Mounting things to light poles is 10,000 times more practical.

For years, we have had a cut-out in ITAR 121 that applies to Open Source, it is due to a lawsuit that Phil Karn brought against the Federal Government. Thus, you can implement with impunity, and export to anywhere, as long as it's Open Source.

Rather than an encryption gateway, having your email client handle encryption avoids the problem of man-in-the-middle attacks between the gateway and the client.

I don't have much reason to encrypt, but Thunderbird has my certificate installed and does my digital signing. This is not unusual for a modern email client.

This is why I don't leave my mail on servers. It's deleted as it is downloaded to my local client, via old style POP3. Mail stored on my own personal property at home does still require a warrant to retrieve.

Yes, this means less convenience, I can't access my email archives wherever I go, but it discourages snooping from remote.

Pick a nice client like thunderbird/mozilla mail and read your mail the classic way - via desktop client. You can even set it to not delete messages on the server for X number of days, so you have your most recent correspondence online, but not the whole pile.

Unfortunately, what people don't realize is that taxes actually do pay for things. I've literally been told by people, here in the US, that taxes are just "wasted" or "stolen" money and don't really do anything. When I ask them if they've ever driven on a public road, or attended a public school, or occupied safe and well-inspected buildings, or taken safe and well-controlled flights, they launch into rants about "inefficiency".

We live in a society, and we're supposed to care for one another, especially those most vulnerable. "I've got mine and %$)@*% you buddy" is not a recipe for a stable or pleasant society, certainly not one that I'd want to live in. And that's said as one who's at least to a reasonable degree got mine--as many of us here know, developers don't make bad money. But that doesn't ultimately mean much if society isn't kept stable and healthy.

It reminds me a great deal of Monty Python's "What have the Romans ever done for us?" sketch. Substitute "gubmint" for "Romans", and you've essentially got the same scenario.

And it boggles my mind that people think private companies bent on making as much profit as possible will provide services at a lower cost than an entity which need not make one.

Why do you think the Occupy movement scared the holy hell out of them? It wasn't because they set up tents in a few parks.

Really, neither side cares too much whether you favor the puppet on the left or the puppet on the right, so long as you're busy demonizing the other side and staying divided. That's just your required participation in the Two Minutes' Hate, citizen. But when someone came along and said "We know who's pulling the strings, and we're all here to talk to the puppeteer", well now, THAT had to be stopped.

...when your country completely discounts nuclear as the best option for an environmentally friendly energy source. Solar and wind can never be primary energy sources - they are not constant power sources. They can only supplement a steady power source. And they waste so much real estate compared to the alternative that even environmentalists don't like them, especially wind farms. I live in the shadow of one of the biggest wind farms in the United States, and it's an obnoxiously terrible use of land with comparatively little energy in return. At least now they're required to cover the cost of their eventual removal and land restoration.

Frankly I'd rather live next to a modern, safe nuclear power plant. China is appropriately proceeding with caution on the development of their next plants based on lessons learned with Fukishima (see recent slashdot posting) but they did not have a knee jerk "OMG nuclear is bad!" reaction. You fix it, you evolve the design, you move on. That's engineering. You don't go hide in a cave. Even Japan is coming round to the fact that ditching their nuclear reactors wholesale would result in an unacceptable level of energy dependence, plus they'd be burning dirty.

Nuclear is the only future in which we can have the energy abundance we have now, and do it clean. We CAN have both, unlike what some people may like to tell you.

If the interrogator has already decided you're guilty, and is going to beat/torture you regardless, I fail to see how it makes any difference even if you really did have no idea the encrypted data was on the machine and have no clue what the password even is, or if you really do only have a single encrypted main volume because you handle, for example, sensitive data from clients and aren't hiding anything illegal at all.

So I guess I really don't see what the difference is. In that case, you're screwed even if you really are innocent. Maybe you really aren't doing or hiding a thing illegal, but how does even that help you in a scenario like you put forth?

The interrogator's imagination of what would happen: "Hit him with the $5 wrench. He'll give up the password."

What actually happens: "Ow! Ow! Alright, here's the password!" (Not said: To the non-hidden volume, which is seeded with things that are embarrassing but legal, explaining why I'd want to encrypt them.) Truecrypt can make an undetectable hidden volume, and the computer will behave totally "normally" if only the visible one is mounted. If anything is written to the hard drive with only the visible volume mounted, it may corrupt the hidden volume data, but it won't reveal it or show a smaller size than the size of the partition.

The critical difference in Scenario 2 is not actually reasonable suspicion. The difference in Scenario 2 is that the authorities now already know the encrypted data belongs to you, because of your friend's testimony. Decrypting it for them will not prove that you're the owner of it, they already know that.

On the other hand, if they just suspected (even with probable cause) that the encrypted partition contained evidence of malfeasance, but didn't already have conclusive proof it's yours, requiring you to decrypt the data tells them something they didn't know; namely, that you have access to that encrypted data. That's exactly where the Fifth applies. They can get a warrant for the data, but they can't force you to admit it's your data.

Yes, the German one looks a lot more impressive, with a real person in it (piloting using the remote control) rather than a mannequin.

I had a customer who thought I was crazy for suggesting that all they really needed was chroot for their particular task. In the face of VMs people don't realize that simplicity often works better.

Xen's biggest obstacle right now is KVM. I am no VM expert, but I've been impressed with how well KVM runs, supporting non-VM-aware versions of Microsoft Windows among other things. It's really fun to put that Windows screen on the face of someone's iPad and watch them freak out when they see it's not a screenshot, somehow their iPad got Windows 7 installed on it!

...and stupid people take them seriously.

If they're stupid or crazy enough to joke about having a bomb in an airport, I'd prefer not to have them on the plane with me even if they don't have one.

No. It's possible that the two packages were split into 2 separate shipments due to truck capacity (as an example). Shipment #1 ships out on the last truck at the end of a business day. Overnight, a snowstorm could hit, causing Shipment #2 on the first truck out the next day to be delayed because of poor road conditions.

While that's certainly possible, if both the labelled and unlabelled package were in each case otherwise the same (sent on the same day, the same weight and size, near the same time, to/from the same location, random order whether labelled or unlabelled ships first), one would expect that, even if such splits or unforeseen events occurred, they would affect the unlabelled packages with delays roughly as often as the labelled ones. Instead, the labelled ones were affected far more frequently, to a degree that's easily into statistical significance.