The console has long since become more of an Internet-enabled home media center than a single purpose video game player --- and most of the video games these days have a online multiplayer component.

I think you need a new tinfoil hat.

If the VPN traffic is encrypted properly, and they don't have access to either end point, how is it you propose they crack it? Magic?

If there is a vulnerability in the software, which that delightful OpenSSL bug provided (thank goodness I stuck with Debian 6 so long) then you have a point. But not even the NSA, as the article makes clear, has some means to break into a properly encrypted stream.

Largely because if the article, despite /.'s hysterical headline, states that well configured encryption systems remain secure. And how exactly is the NSA going to crack into my self-signed certs, with the CA sitting on a box with no connection to the Internet? Short of breaking into the location where the computer is, I'd say with reasonable certainty that the NSA cannot crack the certs that are used for my interoffice VPN. Now maybe the VPN software has a vulnerability, and that is always a a worry, but the actual implementation itself is as sound as I can imagine it being.

If the encryption is properly implemented, I'd say it is highly unlikely that they will crack it any time soon.

Properly configured systems with a well-implemented certificate infrastructure are very hard, if not outright impossible, to inject a MITM attack into.

Before we all get too hysterical, from the article itself:

The digitization of society in the past several decades has been accompanied by the broad deployment of cryptography, which is no longer the exclusive realm of secret agents. Whether a person is conducting online banking, Internet shopping or making a phone call, almost every Internet connection today is encrypted in some way. The entire realm of cloud computing -- that is of outsourcing computing tasks to data centers somewhere else, possibly even on the other side of the globe -- relies heavily on cryptographic security systems. Internet activists even hold crypto parties where they teach people who are interested in communicating securely and privately how to encrypt their data.

In other words, the NSA, GCHQ and other intelligence services are probably only able to crack badly configured or unpatched and badly out of date systems. That doesn't stop them from using out of band vulnerabilities like hacking into someone's PC or forcing some online service to open up the decrypted data, but it seems likely that if you have a well-managed cert chain and your systems are kept up to date and patched, the odds of anyone, government or otherwise, busting into your encrypted data seems pretty low.

My big fear out of all this isn't the unlikely hacking of mainstream encryption schemes, but rather that those that do use encryption may end up being targets of other methods; like malware, to get at their critical data.

That's an interesting take on the idea. There may be, almost certainly is an "optimal" point of view where the balance of future carrying cost, productive potential, experience and future work expectancy.

If you value experience the highest, then older people are the most valuable. Children have highest carrying cost, least experience, but the highest adaptability and future earning potential.

Now you could take a *market* approach to valuing lives by holding an auction to see how much people will contribute to save a life. In that case I have no doubt that children would win hands down. In a sense we do this already; charities which rescue children have a distinct advantage over those that target adults or the elderly.

It's got to be better than New Jersey.

I didn't say it wasn't a big deal. I said it isn't enough to cause noticeable disruption or bankruptcy of a government, because that's what plopez seemed so concerned about.

For what it's worth, getting the price up to 1% is also unrealistic, but it was an easy calculation to make to show that it's not a threat. Really, the $400 billion price tag is an estimate for the entire program, extending slightly past final delivery in 2037. That works out to only about $10 billion per year (not accounting for inflation), which is roughly 0.3% of a year's federal budget. That's less than the amount the government loses due to the home sale capital gains tax credit, but nobody whines about those stability-threatening home sellers, do they?

I believe you, but I don't understand what result they got from the blood test that led to your getting convicted of drunken driving. Blood tests are supposed to be more accurate.

My doctor prescribed Ambien to me. I tried it for a month and it didn't work. Nobody warned me about the "sleep walking" or any of the other exotic side effects.

A friend of mine was taking gabapentin (Neurontin). A co-worker at work started a fight, he fought back, and they both got fired (from their non-union job). It was in the depths of the recession and he couldn't get another job; he wound up in bad shape. I called the FDA to find out if this could be due to the gabapentin, and a doctor looked it up their database and said yes, they had a few reports of gabapentin associated with aggression. I don't think it was in the patient information then, but it (sometimes) is now. The warning isn't prominent http://www.drugs.com/cons/gaba... http://www.fda.gov/downloads/D... and they emphasize the effect in children, not adults.

It's not possible for a patient to be aware of these things in a country where doctors' appointments are 15 minutes or less, they don't get paid for phone advice, and primary care practitioners are prescribing these drugs.

Something I wonder: what's the real role of the Air Force? It has a valid strategic role, but its other roles on the battlefield look like they should be subordinate to the Army. The Navy has its own air forces, and that seems to work well.

Only in the US.

Paying to receive is RIDICULOUS. Just because it's the norm for you, doesn't mean it's not still ridiculous.

Why do people think FTL allows for backwards time travel? It's called Special Relativity, and is much more convincing than people's general ideas. p> Suppose you're in a spaceship traveling at a speed relative to another spaceship such that time dilation is 2, meaning that for each of you time appears to pass at half speed for the other one. When you meet, you exchange ansible (instantaneous communicator) settings. An hour after, you put your coffee cup on the edge of the console, and it falls and breaks. You send a message to the other guy. You observe him getting it when, from his point of view, it's half an hour after meeting. He relays the message back, and observes you getting it when you are fifteen minutes from the meeting, and the message has therefore returned forty-five minutes before you sent it.

In order to argue with this, you need to at least understand it. You need to understand that "forward" and "back" are not determinate with any FTL phenomenon. (There is an objective forward and back as long as things stay under the speed of light. FTL is "sideways", using this classification, and has no "forward" or "back".)