Well, unless you actually act on the tool and treat those 150085 people as terrorists, in which case 10% of them will actually become terrorists and each will drag at least one other person into it through loyalty and/or family ties. In which case you now have more than 30k terrorists of which only half is believed to possibly be a terrorist.

Not a solution, no, but part of the problem.

According to TFA and the blog post it's server side encryption. Which, of course, does absolutely nothing for security as the NSA will just get the data before it's encrypted.

If you don't want your data read you encrypt it before sending it to someone else.

And forward any interesting business intelligence or gossip to anyone who might want to know.

Of course, the part that the NSA et al seems most interested in is the source and destinations of your mails to map your associations. By sending via your ISP smarthost you're still handing them that info, so if you want to cut them out of the loop you need to vpn the mail relaying outside their grasp and ensure encrypted smtp/tls direct between endpoints.

Your random mail idea does screw with them in a nice way tho as it'd mess up their social graph and probably get yourself classified as an uninteresting spammer after which you can freely inform islamic insurgents how they can enlarge their manhood and obtain large fortunes from Africa by sending a small upfront payment.

But for actual secure comms it's probably better to use i2p or some other darknet. And traffic on that screws with the snoops as well.

You do realize that the definition of taking means that the one whom the thing is taken from no longer has it? If I take your apple you don't have it. If I take your book you no longer have it.

If I pirate your book you still have it. Because I copied it. I neither took it, nor stole it, I copied it. And if you didn't see it, you'd have no idea it had happened, nor could you demonstrate or even experience any loss, while had you been robbed you'd certainly notice it.

See, physical property rights are actually demonstrably real and arguable as part of natural law, while imaginary property rights cannot be demonstrated or argued without their own previous existence.

If it's society's job to ensure that someone can benefit from creative works, why is it handing the creators something which is utterly worthless? The right to control copying of an abundant product is worth nothing without the distribution network which is not owned by creators.

Oh, right, because copyright is intended to benefit the distributors and not the creators. The creators are merely a cheap excuse and as they are not particularly scarce and most cannot independently gain access to end consumers to a significant degree, they hold no bargaining power and thus have the choice of between getting screwed or getting nothing. Perfect. For the distributors.

If 'copyright' had actually been about incentives for producing creative works it would have been constructed to automatically hand creators a significant portions of the end user transaction. A guaranteed significant cut would actually be worth something and would actually let someone focus on creative works full time.

But it's not. And most 'creatives' would have a better chance of striking it rich by working selling fries with that and investing their proceeds in the lottery than by playing a game which is intentionally stacked against them every step of the way.

And by nailing this family they're up to 59! Well, maybe not this one (today at least) as they seem to have gotten to the newspaper faster than they could run them through a secret court. But I'm sure there are other serious googling terrorist plotters when the stats need padding and the budget needs justification.

This. Don't respond to crazies like this, if you're not forcing them to serve you a notice physically or at least via mail you're encouraging their crazy. Don't argue with them, don't cave to them, dont send any reply of any kind. If the guy is coherent enough and tenacious enough to actually engage in a valid serving then it might be worth either caving to or letting a lawyer take a look at it and reply to it, but in no way engage the asshat in an argument that you simply cannot in any way benefit from.

See the commentary at the top of the page from this link:

http://www.righto.com/2012/03/inside-cheap-phone-charger-and-why-you.html

--Paul

There's always the Convergence project (based on the previous Perspectives CMU work).

Basically, instead of CA's you have notary servers that track changes to certificates and that you (your browser) contacts to verify that they and you are seeing the same certificates.

That way, if a MITM attack is ongoing it will, if targetting you specifically, probably show a discrepancy between the certificate presented to you and the one presented to them. If targetting the specific website and MITM'ing all connections to it the only demonstration of a problem might be that the site suddenly appears to have a new certificate, but that would still most likely alert site operators who may be surprised to note a change they didn't do.

Actually, in this case it means quite the opposite; investing your bitcoins in something (a scam in particular) is worse than investing _in_ bitcoins.

If the investors had merely been sitting on their bitcoins they would have gotten the returns he promised (although in dollar value).

Yes, it can be fixed. Sort of. But only if the entity handing out the patents is the same entity paying the licensing costs for the patents. That's the only way there is a continuous incentive for the involved parties to award 'patents' for the right things and only the right things.

It would be possible to remake the system from ground up as a publication/invention incentive system without any exclusive rights that would pay out from budgeted funding to holders of granted 'patents' according to usage. That is, if it is truly needed at all, which I'm not convinced of. At least that way we'd get an actual price tag, instead of the nebulous but huge costs the current system burdens the economy with, it would probably mean much less litigation and it could actually be tuned to maximize incentive efficiency.

The Wikipedia entry on wolf attacks certainly indicates otherwise. It seems they prefer not to attack men who can defend themselves but they'll certainly attack and eat women and children if given the opportunity.

As most users trust their browsers for SSL verification it is of limited use against entities like the NSA. They certainly have their own signed certificates for any site they're interested in intercepting and thus could easily man-in-the-middle any session they're interested in.

Of course, that's most useful in targetted surveillance and much less useful in the dragnets where it'd most likely get noticed reasonably fast.

But against government sponsored entities any hierarchial trust such as SSL is fundamentally flawed as they can simply compell the issuing of false certificates.

What would be the point of having gmail and outlook using signatures or encryption? Anything the user of those can do one can assume the NSA can do on behalf of the user. You need to be doing your encryption on secure endpoints on both ends for there to be a point. Which means no webmail. No proprietary Microsoft/Google/Apple software. None of todays smartphones. Etc.

That's not to say it can't be done, but if you want to move beyond postcards vis-a-vis the NSA you'll have to go open source for OS and software and start using vpn's, darknets and things like i2p for communications.