Hope you enjoyed it! And thanks, even if you disagreed with the premise I'm happy enough to know it was worth a read.

Common misconception - certificate authorities do not have private keys. Your private key never leaves your own computers. That's why the NSA would have to force companies to cough them up (or steal them).

Also, for normal SSL having the private key lets you passively eavesdrop and decrypt. For souped up SSL with forward secrecy it doesn't, it only lets you MITM the connections, which results in the server and client having a different view of things - that's detectable, whereas a leaked SSL key isn't.

Forward secret SSL is new, and not that easy to do. At the end of 2011 Google employees did the necessary upgrades to OpenSSL, but most other sites haven't deployed it (yet). Enabling forward secret SSL is the best and easiest step forward to beat the NSA/GCHQ right now, because if they HAVE obtained your private key, it forces them to start actively intercepting connections which is expensive and detectable.

This is a vast amount of storage. Obviously, the puzzle they've bought a data palace of a storage facility to assemble doesn't require indefinite storage for everyone. They're looking to cache everything they can get and then filter what's interesting. Maybe they have a range of target levels from indefinite storage of everything collected for one group, a year for another group, a month for a third group, a week for another, all the way down to a day or hours for the entire slush.

They don't need it all. They just need to run whatever algorithms they care about so they can toss whatever they think doesn't matter and keep what does.

Oh yeah. This is very bad. One of the cornerstones of the Republic at its founding was the institution of a public mail service. Because transferring documents and contracts with legal force is crucial to performing business.

What we're seeing here is the dismantling of a public service that the entire Main Street economy is reliant upon to perform day-to-day operations. It's so short sighted, one must wonder if these guys running our country want it to fail.

Rumour by a conspiracy theorist? We know for a fact that there is a vast conspiracy at work here, because it was just blown open by Snowden. No "theorist" about it, call them conspiracy pragmatists instead.

Given what we know about SSL, the NSA and the FISA process, I'd say compromise of SSL keys is practically Occam's Razor by this point. The interesting rumours to me are the ones that imply they were somehow NOT able to get that data. Bear in mind, all it takes is one mole, or someone served with a "superwarrant+supergag" so they can't tell their management, and the keys are gone.

Perfect forward secrecy helps a lot here because stealing the keys doesn't let you decrypt the traffic, just do MITMs, and active MITM is a lot more detectable than standard SSL key compromise. But hardly anyone uses it (only Google).

I guess that's why you won't see them with an Android load and a discount. MS has probably contracted with ASUS not to do that.

I'll believe it when the NSA is actually defunded.

The more cynical side of me says this is bullshit politics as usual.

Here's what's really going to happen: the congressman is going to go to the NSA leadership, and say "look, I have hundreds and thousands of constituents who want to shut you down, but if you let me spy on my political opponents, and listen in on their calls, and help me sabotage them, then I can justify and risk continuance of your funding"

The more we petition them, the more they will be able to use shutting them down as a threat to get more political power that is turned against us. I predict it will be a cold day in hell before political leaders in DC give up that kind of power to spy on and blackmail people.

But why should someone who creates something not be able to control how it's used? That seems pretty basic. It wouldn't exist at all if not for them.

See, the problem I have with copyright reformers is that copyright is a quite well thought out piece of law (relative to most, anyway). It gives people who create things an optional tool that they don't have to use. It allows everything from Hollywood movies to open source software. If someone felt their work was best given away for free, they could certainly do that, or they could use a creative commons style license and many people do.

Now the situation we have is that a whole generation of people doesn't have any respect for other peoples work. They feel they deserve free movies, music and software because "zomg industry!!!" (reality check - the content industries are quite small relative to others, like the tech or energy industries). They feel that people who create things should have fewer options than today, less freedom to decide how their work is used, because gosh isn't it annoying and inconvenient when you want something and can't afford it?

Much though I dislike the way the US government puts political pressure on other countries, Finland does not, last time I checked, have an equivalent to Hollywood. Probably its people would benefit if the government just shrugged and said, well, we don't create much relative to other people so why bother enforcing their copyrights? Might as well take what we can for free! Party time!!

The problem is if everyone does that, you kill the goose that laid the golden egg. The idea that nobody who creates movies or writes software cares about money is naive and childish. People do create less when they are unable to earn an income doing so.

The issue discussed at the Slate story, and by extension the problem with _Save the Cat,_ is that in an attempt to replicate blockbusters like _Star Wars_ an extremely rigid page-by-page screenwriting forumla has emerged which sucks any creativity out of the process. As a result, deep characterization has been eschewed for flimsy plot elements that are shoehorned in to fit formulaic concerns, rather than crafting organic work that fits character and situation. Which doesn't negate your lament about storytelling by committee as far too common in commercial Hollywood filmmaking. However the work is diluted, whether by committee or by adhering to rigid formula, we're seeing the same damn story repeated again and again with nothing more than the flattest of cardboard cutouts for characters and absurd situations papered over by fast pacing, loud noises and flashy explosions.

I've read Campbell, though not the poem Parzival. Campbell has plenty of dissenters in the litcrit scene as one who's work is overly reductionist. But that's a side issue to the point of my top comment.

The problem with Hollywood films right now can be summed up by they're killing the cat in an attempt to save it. What do I mean?

There's a popular screenwriting book called Save The Cat - The Last Screenwriting Book You'll Ever Need that sets a page by page forumla for events within a typical movie. Things like, an opening image, setting the theme, introducing the hero, start of a B plot at the beginning of Act II, cross points for A and B plots, the great False Defeat, leading up to a Crisis of Self Confidence, and then the Big Payoff.

Blah blah blah blah.

Slate has a good article on how this book as turned movies into showdown of formulaic familiarity.

It's not like the forumla is bad, per se. But if every film had been made this way we'd never have classics like Bridge Over The River Kwai, Laurence of Arabia, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, yada yada yada. Because the formula is limited. At its heart, it harkens back to Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces thesis (which every /. nerd into Star Wars should have heard about). A fine way to tell the Great Hero story, but terrible for deep character studies. And that's what's missing in Hollywood film and why good television like The Sopranos, The Wire, Game of Thrones and Mad Men have become so popular (and let's not forget the first few seasons of Battlestar Galactica, which were fantastic).

In fact, George R. R. Martin's entire Song of Ice and Fire series eschews the whole Great Hero narrative and offers flawed characters with conflicting motivations told from multiple points of view, and - sorry to bring this word in on a tech site but... - that's why it's art. Which is also why Transformers isn't.

A lot of people have been discussing issues with the blockbuster cycle and financing, and that's all part of it too. But there is a serious dearth of experimental writing involved too. The whole Hollywood system is screwed up. But let's at least Thank God for HBO and other cable network financing of long form multi-episodic storytelling.

By "encrypted" they almost certainly mean, "credit card data is encrypted with a key that may or may not have been compromised as well" and "passwords were hashed". Password hashing doesn't achieve very much these days unless your password is unusually strong.

Can't avoid it in parts of AUS. For example, I'm in Perth, WA at the moment and there have been several shark attacks over the last few years that have resulted in killings. But somedays there are crazy waves here and just people come regardless of the history. On average, it's not that dangerous. Still.

I'm no surfer dude. I'll stick to the patrolled beaches.

Contrary to what you say, you submit the compiled pdf file to peer review, not the tex.

I've been there. But I'm not submitting manuscripts for peer review, and no publisher will take a pdf. Nobody outside of a few small academic disciplines accepts material generated by LaTeX. Period.