Not everything can be reduced to numbers, factored and condensed down to a single answer or list of probabilites. I'm a methematician and I'm here to tell you that a lot of what is presented as "mathematical" modelling in the modern world is little short of numerology and data massage.

Eventually, if you go deeply enough into these kinds of models, you will forget that there is an actual game of basketball, being played by real human players. The instant that happens, you've become a numerologist and cargo-cult scientist. My opinion is that this is occuring in an increasingly large number of "clever geeks" now equipped with powerful computers and sophormic mathematics.

If your browser is presented with a genuine signed Google.com certificate, issued by Honest Achmed's Trusty Certificates of Tehran Iran, then why shouldn't your browser just trust this certificate from a trusted CA?

Because if you don't accept, your browser will emit a shrill piercing wail, loudly declaiming your obscene and hertical attempts to use a secure connection which has not been certified. A yellow clad official -- likely of Arstotzkan origin -- will appear to lend an air of official disapproval to the disgraceful suggestion that you should prefer encryption, any encryption, over plain text without authentication.

So, you must Accept Our Glorious CA Validated HTTPS Protocols or else revert to wide open plain text. Cause no trouble.

P.S.

I personally believe that Firefox's self signed policies were the result of NSA lobbying/influence at Mozilla. The secure web was set back a decade by this decision, and the fallout has render the entire CA and hence https infrastructure all but useless.

You might think it's a good idea to kick everyone who comes up with a terrible idea out of society, but it really isn't. In fact, the type of person willing to consider such radical -- albeit ridiculous-- ideas is in fact the ideal candidate for an associate editor of an academic journal.

Feynman was a bit of a maverick; in somes ways a cultivated one. And at times -- Manhatten and the Challenger Inquiry -- a very useful one.

But as a scientists Feynman was anything but a Maverick. His work was entirely mainstream, even his most original and innovative work, as theoretical physics was at the time in a radical phase. Personally Feynman may have been somewhat goofy. Professional he was very creative. But he was not a Maverick who ever seriously went against mainstream opinon; even his objections to String Theory were muted.

The closest scientists who would qualify as Mavericks were the Quantum pioneers of the 1920s, Einstein with relativity, and possibly Micheal Faraday. You could also go back to Newton and Gelileo, but remember, for every one of these there are fifty Velikovsky's.

Insecure systems are merely a corollary to that 1948 proof, and your schoolboy suggestions on how to make systems "secure" just shows you don't understand the problem. Everyone who understands the problem accepts the ultimate futility that underlies attempts to solve it.

What is this, a rerun of the "security is encryption+verification" No-True Scotsman fallacy that lead to the Firefox self-signed certs debacle.

An abstract mathematical proof means we cannot make a secure product? And somehow the security community has bought into this? I worry sometimes that the security community is prone to ridiculously levels of dogmatism and groupthink befitting any serious hacking group.

You can make a secure product. Security does not mean 100% proof perfect security. Security means that it is difficult, very difficult, to break into or even break the product.

Right now, in a similar way to unencrypted connections, we have a situation where most programs are insecure, and wide open to exploits and worse. And right now, just as with self-signed certs, we have a security community dogma that regards trying to improve things as a step backwards. This is asinine.

Stop making excuses for bad software, and bad systems designs. We can build a better internet, which is more secure from the ground up. Our efforts will not be futile -- far from it. A better internet for all is waiting to be created out there.

There is no honour amongst hackers any more. There is no real community. There is precious little skill.

This quote should concern everyone. We have now had an entire generation of programmers raised on walled garden apps, cookie-cutter scripting libraries, and above all a wave of cheap VC funding and hardware. How many people are left out there that can build the likes of Bittorrent, Bitcoin, a language like C, a game like Elite, or even a site like Slashdot? How many people, young people, are there who can write an OS kernel, design a basic circuit, and at a more pertinently serious level, reliably write software to implement mathematical encryption algorithms.

Reading this I'm inclined to believe that recent meme post about how the programming/silicon valley community has been taken over by "brogrammers", "hipsters" and "neckbeads", which to my mind are simply constitute cultural re-skinnings of the infamous Visual Basic programmers of old.

I worry that the unglamorous, mostly uncompensated, and largely intellectually driven practice of pure software programming and creation has been left behind in recent years. I personally have noticed little progression and indeed in many areas a general regression in the quality and reliability of software since approximately 2006/7.

While I would attribute this to my general "civilization is in decline" zeitgeist worries, my frustrations with software, UIs, and websites in particular has undoubtedly increased manifestly in the last 2-3 years or so. Maybe I'm just getting old -- or maybe programmers really are getting worse.

UX Webdesign hipster-trons have laid waste to yet another well known IP. When will it end? When the internet implodes into a black hole of dyslex-o-vision whitespace sites, and buzzfeed headlines, NSA surveillance crawlers. The few of us left will have to take refuge on resurrected BBS boards.

Bitcoin is not subject to, artificially limited by, nor of value due to copyright. You are not stealing bitcoin, you are stealing the value that bitcoin represents. That value is not some abstract hypothetical potential profit loss but a fairly easy (within a reasonable margin for exchange variation) to quantify amount of spending power in any currency in the world.

If I steal your credit card number (and bitcoin is ultimately nothing more than a secret number that allows you to unlock a persons money and spend it) and then buy something with it I've stolen pretty much the same thing. A number that allows me buy goods using a system that operates entirely on streams of bits.

If I hack your bank account and transfer the money out, that money also is a stream of bits. The same of your paypal account.

These things are unique and set up in such a way that the value, just like an individual tangible CD, can only be possessed by one person.

Software does not actually belong to the guy who holds a copyright in the case of copyright violation the software actually belongs to the guy sharing it and violating the copyright. You can steal a copyright, you can't steal the software. If you copy the software, you both now have copies and nothing is lost from the source. Software that is shared becomes no less functional no matter how much it is shared, software can be possessed by every person and they will all have the same thing with the same intrinsic value.

Whut up, yo? Mostly moved to Twitter... You have an account... why don't I see you there much?

3/14 is Steak and Blowjob day.

Bitcoin is not software but of course there is theft. But that has nothing to do with copyright infringement being theft. If I steal your office cd it's theft. That has absolutely no bearing on the fact that torrenting your copy of office is NOT theft.

And you'd pay the same amount less in either CC or cash without it. Since the average person never or nearly never is able to use the chargeback mechanism on a CC and most who do are lying and claiming unauthorized use (since you do NOT qualify for a Chargeback if you are unhappy with a purchase) we are almost universally worse off for it existing.

No, you are focusing on irrelevant mechanics. What you stole is the VALUE. This is no different than if you stole my paypal balance and there are a number of other laws which apply beyond simple theft because of the unauthorized use of my computer.

Just because a black market enables the trade of things which should be illegal doesn't mean it doesn't enable the trade of things which should not be.

There could be nothing like Wikileaks without a black market.

all these software engineers that work for nsa/gov , do they have any fucking morals? do they really believe they are securing the world from the evil guys? are they kept at gunpoint? are they just plain stupid?

Imagine a fraternity house filled with hundreds of "bro-grammers" looking to impress their peers and outsiders, alongside more socially inept nerds with a superiority complex and a grudge against society for its refusal to pay homage to their obviously superior intellects. The herd is managed by a cadre of MBA/careerist sociopaths with a lust for profit, exploitation and power. The entire operation has been given essentially unlimited budgets, unprecedented resources, and unrestricted access to private industry and the backbone of the net, and finally has been mandated to gather all it can, on whoever it can, by whatever means necessary by an ascendancy whose interests are explicitly opposed to the general public good.

Things have worked out about as well as you'd imagine. The fraternity house has engaged in naked, shameless and destructive criminal behaviour; in effect the NSA has become the largest hacker/cyber-crime organization on the globe. The Rule of Law now has no meaning on the network, or for computers, and society itself has been pushed into a literal sci-fi dystopia of surveillance and state security excess.

And were it not for one single fraternity member who found the courage to turn back and listen to his conscience, we would be spiraling into an even darker scenario at this very moment. Whether we eventually meet this fate is still uncertain.

The NSA is an out of control cyber-criminal gang. It is a matter of time before insiders at the NSA make contact with the criminals who run the banking industry, and at that point western society will probably be ripped apart in an orgy of computer-aided looting, sabotage, fraud, and political suppression. This is what happens when you let the hyenas run the zoo.