In p 31 he is asked to hand over the SSL and TLS keys for his service, which in practical terms it would allow the FBI to eavesdrop in the communications of *everybody* at will, this with all certainty would have meant a breach of contract with his users, lawsuits would have ensued. Would the FBI have paid for the damages?

Most importantly Lavabit was willing to comply with the original request, which was limited to a single email account.

You'll have to try harder if you want to dispel the positive aura around Ladar..

Many outlets in the right wing media will have a field day with the name alone.

If one is going to try to occupy the moral high ground the choice of language really matters: you are framing the debate by how you word every single relevant item related to a given project, and which item will have greater visibility than the very name of your project?

By using such a name they are serving in a silver plate the opportunity to malicious, uninformed and naive commentators to badmouth whatever they come up with and that before having put forward a single detailed sentence about the proposal.

DarkMail may sound cool, but from the start is eliciting all the wrong kind of associations, I am sure many parties in the field could be interested to join such an effort, but the DarkMail name alone may put some people off.

The name really should be changed, these battles are difficult as it is, people shouldn't make it unnecessarily harder than it is going to be.

Let me put an example, lets compare these 2 headlines:

"Terrorists confess to using DarkMail"
and
"Terrorists confess to using PrivateMail"

Look, at the end I know it is the same thing, but while a headline would push many to say "yeah, tell me something new" the other may elicit comments of the kind of "What? That is what I use to email my bank"

I really think that name ought to go.

Ease of use.
Consistent protocol for exchange of encrypted mail (which could be based on PGP).
Key decentralization and anonymitation ....

Using PGP is a PITA in most stand alone systems (Windows, OSX, Linux) relies in way too much trust as well (how do you know that PGP key is legit?), and it isn't implemented at all in big emailers (Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Microsoft's whatever it is called this week, etc).

You pay me the difference and I'll buy local.

Oh wait you also have to pay for my time.

And other costs (parking and/or transportation to name only the most obvious)

When something goes wrong Amazon really sorts things out.

With an Asian based company with no local presence where I live? Good luck with that one.

I never did the same problem 95 times (I may have done 95 different problems, applying the same principles).

So writing a paper is also "busy work"?

Under such limited perspective, pretty much any intellectual endeavour will just be "busy work".

That is how people that didn't have the drive or will to go through higher education devalue the hard work of others. It's ok to vent frustration that way, but is fundamentally nonsense.

... if you had an education you would know that an anecdote is not enough substantiation for statistical analysis.

After interviewing and working with hundreds of IT people I can assure you that your situation is the exception, not the norm.

People that learned to put a bit of code together, disassembled a PC to change a RAM chip or do some other menial IT work are promoted to positions for which they are sorely lacking in skills.

They don't care to document what they do (because they never undertook six months or a year of software engineering classes), they don't have the mathematics and physics background to tackle complex problems (because they missed calculus, classical physics and other knowledge imparted at degree level foundation courses) , they try to reinvent the wheel (because they didn't take courses about computational algorithms) and they keep programming undocumented spaghetti code (normally Perl) because they didn't receive formal education as programmers (structured and object oriented programming), or they don't know how to avoid the basic pitfalls when designing a database (because they didn't learn the mathematical theory behind database design).

You tell people that they will be ok without a solid education, those of us that know this to be untrue will have less competition. Many thanks.

Would dictate that the first arrivals own an empty (truly empty) land and can call themselves Native.

Says where exactly?

In the UK you don't need an insurance plan. Even if you are unemployed.

I can't bloody believe the negativity about this kind of gadget, and in any case, it seems most people are missing the bleeding obvious.

A smartwatch would be safely attached to your wrist.

I am looking at my phone know and his screen is cracked in several places due to it falling to the floor (mercifully it is still working).

When you compare the cost of replacing a screen vs the cost of having a smartwatch the gadget becomes a very attractive proposition.

Minimizing the amount of times you need to manipulate a $500-600 small device that is just a fall away of becoming unusable will save you money in the long term.

President-Prime Minister-President

Opposition: in jail or in exile, some of them murdered in suspicious circumstances.

But whatever you say buddy.

The people fumbling for power are different factions of the same powerful class.

USians still believe those people represent them...

Lets burn books. magazines, and the evil contraptions that churn them out.

Lets stop radio broadcasts.And TV. And telephone. And telegraph for good measure.

And lets declare pigeon breeders criminals and destroy those terrorist animals, just in case.

And ban fire, so smoke signals can't be used.

Lets cut peoples tongues. And their hands so they can't signal. And gauge their eyes out (and block their ears).

Because any means of communication could be at the disposal of terrorists.

Don't you want to be safe or what?

In older times intelligence agencies would follow suspects, build a file, keep track of them, build a case against them.

Now sometimes it seems to me like they want a contraption akin to Google to give them all what they need to do their job, sometimes one feels they don't want to get to work properly.

if the chaps manning drones have a 9 to 5 job, hey, why they shouldn't?

People should remember that Osama bin Laden's technology usage was minimal. Most likely meaningful communication happens face to face or via more conventional channels, only a complete moron would take the internet for anything secure now.

Anybody with a bit of technical acumen knew that the net isn't a safe communication medium and that it is easily infiltrated, by undermining the very fundamental of (very imperfect) secure communications the NSA and its UK counterpart have put a clear marker in place: don't use the internet.

Which is fine for actual terrorists, who already knew that, but is not fine for the rest of us, since now other kind of criminals very adept at exploiting the Internet have confirmation of how dumb the NSA is for undermining secure communications.

We as a society will be owned by a cracker in ways we haven't imagined yet, and the seed of that failure will be the NSA's cavalier attitude regarding people's privacy and appeal to security by obscurity (no matter how sophisticated the obscurity is) by undermining standards that should be as safe as practically possible.