Thanks for the insult. It hardly stung.

Unless you worked at Netscape in the mid-1990s, no insult was intended.

All I meant is that by the very early 1990s, we (and by "we" I mean people smarter than me; I was clueless at the time) had a pretty good idea that CAs wouldn't work well outside of real power hierarchies (e.g. corporate intranets). But then a few years later the web browser people came along and adopted X.509's crap, blowing off the more recent PKI improvements, in spite of the fact that it looked like it wouldn't work well for situations like the WWW.

Unsurprisingly, it didn't work well. Organizing certificate trust differently than how real people handle trust, 1) allows bad CAs to do real damage, and 2) undermines peoples' confidence in the system.

A very nice way of saying this, is that in hindsight, the predicted problems are turning out to be more important than we thought most people would care about. ;-) It's almost as though now (no fair! you changed the requirements!!) people want SSL to be secure.

Keeping the same organization but with new faceless unaccountable trust-em-completely-or-not-at-all root CAs won't fix the problem. Having "root CAs" is the problem, and PRZ solved it, over 20 years ago.

I expect you to start the project shortly.

It's a little late to start, but I do happen to still be running an awful lot of applications (web browser being the most important one) which aren't using it yet.

Personally, I would say buying iOS devices is a mistake generally, but not necessarily in every case. I'm in Educational IT (K-12), and have seen quite a number of pilots in our district trying to decide what is "best" option. The answer is, "it depends".

Personally, I see much more value in Chromebooks in education, especially when tied to Google Apps For Education (GAFE). Have you heard of Google Classroom? https://classroom.google.com/s... Having taken a look at the promo videos (yes, I understand) but if it is half as easy as it looks, it is going to change how we do education.

Add in things like Khan Academy, and other "online" educational material, the world is our oyster field. I see, in the future, customized education for every student, where we break free from the industrial model of Education.

Summarily dismissing information because you dislike the source is like fallacious reasoning, because it is.

He was obviously talking about building your own hardware. Did you really think his parts list of "A small controller, an LCD display and a keyboard," was in reference to writing an alternative to OpenBSD?

Actually, most teaching is done between K-8 schools, is simply basics. And some of it is really basic, even in 8th Grade. You don't start getting interesting until High School. Then again, Math and science is "hard", and therefore isn't really promoted. Higher level math and science (Calculus, Physics, Chemistry etc.) are so hard, that most teachers don't know the subject well enough to actually teach it.

But then again, I remember my college roommate's girlfriend going for her teaching credential, and couldn't do basic math in her head, and used a calculator and still got the wrong answer. Teaching seems to be the last resort for certain people, after all, you don't need a PhD to teach kindergarteners?

But when you pay a K-6 teacher the same as a HS Math and Physics teacher, you start to see the real problem.

How does Diffie-Hellman key exchange provide identification of the other party? .. It is not possible to determine who the other party is

It's possible. It requires an extra piece beyond the DH, but that extra piece isn't PKI. The user is the trusted introducer. The user looks around and says "Yep, these are the only two devices physically here that I have ordered to peer, right now." They are identified by being in the right place at the right time, triggered by the user saying "Now." That's a pretty good way to do things unless you're just totally surrounded by spies.

The USA, Germany, UK, etc. insist they are capitalist. Does that really mean they have free markets?

Maybe the warnings issued could be used by the IP holders in civil court. Perhaps there should be a fast track IP infringement court.

I guess I imagined the videos I saw that showed most of the rockets being intercepted and winking out in a flash. I can't say when the video was shot, but SOMEONE was firing at Israel (based on the Hebrew chatter of spectators) and the rockets weren't making it.

So communism and socislism is a religion?

Otherwise your comment is a bit like yelling "what about Ted Bundy" when someone points out something kills a lot of people.

...if it is, it's more a symptom than cause.
I believe it's societies in which the economically optimal behavior is cheating.

In Socialist East Germany as many have posted here anecdotally, the system was so broken that cheating - going outside the formal rules of the system - was the only way to get many basic and preferred needs met.

This is endemic to CORRUPT societies, not just socialist ones.

For cheating to be optimal, you have to have two elements:
- a system that gives people motivation to break the rules AND (importantly)
- an alternative - a black market, corrupt officials, etc - that is workable.

I'd argue that *any* overbureaucratic society will eventually reach this point.
Capitalism - insofar as it mitigates the issue - allows people to DIRECTLY follow their self-interest, without having to 'cheat' around the system.
I'd argue that the conflicted desire of the US populace for ever-greater safety-nets and protection by the government (and thus control) will likewise ever-more incentivize cheating in precisely the same way.

Well, considering the ruling party SED had the name "socialist" in it, I'd say he was correct.

You're European, aren't you?

Indeed. FDR was probably our most fascist president, followed very closely by Wilson. By no coincidence, they were probably the two most socialist and most "progressive". Fascism is the drug, by which socialism is the most efficacious delivery system.

Well covered by, "Engage!"

I'll be in my ready room. Tea, Earl Grey, hot.