Yeah this - viral loading is how you judge whether a patient is sick or not or responding to treatment. The depletion of the immune system only happens once you develop AIDS, rather then just HIV infection. And we've been decent at preventing AIDS for a while, but the headline news is really "we can clear an HIV (well, SIV) infection maybe".

I mean it's really hard for me to imagine what a world where "HIV is a couple of sucky years of intensive medication" is like. I grew up in Australia where we had the grim reaper bowling commericals about HIV awareness in the 90s.

Nature papers are really short compared to others. Pretty much all the actual content gets put in supplements.

And the thing to remember about all storage is that it will fail. If you have a single disk in a machine, and that machine is not backed up properly, then you will lose that data in the next 5 years.

It won't make a difference. It's reading your fingerprints, and your fingerprints aren't that clear to start with so it can't be too picky about correspondence. You're talking about microscopic differences on the matter but your fingerprints are huge structures relatively speaking and also the only reliably unique structure to look at there.

I mean I guess it defeats casual snooping, but so does my Android phone's pattern lock.

My problem is present public knowledge - from people claiming to have seen the evidence - is incredibly sketchy. Its worded weirdly and omits important details. I mean why are we getting stuff about a memo and standards selection process if the evidence is supposed to be "the NSA definitely backdoored Duel EC DRBG". Presumably this means there's text, written on one of these documents somewhere, which describes this as being exactly what they did. Why can this not be published?

The Guardian was very confident it had dynamite when all it had were powerpoint slides - they've walked back the articles on their website a lot since the initial publication.

Again: water doesn't behave the same in zero-g.

A fan will blow air from one point to the other, it will pull some water through. But it's just going to blow it into another compartment where it will have the same behavior - coating the walls as much as the plants and then just staying there. It won't run down or run off anything on its own, so you're heading towards gale-force strength winds to try and keep it all moving.

ZFS in the Linux Kernel now!

The problem I have with this article is that it also doesn't say what "appears to confirm" actually means.

The two quotes would apply as much to the agency pushing a standard through a difficults standards body as it would to hiding a weakness in a standard while doing the same.

Where do these quotes appear? Where is the surrounding context? If you can say the NSA weakened an encryption standard then why can't you give more context since that's almost certainly not a problem people are going to imminently die over.

Color me intensely skeptical when the NYT has everything to gain from being sensational.

"Trust" has not been lost, but paranoia seems to be alive and well. Unless you can actually illustrate a possible attack (in the case of ECC the issue was that the PRNG could be hosting a public key as one of its magic numbers which would allow it to be predicted) then your just jumping at ... something less then a shadow.

There seem to be an awful lot of people with no cryptography expertise making grandiose statements, some probably running off to implement their own crypto which will be "NSA free" and so hilariously broken that if you had to pick a social-engineering attack to catch terrorists then this would be a good one.

At the time the performance of DES was a big problem. Processors weren't nearly as fast, the habit of having dedicated coprocessors on portable devices/network cards hadn't yet emerged. There were a lot of good reasons to get the key-size down to something which would actually be usable at the time.

Its still a concern today - AES was selected because it was easier to implement in hardware, amongst other benefits.

Aeroponics has containment issues. If you're misting water constantly, it's going to go everywhere. In fact it's probably not going to behave quite right either since the water doesn't fall - droplets can aggregate and just float around forever. So you're then looking at a complex vacuum system to keep the water moving through properly.

Much easier just to absorb it into something near the plant roots.

Largely coz they don't exist. The closest is mycoprotein for synethic meat products, and its still a labor intensive process. Plants, if they grow, pretty much handle it themselves.

You realize every country in the world uses its embassies as the central headquarters for their intelligence apparatus in that country. So you know that row of embassies in Washington? Every single one of them does the exact same things or tries to. They're just not as good at it.

Functionally identical. I highly doubt that the NSA has compromised GCC. They will have an enormous database of version numbers and working exploits for different systems though, and get are presently getting a good chuckle from all the all loudest people implementing their new "secure" platforms and most probably writing their own buggy and exploitable cryptocode.

If I wanted to fight terrorism, then convincing all the terrorists not to trust US government standards for top secret information sounds like a pretty good bit of social engineering to avoid arming my enemies.

I use contact-less payment all the time in Australia these days. But I don't wear my credit cards on my risk, since my hand goes near a lot of contact-less scanners just as a part of interacting with the checkout. If I'm getting on a bus, it could gets even nearer routinely. A watch would be on my hand. Which puts it in the accidental scan zone. Unless I have to push a button to validate - which, with a phone, I can still do one handed. With a watch I have to use two hands.