If you read the comments on his site he mentions:

"It is more likely that the NSA has some fundamental mathematical advance in breaking public-key algorithms than symmetric algorithms."

So he discourages it's use.

He didn't say why you shouldn't use public-key crypto.

At first I thought he might still trust the math, not the CAs. He might be saying that because of possible: man-in-the-middle-attacks with a CA-signed certs.

But in the comments on his site he mentions:

"It is more likely that the NSA has some fundamental mathematical advance in breaking public-key algorithms than symmetric algorithms."

> better to keep your communications inside your own country.

This is not enough. Just look at Germany.

Transit providers were involved with providing copies of traffic to the NSA or GCHQ (basically a port-mirror) in Germany, there is a compound about 30 kilometers away from the DE-CIX Internet Exchange in Germany.

Here is an introductory article:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/seven-telcos-named-as-providing-fiber-optic-cable-access-to-uk-spies/

If you trust DNSSEC and operating systems and browsers supported it DANE could solve that problem.

I think you mean the other way around. You don't add standards to patents, you use patents over parts of standards. Either that or you mean something about adding patents to patent protection pools?

In any case it isn't true that their patents are worthless when they don't put them in.
Look at Microsoft with the FAT patents.
What the current ruling does is encourage companies with patents to NOT disclose them, or to keep them as patent applications as long as possible (and thus they can be kept secret for longer) only to pull the patent out of the proverbial hat after the technology is established.

Again, the only way to fix this is to provide an ability to remove these patents from the patent holders.

And the difference is that the Motorola patents are part of a standard, and part of being included in that standard is that they agree to license under FAIR and REASONABLE terms. The amount they asked for was not fair, nor reasonable even by **Motorola's own admission**.

The 2.25% Motorola was asking for was within the norm charged for other standards-essential patents (0.8% - 3.25%).

While I can see an argument that the industry norm is too high and the courts need to bring it down, it's completely untrue that the amount Motorola was asking for was not fair nor reasonable. That's just BS made up by Apple and Microsoft to try to make Motorola look like the bad guy. The amount Motorola requested was within the industry norm, which absent a government-mandated rate is the best measure we have of "fair and reasonable."

I've always maintained that passing laws to protect our privacy is a losing battle. If you make a law to make someone stop doing something they want to do, all that usually ends up happening is they figure out a way to do the exact same thing while skirting around the law.

Instead, we should pollute their data. Create programs which can run when you're not using your computer, which look like multiple browsers and access websites in a random but quasi-human-like fashion. They'll amass tracking cookies, but the cookies will be tracking bots rather than real people. Decrease their signal to noise ratio so much that it's no longer cost-effective to collect people's private data, at least from monitoring people's browsing habits.

Why should a rental store/Netflix have to pay full price to replace a broken DVD? You paid full price to license the movie, not the plastic disc. If the disc is broken, that doesn't nullify the license you already paid for. You should be able to just send the studio the pieces, pay a nominal fee, and get a replacement. That's what Disney does. If the other studios don't offer a similar service, they should be sued for breach of contract (violating the terms of their license where they give you the right to do certain things with the movie in exchange for your money).

This is why New Zealand is region code 4, but pretty much all the content is region code 1. You've been sent to "we can't enforce software patents on you so you don't get content until after everyone else has paid for it" Coventry. It's also why the same content costs more there: out of spite, by the content production companies.

You are being short-sighted then... because as a natural consequence, companies will not license their IPR for use in standards, and, if that isn't sufficient, they'll not make standards anymore.

The better solution is fixing the damn patent system. A mandated eminent-domain purchase of any patent deemed essential and then allowed for public use, for instance, would be an interesting way out, though fraught with its own problems (who determines the fair price? This is always the problem with any eminent-domain issue). I'd prefer those problems to what we have today, though.

I'd rather attribute it to ignorance and poor record keeping than to billing fraud, but yeah, there's also billing fraud sometimes.

In both cases you're decoding media. Just point it out :)

What the AC says here seems spot on.

The easy solution for this is for companies to stop releasing whatever people are calling 'standards', and instead let people reverse engineer it (and then sue with their patents), or to provide no FRAND terms when licensing the IPR, or not licensing the IPR.

What they're doing here is not going to incent the proper behaviors out of the actors-- it is pretty short-sighted.
It would be better to abolish these patents for some one-time-fee when they become essential to the economy/public benefit in some way.

Pyraf is a Python module that wraps IRAF. It allows one to write scripts and use all of the power of Python and its packages when doing photometry. It is far easier to do complex analysis using Pyraf than using the IRAF cl. I still sometimes use IRAF scripts from years ago, but I have not written a new one in a long time.

IRAF has a very steep (and unforgiving) learning curve, and thus tends to be beyond most non-technical types. And the technical types are migrating to Pyraf.