California State Senator Leland Yee (D-S.F.) says he wants regulations to track who possesses and uses encryption technology. Yee's comments come in response to the recent news of a successful trial of a super-secure encryption algorithm.

"He's concerned that just about anyone with access to those cutting-edge encryption algorithms can protect their information. 'Terrorists can use these encryption technologies to protect their communications while they plan to do some horrible things to an individual and then walk away scott-free, and that is something that is really dangerous,' said Yee. He said while this new technology is impressive, it must be regulated when it comes to protecting information. He says background checks, requiring serial numbers and even licensing possession could be part of new legislation that he says will protect the public. Yee added, 'This particular encryption algorithm has no backdoor whatsoever.'"

Those darn hackers..

That must have been the noise I heard ~20 minutes ago.

Do you have a stick up your ass, or something?

OF THE YEAR!!!!!

You've said before that you don't like software-as-a-service (SaaS) because it puts the users data in someone else's control.

1. 1. Are you therefore implying that everyone in the world needs to run their own server in order to have the benefits of SaaS?
2. 2. If so, do you think they *actually* have to run their own physical server? What about regular hosting providers?
3. 3. Doesn't GNU provide SaaS for hosting free software projects, i.e. Savannah? I know the software running Savannah is free, but you've said before that even then, you don't know what modifications have been made by the server operator. Does using Savannah fit under the exception of published work not having to be private, e.g. Twitter vs. Facebook as you mentioned in your 2009 talk at the University of Calgary?
4. 4. Don't you use non-free software every time you go to a website that has custom code running on the server? Is this a compromise you make to receive the information (presumably you wouldn't give them any private information)? Or is this not a compromise at all? Is therefore the real issue of SaaS just the fact that you're giving private information to someone else, irregardless of the software's level of freedom (though of course that would matter as well)?
5. 5. What do you think about the various infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings that are available, specifically things like Amazon's EC2 and Google's Compute Engine (irregardless of your views about other aspects of those companies; I don't want your views on the Amazon Swindle to affect your answer)? Users of these services are running their own software (or at least can; for this question, assume the users are running either free software or private software that they created and have the source for), but at some lower level these services are managed by non-free software. Is it immoral to use such services? What if they were managed by entirely free software? You would still have to send data and code to their computers. How would that change your view, if at all?
6. 6. What do you think of a service like the Blockchain.info Bitcoin Wallet that encrypts/decrypts your private data in the browser and releases all the client-side code as free software, along with a browser plugin that checks the code provided by the website against the code in the public repository to verify that they are the same? Would such a system be moral to use (irregardless of your views on Bitcoin either way)?
7. 7. Homomorphic encryption allows computations to be carried out in ciphertext. Although currently unpractical, if/when it does become practical to perform secure, private computations on someone else's computer, how would this affect your views on SaaS/IaaS/hosting providers? Would you have different views depending on the freedom of the software managing the service provider's low level systems?

I've gone on much longer than I initially intended. Thanks for your time :).

Can you post a source for that quote?

Did anyone else think this was going to be about some sort of Universe-scale natural phenomenon being modeled as a supercomputer?

Just don't overestimate the DESTINI-- I mean density of the core-- I mean mantle.

To all those anti-warp drive downers.. HAHAHAHA!!!!

As an English speaker, I find it outrageous that I might now have to deal with a language I don't know while coding JavaScript. This is going to restrict my use of third-party libraries. So unfair.

"... with each of the ISPs launching at potentially overlapping but different times."

Potentially overlapping? Does that mean some ISPs are only going to be running the system for a limited time, possibly ending it before others start? Or are the "launch windows" potentially overlapping? Or was that just spokes-babble?

The curses on tombs didn't work because people didn't believe in them. If some future civilization doesn't believe in radiation, well, sucks for them.

1) Write multiple warnings and translate them all into every language you can manage. This has the side-effect of being a Rosetta Stone.
2) Draw pictures of humans and other living things suffering the effects of radiation poisoning (and other death images, for good measure).
3) Draw the atomic structure of uranium, plutonium, etc. You could also try drawing fusion/fission/etc. Go crazy.
4) Make it really, really, really hard to get in.
5) Anyone who still gets in is either advanced enough that they'll be safe or dumb enough that they don't deserve to survive.

BONUS STEP: Keep maintaining it so the only way it'll ever become a problem is if humanity gets so close to extinction that by the time they would even get close to getting in, language will have changed so much that they might not understand the written warnings. Or the pictures.

Don't worry about the aliens. If they can get here, I think they'll probably be fine.