Viewing profile — ds9

The networking of "things" is not a problem as long as you can opt out of it. Can you stop the toaster of the future from talking to the vendor, the crock pot, Google, the neighbor…

"an open conversation about knowledge that can easily kill people" This phrase and the article contain the same fallacy ( ("disclosing 0days when they can kill people"). I may be a…

"My recommendation is to plan privacy ahead. Think of your product as something that should not 'keep everything, analyze later' but 'keep what we must, and dump the rest'." This i…

Even a "correct" tap installation might cause an outage due to the particulars of optical-fiber manipulation. There have been occasional reports of cable breaks in the news - I've …

Well said. How to get there is a difficult question - particularly the political question of how to get better policies in place. It is effectively a test of democracy, whether the…

My first thought was, wow, they could have had computers based on sets of these connected in different ways, as logic circuits. As I recall from the Stephenson version, Turing and …

I meant that sending logon + password is somewhat pointless if it's plaintext over the internet, while if you have some encryption going on, someone intercepting the data in transi…

This is the right answer and it's too bad it was way down the page (I upvoted). For your situation, mark_I_watson, probably get a cert from a CA, the cheap "domain only" variety wh…

Amusingly, the areas where the most US Americans are familiar with SI are gun calibers and recreational drugs. [n] (OK, I may have a warped sense of humor, but it's true) n. (not t…

As a USian I can testify that there's a lot of irrational opposition here. Disclaimer: I don't have scientific sources on this, just subjective impressions from a lot of little int…

Ghostery, the last time I checked it out was closed-source, subject to control or influence by advertisers, and reporting to the vendor about users' browsing. Clearly lots of peopl…

Somehow I'm missing your point. If sites make requests to Google Analytics, Google APIs, etc., then anyone who looks at those sites and allows the requests is being tracked and dat…

I wonder whether it is also a bad practice to set the contact email to an address on one of the domains that that registrar controls. I.e., register example.com with DomainCo, and …

Yes, it's called front-running. There have been accusations against some registrars in the tech news. I just go to register as soon as I'm sure I would like the domain name. That w…

Deleting the emails would have put Levison/Lavabit in violation of long-established law (destruction of evidence is a crime). Note that with PFS (if I recall correctly, Lavabit did…

It's not exactly illegal, and the new secret-orders tactics are the government's workaround. In the 1990s there was a series of political/legal conflicts over encryption, which was…

"When you say Levison's system made claims it couldn't possibly backup, do you mean that from a technical perspective, or from a legal perspective?" Both. I can't speak for tptacek…

That's actually a contradiction. DRM and security are mutually exclusive. The level of control that enables a remote party to "trust" a computer makes it impossible for the owner t…

Thanks for saying that. It's remarkable that so many writers will declare a subjective preference as if it were an objective fact ("$SOME_UI is so ugly!"). Although I also agree wi…

"How would content producers possibly deter copying without exerting control on the consumption hardware and software?" Imagine this fictional scenario. Copyright owners sell audio…

Teaching concepts as well as techniques is definitely the way to go. The problem with "Common Core" appears to be that complex procedures have been selected as the way to teach con…

Compliments on making it a deal for the "whole piece" instead of per-page. The latter invites a scam where sites would break an article into many small segments, and when the visto…