There are usually around 60 cases per year. Religion accounts for more than half the rise.

Because debasing irrational belief is a field of its own. Medical doctors can tell you exactly what happend during a vaccination but this is not the kind of things that help convince people to get vaccinated. A normal doctor of medical researcher will just shrug and stop debatting if faced with the regular anti-vaxx comments.

Phil Plait has spent a lot of time comfronting irrational beliefs and that makes him more likely to become a spokerperson for this case.

To be certain of not being snooped, you would also need to use open source tool to generate the content you want to send and run that on an open source OS which guarantees that other process won't have access to the cleartext message you wrote.

And here I am assuming no backdoor in hardware or firmware, which in 2013 is quite a leap of faith.

Open Source has a hard time providing the minimum trustable stack (BIOS is the current obvious weak link) and I don't see microsoft doing that any time soon.

The thing is, a rooted android phone is still very far from being an open platform.

This, however, answered a question I had: the NSA probably has access to half the forums in the world without needing any kind of attack. I was wondering if other services were happy to ask for NSA help or tried to independently get the information they needed.

Actually, I am not aware of the French courts being dissatisfied by something else than a simple DNS block. This is non news so far.

You don't understand how abyssmal is the consideration for communication security here. People here really learned from Snowden that NSA intercepts internet traffic. Sarkozy and Merkel were exchanging information through f$cking SMS! MEPs have to be hit repeatedly and very hard with a cluebat to understand anything.

This guy, before being a white hat, was a concerned citizen. Yes, it is more about education and public perception than security research, but we are talking about people who are highly valuable target to lobbyists and who don't understand that their smartphone are not a secure way to receive their emails.

This is one case where competition is bad. It causes license fragmentation without adding anything to the community. CC is for works of art, designed for that and more likely to hold well in that case. GPL/LGPL/MIT/BSD are for software and are more likely to hold well in these cases. You should also consider public domain. It is a tested and proved "license" not very far from the BSD... ;-)

I did that when it peaked at 30$ and sold the 50 bitcoins I owned. I felt smart when the crash happened a few weeks later. I now regret this move deeply.

It is a bit subtler than that :

incredibly relevant SMBC

I just wish people used the correct expression. It is not "doomsday switch" but "dead man's switch".

This requires another type of contract than a will.

I'll be happy with this photographer getting zero dollars from his work when any copyrighted work can be copied without problem.

Actually, I endorse a return to a sane copyright law: 5 to 20 years from first publication, then it becomes public domain.

Copyright laws suck, because indeed information wants to be free. Today, however, it is not. So if someone makes money by claiming property over some information, at least do it by giving a part of the money to the guys with a minimum of merits.

They do. There are services (which require quite a lot of trust) who propose you to take a bitcoin payement, and will give you back this amount at a later time (a few days) on the address you desire or splitted in several addresses

If done correctly, this can effectively "launder" bitcoins. However, the likelihood of some of these services being traps is quite hard.

I think that people who believe that bitcoin is great for tax evasion of criminal transactions are there for a surprise. It is but one brick in the platonic society of ideas that idealistic cryptoanarchists try to build. First, there were cryptotools, and identities and pseudo identities could be verified, communication could be kept private. Then there were darknets, and ideas could be exchanged anonymously. Now with bitcoins, money can be exchanged. So right now, what you can do totally anonymously is buying dematerialized service or data. It is not a good tool for buying a yacht without the IRS knowing it, and it is not about that.

More bricks will come: people are currently making schemes to create pseudonymous companies, to make some kind of contracts enforceable, to manage trust between entities with no history, etc... It is an interesting subject to follow.

The fact that the content of every bank account and every transaction is public makes bitcoin a very bad tool for money laundering.

It would give you a pseudonymous social network of criminals. A law enforcement firm then just has to play crosswords and make some honey pots to get the big picture.

Bitcoin suppresses the need for extorsion fees during international wire transfers, not the need for suitcases full of cash during shady transactions.

Sell it? Hammond did this? I think he just published them.

And if you run a private spy company, complaining about getting your data stolen is just hypocrisy.