I never could get the hang of Thursdays.

Hi. I'm a theoretical cryptographer.

Some implementations have been broken. Encryption itself is generally fine (as long as you go with well-studied, standardized methods). There is a point that encryption is always subject to real-world factors, but the most common libraries are pretty good. Whenever you read about a data breach in the news, it's not because encryption was broken--something else went wrong (and, frequently, exposed data that wasn't encrypted in the first place).

Homomorphic encryption does not expose useful information about the plaintext, although the article doesn't make that clear. You start with an encrypted input, perform an operation, and get an encrypted output. Only the person with the key--who is not the person performing the computation--can decrypt the result.

There is a somewhat-related but distinct concept, called "functional encryption", in which one can distribute a key associated with a function f. That key allows a user to take an encryption of x and obtain f(x)--but nothing else about x other than f(x), where "nothing else" has a mathematical formalization. So you could (conceptually) encrypt your entire medical record and give your doctor a key for the function that calculates the probability that you'll have a heart attack in the next five years. Then they'll be able to calculate that probability, but nothing else about you.

This I agree with, in an ideal world. Will we be living in such a world, 5, 10, or 20 years down the line? I don't know. Right now, the trends are largely in outsourcing everything--more and more, your data and computation live on the cloud. For medical information, your doctor doesn't do all the tests himself--he outsources them to a lab. For genetic information, 23andMe doesn't sell software that lets you analyze your own genetic markers--they take your information and perform the analysis on it themselves. So these trends will need to change before the above takes place.

It would be great to keep one's own data and get all the various analysis tools via FOSS. But someone needs to write and distribute those tools--as well as make it feasible to obtain one's own data in the first place (I don't know about you, but I don't have an MRI machine in my house). So until that world exists, homomorphic encryption is a potentially useful tool in this area.

[It also has uses beyond securely outsourcing computation, but that's somewhat off-topic.]

Actually, it's not.

If I had been talking about Swartz, or the case itself, it would be an argument from authority. But as I mentioned at the beginning, I was talking about Abelson.

Various commenters are slamming Abelson for making a comment they disagree with, when they don't have a clue who he is or what work he's done--he isn't saying what the knee-jerk /. mentality wants him to say, so he has to be tarred as The Enemy.

I'm not arguing that people should agree with Abelson about Swartz. I'm saying that given his history, it might make sense for people to at least give a reasonable look at what he's saying, and if they then disagree with him to address that on the issues, rather than rushing to post inaccurate, sarcastic posts based on a headline.

No, it wasn't, despite what the highly-modded-up comments on /. and elsewhere would like you to believe. Have you read Abelson's report? It's long but actually quite easy to read. It starts with a detailed description of the facts, and maintains that MIT took a completely hands-off approach. They did not push for any punishment whatsoever. They didn't take action in explicit support of him either--and the report gives a large amount of attention to this decision, its reasoning, and its ramifications. I haven't heard any credible source [read: anyone other than ill-informed Internet commentators] dispute Abelson's facts in any meaningful way, including the claim of MIT's "hands-off" approach.

It can't be both?

Including Slashdotters', apparently. But since you're making this about Abelson rather than Swartz, here are a few facts about the man you're casually brushing off.

Abelson is an old Lisp hacker. He has a long history of standing up for Freedom, in the sense /. appreciates. He's on the Board of Directors of the FSF, and was in fact one of the directors at its founding. He has solidly been in support of David LaMacchia, bunnie Huang, and Keith Winstein.

He has not shied away from standing up for freedom of information, even if there are heavy legal consequences involved.

He also puts his money where his mouth is, releasing a number of his own works for free. Before ebooks were a thing, he made sure his book was available for free online. He helped get OpenCourseWare off the ground. Heck, he's released (under Creative Commons) video of some of his own lectures...from 1986.

He's an expert in the area (in addition to the above personal experience, he also teaches a course on Ethics and Law in the Electronic Frontier). He also spent six months investigating and writing a book-length report about the Swartz case, and MIT's response to it, in particular. The summary describes the report as MIT "clearing itself"--while the report details that MIT did nothing legally wrong, it also goes into the moral and ethical issues of MIT's response without reaching a bright-line conclusion.

So, with all of this as context, which is more likely:
-Abelson is trying to make Swartz look like a bad guy in order that he can "sleep at night", or
-The man with a long history of views and actions supporting freedom of information, with a background in ethics and law on computer-related issues, who quite possibly is the single individual who has done the most thinking about the details of the Swartz case and MIT's response to it (and certainly knows more about it and has thought more about it than any Slashdotter), honestly and genuinely thinks that Swartz was naive about the realities of the situation he got himself into....and maybe, just maybe, it might make sense to give at least a small amount of genuine, honest consideration to his views?

The technology is already on the roads. But aside from the normal amount of time necessary for technology adoption, this also faces significant legal hurdles. There's the big question of liability, of course, and we're starting to deal with that now. But the legal issues will get worse before they get better--self-driving cars are still experimental enough that they aren't a huge political battlefield yet.

Once they develop a bit more, many people will have safety and NIMBY concerns--even if they're much safer than human drivers, many won't want it around without 100% safety. Not to mention other lobby groups--cab drivers, truck drivers, and so forth are heavily unionized, and will use their political sway to oppose this technology as much as possible, since it will (eventually) take their jobs in a very real, direct sense.

There's some needed context.

Aaronson himself works on quantum complexity theory. Much of his work deals with quantum computers (at a conceptual level--what is and isn't possible). Yet there are some people who reject the idea the quantum computers can scale to "useful" sizes--including some very smart people like Leonid Levin (of Cook-Levin Theorem fame)--and some of them send him email, questions, comments on his blog, etc. saying so. These people are essentially asserting that Aaronson's career is rooted in things that can't exist. Thus, Aaronson essentially said "prove it."

It's true that proving such a statement would be very difficult, and you raise some good points as to why. But the context is that Aaronson gets mail and questions all the time from people who simply assert that scalable QC is impossible, and he's challenging them to be more formal about it.

He also mentions, in fairness, that if he does have to pay out, he'd consider it an honor, because it would be a great scientific advance.

Exactly. (PDF)

TL,DR:
Last Supreme Court term,
-Almost half of all Supreme Court decisions were unanimous
-The two Justices who disagreed most frequently in judgment were Ginsburg and Alito--and they still agreed with each other noticeably more than half the time (62.5%). Ginsburg and Scalia, in your example, agreed in judgment 65% of the time.
-That said, there is at least some truth to there being a "liberal wing" and a "conservative wing" (with Kennedy being the "swing vote"): of the 16 cases that were decided 5-4, 14 of them were Roberts-Scalia-Thomas-Alito vs. Ginsburg-Breyer-Sotomayor-Kagan with Kennedy casting the deciding vote. But a number of the lineups are more interesting.

The Justices are highly educated professionals, and as such agree with each other a lot of the time about what the law actually says. None of them is blindly ideological--but just the same, they do have their individual opinions about how the law should be interpreted, so some level of ideology is certainly present.

It's not just "the ones who fail the metal detector" who get pat-downs, and that's not what the article is about. The TSA is increasingly using backscatter x-ray machines; if they decide to put you through one of those, you can opt to get a manual pat-down instead. This is the category of people we're talking about; they are trying to get more people to choose the backscatter x-ray by making the manual search more uncomfortable.

As for there not being enough scanners, TFA says "Agents were funneling every passenger at this particular checkpoint through a newly installed back-scatter body imaging device." I can confirm this; the last few times I've been to Logan Airport in Boston, they were putting every adult through the scanner. (They allowed a few small children to go through the metal detector instead.) Perhaps this is true only at some airports or only at non-peak times, but there are certainly situations where everyone gets funneled to the backscatter machine, and opt-outs get patted down.

The second time this happened to me, the TSA agent announced that we would go through the scanner, and didn't mention that anyone had the option to get a manual pat-down instead. When I politely requested to opt out of the scanner, the TSA agent kept trying to talk me out of it, repeatedly asking why I wanted a pat-down, informing me that it would be degrading, etc., before finally allowing it. (Honestly, one of the reasons I wanted to request a pat-down was so that other people knew it was an option!)