And by nailing this family they're up to 59! Well, maybe not this one (today at least) as they seem to have gotten to the newspaper faster than they could run them through a secret court. But I'm sure there are other serious googling terrorist plotters when the stats need padding and the budget needs justification.

This. Don't respond to crazies like this, if you're not forcing them to serve you a notice physically or at least via mail you're encouraging their crazy. Don't argue with them, don't cave to them, dont send any reply of any kind. If the guy is coherent enough and tenacious enough to actually engage in a valid serving then it might be worth either caving to or letting a lawyer take a look at it and reply to it, but in no way engage the asshat in an argument that you simply cannot in any way benefit from.

See the commentary at the top of the page from this link:

http://www.righto.com/2012/03/inside-cheap-phone-charger-and-why-you.html

--Paul

There's always the Convergence project (based on the previous Perspectives CMU work).

Basically, instead of CA's you have notary servers that track changes to certificates and that you (your browser) contacts to verify that they and you are seeing the same certificates.

That way, if a MITM attack is ongoing it will, if targetting you specifically, probably show a discrepancy between the certificate presented to you and the one presented to them. If targetting the specific website and MITM'ing all connections to it the only demonstration of a problem might be that the site suddenly appears to have a new certificate, but that would still most likely alert site operators who may be surprised to note a change they didn't do.

Actually, in this case it means quite the opposite; investing your bitcoins in something (a scam in particular) is worse than investing _in_ bitcoins.

If the investors had merely been sitting on their bitcoins they would have gotten the returns he promised (although in dollar value).

Yes, it can be fixed. Sort of. But only if the entity handing out the patents is the same entity paying the licensing costs for the patents. That's the only way there is a continuous incentive for the involved parties to award 'patents' for the right things and only the right things.

It would be possible to remake the system from ground up as a publication/invention incentive system without any exclusive rights that would pay out from budgeted funding to holders of granted 'patents' according to usage. That is, if it is truly needed at all, which I'm not convinced of. At least that way we'd get an actual price tag, instead of the nebulous but huge costs the current system burdens the economy with, it would probably mean much less litigation and it could actually be tuned to maximize incentive efficiency.

The Wikipedia entry on wolf attacks certainly indicates otherwise. It seems they prefer not to attack men who can defend themselves but they'll certainly attack and eat women and children if given the opportunity.

As most users trust their browsers for SSL verification it is of limited use against entities like the NSA. They certainly have their own signed certificates for any site they're interested in intercepting and thus could easily man-in-the-middle any session they're interested in.

Of course, that's most useful in targetted surveillance and much less useful in the dragnets where it'd most likely get noticed reasonably fast.

But against government sponsored entities any hierarchial trust such as SSL is fundamentally flawed as they can simply compell the issuing of false certificates.

What would be the point of having gmail and outlook using signatures or encryption? Anything the user of those can do one can assume the NSA can do on behalf of the user. You need to be doing your encryption on secure endpoints on both ends for there to be a point. Which means no webmail. No proprietary Microsoft/Google/Apple software. None of todays smartphones. Etc.

That's not to say it can't be done, but if you want to move beyond postcards vis-a-vis the NSA you'll have to go open source for OS and software and start using vpn's, darknets and things like i2p for communications.

The NSA doesn't need any warrant at all if GCHQ does the work. Which it does. So don't worry, US citizens aren't entitled to privacy either.

And us non-terrorists who encrypt every little piece of shit information ruins that work for the goons. So I'm pleased to see my random junk archived, hope it made them miss something they wanted. Then maybe they'll learn that dragnets will get them such a bad signal to noise ratio it's better to actually target suspects than everyone.

To keep the NSA away? None. I have nothing to hide.

To ruin these assholes day? Lots. I have massive amounts of meaningless data I constantly send encrypted via foreign countries. It contains absolutely nothing of interest to them, but it will make it harder for them to find whatever they're interested in, and it will force them to either store massive amounts of meaningless data or discard it all, meaning they won't catch anything interesting in the future, should I ever need to send anything I don't want them snooping.

Either way I'm screwing with them. Not much but easily enough to cover the time and money spent doing my patriotic duty to humanity.

And my supermarket, the local restaurants and none of the places I spend money day to day take pounds. So their utility... oh, wait.

Bitcoin is equivalent to foreign cash and there certainly are enough places that take them so they do not lack utility any more than any other foreign currency (that could be instantly transferred across the world) would.

One would wonder about the nature of that "conflicting information". Did they think it was a CIA rendition flight? No, right, kidnapping and torture is ok, it's transportation of asylum seekers that must be prevented.

The fall of western civilization into vile barbarism is painful to behold. These stains cannot be washed away.

Great. Just like 4 guys around here. Well, up until they got the security forces storming into their apartments and showing them, their wives and children to the floor with automatic rifles to their back, then dragged away for some time in a cell.

See, some housewife had heard a guy talking on the phone about blowing up a bomb in a mall. So the security police pulled the call records on the nearby cell towers, the housewife identified the talker off a drivers license, tracked down who he'd been talking to and stormed the apartments.

Of course, one of the less dense analysts pointed out that the housewife couldn't have heard that guy talking on the phone like she said as the records on her phone showed her elsewhere at the time that matched the cell records. Which nobody cared about. The rest couldn't wait to get themselves some of that hot terrorist action. Yay, count another terror deed averted! (Or, well, a schizophrenic hallucination indulged in, but 'terror plot foiled' sounds much better when asking for funds).

So, you have nothing to hide. Are you certain nobody anywhere near where you are has something to hide? No chance that any ip address resembling yours might access some bad place at a some time that may or may not be when you're at a computer plus minus misread time zones on the logs? Because the goons don't give a shit that you have nothing to hide and they're certainly incompetent enough to get you shot due to a clerical error. And if they ever do feel like targeting you because some neighbour was bored one day and a bit pissed off at you, you can be damn sure that none of the data they have will be used to clear you. Instead every byte will be used to dig as deep a hole as possible for you. And after a few days of water boarding they'll have your signed confession, so obviously you did have something to hide.