Indeed. Internet censorship fortunately does not work, but one has to wonder why are they trying so hard to establish it nonetheless. My only explanation is that those in power are extremely scared of those they are supposed to serve.

TOR has this as one of its project-goals. And since they are in an arms-race with the "Chinese wall" firewall, I expect TOR has quite a head-start.

Of course, it is a sign how much of a problem western governments have become these days if one seriously needs to contemplate using TOR to fight back against them.

The whole purpose of battle is that one side thinks its lives are worth more....

You seem to have no clue whatsoever what you are talking about.

'tails-autotest-remote-shell' in /etc/init.d includes a rather obvious test for a kernel parameter:

if grep -qw "autotest_never_use_this_option" /proc/cmdline
then
                :
else
                exit 0
fi

If that parameter is missing, the script aborts. I guess you do not know how to read shell-scripts or you did not bother to even look what it does.

And 'tails-autotest-remote-shell' in /usr/local/lib is different from the file in /etc/init.d and actually the python script called from there if needed. It also includes a pretty clear and accurate statement at the start: "ATTENTION: Yes, this can be used as a backdoor, but only for an adversary with access to you *physical* serial port, which means that you are screwed any way." As this very clearly says this is a serial-port connected remote shell, I guess you did not look for one second into the file. And if you had looked and looked at the code as well, you would have seen that it does indeed only open serial port.

So, in total: This script opens a remote shell on a serial port if you give a very specific kernel-parameter on startup.

Remind me again where there is _any_ security problem here? My guess is you are just an honor-less shill spreading FUD for money to keep people from trusting TAILS.

Excellent example!

Thanks!

Incompetence and only be fully developed and utilized to its maximum potential if it is paired with arrogance, as otherwise people could utilize undesirable insights into their own skills (or rather lack thereof) as motivator to increase their competence level. One of the tried-and-true ways of establishing arrogance is fostering high self-esteem that is not founded in accomplishments, but in the believe that everybody can and should regard themselves as highly valuable, regardless of whether they have actually accomplished something.

Makes me wonder whether this drive to give young people high self-esteem is actually a coordinated attempt to sabotage education and self-improvement.

I do not think it can be fixed. The western world managed to acquire technological leadership, and then its governments found out that they do not actually like their citizens to be educated and smart. Hence they have been sabotaging that systematically for a long time and the fruits of that sabotage are obvious now. This decline will continue for a long, long time.

Many smart potential or even fully educated STEM workers take one good hard look at the way STEM workers are treated and compensated and go somewhere else. What is left is the not-smart ones and the ones that for some other reason have no alternatives.

That equation does not work at all, except in menial jobs that are not physically demanding.

That one is pretty simple: The media have no clue about technology at all and think being able to use a simple user-interface is actually is some way comparable to "mastering" and "controlling" a device. Of course, none of that is the case. Instead, there are just even less incentives to learn how technology actually works. All surface, no deeper understanding at all.

Indeed.

And hence, Bitcoin actually makes it easier to monitor money-flows, as they already have all Internet traffic. Getting the data from Banks, especially foreign ones, may be a tad more effort and the Bank knows.

As MBAs are often complete idiots and utterly disconnected from reality, I am not sure your argument counts. In fact, believing a Wikipedia-article without any additional verification may be a good test to see whether somebody is MBA material. Hence on a meta-level, this school did a very professional assessment of whether people were qualified for an MBA or not and only directed those to it that were. Hence, again on meta-level, this would actually strengthen the belief that the school was genuine and well-respected.

So I do not see what the fuss is about.

Unless you really mess up your in-memory variant, there is no way in this universe that disk access can be faster. Here is a simple thought-experiment that shows this: Just use an in-memory array as storage vs. the disk. The array must be faster as RAM has orders of magnitude better bandwidth and latency as even the fastest SSDs, and it has far, far smaller block-sizes in addition.

Of course, if your in-memory data storage is so badly organized that the OS in-memory (!) buffer-cache does a better job, you may think that you observe the disk being faster than your RAM.

Looking at the paper header, the authors are all from a biology-department, so the suspicion that they are clueless of how to write things efficiently is really not far-fetched. I will not read the paper, it is likely a waste of time.