throwaway876876

I'm sure he menat "niche" as in web dev or machine learning, not as in "COBOL" or "WPF"

Thanks for sharing.

I find it quite amusing, but in my observation, this 25%/75% split can be found in each age group you'd look at...

What has the message to do with the messenger, in this case? Sure we should be skeptical to all sources - media, individuals, government. Isn't this common sense? The presented information, however, stands on its own, no matter who the person who delivered them represents.

What exactly would we gain from discussing the messenger? Would that move anything forward?

What if we found out Snowden was paid by some russian agency. What exactly would that change? Would the guys at Stellar say "Oh, the russians paid him? Everyone stop changing passwords and re-issuing certificates, guys, everything's fine; he got paid by the russians", and the slides with router passwords would suddenly disappear from the face of earth?

I hope it's the language barrier and I'm failing to understand your point.

"discredit" was the right word, of course.

I disagree. Solutions can involve broadening technical security awareness and education, not only for experts, but for the great masses. Suddenly, people who wouldn't have done it otherwise, are installing PGP, guided by well-designed step-by-step-instructions which haven't existed before Snowden. This is per se a Good Thing.

Awareness leads to more people trying to exploit things previously thought to be at least very improbable to break. Discussions about Crypto-Quines, VM-breakouts, you name it, are suddenly on the rise, at least in my perception (which has since sharpened significantly, and I'm not even in the least involved in security)

Better tools are developed to prevent goto fail;s. Other people fork OpenSSL, sunset SHA1, visit security-related conferences or donate money, you name it. This is a slow process, but things are definitively moving forward.

But again, you're avoiding to answer the question: What a difference would it make if your scenario would be true? Would it negate that mass surveillance exists? Of course not. But that's what's important here, that's what's being worked on by people.

It's one thing to be a classical "we can't win anyway" naysayer, but is's a completely different thing to try to pull an ad hominem derailment, so the question arises: Who are you working for? What if your supervisor came to you telling you "Try to find something about Snowden we can use against him and his findings. A way to discredit him, maybe find someone who went to school with him who can make a fool out of him; maybe try to pull an assange-like sexual assault case on him, anything", what would you do?

Wouldn't we find you here?

This is a Youtube/GEMA issue, however: [1]

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2853834?hl=en ("YouTube Live streams cannot be viewed from Germany.")

Since his "sexual assault" allegations were, in essence, an orchestrated smear campaign to discredit him and by extension Wikileaks, and the health of the former depends on the latter, I see absolutely no problem here.

Why do you?

You're deliberately trying to discredit a person who made available proof that the surveillance machine is out of control.

While everyone else is dissecting the information and trying to digest it and working on solutions to the surveillance problem; you're obsessed with the messenger.

Why?

As a customer in Germany, I find them on almost every international order form.

As a recent example, see KanbanFlow for example https://sites.fastspring.com/kanbanflow/order/customer

The "Zip code" input field is simply hard coded for every country.