"A few generations away"? Maybe a few election cycles, (two years each) but certainly not a few generations (around 30 years each, traditionally).

The GOP, including DeSantis, has gone the way of the Lying Loser #45 with only enough exceptions to prove the rule.

With only a usually-ineffectual Democratic Party to oppose them, the Lying Loser's cult followers are likely to take over parts of the government next year and all of it in 2025. I suppose Pence might pay lip service to democratic standards, and might lie only half as often as 45, but he'll still support the same far-right and far-weird policies as DeSantis or other potential alternatives to the Lying Loser, e.g. lower taxes on the rich, make sure poor women can't get abortions, block all immigrants except for Norwegian men and those that GOP donor corporations want to hire, etc. Which of those is going to lower inflation or get the supply chain working or get Russia to stop bullying Ukraine? Yet the cult will elect whatever crazies the GOP runs, and the other 70% of the population is likely to sit on their hands.

And when that happens, it won't be just Canada that needs to watch out.

Not true. Trump won in the electoral college.

But he's ruling as if wants an even smaller part of the vote. No attempt to win over a scant majority, let alone pretend to be a president of the whole country. Not a good look in a democracy.

Most decent PKI implementations include a copy of your certificate/public key in a signed message that you send. Most decent email programs will strip the public key (and/or certificate) out at the recipient's end and associate it with your ID in their contacts list. (A decent company IT implementation would do it globally, but that's another story.) So if you send her a signed message, she can still read it (unless you encrypt it too, which you wouldn't, because she doesn't have your public key yet) and she will have your cert/public key stowed in her contact list.

If you can get her to (a) sign up for a cert, and (b) install it in Windows or Outlook, and (c) set Outlook (she probably uses Outlook, sigh) to sign all outgoing messages, you will get her cert/pubkey the next time she sends you a message. (I believe Outlook handles certificates out of the box, but you need to use an add-on for PGP/GnuPG. A certificate is just a public key with some certified identity information to go along with it.)

Then you can use her certificate or public key (which you got from her signed message) to encrypt your private information for her, even if she doesn't realize she sent it to you. Outlook will automatically decrypt it with her private key if she opens it (even if it doesn't in some list views).

The hard part is getting her to sign up for a cert or create a GnuPG key. Her IT staff could take care of that.

If people would start using the encryption that is built in to their email programs, public keys would be widely distributed and you wouldn't have to ask.

I assume you asked a keyserver (e,g, keyserver.pgp.com) if there was a key associated with her email? That would be something you can check easily.

Not sure why you would bring up ssh keys. Yes, they are one aspect of PKI, and the principle is similar to PGP or s/mime, but you wouldn't use them to encrypt email (normally) and you certainly wouldn't suggest to someone else that she use them that way.

About the only time you would get into difficulty like this (someone sending the private/secret key) is with a command line implementation of gnupg or pgp. Most decent key-management gui's would let you "copy" the public key somehow, and would ask you to confirm it a couple of times if you told it you wanted to copy the secret/private key too. In other words, the default "copy the key" functionality deals with the public key. Even with GnuPG, the default "export" command exports public keys, while you'd need to tell her to use "export secret keys" to get the secret key too. No reason to even let her know about the "export secret keys" option, if she doesn't know what she is doing.

With S/MIME, you simply tell her you want her "certificate". Yes, you know that her public key is part of the certificate, but you don't have to tell her that, and in fact if you just ask her to sign a message to you, the certificate (and the public key) will usually come along with it.

Loss of privacy is not due to overreach on the part of anonymous and malicious government agents, but of ubiquitous marketing offices of multinational corporations. Yes, the government can get into the act too, but there are a few protections against some of that, while there are almost none against corporate interests.

Or, look at it another way: why shouldn't the government get the same access the multinationals have to our private information? Sure its creepy to think of an anonymous government bureaucrat spying on me, but no more so than the marketing division of Big Corporation, Inc, or the teenage geek down the street.

In other words, let's not turn this into a rage against State tyranny. Let's just train our kids in, and demand from our suppliers, tools that prevent 'them', whoever they are, from spying on us, or from adding anything they want to a widely available database used for correlating financial records or facial recognition or whatever.

I have no problems with there being a way for me to prove who I am uniquely under certain circumstances. For example, I think it is appropriate that I prove who I am before getting a passport or registering to vote. I'd certainly not want it easy for someone else to claim to be me if it lets them have access to my bank account or get me blamed for something they did.

There should be more use of a coat-check type of authentication -- making sure I'm the one who left that coat -- rather than proving who I am uniquely, especially when the more complete information can be re-used by the coat-check attendant to let her/him pretend to be me.

And how many times have you been in a Doctor's waiting room and had the receptionist yell across the room "What's your date of birth" and hearing the patient yell it back? Then they pretend that the date of birth is some sort of proof of identity. It's silly and unsafe, especially since there are ways of doing a "relative" proof of identity (associating me uniquely with the chart open on the screen) that is easy to use, relatively secure, not reusable by someone else, and doesn't involve two forms of government issued ID.

Further, why not tell our representatives that we expect them to provide for anonymous authentication when formal identity is unnecessary. Right now they think the only kind of authentication needed is the "two forms of government ID".

The attitude of Facebook, restricting use of anonymous online IDs, is driven by a desire to be able to advertise more effectively to a single unique person. Yes, it is a commercial motivation, but it is hardly less oppressive or less subject to misuse than similar misguided requirements by government. The commercial entities have no incentive to do the right thing, so it will require a political decision if this concern is going to get anywhere.

It's one thing I've liked about the Pauls (Ron and Rand): they aren't afraid to say what they think, even if polling doesn't show it popular. I'd rather have someone with whose positions I disagree than someone like McConnell who depends on people not knowing what he really thinks, and goes all apes**t if his strategy meetings get bugged and someone releases an accurate transcript.

The fact that I disagree is something else. I'm a firm believer in "ours is the worst form of government ... until you consider all the rest". Taking the current functions of the TSA and distributing them to private firms would be much worse. It's much harder to hold a private firm accountable, especially when it is doing what it was hired to do. What's needed is for Paul and others to rethink the whole purpose of the TSA, knowing that we can't get an entirely risk-free country.

The question then becomes "where is the acceptable compromise between an unattainable zero risk and an unattainable complete freedom?" Only then do you decide whether it is best to have a private entity help out, as opposed to a government agency. Even there the issue isn't black and white. There are too many private agencies doing governmental functions as concessions, monopolies whose main purpose is to wring as much money out of the public as possible. Is that worse than a government raising taxes? Yes, if it is "taxation without representation" or a monopoly that has the appearance of corruption.

In my experience most "privatization" schemes are much more oppressive and monopolistically acquisitive than the government program they replace. So if Paul thinks he is appealing to my libertarian side by suggesting privatization as a solution, he's definitely striking the wrong chord with me.

I think the question is, are they circulating, or are they being hoarded? The answer is, people are buying them as a way to maintain their wealth.

Once bitcoins start being used to buy and sell things, instead of just to hold, we might see some interesting times. But just buying them (demand) creates just a bubble. Nothing interesting to see here, except maybe people losing everything once the bubble bursts.

In general, it is best not to violate whatever the destination or transit country decides are its regulations. Lots of countries are a lot stricter than the USA.

That said, I don't condone the bad TSA anecdotes cited here, nor even the necessity of a lot of the visa/immigration requirements imposed on foreign travelers. I think we'd be a lot better off if they concentrated on keeping people safe and less on dotting i's and crossing t's. (Most of the TSA workers I've encountered have been very reasonable.)

Fortunately most such incidents are newsworthy ... meaning they are infrequent enough to cause comment and interest. Most people don't encounter the blatant misbehavior described above. Most international travellers have their papers in order and go through pretty quickly.

By all means, let's teach religion in science classes -- by which I mean, teach students the difference.

Too many students have a faith-based understanding of science. They "believe in" evolution, Newton's laws, or the Pythagorean Theorem, the same way a catechism student might believe in redemption or the trinity. Science classes, it seems to me, would be an ideal place to teach the difference, and it would be healthier for both science and religion if it did (or if some class did).

Politics is rarely about choosing the one perfect option. It is usually about shades of gray.

So, first, if any of those entities were actually to get into power, would we be better off? Have you looked at their policies and thought about what has happened in the past to other cultures that have tried them (if any)? (I might be better off in a green libertarian ultraconservative theocracy, but more than half of the people in the country would end up in a freedom that is also exactly the same as poverty, as opposed to less than half in poverty now. Sigh.)

Second, would casting your vote for one of them actually hurt the guys who are going to be governing us next year, or influence them in any way? (Romney, for example, has already written off 47% of the population. He'd probably just add you to that group, meaning the group of people he is accountable/responsive to will become that much smaller and/or more elite.)

In other words, by voting "against" Obama and Romney because neither of them is perfect, you may be allowing the one who is more imperfect to get into power. There are any number of policies that are going to be on the line if one or the other party gets control of all parts of the government. (If one gets into power, the deficit will get reduced less quickly. If one gets into power, medical costs will drop because most Americans will be unable to afford health care. If one gets into power, government will get even more power to control a woman's health care decisions. If one gets into power, the number of Americans crammed into jails will grow yet higher.) Your vote for a third-party means that no such issue is important to you, that you don't care to influence any of them, or that no one you know will be affected by the good or bad effects of those policies -- or perhaps you think that by washing your hands of what those idiots or amateurs do, you will hasten the fall of our current form of government allowing it to be replaced with something more to your liking, that is, something that won't be made up of fallible idiots or amateurs, that won't have shades of gray, that will always be right, that will acknowledge your perfect freedom while perfectly restricting the freedoms of criminals and those out to harm you or your family or your business, and that will never require confiscatory taxes or deficit spending, etc.

The democrats thought they were onto something with the onerous "sequestration" deal they got with the republicans. What they didn't count on was that a large number of those republicans think cutting the federal budget to the bone (and beyond) is a good idea, while the rest figured they'd eventually be able to get things they want (defense spending) exempted from the cuts. And no republican will do a thing that makes any democrat look good.

The chances of the federal government figuring out how to make a budget and stick to it are pretty much dead, unless democrats give in and do exactly what the republicans and teapartiers demand. So, yeah, the Obama administration really does need to get ready for the sequestration cuts to happen. The only way out is for Obama to be re-elected, and democrats to get a majority in the House and a super-majority in the Senate ... and even then it's not guaranteed, since democrats can't agree on anything useful.

Hooray for austerity, and going back into Super-recession.

If you are on NTFS you can use http://freedup.org/ or freedups.pl (http://www.stearns.org/freedups/). It makes hard links among duplicate files. On NTFS, it poops out after 1024 links, but at least you have 1023 fewer copies of the file on your hard drive.

This makes sense if you are used to a particular file structure. The file structure stays the same, so you can find the one copy of the file by whatever name/path you happen to remember first.

I've used a few free deduplicators, and haven't had a huge problem with them. I'd work in smaller chunks (directory trees) to start with, if you don't want the computer chugging away for long periods without knowing what it is doing. The first one I tried (DupeLocator, no longer at it's original location but possibly around in freeware collections) seemed relatively efficient, finding equal size files and doing some sort of compare. It eliminated the files that were not dupes pretty quickly. Took longer to confirm that the rest were really dupes, but not excessively long. It had the added advantage of "locating" the dupes, and letting you do with them what you please (I drag them into the Recycle Bin most of the time, all except the one I want to keep). It also keeps updating a status so you know how far it has gotten. I suppose if there are thousands of 1GB files, it might take a while.

Surely someone creating a de-dupe utility would make it at least moderately efficient, if not user friendly. I'd guess a program using a less-efficient algorithm with updated status would seem faster than one that just sits there doing a highly optimized algorithm without letting you know what's happening.

The fallacy is that you must have exactly one identity online, linked to your real identity offline.

In fact, there are relatively few transactions on the web (or anywhere else) where I am a customer where the vendor needs to be able to link to my real world identity. She may need to learn that a payment has been authorized, or that I am the person who submitted a blog post so I can edit it; but she does not need to know my social security number or mother's maiden name.

Once in a while you need to establish a one-to-one identity with a real person, such as to prevent money laundering or in an election. But for most of us those are the exception, not the rule.

As long as the marketing folks get us (and our government/bank/ISP) to believe we need to establish that one-to-one identity every single time we participate in any sort of interaction with anyone at all, yes, we have lost. And all in the name of them being able to call me at dinner time to try to sell me something, or send me a bunch of "credit card pre-approved" mails, or whatever. Or for some overly-paternalistic government bureaucrat wanting to make sure I get caught if I say a dirty word or look at a dirty picture online.

Please folks (even you folks in Germany!) please resist the temptation to think that one-to-one identity is the only way to go. It's not.