To the contrary, Harvard operates another wireless network called "Harvard Guest" that does not require a Harvard ID for accessing the internet.

Not true, in Switzerland it's the same. However, each insurer needs its premiums for the minimum plan to be approved by the government.

Too bad that our universe is neither AdS (the cosmological constant is positive) nor ten-dimensional as in the papers.

In Germany, a lawyer sending a cease-and-desist letter can ask to get paid for his services from the recipient of the letter. However, the fees associated with this (making up most of the €250 in this case) are essentially lump sums set by law that are unrelated to the acutal amount of time spent for each case. If a lawyer sends out thousands of letters, this means huge profits, which are often shared with the rightsholder through illegal kickback schemes.

This is a well-known problem, but most lawmakers (who were often legal professionals before), prosecutors, and judges see copyright violations as the bigger issue so they tend to welcome this process as a private-sector law enforcement despite the fraud that is usually associated with it.

Encrypting your stuff is all good and nice, but you should use a piece of software that has been written using established secure coding standards. Just because it's open source doesn't mean it's also secure (cf. PHP, OpenSSL). Rather, being open source is a necessary, but not a sufficient criterion in the evaluation of security-critical applications.

Given the track record of this particular application, I'm a bit skeptical whether one should really use it for anything serious.

Unfortunately, you lose security support when you do this.

The FSF considers permissive license to be free software. They do not consider copyleft licenses to be "more free" than permissive licenses. Please stop spreading false propaganda.

Not if the forced study participation occurs halfway through the course when users have already invested significant ressources. As long as the annoyance being asked for is less than than the total amount of work invested, people will stay in whether they like it or not, making this approach highly unethical (unless it's clearly communicated before peple enroll).

Sure, when dealing with pedophiles in the intelligence services.

But that's not what is happening right now. The US are spying on everyone, no matter whether there is something fishy going on, there might be something fishy going on, or there is nothing fishy going on. Do you seriously believe that there is any realistic chance that any of the NATO allies is going to launch war or state-supported terrorist attacks against the US in the forseeable future? Do you seriously believe that everyone using Google or Facebook is up to something fishy?

From a legal point of view, it is mostly irrelevant and this is not limited to the US or even common law jurisdictions. Factual impossibility is not a valid defense when charged with the attempt of a crime.

Would you care to explain this point? As far as I can tell, neither Snowden nor the journalists he has cooperated with have stated anywhere that they want to abolish intelligence practices completely. Nor have they done anything that endangered ongoing operations with imminant risk for human life.

I also doubt that they adhered to their own guidelines for Human research studies:

Informed consent must be obtained for studies on humans after the nature and possible consequences of the studies were explained. All research on humans must have IRB approval.

... the story only shows that German media outlets are not familiar with US entry regulations. He says that he was denied a visa last year, which automatically disqualifies him from the visa waiver program. This is just a garden-variety ESTA issue, and most likely has nothing to do with his stance of the NSA surveillance.