you CAN still buy REAL OP-AMPS in SO-8 packages OMGWTFBBQ!) or, say, power supplies, or any sort of signal processing. A scope is quite a bit more than a nice-to-have. You may as well tell a machinist a Bridgeport is a "nice thing to have".

Comment Desktop is what you make it of (Score 1) 115

*shrug* Samsung Electronics has some tempting little eight-ARMed chips that would feel great on a Mini-ITX motherboard. Still not FOSS, but if that's really important to you, there's lowRISC (Berkeley RISC-V including development toolchain and Linux image) and just now Parallax's Propeller for your I/O needs...

Comment Re:Spyware companies will love it (Score 1) 172

If FireFox took a stand against stupid bullshit that costs more than it benefits, they could kill it. They're big enough to do so.

Raise your hand if you really thought firing Brendan Eich was about LGBT rights and not corporate control over the window to the web...

Maybe better to just start calling them Netscape again.

Comment Random thoughts (Score 1) 361

DUAL_EC_DRBG was a random number generation algorithm that only its mother could love. It's slow, complex not provably more random than other algos, and comes with magic, unexplained constants, which are the last thing you want to see in an ostensible entropy generator based on asymmetric crypto... and if you want FIPS certification you have to use the given constants. Why did NSA want it in there so badly? Why, after a potential flaw was found and corrected, did NSA personnel "suggest" a change that, in retrospect, only made that putative flaw more reliably exploitable? Cryptologists explain.

On the hardware side, Theodore T'so observed that Intel was very eager to have RDRAND be the exclusive source of entropy for the kernel's RNG, as was one goofball at Red Hat who tried to introduce a kernel parameter to do the same thing. He fought them both off, thankfully.

In general, see also ProPublica on the SIGINT Enabling Project.

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