From TFS: "You can see how it would be viewed with skepticism; after all, these are the individuals who will give Watch Dogs a review score, which many gamers rely on to help them make a purchasing decision."

Come on, we're all adults here. We all know the industry gives perks to reviewers in exchange for favorable reviews. This is just more blatant than most.

"The problem here is that people have been using the argument that Open Source is better because these issues can't happen "because" of the visibility."

No, just no. No one with any sort of a clue ever argued these issues cannot happen with Free Software.

No, they haven't made that claim in so many words. But they've sure as hell implied it for years now. That's the whole line of thought that Raymond's statement (quoted in TFS) is based on.

The amount of backpedaling and smoke blowing in this discussion awesome.

There's no doubt that OpenSSL needs work, but they seem to be needlessly combining actual security review with "break every platform that I don't like." At a minimum, anyone else trying to benefit from this will need to unravel the worthwhile security changes from the petty OS wars crap.

I don't see this as a problem. Since OpenBSD is working on their own, for-themselves, branch, they can fix it any way they want. If they do a good job (as expected), the OpenSSL project can then backport their fixes into their project and integrate it to their hearts' content.k (If they chose not to, someone else can chose to fork and do it, and the two versions can fight it out for acceptance.)

This is how it works in the Bazzaar.

... as they keep saying about Jerusalem, it will go something like this: "Annexed by Russia in a move not recognized internationally."

I recently too a course titled "Ethics in International Relations" at a major college. (This was to fulfill a distribution requirement for an "ethics" class and the particular course had the bonus of also fulfilling an international affairs requirement.)

One of the first points made:
  * Which regions are part of which countries is NOT a subject of international ethics.
A fait accopli is accepted as is. (This was taken as a universal, part of the definition of the boundaries of the field (as taught), which otherwise studied many different, often conflicting, schools of thought.

I interpret this as follows: "International Ethics", as a dicipline, is an attempt by academics (and the rich people who fund them - such as Andrew Carnegie, who largely founded the field) to influence governments, primarily to improve their treatment of the people they rule and otherwise use force upon. ("Improved" being viewed throught the biases of the academics in question.)

In order to sway the behavior of rulers - especially those who are oppressing their long-standing citizens, recent conquests, or those with whom they are considering resolving a dispute with force, they have to appear non-threatening to the rulers' core issue: that the ruler is in charge. So they must strictly avoid challenging WHETHER the rulers rule, sticking to issues of HOW they rule.

So don't expect academia to support any move for self-determination by the people of an occupied region. The rulers that make the claim and have the power to enforce it will be passively accepted.

DO expect them to oppose such people arming themselves to assert a right to self-determination, or even anyone speaking in a way that might "lead to conflict" rather than passification and quiet (but mainly non-violent) suffering. Thus you see them supporting things like censorship of speech an arms blockades to regions of conflict - which are then selectively enforced and lead to "ethnic clensing" genocides by the side that more successfully evades them against the side that is now largely disarmed.

(Example on censorship: During the period where the Benghazi attack was being blamed on a video posted on YouTube, Sarah Chayes, a senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote an op-ed for the L.A. times calling for its censorship.)

That's the OP's point - you're missing my point, which is that it's not really so unfathomable at all. By 1981, we'd already in less than a decade gone from pocket calculators being expensive rarities to being practically given away in breakfast cereal. LORAN was already widely available in a compact box. Etc... etc... By 1981, the accelerating pace of technology was already clearly visible to anyone who was looking. (Which I was at the time.)

What I missed/didn't grasp the full import of is that between 1981 (the year of my high school graduation) and 1991 (the year of Desert Shield/Storm) GPS went from being a highly classified piece of military hardware to a handheld commercial unit. There were actually more units in the civilian world than in the Army. (Folks were actually buying handheld GPS units at sporting goods stores and sending them to soldiers in the field because there was a shortage of officially available and issued GPS units!) But given the rapid advance of IC's into the civilian/commercial world, I shouldn't have been surprised at all. (OTOH, the full story of the DOD's role in developing IC's wasn't fully known/grasped at the time.)

I always thought the most unlikely technological development in my lifetime was the handheld GPS device. It would be "most unlikely" because it required tremendous, simultaneous, and largely unforeseen advances in several different technologies, each of which was hard to predict in 1981.

Yes... and no. In 1981, the pieces and precursors of pretty much everything on your list was already in place. Very little of it was available down at Radio Shack, granted, but much of it was already in use (at a minimum) by the military.

Especially when you consider, science has a hard time predicting future trends and technologies, yet Science Fiction seems to have been fairly accurate in predicting, if not outright influencing, future technological trends.

Certainly, if you cherry pick the hell out of the (tens of?) thousands of "predictions" made across the last century or so... science fiction seems remarkably prescient. In reality, the picture is much bleaker. In reality, science fiction is not much better at predicting the future than a million monkeys pounding away on typewriters.

Not only is it a good idea, but it may be a necessary idea (to our survival). And the idea that ppl don't want to finance it? I know, let's spend more money on weapons to invade other nations on false pretenses. That's a way better use of funds.

This is pretty easy to fix though. Releasing carbon is exothermic, so if we overcorrect, we just burn more fossil fuels. It's taking and sequestering carbon that takes energy input.

As far as the fundamentalists go. . . no quarter asked, none given.

The next question to answer is: Can Heartbleed compromise True Crypt?

This. As a former bookstore owner, the parent grasps what the grandparent is clueless about.

So the question here is should the NSA put every single American SSL using business at risk for years on end to protect a single source of SIGINT?

The big question, for real, is; is there a backdoor in SE Linux?

If they were irresponsible enough to leave Heartbleed alone for 2 years, then how can we believe they haven't discovered (or inserted) compromises in other software?

"spy agency's job to spy" sounds like a convenient excuse to ignore ethics. All is permissible due to expediency, and because if we don't do it, our enemies will. Guess I thought that we were better than that. If we're going to accept that we're not, then I'm wondering why exactly we came down from the trees in the first place.

Yes, there's scrap from cars. Duh. Less and less each year though - most cars are recycled, and the steel quantity in each individual vehicle is dropping with each model year to save weight.

But you still need someone to strip the car and transport the material to the forge site. You still need fuel for the forge. Etc... etc... Here in the real world, that's called infrastructure. I have no idea what it's called inside that piece of rotted shit you call a brain.