Yes, it was small. But in terms of secure comm, I'd bet that his (PZ's) last release before they busted him, PGP-2.6.2, is probably more secure than any release he has made since.

But really, I think as far as the American Public is concerned, the horse is out of the burning barn now and the NSA as we know it, is likely not to exist 2 years from now.

Just how long do you think RSA will last when its known they sold out? They are supposedly in the business of selling security, and they just sold the family jewels for a measly 10 Mil? If the lawsuits don't finish them, the lack of future business will because no one will renew a contract or license with a company that betrayed the public trust.

And just how long will it be till Boeing files for both civil and punitive damages over the statement Brazil made yesterday when the suddenly gave a 4.5 Billion dollar contract for more modern fighter jets that Boeing was, and so was SAAB, convinced they had locked up 4 days ago.

There are legal teams working for Boeing, eager to prove their worth, plotting the lawsuit for truly staggering amounts of money as I sit here typing this. Amounts of money that will only be printable by the fed because this government could not pay it in 20 years.

The overall effect on our ability to do business internationally will amount to Trillions of dollars of losses in the next few years. The business people will settle for nothing less than being "made whole", and their definition of "whole" is being able to do business without a whole damned battalion of these 3 letter agencies snooping into how much tp they use in the company cafeteria. Or turning on the cameras and mics in laptops & cell phones so they can watch and listen to stuff that is absolutely none of their damned business.

I love my country, but I do not love, nor do I trust my government, they have NOT been by the people, for the people in 65 of my damned near 80 years. Ben Franklin had a clue but probably went to his grave without knowing just how correct he was. Ike tried to warn us too.

This is, for the coder in this situation, also damned good advice. GTFO soonest if you don't want to be chained to the oars in a sinking ship.

+1000 to all of the above.

Wikipedia is editable by anyone. And no one has come through dd-wrt here that I didn't give them the password to do so. No one. I used to watch the logs while the NK and CN folks hammered on it for hours at a time, but that got boring although I did occasionally cost someone their net account if they were being a big enough pest to DDOS me. Those sorts of attacks have actually decreased, I think they've some sort of a fingerprinting thing now that tells them if its a vulnerable target, so they don't waste a lot of time doing dictionary attacks like they did 5 years ago. The proof is in the results.

I once bought a Siemans router back in my greenhorn days, lasted about 15 minutes before somebody bricked it. I made circuit city eat that one. I had an old slow wintel box with 2 net cards in it that I ran the X86 version of dd-wrt on for 4 or 5 years, stripped, headless, booted from a CF card switched read only. It Just Worked(TM). And this much lower power consumption Buffalo NetFinity with the real dd-wrt reflashed into it has now been standing guard for about 2 years.

So all I can say is, let the results be the proof you need.

Cheers, Gene

Sorry, I don't buy this for more than 10 milliseconds. D-Link customer in Mumbai has an attitude that the customer is a dummy, and when he calls in to get some help with a real problem, he either gets the brushoff, or they ask for the seriel number and suddenly discover the device I bought new from Wally's (I'm out in the puckerbrush, Wally's is as hi-tech as can be driven to locally) a week ago was sold, then returned as defective over a year ago by another dealer , and has been marked as having been destroyed in their records. So I asked for an email confirming it, took the router and the email back to Wally's, got a 100% refund and mail ordered a Buffalo Netfinity that I had to reflash with a real dd-wrt image since their branding covered a menu item I had to have access to.

The next D-Link product that crosses my threshold will be after I hear reliable reports that hell has frozen over a year ago and pigs are using it for an airport runway. IMO its dd-wrt all the way down.

I don 't think its a bit over-broad. I've had a scope probe in one hand since about 1950, and while you guys with the logic analysers will eventually find the problem IF you know what the signatures are telling you, some old fart like me with a scope probe in one or both hands, will find the problem and have it fixed while you are still consulting the schematic and hooking up your 16 channel logic analyser.

If you do not understand ALL the physics behind how all this stuff works, you are just a wannabe. Out in the real world, we are checking electrolytic caps for ESR first, then cracked "cold" solder joints or corroded IC pins. When you think you are good enough, go sit for a C.E.T. test, pass it with a 99% correct score, and then spend the next 40 years convincing the folks who write the checks that you can indeed walk on water. BTDT, still doing it occasionally at 79.

I have to clue what that test writer is smoking, but its got to be great stuff. But the people who actually approved this shit have got to be full blown crackheads. There simply is no other explanation that can begin to explain this level of abject stupidity.

Here I am, now 79 years old. I went through the so-called educational system back in the 1940's, and was once tested by the Iowa test as having an IQ roughly equ to 147 on the S/B scale. I am also the only one scoring over 40 on the 100 question AFQT I took in the middle of the Korean war, scored a 98 on that, next best was 39 in a group of 136 boys that day.

I have made my livelyhood for about 60 years now in electronics, making stuff work again when it quits, although I have now been retired from the Chief Engineers chair at the local CBS affiliate, a position I held since 1984, for a bit over 10 years, but just yesterday I had to go put our local daytime AM broadcaster back on the air.

But I don't blame my 8th grade education, having quit school and going to work fixing televisions in 1949, on my poor math education. I did get decent scores on the math they taught, but there was little to almost zip underlying theory, and I did not actually learn a usable amount of algebra, and am still poor at calculus to this day. My math teacher, the best one ever, was when in the early 70's, I bought a TI SR-51 calculator. Strictly enforcing the algebraic rules, it taught me more useful math of the stuff I needed every day, in a month than I learned in 8 years of schooling. When it gave you the answer, if it wasn't correct, it was off by so far that you _knew_ you had screwed up stating the problem to it.

I never did grok the RPN calculator craze, and while I had one for several years, I considered it a crutch for those who didn't ever understand the rules of math in the first place. It did NOT help me to solve the problems I encountered in every day repair, and occasionally redesign work, some of which was in digital stuff, done by high priced design people that never were in the same room with a book of recommended practices. Or mechanical, designed by people whose hands don't fit the tools. Mine has always fit the tools well.

I realize I am just one voice in the wilderness, asking when in the hell are the parents going to demand that their children actually get a good, 100% usable education from the socialist indoctrination centers our schools have become in the last 100 years?

But the reality is that there is so damned much federal money in the schools and they demand that the school boards do it their way if they want the money for that new school to replace the one the feds built in 1927. Said another way, if you want your kids to get a decent education, it will involve higher taxes to do it because you are not going to get that good education when there is a single penny of federal money in it.

The choice really is that when its boiled down to its essence.

This isn't it, not by a hell of a long row of apple trees. I was tempted to run for the local school board, but several conversations with other retired members of several boards, I learned they are so ham-strung by the need for federal money just to heat the buildings that most, still in good enough health & sound minds, simply gave it up and never ran for such a thankless job again. Their thoughts, like mine, are just that lonely voice crying out in the wilderness of mediocrity we have today, as exemplified by this example test's idiocy.

So, no cheers from Almost Retired this time folks. But it really is you and I, who will have to "foot the bill" who will have to fix it. And be aware, the feds will use every hammer they have to flatten you when you do.

Nor do I, and I've been watching the slow intersection of the excrement with the air moving device for 79 years now. You see a splatter on the walls occasionally, but the build up is so slow its not noticed.

I am proud of my country and what we have done, I have even had a walk on part in it now & then, but I'm scared shitless of my government and have been since the mid '60's.

Here is another Brother fan. I was always an Epson person until my C82 finally burned up its head. Then out on a job I needed a printer so bought a C89, 5 or 6 color. One nozzle plugged before I even loaded it in the truck to come home 6 or 7 weeks later. I had been doing wedding prints on the C82, but the C89 flat could not be tuned to do color anywhere near as well as the C82 did. Bought an Epson NX515 MFC, which allowed me to toss an old epson scanner that had always had a vertical line artifact. Then I shut amanda down, which was exersizeing it nightly as I was switching distro's so I was running the same thing on 3 of the 4 machines here. Took 6 weeks or so to get everything working so I could restart amanda. First amanda report might have had 50 dots of ink on the paper. So I was reduced to using it as a scanner, but even that is problematic because the glass is tilted and you cannot, short of gluing it to the glass, lay a sheet to scan on it and have it straight when you scan. As a scanner its quite decent, so its still hooked up & turned off.

In the meantime, the xerox 1650ro I had been using on an old computer started shattering its film ribbons, and no new ribbons can be had, so I bought a Brother HL-2140 B&W laser, hooked the ser-port on the old machine to a usb translater and wrote a script to intercept the data and cross-feed it to cups, then send the cups output back down the same 15 meter usb cable to the hub the 232 adapter is plugged into where it hits that printer and spits out my assembly listings at 19 PPM. 4 or 5 reams of paper, and a toner cart later, it still Just Works(TM).

So when the NX515 died, I bought a Brother HL3170CDW. Old firmware, and Brothers firmware needed a windows machine to reburn it.
Next door neighbor's win7 lappy couldn't find the printer. Hauled printer 30 miles up the interstate to Staples where I had bought it. But they weren't interested enough to install brother installer on one of their windows machines, screw you attitude. Hauled it over to my old employers (I am retired for over a decade now) where Jim had an XP machine that found it instantly. Installed the cd I'd burnt, and the upgrade went flawlessly.

Got back home & hooked up to cups, tried duplex. Binding ditch on wrong side of the page! Turned the option off both in the printer and in cups. A couple months later I needed to do duplex again, turn it on, and the binding ditch was gone! So I haven't putzed with that since.
Trying to print some color, it looks like its sharpness is severely diffraction compromised, but using gimp, I can apply a fairly large amount of unsharp mask and make it usable, but the color saturation isn't quite there, nor is the contrast, but I'm still tinkering with that. Normal text output, and stuff in color from firefox is quite usable.

Would I buy another? Probably, since its now down to about $270, where I paid $399 last spring. Can I print wedding photos with it? Maybe, with enough putzing in gimp. The reds aren't as bad as HP's orange but not exectly spot on, but gimp has the corrections needed, I just have to find them.

I've used the starter black in 400 pages, but due to the size of its cartridges, 2200 pages of black is the rating, at $85 a pop. So its not the cheapest. It refused to feed one page so far, it had a dinged corner.

So yes, I'd buy another unless I was able to find one of the kyocera's at a good price. No clue how its reds are, but that seems to be the Achilles heel of doing decent color. IMO the only red that was truly red, was the red for the C82.

"I wouldn't have given the prize to Malala either."

She is, IMNSHO, far more deserving than a nearly nameless group of people who will try to do the job, but miss half of them, and will be forgotten by the time the next GP races results are posted.

"She can get it when she turns 18 or 21.

By whose rules? OTOH, that might serve as a mild life insurance policy they'll want to get a large piece of before the taliban kills her.

"Her actions have already made her more than deserving, but she is a big enough celebrity as it is. She should finish what is left of her childhood."

I agree with the latter sentiment, but this girl has no childhood left in her future. She has been forced to grow up 10 years worth of maturity in the last year, and you cannot turn that around now or ever. If she goes home, the taliban will just try to kill her again until they succeed.

But, if she goes home with the prize, and the money, then they will let her live as long as there is money to be milked, and she will probably use the money to grease palms to gain access to the local radio and continue to be a PITA to the taliban, so they'll take her money till it runs out, and the dirty, smelly end of the GI tract that is Karachi's powers that be will do nothing when she is killed for real the next time.

I admire the girls understanding of the situation, greatly, but I can't stand guard 24/7/365 for another 75 years to keep her from being killed, and neither can the lot of you, without first doing something about the taliban.

Which makes me ask the question: Is there a connection between her, and our putting the collar on one of their top people in Pakistan earlier today?

Good question that, but I am not a fly on the wall. Future news story, video at 22:30...

No Cheers on this one, I just don't see that much length to her future.

Gene

But first, before you can do that, they must have a _working_ Customer Service dept. One that puts you talking to a human, not listening to elevator music tapes that are 10 years past their use by date, and do it after not more than one menu redirect. VZ hasn't had one of those in 8 to 10 damned years. Sorry ladies but s_____w'em, and the camel that rode in on them.

Chuckle, gives me a good excuse to relate why I jumped ship to the local cable provider 3 or 4 years ago.

I had a damned slow (80kb/sec) adsl, and my phone on VZ copper for years.
Late December, the phone goes out, but the net remains, which I guess it can when only one side of the copper opens up and the other side, due to 50 yo paper insulated cable being soaking wet, might as well be ground.

Call VZ on my cell phone, they promise they'd get to it in about 4 days. Really? Week later I call again, and told maybe 10 days.

I call the PUC & filed a complaint, 3 days later they come out, make snide remarks about me calling in the PUC, claimed they had enough problems, found another so-so pair in the cable & moved me. Bad hum and I can hear the neighbors. Phone rings half-heartedly at all hours of the day/night.

I should mention that typical wait time to talk to a human started out at about 10 minutes and got progressively worse, till the last time, in late April, they didn't even transfer twice, and I timed the last time they started the elevator music & I gave up after 47 minutes and called the PUC again, but since I hadn't talked to VZ long enough to get the persons name, which our PUC requires you do, that was the end of it.

Between then, late Dec 2008 and April 30 2009, I actually had a working phone 17 days. And no pro-rate adjustments were ever made to the duns I was getting. I called Shentel, who had bought the local cable tv system 2 years back, got a 5x faster net connection and the same free to the lower 48 I had with VZ, for about 5 bucks a month less. All installed and working great in 4 days most of which was waiting for the modem to arrive. Outages have been 99% power related, two weeks once when the 112 mph direcho came thru in 2010, clearing out lots of trees including 3 of mine, 40 yo jack pines, one of which wound up on the next door neighbor's roof. Anything that looked like a wire or something to hold up a wire had to be built back up from scratch. Not Shentels fault IOW.

AFAIAC, VZ still owes me about $300 for services billed and not delivered. If I owned any stock, I'd sell, because its only going to get worse. With their managements attitude it can't help but implode at some point.

Cheers as usual, Gene.