Which?

OK, if they'd thought of it they'd have wanted to do it. That's hardly proof they did it.

Don't worry. When the governments keep changing eventually you get a real winner at the head. I'm still expecting India and Pakistan, or some other pair of "friendly neighbors" to put the nuclear autumn model to the test. Unless something worse happens first. Hopefully, however, not this decade.

Threats are cheap. Is there even any evidence they come from the same source as the original hack? (Mind you, I have no idea who did it, and don't believe anything the government says anymore unless they have verifyable evidence to prove it.)

Now once someone *acts* on one of those threats, then there will be more belief that it was done with someone with either excessive zeal or lots of backing. Right now even that's lacking. Threats on the internet are so common that they've *got* to be ignored, even though that's frequently difficult.

They didn't purposely deceive people, because they didn't care whether it was true or not. If that had known their claims were false, that would have been purposeful deception. However they didn't care whether the claims were true or false, but only that they were useful That's probably a bit worse than intentional deception.

What you have demonstrated is that there is no politically acceptable proof, not that it didn't happen, and not that the document did not match something from the NSA database.

I haven't followed this, so I don't really have an opinion one way or the other, but what you have provided does not constitute proof that it was a hoax.

If SSL was an inconvenience to the TLA's, this would not be happening.

The boy-who-cried-wolf is the problem here. That story is at least 10,000 years old, and Google still have not got the message.

Perhaps Cartoon Network is not encrypted, so they have not watched it?

Why do we need security to view academic articles, adverts or mindless blather? Most people have no need of locking their rubbish bin (and most of what is on the internet is definitley rubbish - I have looked :-) There really are people who use the internet for other things than shopping!

There is every reason to have security for some things, but none for others.

Why force it on people? The result of this will be huge numbers of badly configured systems, and either over confidence or total loss of confidence in SSL.

Sure it's possible, but given their history how could you trust them?

It ought to be possible to design an alternative based on interpersonal recommendation. But what do you use for a unique identifier? You need something. Phone number has possibilities, but that, too, is subject to centralized control, AND it identifies the individual, which effectively removes anonymity.

The problem is, you need SOME unique identifier, or nobody can find you to deliver the messages/webpages/etc. I can imagine a hierarchy of geographically based names with the lower level assigned on a collision avoidance kind of approach, which would allow anonymity to the lowest geographical level, say 1024 square kilometers on the average. But you need to remember all the id's you've used, and when you move there would be no way to carry your id (unless the system has some built in way of automatically forwarding calls, which has its own problems).

Sorry, but I have avoided anything sponsored by either the MPAA or the RIAA ever since the Sonny-Bono copyright extension act.

If I felt I absolutely *must* see that movie, I'd feel compelled to donate 3 times the admission cost the the EFF.

No. What you need is a system that is easy to clone, and which n countries can run independently, for n a positive integer.

DNS seems a good choice for the lower layers, but the top layer needs to have a round-robin resolution, such than any root server that don't find the site will pass you on to the next. You need to also, however, be able to specify the starting root, and possibly the 1st alternate, to avoid cache poisoning.

And if you go back further there was a period when nobody had a "job". Everyone worked at hunting, food gathering, or tool making. Nobody owned more than they could easily carry. And people were around as tall as today (which probably means as healthy). Then populations started increasing, somebody invented agriculture, and people started needing to work all the time. But agriculture supported larger populations, even if they were a lot less healthy, and, to all appearances, a lot less happy.

Time doesn't stand still. The question is always "what are the viable ways forwards from here?", and the answers MUST recognize the tendencies of populations to expand until their food supply is insufficient. (There *ARE* ways around that, some quite pleasant[*], but they need to be designed into the system.)

* TV, education of women, video games, etc. are pleasant ways to control the population growth. Some are more effective than others. Populations will inherently evolve to evade the restrictions, but biologic evolutionary time is so slow WRT cultural evolutionary time that this can almost be ignored.

Frederick Pohl:
The Midas Plague
The Man who ate the World

I think the first was originally a short story, or a novella, but that it was later expanded into a novel. I only saw the second as a novel.

I found them both unrealistic because they ignore the geometric expansion of populations. Still, they were well done. They should be seen, however, mainly as social criticism written as science fiction.

My first reaction was "Gee, they noticed.".

The point is, to do most jobs you don't need a strong AI. Someting a bit smarter than a horse, but which was better at manipulation would do fine. The jobs that need more are unusual. (And, by the way, logic engines better than human aren't hard. Our strengths are in other areas.)

E.g., for me the hard part of programming is often writing the code. If it gets complex I can run out of short term memory. But for an AI it would be understanding the problem. (Modularizing the code helps me, but when it gets complex either the modules get too large, or there are too many of them to easily deal with. An AI could be designed to not have that problem. Resizable stack depths, etc.)