jvdh

They will run into it when they submit an update however.

There is no way at all to handle duplicate location names. Another nice example is wttr.in/denhaag which uses the South African city of "Den Haag", which is so small even Google Maps searches for it end up with the South African embassy in the Dutch city of that name.

That is the point, the rats would have been introduced by the Europeans when they visited.

Exactly, their statement has been made in October already: https://letsencrypt.org/2015/10/29/phishing-and-malware.html

That statement did not contain anything on other kinds of reports. They do have an email address for reporting certificate abuse. So far, I have not been able to find any public statements on how they will handle that.

Yes, just about any PRNG is more robust than DUAL_EC. It's hard to implement correctly, its performance in software "is rotten"[0]. And even before the backdoor was discovered, the constants were suspect, and you can never get rid of that in your own implementation, as you have to generate those numbers then, then you are suspect.

[0]: http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/12/a-few-more-n...

Medical ethics committees have ethicists, but the main advice is from medical experts. I would not want anybody else judging the ethics of medical experiments, as no one else has the expert knowledge. I see absolutely no reason why this should different for computer scientists and cryptographers.

No one else understands the implications of an experiment or a new methodology. I was at a meeting recently discussing ethics committees for computer science. A medical expert gave his opinion and said (paraphrasing): I fail to see the problem with digitalisation, we have had medical records on paper for years, now they are on a computer, what is the difference?

I don't mean to say that every scientist should do this individually. They should discuss this with colleagues, and with an ethics committee, which should contain subject matter experts, but also ethicists.

Morality is subjective at the edges. We all share a common morality, otherwise our society would not function. Most of the common morality is captured by laws.

I completely agree with you that law enforcement officers will see it that way. I posit that that is a matter of limited perspective. They see backdoors as a means to catch criminals, and do not consider the implications for surveillance, democracy and freedom at all.

This paper is not aimed at them, it is aimed at the cryptographers, who could hopefully more easily understand that perspective.

  Computer scientists (and any self-respecting scientists) HAVE to separate their ethics from the interests of state institutions.

Why? The paper argues exactly to the opposite in the first part, describing the atomic-bomb scientists, and the Russell-Einstein Manifesto.

In my opinion, cryptographers and computer scientists have ignored morally questioning their work for too long. Reality is now catching up on this, with techniques for surveillance. The paper argues this for cryptography, in my view this is even more generally applicable.

The statistic points at an average of 100grams of sugar per person per week in 2000. Considering that a single can of coke already contains 30 grams of sugar, the statistic seems to indicate raw sugar intake, and not added sugar or other sugars.

Do you have link to evidence to backup that claim?

In my view sugar has been used more and more as an extra ingredient in other foods. Additionally, there are different kinds of sugar, which may influence your statistic: http://thatsugarfilm.com/blog/2015/03/16/added-sugar-vs-natu...

I thoroughly recommend watching That Sugar Film.

The name-calling referenced in this article also influenced a talk by Theo de Raadt on a new security feature for OpenBSD:

http://www.openbsd.org/papers/hackfest2015-pledge/mgp00003.h...

Note that this is not an official statement, this is something that an agent at a conference:

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2015/10/28/did-the-fbi-real... has the official statement:

  The FBI doesn't make recommendations to companies; instead, the Bureau explains
  what the options are for businesses that are affected and how it's up to
  individual companies to decide for themselves the best way to proceed.
  That is, either revert to back up systems, contact a security
  professional, or pay.

To me the quote you use from the original post talks about people who move (physically) from the EU to the US. These people remain EU citizens, but can hardly be distinguished from US people, as they have a US address. As EU citizens they have more rights to privacy than their US neighbors.

Haven't amalgam fillings been phased out yet? At least in the Netherlands most dentists now use composites to fill cavities.

Wikipedia seems to suggest that the performance of those is comparable to amalgam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental_composite

Cost also seems to be comparable, where composites may even be cheaper than amalgam, because of all the environmental issues surrounding the amalgam material.

Finally someone with credibility who states that regular password changes are pointless, and may even reduce security. It's even backed by scientific publications from Microsoft.

You may want to edit the title, there's a few words missing: "was nearly forgotten"

There are both syntactic as well as behavioural changes.

A simple example is the print statement, in Python 2 you could do:

    print "Hello World!"

Whereas in Python 3 you have to do:

    print("Hello World!")

Now obviously, you can easily change this programmatically. Things get harder when you use more advanced print statements, for example adding a "," at the end to prevent a newline, printing to different targets, new ways of using placeholders, et cetera.

Then there is the fact that strings are no more in Python 3, but they are Unicode. Again for average strings that's not really a problem, but when you start using bytes, special characters, et cetera.

There is a tool to translate programs from Python 2 to Python 3, but it does not catch everything, and you still have to fix stuff manually.

Reading that the patents were about SSL and RC4, I had an evil thought. A patent troll with these patents would actually help make the Internet a safer place.

Companies that are still using those should be sued for not securing their consumers' information properly. Failing that, this would be an even better way of achieving the same thing.

that's exactly the wrong way to think about this. If we want everybody else to use these kinds of tools, they have to look good, and be easy to use.

The Netherlands has seen some refinement of the cookie law, and there are some sites, for example http://www.ns.nl where you now have a choice in what kind of cookies you want to allow.

Again, companies are trying very hard to hide this choice, but a tiny result from the study is that you do get this choice.

The idea behind this proposal was a noble one: companies should ask permission before invading the privacy of consumers.

Unfortunately, companies collectively decided that their businessmodel does not need changing at all, and simply implemented a "cookie wall" for all their consumers. This led to consumers, like you, to quickly get "cookie wall fatigue" and try to click 'OK' as soon as possible, without thinking at all.

And all the while, we complain that privacy on the Internet is going to hell, and there is nothing we can do about it, because consumers don't care enough, or have given up...

The article is using 'fancy' graphs, economic 101 and a long analysis to hide the fact that he is basing most of his theory on gut feeling. There are several points at which he states this himself, but fails to mention that these become crucial to the whole analysis.

The video on their site is terrible. It's some kind of artsy impression of what you could do with the suit. That's all fine, but it gives the impression that the suit is just some kind of band that you pull around your chest and then lights up.

Furthermore, there is no way that they can do all the things they imply in the movie. Getting hit by an arrow, or feeling like drowning is going to take a lot more than just a flimsy suit with haptic feedback.

Discovering Path MTU black holes on the Internet using RIPE Atlas: https://www.os3.nl/_media/2011-2012/courses/rp2/p57_report.p...

A Master thesis research report from 2012 which examined this very problem on a global scale, using the RIPE Atlas monitoring network.

Like I said, this changed my interests and career. I've written several papers on this, including one analyzing the ethical aspects of violating users' privacy to support a general cause.

All papers are online at staff.fnwi.uva.nl/j.j.vanderham/research/articles.html

I have less of a problem with downloading being illegal in general. I strongly object to censorship in a democratic society, especially without a good checking mechanism or rules about ending a blockade.

I'm going to answer from my own experience, which may or may not fit your situation at all (you're kind of vague about it, so there's no way to judge). This is also in part inspired by the comment of humanarity (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9360218)

Several years ago in The Netherlands we had a website blockade of The PirateBay. Most ISPs had to block it, it was stupid, and it did not work at all. The ISPs were challenging it legally. The question got asked: "How effective is this blockade anyway? Can we measure it?".

I did not realise it at the time, but this was somewhat an identity inflexion point for me, and very much changed my career.

As a scientist in computer networking, with some knowledge of Bittorrent, I thought to myself, how hard can it be? I could take some torrents off TPB, record IP addresses passing by and checking which ISP they come from. I finished the bittorrent measurements, wrote a report, and tried to publish it. Only the dean and the faculty lawyer got wind of it, and they were not amused, and saw a risk of getting sued by the entertainment industry.

I challenged them on this, and noted that I would publish this, even without their support. Fortunately I also got full support of my professor, and we did get to publish it. It was used in the court case, and it helped show the ineffectiveness of the website blockade, so it got lifted.

This little weekend project changed my research interests, has made me focus on ethics in computer science research, and especially security research. This has changed much of how I initially planned my career, and it has gotten me to where I am now. I have enjoyed every minute of it, and months later also realised I was not happy with the way my career was going.

I took some risk in doing this, but it was something I believed in. The change was possible because I was a researcher at a university, so that made it somewhat easier.

Reading the abstract and the conclusion is the most important part of reading and selecting academic papers. Especially in the beginning.

If you read the abstract and the conclusion you should have a good sense of what this paper is about, what it is trying to prove, and perhaps also a sense of how they prove this. These are the primary factors for you to see if this paper is worthwhile to you.

First of all, I'm a bit surprised that the article does not even mention Club Mate.

Second, it's catching on in the Netherlands through the underground. All hackerspaces have their own supply line, either through their own import, or through other channels. There are now several wholesalers who sell it, and I'm starting to see it in small cafe's as well.

I've also heard that there is a cocktailbar in Amsterdam which uses Club Mate in some of their cocktails.

As a user you're exposing your reading habits to them. You can't know whether they do something with that or not. They don't even mention it.