For all values of ___, never pay for an encrypted ___ service. Whether it's mass storage, email, or whatever. All service providers who offer this kind of stuff, are snake oil sellers. What happened to Lavabit this year wasn't news; we already knew about CALEA and have known for twenty years.

Twenty years in the tech world is a long time and ought to have conditioned your thinking by now. Even well-meaning, loyal professional allies can be subverted. The popular example case is government pointing guns (a.k.a. "court orders") at peoples' heads, saying to share the secret and keep it a secret that it's being shared. But really, once you even allow for that to be a possibility, all sorts of other things are possible. Replace the gun with a software bug exploit, replace the government with some random script kiddie with pretty much any agenda that you can think of. Anything goes.

Crypto is something that is performed by your machine, always done by software that you can understand (i.e. not proprietary). You never think about additional crypto that somebody else may or may not be doing, or by software not under your control. That's why you use a storage service that doesn't advertise crypto, you use a plain IMAP provider (if you some weird reason you're not handling that yourself), etc. Any service that tries to lure you with "security" is probably lying, unless by "security" they mean certain areas that intersect with reliability, such as DoS resistance.

Buy you're wrong. The answer is 1 penny plus 1 cup. That's why you always need to be explicit with units, to avoid making the mistake of thinking it's merely just one penny.

One of the silly/weird/sad things I have noticed in the last couple years, are long/lat coords being referred to as "GPS coordinates." Yet the same people who say that, don't say "ruler feet" or "thermometer degrees" or "Amazon dollars" etc.

What could go wrong with e3-1240 v3 Xeons costing only $276? Normal people might HAVE them! *shudder*

..government investigate press!

nothing is a done deal until they revamp the entire house/senate system.

Who is "they?"

I don't know why people pick that line, for those two characters. I always thought "Perhaps you think you're being treated unfairly?" was waaaaay better. Long before Vader demanded the wookie and the princess, he made it very clear to Lando who had the real power, and he forced Lando to acknowledge it! It was so cold, so perfect, so tyrannical. It was awesome.

Before Vader's "alter" line, it was already made crystal clear that no "deal" truly existed at all. There was nothing to "alter."

I thought it was us techies, who keep promising that tech advances will kill jobs.

(Keeping in mind that killing jobs is a desirable; achieving a near-100% unemployment rate is part of how resources (labor, in this case) could cease to be scarce, thereby overturning all previous economic theory (e.g. Adam Smith and Karl Marx become irrelevant), and allowing people to live like the characters on ST:TNG. Sure, it's a fantasy ideal, but fantasy ideals are what you always aim at, right? It's not like Adam Smith and Karl Marx don't also target fantasy ideals.)

It sounds like it's the luddites who have (metaphorically) thrown a wrench into the plan, showing that no matter how well we automate, some asshole somewhere will find a way to keep people wasting their brief limited lifetimes on toil rather than hedonism.

Blaming voters is taking responsibility. It's all the alternatives to voter-blaming, which look like desperate efforts to shift responsibility away from the One And Only group who actually has the power.

They must be doing lots of good, because we keep voting for them. I say: Republicrats in 2014! Lets make it Yet Another landslide! Who is with me on this? Oh, that's right: nearly every single voter. Any dissent? (Crickets.)

What an idiot.

Yes, BUT...

You're listening to a priest, whose entire authority and stature is based upon knowledge of paranormal things, mystic phenomena that no person has ever seen or measured, but that he happens to know about, thanks to his special lore or insight. IF you've already accepted that (it's a big "if" but actually very common!), then there's nothing unreasonable about the gods or a god choosing to inflict damage upon ovaries upon women who drive, but choosing to abstain from harming women who sit at home.

That is why his statement, as absurd as it is, is totally valid within the FUCKED UP CONTEXT (that people listen to that guy about anything at all).

Why wouldn't Allah mess with some women's organs and not others? Do you know something special about Allah's motives and thoughts and capabilities that I don't? WHO ARE YOU to tell the Flying Spaghetti Monster what kinds of sauces are appropriate for Him to cover Himself in? Are you FSM's controller? It is blaspemous arrogance for you to say His priests are incorrect, as foolish at their statements may seem to you, puny human!

There's nothing crazier about believing this stuff, than believing that Xenu threw aliens into volcanos, or that Jehova parted a Red sea, or that Cthulhu will rise from the depths when the stars are right. Maybe some of it is true and some false (and I can't begin to prove anything about any of them) (and no, actually none of it is true) but from a "what an idiot" perspective they all have exactly equal what-an-idiot-ness. If we assume the statement "1==3" is true, then don't start trying to logically convince me the statement "4==2" is stupid. It's not any stupider than where we started from.

then why can't the USPS open letters, scan them, then reseal and deliver them?

When a person uses USPS, they think they're using a system intended for The People and their communications needs. It's a system created as a public service by an act of .. uh, by the ratification of the Constitution. :-)

When a person uses gmail, they think they're using a commercial system primarily intended to make Google money at the users' expense. And since they don't pay money directly for it, they know the expense is going to involve all the myriad ways a person can be treated as a product rather than as a customer.

No gmail user believes that gmail's primary purpose is to serve the user, or that they have privacy. When gmail appeared, the first thing everyone thought was, "Oh, this weird idea, exists to increase Google's ad revenue."

FWIW, if the USPS had actually been initially established by an advertising company, for the purpose of opening and reading everyone's mail, and if all USPS' users knew that was happening, then it would be ok for them to do that. (Well, sort of ok. I would definitely want the prohibitions against direct competition removed...) Call it "SpyPost" and actually brag about how you read people's snailmails and insert related ads into them, and I really don't think there would be a problem. Just be up-front about it.

It's the whole up-frontness and lack of sneakiness and informed consent that makes it not be wiretapping. Unless... shit. Gmail's been around for a few years now. Might there be new kids who grew up, not realizing what it was or why it started? Could there actually exist some strange subset of population, who thinks gmail is normal email, rather than the bizarre exception to email that all of Slashdot knows it is? If there's a problem here, it's all going to come down to whether or not the signup pages help to make this obvious to laymen.

When will you guys get it through your heads that 'distributed everything' doesn't work. Central authorities are needed to mediate and ensure everyone is on the same page.

Those central authorities are welcome to join in, and become highly valued nodes in the WoT.

Central authorities also come with the risk that they can be compromised, but its far easier to deal with one compromised CA than several billion.

Aha, now I get it... could it really be this simple? Are X.509 advocates merely bad at math? The terms in your risk assessment formula are wrong.

If a signer has a probability p of being accurate/trustworthy, then the chance of its attestation being correct, is p. That's how X.509 certs work and of course you understand that very well. Cool. With PGP, if signer1's probability of being accurate is p1, and signer2's probability of being accurate is p2, then the chances their joint attestation of an identity is accurate, is 1-((1-p1)*(1-p2)). Dude, that's a number which is greater than either p1 or p2.

For example, say you think it's 90% likely that Verisign is telling you the truth about a key belonging to a certain website. They're the one and only signer for some website (because one signature is all this shitty tech can handle), so you think it's about 90% likely you're talking to that site, and 10% likely you're talking to the NSA. If that's your estimate of Verisign's reliability/trustworthiness, then 90% is the best you can do with that tech.

Now let's say we upgrade from that garbage to 1991 technology: the PGP WoT. Suppose Verisign and CNNIC have both signed something, and you think Verisign is 90% reliable and CNNIC is 60% reliable. (Those sneaky Chinese bastards!)

You're 1-( (1-0.9)*(1-0.6) ) = 0.96 , that is, 96% confident that you're talking to the website you wanted to, and 4% worried that you're talking to someone who is involved in a join US-China conspiracy (which, now that you think of it, is less than 4% likely to really occur). You have just wiped the floor with X.509's security performance.

Suppose I signed it too. You don't know me. While it seems absurd at first that I'm less trustworthy than the Chinese government (they're known badguys; I'm merely some internet asshole) at least you know something of their loyalties or lack thereof, and very little of my competence and motivations. It's reasonable to assume I am probably more likely to conspire with your adversaries than they are. Some guy with US government might be holding a gun to my head, right now! So you decide to only trust me 1%. Ok. Guess what? You can work with that!

Now my super-weak signature is on there. You trust the identity 1-( (1-0.9)*(1-0.6)*(1-0.01) ) = 96.04%. My super-weak nearly-completely-untrusted attestation made it stronger.

This is why were totally wrong when you said one compromised CA is easier to deal with than a billion. A billion compromised CAs are easier to deal with than one. Distributed authentication is more fault-tolerant, and we're now in a situation where the mainstream finally "gets it" that the faults really do occur, rather than it simply being a tinfoil hat thing that cypherpunk SciFi authors pretend to worry about. X.509 is based on the idea that Verisign is telling you the truth 100% of the time, and cannot model the idea that you think they sometimes fail. PGP, on the other hand, is based on reality: that grey world where sometimes things work and sometimes they don't, where you sort of trust some people some of the time, etc. You know, that world that you actually live in.

Encryption without authentication is useless.

Is plaintext useless? We're having an unauthenticated discussion here on Slashdot right now.

Encryption without authentication is useful. It's at least as useful as plaintext (that's the lower bound, the worst possible case), except that on top of that, it has the advantage of preventing passive risk-free snooping.

That's why unauthenticated encryption should not display any warnings that you wouldn't also display to plaintext users. Any such warnings can only serve to mislead the user into thinking plaintext (where they don't see as many warnings) is safer. And plaintext isn't safer; plaintext is worse.

Nobody's saying don't authenticate. They're saying that failure to authentication still isn't as bad as the default behavior, which for some reason, doesn't show warnings every time someone loads an unencrypted page. If you can explain why plaintext users shouldn't get scary warnings, then your same explanation will work for why unauthenticated encryption shouldn't result in warnings.

Now think it through. If Verisign is owned by the NSA, and a Russian CA is owned by FSB, and a Chinese CA is owned by that government, and all three of these compromised CAs agree on a cert, what does it mean?

It means the cert is probably accurate, or about as accurate as you can possibly get, without going over to the server certing it yourself. If those three parties are conspiring to disrupt your Amazon order, then I'm afraid you're not going to get your package, no matter what crypto you use. :-)