Balloons don't waste helium, that's largely a misunderstanding. Balloon helium is recycled and impure and not good for anything but filling balloons.

Writing your password on a post-it note is much, much safer than most other things. At least that way you can pick a properly complicated password. If somebody is in your room and looking at the note, you have bigger problems anyway most of the time.

And as for end-point security, you should be worrying far more about whether your decryption software or OS is spying on you after you decrypt.

Now, maybe. In the past, not.

That's how the legend goes, but as far as I've been able to tell that is not actually true.

It wasn't even the NSA that came up with differential cryptanalysis in the first place, it was IBM, and NSA made them keep it quiet.

We know pretty much what happened then, because it was mostly IBM doing it and keeping it secret, not the NSA. And your theory makes no sense at all, and no evidence of anything remotely similar being even possible has been found in the decades of research that has gone into DES since.

Gonna drink space beer at the space bar

No, the guy who made the petition was way out of line for calling Linux "an approved partner of the NSA", and way out of his depth because he had no idea what the hell he was talking about.

Linus was just responding to an asshat, and went pretty easy on him.

There was no negotiation going on. There was a single obnoxious guy calling Linux "an approved partner of the NSA" and complaining about something he knew nothing about. He deserved what he got. In fact, Linus went pretty easy on him.

I thought the current fashion among self-important people was to constantly talk about how little they care about iPhones.

Doesn't matter. AES is not going to fall to a few ASIC chips in the first place. Doesn't matter how many the NSA builds, and they wouldn't waste their money on that in the first place.

h.264 is massively patented, and it is huge success. JPEG2000 was a failure because it wasn't actually good enough to be worth dealing with the patents for, unlike h.264.

Rafael Vinoly, apparently.

The Arctic is floating, so a melt will not affect sea levels. Greenland is not, though, so it does have an effect. Same goes for the Antarctic, and much more so because it is huge.

No, I mean that all Tor exit nodes can spy on you. And anybody can run an exit node, not just the NSA. Private companies can do so too and collect data on you.