salient

Again, unless it was registered as a company in US, then I don't see the problem.

Last I checked those two organizations were also in favor of stronger Patriot Act-like laws, and other such things, probably because such laws favor their friends in the Military Industrial Complex.

Was Megaupload registered in US, too? Otherwise I think they have a very bogus case of "jurisdiction".

Just having the data pass through US servers doesn't or shouldn't count, the way the Internet works, and how it's supposed to decentralize the data to keep it more localized. Otherwise you could argue that just by the nature of people using Megaupload from US would also give the US government the right to prosecute Megaupload. If that's the case, then Google could be prosecuted in countries where it doesn't have headquarters, too.

How can it be constitutional to extract your DNA, and then make you pay for it? That doesn't make any sense to me. What's next? Making you pay for your own jail time? If they want to make you do all of that, then they should pay for it.

It reminds me of this recent story:

http://www.policestateusa.com/2013/woman-probed-cavity-searc...

Why are countries in such a hurry to decide one way or the other, when Bitcoin's market cap is still very small in many of these countries? Can't they wait a year or two longer, and see where it goes and pass more appropriate laws after they've had a while to think about it? I imagine most people in Parliaments didn't even hear about Bitcoin until last month. So why rush to a decision now then?

Another paper dealing with IP-layer anonymity:

http://www.magnusbrading.com/phantom/phantom-design-paper.pd...

And a first try at implementing it:

http://www.magnusbrading.com/phantom/phantom-implementation-...

DEFCON 16 presentation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYM_zog5Su4

No. Survival is our strongest instinct. Besides, human population will plateau around 10 billion or so, and we're already seeing trends, from very early ones to pretty advanced ones (Japan), where people decide not to have kids anymore in modern societies, or even have sex with other humans.

You're thinking immortality would be a problem given the current conditions. But the conditions will be different in the future. The same will be true for food production, which should be vastly more efficient in the future, and enough to feed everyone.

I'd rather have the choice. I have no choice with ageing. The same is true of "immortality". What immortality really means is that you kind of have a choice of not disappearing forever (well unless a car runs you down or something, but in the future that can probably be fixed, too, by "backing ourselves up").

Completely disagree. It was just a week or two before Snowden came out that New York Times was praising Skype for how "secure" it is, even against government snooping. The poor souls thought Skype was still P2P, when that stopped being true many years before. The NYT journalists were also probably using Skype to talk to their sources, thinking they are secure. That's why it's so important to have such reviews of these apps - especially if they're a more "mainstream app", and there's a potential for hundreds of millions of people to use it. If we can get hundreds of millions of people to use end-to-end encrypted communication, why not do it properly, and give them half-baked secure apps to use instead?

Also all "secure apps" that aren't fully open source should be considered insecure by default. No compromises. Whatsapp, Snapchat, Hangouts, Skype, they're all insecure and you can't rely on them for keeping your communications private.

The app was far from being a "secure" app. And going by how far they've to promote it as a "secure" app, of course there should be an equal amount of response for why it's not secure (since it isn't!). This is not just about some "guys making an app and being taken down for it". This is serious stuff. They're claiming their security is one of the best in the world, when it couldn't be farther from the truth. Why would you want such an app to be popular and make people think it's actually secure, when it's not?

EFF is doing such amazing work with these lawsuits. I hope people remember to help them out and donate:

https://supporters.eff.org/donate

You could also help this campaign for privacy tools which NYT and many other journalists are going to need from now on, to reach its goal:

https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/

Now, if they can adopt F2FS (flash friendly file system) for SSD's, that would be neat, too. On Motorola's latest phones and in benchmarks it shows substantial performance difference (~50 percent more on average or so).

I actually read that Boeing was in the lead for winning this contract before, but I don't remember the source.

They pick on this guy and harass him with every chance they get to "send him a message" (they should know by now that doesn't work on him, but anyways). The US government really is extremely petty and vengeful. And that's just one of the many reasons why letting it have so much power over anyone in the world at anytime through mass surveillance is so dangerous.

And knowing that, they still chose to implement it in Windows?

Are you saying there should be no outrage over this because "they should've known better"? Let's not forget the website is a victim of an oppressive government, ultimately.

You're also implying, people shouldn't try to do "free press" in an oppressive country. By that logic, nobody should've thought freely in communist countries either. They would've just gotten themselves into trouble. And yet, that's exactly how a society evolves - by having more and more people try to think and talk freely, despite knowing the government won't like it.

I see it's not mentioning the open source KeePass.

> And finally, the most exciting news: we've signed a first contract with iSEC partners to evaluate large portions of the Windows software and bootloader code. This review will begin in January.

That's huge. I assume you're not referring to having access to the Windows source code, though.

Here's a crazy idea. After the whole NSA stuff, many governments are going to require Microsoft to give them access to the source code, if they want them to continue using it, or buy the new versions of Windows. Any chance you could contact such a government, to allow you to do the audit on their behalf, or to work together with them on it?

That would be a win-win for everyone. They get a team of experts to review the Windows code base, and you get to know everything about Windows. They probably won't be very eager to get Americans to do this for them, though, so make sure you flaunt all of your credentials.

Unpack the extension, too? This process probably reduced the external extension installations by 100x, while they can still pretend that you can still technically install external extensions.

First off, I think their original excuse was BS, because I very much doubt more than a marginal number of users were affected by malicious extensions this way. And second, there has to be a balance between what's safe by default, and what level of freedom/flexibility you have. If that "freedom" is hidden away in 10 layers of submenus, then might as well kill it for good, because it's not going to help anyone.

Not anymore:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57611380-93/google-to-ban-e...

I agree with others - there's a trend here.

Well I can think of at least one extension that they'd love to make disappear for good.

The end of RSA (the company)? I find it absurd that a security company no less, would hear many veteran cryptographers say this is backdoored a decade ago, and still going ahead and using it - as the default! Who stakes the whole reputation of their company in the field for a meager $10 million (I assume RSA was pretty big back then, too)? It's insane.

RSA, much like NIST, can not, and should not be trusted any longer. All of their customers should be warned, and advised to quit them ASAP. Companies need to learn this is just unacceptable.

What the hell? And people are still skeptical about trusted computing having backdoors?

You mean something like this?

http://cipherbit.org/

Second DJB! Would be the perfect choice, especially now that more and more cryptographers are looking to his curves and protocols, so he already knows what the vision for the future of IETF should be. I'm actually quite excited about the possibility of him being named chair at IETF.

As IETF chair he may be even bring us the elusive "secure by default Internet" with his CurveCP protocol or a future evolution of it. The secure by default Internet has actually been declared one of the main goals of IETF at their recent meeting:

http://www.ietf.org/live/

http://curvecp.org/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8EGA834Nok

Even after this you still don't think they're actively subverting encryption standards?

http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg123...

What do you think about Surespot?

https://www.surespot.me/documents/how_surespot_works.html

Yes, that's what they're doing. I checked them out earlier this year and I remember being disappointed they didn't offer forward secrecy like OTR.

What happens to that facility if the Supreme Court/Congress bans mass surveillance - which would imply they don't need it anymore (to host that many servers)? I fear that if we let them continue to use it, they'll keep running the mass surveillance in secret under new names and with new secret budgets. That's why I think it should be closed down and sold off. Make it physically hard for them to perform mass surveillance even in secret.

They were way too early to the market. Maybe it would've been ok to be there since Cortex A15, but being there at the Cortex A9 generation always seemed premature - at least for big customers like HP, Facebook, and so on. Maybe they should've tried selling them to the same people who like the idea of a much weaker Raspberry Pi server. Instead they tried to sell only to a few big guys, and none of them were really that interested.

I'm not too worried about them, though. They'll probably get acquired by someone like Samsung, or Qualcomm, or Nvidia.