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Comment Re:Y2K (Score 1) 197

This sounds like Y2K all over again...

What, that legitimate problem lots of people worked on successfully to avoid before it could have major consequences? Yeah, I agree.

Yeah, and after all that work to prepare, the rest of the world said "I don't know why you nerds made such a big deal out of this. Nothing happened!" It's enough to make you want to quit your job, cut the soles off your shoes, sit in a tree and learn to play the flute.

Power

Thorium: The Wonder Fuel That Wasn't 204

Lasrick (2629253) writes "Bob Alvarez has a terrific article on the history and realities of thorium as an energy fuel: For 50 years the US has tried to develop thorium as an energy source for nuclear reactors, and that effort has mostly failed. Besides the extraordinary costs involved, In the process of pursuing thorium-based reactors a fair amount of uranium 233 has been created, and 96 kilograms of the stuff (enough to fuel 12 nuclear weapons) is now missing from the US national inventory. On top of that, the federal government is attempting to force Nevada into accepting a bunch of the uranium 233, as is, for disposal in a landfill (the Nevada Nuclear Security Site). 'Because such disposal would violate the agency's formal safeguards and radioactive waste disposal requirements, the Energy Department changed those rules, which it can do without public notification or comment. Never before has the agency or its predecessors taken steps to deliberately dump a large amount of highly concentrated fissile material in a landfill, an action that violates international standards and norms.'"

Comment Re:Certificate extortion (Score 1) 60

>If you have a site where an attacker would have bothered with the elaborate process of getting the private key, and then do MITM attacks with it on users, and it >would actually matter, you wouldn't have used StartSSL in the first place, and $25 would be absolutely nothing for you.

>Hint: not you

None of which has any bearing on my original point, which is that we need a better and more secure way of applying security to web servers that isn't reliant on the good graces of a third party (either through their schedule of fees or through their procedures and policies). If you want a more secure internet, you have to make it cheaper and easier for the guys who are just like me. As I mentioned in my top post, the admins I spoke of can't afford to replace their certificates and so their sites remain unsecured.

Comment Re:Certificate extortion (Score 2) 60

>Yup, twenty-five whole dollars. That's the price of several Big Macs, with fries!. Shameless what some CAs will charge.

(Not defending the CA racket here, but $25 isn't really that much when they give the certs out for free. In any case why revoke them, just replace them with a new, free cert. Yes, I know someone can spoof the server using the old cert, but if you want to save the $25...).

That's $25 per certificate. That may sound cheap to you, but it's not cheap to everyone and especially not when you may have several (or dozens) to replace. In any case, revocations should be free. Also, StartSSL won't let you cut a new certificate for a host while an unrevoked certificate exists for that host, so you either pay them to revoke it, wait until it expires, or change the hostname (or move to a different CA, I guess). All three are unacceptable scenarios, IMHO.

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