I agree. Someone once told me I should not go out at night, walk naked (except for a hundred dollar bill pasted to each of my nipples) to the highest-crime district in my city, and start yelling "Some of my best friends are you people!" They said I would be safer if I behaved differently, stayed home instead, and STFU-ed up with my crazy rants.

I explained that even if I behaved differently, that doesn't stop the Russians from launching a nuclear ICBM strike, killing us all, including me. Safe is safe, unsafe is unsafe, there are no degrees in between, and all of us face one single adversary who has one simple agenda.

Hopefully they weren't stupid enough to roll their own key format, and instead, they use standard OpenPGP keys. That way, people can have MitM-proof verified-identity conversations if they want that (and can tune the degree of MitM-proofing that is needed) but also have MitM-vulnerable pseudonymous conversations if they don't (for cases where you'd prefer to be anonymous).

When you're talking to your wife, it's ok for her to know who you are, and you to know you're talking to her, so you'd use the keys that you've exchanged out-of-band and that each of you have signed. When you're talking to your pirate buddies, you just to have the keyid that has in the past, been associated with uber-31337ness, but has never been signed by anyone. And when you're talking to another person in the company, you know who each other is and have at least some company CA as your introducer, any maybe signed yourselves too if it's a small enough company where everyone eventually meets each other in person.

Whatever your case, OpenPGP fits perfectly. The only thing it doesn't handle well, is tricking users into thinking they have a secure connection but really letting a third party listen in. For some reason, PGP isn't well-suited for that. Whenever I see someone not use PGP, I assume that's the reason they chose to use weaker tech.

I see what you did there, Slashdot editors. Brilliant.

If you had used an accurate headline, such as "Bomb hoax perp caught despite using the target's own network." then the "despite" part would have sounded stupid and you would have had an obviously non-story, right on the face of it. But by throwing in a random unrelated part of the story and misleadingly implying something about it, you made it sound interesting! More people need to learn this trick: lies make things interesting!

A guy puts on a mask and walks into a bank. He hands the teller a note, "My name is John Smith, and this is a robbery. Shhh. Give me $10k." Police later investigate John Smith, and confirm it was him. Headline: "robber caught despite using mask" because, clearly, masks are an important and very relevant part of the story!

if you and your bro were watching the game on the couch and he said he'd give you $5 to get him a fresh beer, you'd at least consider it...b/c you can buy a beer at the bar later w/ it

if you refused, but he then offered you $50 to get him the beer, most ppl wouldn't turn that down!

"Get me a beer and I'll give you $5."

"No. Get it yourself."

"Sudo get me a beer and I'll give you a tenth of $50."

"Okay! Here's your beer."

"Get me a beer and I'll give you a hundredth of $500."

"No. Get it yourself."

"Sudo get me a beer and I'll give you a thousandth of $5000."

"Okay! Here's your beer."

globaljustin, you appear to be correct that the responses are varying, so I must reluctantly agree that your model is perfectly accurate.

Why should I store any of my media (or other data, for that matter) anyplace else?

My interpretation of the question, was that if you're taking backup tapes home from the office (or if you have a hard drive stashed at a friend's or relative's house) then some of your media isn't local. And the reason you might want to do that, would be to have data survive "serious" problems, such as fire, flood, etc.

I didn't see the question as implying anything about storing things on other people's computers ("cloud"), though yeah, that would count as nonlocal too.

what I store is my business and nobody else's

It is your business and nobody else's, but it doesn't have to be that way. Perhaps a simple trade (e.g "I'll store your backup disk in my closet, if you store my backup in your closet") could be advantageous.

You really gotta be careful with that attitude. The photos seem worthless at the time you take them, and most of them remain worthless forever. Most of them. Then you see that old picture of when your now-grown-up dog used to be a cute little puppy, and awww!!!

A two-disk RAID1, or a RAID5, theoretically ought to be able to detect when there's corruption, but shouldn't be able to correct it. If you've got two different data values, you don't know which one is right.

But it occurs to me: RAID6 (or three-or-more disk RAID1) really ought to be able to correct. Imagine a three-disk RAID1: if two disks say a byte is 03 and one disk says 02, then 03 is probably right. RAID6, similarly, has enough information to be able to do the kinds of repairs that you could do with par2.

It'd be cool to find out this is already in the kernel's md device. Probably not so yet, though. ?

His point is that there is an extra problem here, beyond the DRM issue. Even if we didn't have evil laws intended to work against the people and their industries, imagine if the unreviewed contribution did rm -rf ~/* rather than playing video. Time spent on code review is not "wasted," regardless of whatever silly laws you have.

No. Obviously German courts are free from US precedent and could theoretically use a layman's definition of "effective" but it's likely that the US lobbyists who wrote the German law, had their shit together and knew how German courts would interpret that word.

In the US, we had the matter of "effective"'s meaning settled way back in the DeCSS case. It doesn't mean what you think it means. It means what they want it to mean, and judges have agreed. That battle is over (or at least until people start taking an interest in their governments and bother to vote against Republicrats).

Don't ever buy (or subscribe to) DRMed content or things that are nearly dedicated to working with DRMed content. Every dollar you spend on DRM, will have a large fraction used to keep the government corrupt, and keep laws like DMCA from being repealed. If you know someone who is thinking of buying a Blu-Ray player or an Xbox or an iPhone or a Roku in the next couple weeks, try to talk 'em out of it.

It lets you be a VPS provider, using nothing other than a copy of Chromium. No need for fancy processors and virtualizing instructions, no hypervisors, no containers, whatever.

Scales beautifully: Got a new customer? Just open another tab!

Voter participation is on an all time low

Ah, humans. We have the perfect strategy for getting what we want from democracy: "Don't like it? Stop voting!"

The problem isn't the website, the problem is the cluster fuck of a law they passed.

That's like saying you're unable to write a computer program that loses at Chess.

Let this be a lesson to everyone. If, like the UK government, you always use the same one every damn time, your bullshit gets so obvious that even the dumbest people will recognize it. Please. Pedophiles again?!

Heh, "financial server institutions." My fingers insist that root just always has to end in "-er."

But what else is there? ;-)

It was people smelling the underlying complexity (and security vulnerabilities) of grain sacks, gold bars, paper-dollars, bank-dollars, credit cards, Paypal, etc that led to the succession of those things, with Bitcoin being the latest solution-to-it-all.

Every one of Bitcoin's ancestors had failures, and due to grass-is-always-greener psychology, the most recent ones (dollars and financial server institutions) are naturally viewed as the "worst" (because their failures, unlike grain bags' failures, are part of people's real experiences and memories) so Bitcoin has gone full circle (not exactly, but it's kind of commodity-like) and tends to have security models similar to commodity-money's models. Thus it's having similar failures ("I lost my wallet" == "I forgot where I buried the gold" ; "someone 'hacked' my wallet and transfered my funds out" == "I dug up my gold, and the chest was empty" ; "The online wallet service closed and they, rather than me, is who actually had the key" == "The guy, whom I asked to hold my gold, disappeared").

Maybe some day, governments will use force or sneakiness or "social weight" to make a new chain policy more popular than today's policy, and there will be a Bitcoin fork, which presents a model more like 20th century banking. Then the security complaints will be "my account got frozen" or "I'm leaking wealth due to government-created inflation" or even "the price of everything in BTC changed because of immensely complicated market and government forces that I can't begin to understand, where my currency on the surface appears to be as strong as it was in 2106, but somehow here in 2109 I'm poorer." And then we'll repeat the cycle again.

We'll repeat it again, because money wasn't actually the problem. Real life was the problem, and life is complicated. Life is full of intelligent adversaries (sometimes posing as friends, sometimes not), bumbling fools with too much power, bad luck, freak accidents, etc, and nobody can ever get rid of all that stuff.