zahllos

I mostly agree. C++ is mature, has standards and a whole array of production ready libraries. If I wanted to build a production cross platform GUI app today and not use electron (vomit) I would likely use Qt for it. Rust has nothing that is quite ready yet to offer there.

However, my overall view is that Rust is the right direction. If I had to improve C++, it would look a lot like Rust: move bounds checking and ownership to the compiler not the template compiler, remove classes, introduce traits and make C++ have concepts that don't require me to type every punctuation symbol on my keyboard to use, const by default.

Getting the compiler to do some of this checking by default is exactly what I want. If we can have an Ada/Spark style subset via Kani, also done at compile time to check correctness, even better.

> It's still an incredibly convincing argument. Rust has decent C interop, but it's not especially seamless to do safely.

I would make this statement slightly stronger. If you interop with C code and there are bugs in C code, all bets are off. You don't get any magical protection because your main routine is written in Rust. Cross-language safety, e.g. C++/Javascript, for example, is a very difficult problem. Here's a discussion of C++ and Rust https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3485832.3485903 If you want a tl;dr of that paper, it is that memory corruptions in C or C++ code sharing the address space of safe Rust code can make safe Rust code unsafe too. There have been plenty of attempts to study for example the interactions between browser C++ and the various runtimes a browser hosts.

The compact you are making with the Rust compiler when you type 'unsafe' is that you are saying you have verified the correctness of that code: that it is in fact already safe and the compiler should not (probably because it cannot) check it. The same is true of any FFI code you use. However, this is not how many people actually _use_ Rust. Here for example is a 2 year old unfixed segfault in a Rust crate caused by interfacing with non-Rust code: https://rustsec.org/advisories/RUSTSEC-2020-0159. This a) demonstrates the issue and b) demonstrates that random crates pulled off crates.io can contain safety issues for 2+ years with no fix.

No it isn't the entire issue. Or more precisely on your average desktop system this isn't really a problem. The jitter dance will suffice here.

The clue is in randomness seed files. You won't have one of these on a PC because you don't need it. Once you have your 128/256 bits of entropy you can stretch this using a DRBG for actual use and it'll be good.

The problem is systems that are much more deterministic, because they have simpler CPUs that don't do speculative execution, or have anything fancy by way of caching. Their peripherals are fixed at boot time via a devicetree file and udev style peripheral plug and play doesn't happen.

These tend to be embedded use cases. To get around this, you have a seed file to give you at least some good entropy. Then you mix in the best you can get and update that seed file for next boot. Hopefully this plus what you get while the device is on is enough for next time.

A lot of crypto including the tls you might use to get stuff off the internet will break if the quality of randomness is not good enough.

You are reading 'Linux' and hearing 'desktop' but the reality is there is a lot more embedded Linux than desktop Linux, and that's where the entropy problems start to creep in depending on the device in question.

Looks like I fired off a bit too hard as I saw peer to peer and... That means something specific. Sorry about that. There's far too much 'zero knowledge encryption' on the internet, eurgh.

Seems WhatsApp does use noise pipes for some some long running connections. Just checked their doc to be sure.

I dunno how to say this but Noise is really a set of possible handshakes with various security guarantees (or, more like, aims, which we are reasonably sure are met), which kinda followed on from X3DH/Signal Protocol. I'm unsure how you got that Noise is a client-server protocol and Signal is peer to peer. When you send a whatsapp message you still send it to WhatsApp servers and the client-server protocol here is probably just TLS. Likewise, when you receive it, probably TLS also. However that message is encrypted "end-to-end" in the sense that the server cannot decrypt the actual message payload on the way. Noise _also_ enables this. Critically this is not peer-to-peer: the clients are still relaying messages via a central server.

Peer-to-peer communication in WhatsApp in the network topology sense happens where possible when making Voice and Video calls, as this is probably WebRTC-derived (it is WebRTC in everything else these days), which concretely involves some kind of call signalling, then p2p setup to talk RTP if possible. This is not Signal Protocol or Noise: it is most likely the S in SRTP with key agreement done over the Signal Protocol. In other words, no key ratcheting between voice or video packets. I'm actually not sure if the session key is ever changed for a given call. To make this clear: call setup happens via a central server but the media streams will go from your IP to theirs directly, if possible (or proxied via WhatsApp if not). The reason for doing calls p2p like this is where possible is to reduce latency.

This is also, last time I looked, true of Signal. We are good at end-to-end text. We are less good at voice/video, particularly voice/video group calls that might not be p2p-able and rather require the server to do something with the RTP streams.

Now, what you're actually missing is that WhatsApp was in its early days based on a fork of ejabberd, the Erlang XMPP Server, with if I understand correctly custom extensions. Thus WhatsApp actually was at some stage somewhat compatible with open standards.

We've also kinda been here before. Google Talk used to interoperate with XMPP just fine and at one stage my own XMPP server could talk to my friends on Google Talk and they'd pretty much not notice.

I agree however that it would be better to have a new protocol that starts based on end to end key agreement like Signal/Noise, rather than use XMPP. Or perhaps use XMPP _inside_ this protocol. This is because "opt-in" crypto is a disaster that probably has happened. Signal and Noise are also missing what the body of those messages should look like and standards for agreeing for example calls, media transfer and so on, basically all the non-crypto parts.

Yes I agree.

It also costs money to make money. Minting coins isn't free: you need the right cupronickel mix or whatever they're using so that the coin matches specifications. This is an industrial process like any other.

Also not all of the countries ask the mint to actually mint. They're buying "flans" i.e. coin shaped metal that hasn't been struck yet, just prepared according to spec. They strike the coins themselves.

As others have noted I think it really also depends what your domestic situation is, i.e. can the whole process be done in a cost effective and safe way where you are? If not... This is just the cloud but for country tokens ;)

Aside from electronic waste, if you ever happen to be in South Wales you can visit the Royal Mint and it is quite fascinating.

They strike coins not just for the UK but also quite a few other nations. They also make the precursor alloy mixes for quite a few more nations, who then only do the striking part for their national currency. All in all, there is a possibility your nation's coins may have in part been made there.

The exhibition they have explains it better than I can and you can see out onto part of the factory floor. I also got to strike a coin... Well... The machine struck it but I pressed "please strike it". So. Not a bad way to spend an afternoon if you are there.

I would disagree on brexit. Am British and brexit sentiment predated the campaign by quite some time. Also many people eligible to vote for this and holding such anti EU positions were elderly, so if the Russian influence campaign was entirely online they would all have missed it.

Maybe Russia funded some campaigns, not sure. Maybe they were able to sway some voters, again, not sure. But my impression is that there was already a sizeable portion of the population pro brexit. I'd be more inclined to lay this at the feet of Murdoch than Putin.

Dual EC DRBG is the known backdoored curve. You have the links to the high level story in a sibling comment.

I would also like to add, however, that the possibility of a backdoor was patented by Scott Vanstone I think, and raised in NIST standardization process (and I suspect standardized under pressure from the NSA more than anything). Other negative facts that were raised include the fact that it sucks badly, i.e. compared to just about any other RNG, it performs very poorly. So the process isn't as bad as it looks.

DualEC was a backdoor, but not a very good one. People noticed the possibility and it sucks compared to literally anything else. The only people who used it appear to be customers of RSA Inc.

I would also like to add that Elliptic (not Elliptical, these are not the equations of ellipses) Curves, even the NIST ones, are not known to be backdoored and there's no evidence they contain any weaknesses at present. There are plenty of non-American cryptographers who are unlikely to keep any analysis a secret if they found such evidence, and I would say quite a few American ones who would also publish.

This is a terrible idea, or one might say, not at all cogent thinking.

I deplore what Putin is doing in Ukraine. This is a war of aggression undertaken because he is scared of the democracy in Ukraine making its way to Moscow (i.e. Russians wanting democracy too).

But. Ensuring Russians can see a view of the world not provided to them by Putin is critical to stopping him and those like him. It gives them access to news on what is happening in Ukraine and gives us news on what is happening in Russia. Cutting off the internet makes his life a lot easier.

I can only imagine people from the State Department to newsrooms to the CIA are hitting their foreheads repeatedly on their respective desks.

Rather than write crypto, what I'd actually recommend is to break it. Schneier put together a block cipher cryptanalysis course a long time ago and while I don't usually recommend his crypto books these days, the course is good: https://www.schneier.com/academic/archives/2000/01/self-stud... (in this case, his crypto book might actually be useful, because it documents some of these out of date ciphers. There's (was?) a mistake in the DES code though iirc).

It is essentially a tour of all the early cryptanalysis literature, complete with suggestions of ciphers to target (e.g. FEAL). This will give you a sense of how the attacks work. Many of the ciphers are old, but I wouldn't let that put you off.

The study technique for this would be a) implement each cipher with toggles to control rounds and any other features, then implement attacks. Most of the papers should be open access by now since the 'course' was written in the year 2000. You could also 'catch up' on the constructions and attacks that have come out since.

I would caveat this with: what I am advising is purely for potential interest. Bear in mind there is little need to implement new block ciphers these days (what I'm saying is: this is a very specialized skill and most people won't find jobs in it).

Another point to consider is the IPv6 global routing table for internet routers. Suppose you decided to give end users /120s instead and those /120s were all routable on the internet. That means there are 120 bits of addressing just to find the network. There are 2^120 such networks in theory. If you could actually enumerate this, you'd be well on your way to bruteforcing AES128. In other words, this is just infeasible.

By handing out /48s the routing table stays manageable. This is the smallest address block you can announce via BGP for this reason.

Given the utter vastness of IPv6 we are also able to do things like carve out an entire /7, fc00::/7, for unique local addresses, and still tell people they shouldn't actually need these addresses at all.

As to the actual process of getting a PI block, I think it is likely to involve some questions. A similar objection exists to handing out smaller than /48s: more people having their own block implies more routing entries. Much better if an existing provider carves you a /48 out of their allocation and routes you traffic. This is probably balanced against the fact that by requiring you to deal with an existing LIR and set up BGP (and your LIR won't want you to muck that up) the number of people who will actually do this just for fun is limited.

Agree. While I can't help but feel the timing of this announcement is deeply cynical given the appalling behaviour of number 10 staff and Boris, I also feel the BBC's editorialising has gone too far.

A good place to see this is actually on the Radio, particularly things like the Today programme and Radio 5 live. Brexit was a stark example of the same kind of coverage. Regardless of what you think of Brexit, they gave only lip service to the idea of any kind of reasoned debate (to be clear, I am not commenting either way, although I have lived in Europe for the better part of a decade and speak multiple EU languages fluently). 5 Live's 'debates' often descended into acrimony.

Boris actually banned ministers from appearing on the Today programme of the BBC at one stage, which to use a current favourite term amongst reporters is 'unprecedented'.

Don't get me wrong, the government needs to be held to account and I'm fine with the BBC roasting the government over partygate, but the BBC is a public service broadcaster that is supposed to be impartial as much as is possible. If the journalists prefer to follow an editorial line, they can move to a newspaper outlet aligning with their views. The BBC don't need to stick to the government lines either, but they should present the facts and host civil debates and BBC journalists should hold themselves to strict impartiality rules.

I think they've long annoyed conservative ministers. I'm not sure I think partygate is going too far (unlike say the relentless negativity you mention during the pandemic) but clearly Ministers have now decided to act and I can't say the BBC made a great case for themselves.

I think you probably already have the answers you were seeking (yes, ideally you should) but I'd like to add some points:

Ideally, it would be nice if the code has a professional-level quality to it, but I think everyone involved in evaluating research understands that it is at best a prototype. Proper software engineering is expensive, and it is not the role of research to do this. The process, as it was explained to me: university research pushes the state of the art, industrial research labs are slightly behind this and looking to transfer into practical uses (along with this some government agencies are interested in tech transfer) and finally software engineering takes these ideas and turns them into actual products. You aren't making a product, so it is OK for the code not to be perfect (also, from experience, 'professional' industry code is not always that great either). The main point is that someone has some chance of reproducing your results.

The exception to this is if you are making a product, where the definition of product is a tool for further research. Examples might be tools for symbolic execution or formal verification, in which case it might be worth some time to make the experience of using it good for that benefit, to reduce friction so that people try and want to use your tool.

Artefact evaluation is rapidly becoming something people are encouraged to do and helps enormously in verifying results, but the point is usually to try to reproduce the results of the paper to back up the science, not to start an argument over coding style. I would hope that artefact evaluation processes make this clear and ensures that evaluations of artefacts focus on reproducibility. For outside comments that might arise, I suggest you publish the work as open source and respond to any criticisms with a fairly standard line: yes this is research quality code and we would like to have time to improve it. If you would like to submit a patch/pull request we would welcome any help.

The main argument in favour of age is that it only does one thing: encrypting files, and does it 'well' in the sense there is no need to edit your gnupg config file to exclude all the crypto from the 90s that your version of gnupg might decide to default to.

This makes things significantly simpler in terms of the code for age, which reduces the possible bugs and possible misuse.

GnuPG is more versatile and tries to solve a number of (arguably, orthogonal) problems, including signing and authentication (by users and also of keys in the web of trust). This leads to more complexity, and some parts, e.g. the web of trust, can't really be described as being a success. Others, such as sign and encrypt, likely don't achieve semantic security (also the case in SMIME / CMS, and I'm not sure if this has ever been fixed) and definitely don't achieve the forward/future secrecy guarantees of say Signal. Age isn't trying to be a messenger, so it doesn't need to worry about this.

It comes down to this: if you use AES-Something with GnuPG or you use ChaCha20-Poly1305 with Age, it is unlikely ever to be meaningfully broken in our lifetimes (including if you are currently 1 day old and including by quantum computers) and everything will be fine. But age will only use ChaCha20-Poly1305, and the format is pretty simple, while GnuPG can be convinced to decrypt CAST5 encrypted messages and has a much more complex format that introduces a greater risk of binary parser vulnerabilities.

Age is written in Go (there's also Rage, written in Rust), whereas GnuPG is a big old ball of C, so if there are parser bugs, GnuPG is bad news and Go/Rust are likely hopefully sound.

It makes no sense, but this:

> In many parts of the world (including the US & U.K.) the idea of central government holding an accessible database of everyone’s identifies, and mandating participation, is cultural and political suicide.

Is a very true statement. I am British but I live in Switzerland. If I want to do anything here, I send a copy of my residency permit. Bank statements wouldn't count.

The UK actually did experiment with ID cards under the Blair/Brown government. I never had one, they were only issued in a trial area. There was a campaign against it: https://www.no2id.net/ and the Cameron government (2010-brexit) scrapped the ID cards. The law was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_Cards_Act_2006 .

One of the main objections was to the national identity register, which would contain biometrics and not need the card in order to query.

I'm on the fence about this. On the one hand, I'm not sure I trust the UK government to run any kind of IT scheme - they tend to pick huge consultancies, waste enormous sums of money and the result is late, 6x the price and doesn't actually work. Also the biometrics thing seems excessive. On the other hand, there are plenty of centralised databases already and if you ever want to drive a car, at least one of them prints out an ID-0 sized card with your photo on it. I would also, honestly, prefer an identity card over proving my identity with easily forged bank statements.

I did some digging, because every time I have heard of ChatControl I have seen all this talk about what the EU plans to do and no evidence.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE... is the strategy document.

So far, there is a temporary derogation from the ePrivacy Directive (https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/docs_autres_instituti...). The ePrivacy directive as part of the EECC forbids (for the sake of discussion) email providers from scanning Maildirs, even if those maildirs are cleartext (as is the case for the majority of providers, s/Maildir/backend storage). The temporary derogation lets them scan for CSE in these sources.

I don't see any proposed regulation explicitly targeting end-to-end encryption, but their strategy document does seem to label end-to-end as a problem, citing the NCMEC (US). The project is here: https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-sa... .

In Switzerland the insurance system has various deductibles you can choose from per year, and then a monthly premium that varies per deductible. If you can't afford to pay this for genuine reasons, then the cantons will step in as part of the social insurance system. Once you have paid out of your deductible, insurance covers 90% up to a certain value and then everything.

Costs for treatments are standardized and agreed on nationally: you can go and look them up. Your bill has codes on it that match this list. It is called TARMED: https://www.bag.admin.ch/bag/fr/home/versicherungen/krankenv...

Insurers under the LAMal system are restricted in what they charge for premiums too, and must negotiate this with the confederation.

There's still a lot of scope for private companies to make money here. LAMal covers what are deemed essential treatments, which is most things you need a doctor for. If you want 'alternative' medicine there are insurers you can pay more money to for that. Likewise, if when you go to hospital you want a guaranteed private room every time, then you can pay extra for that. And so on.

Even on the basic system, you have a choice between telephone doctor for all appointments except emergencies, family doctor for the same or the unrestricted system where you can ring up a specialist yourself without referral. Needless to say, the one where you ring the insurer first is cheaper, followed by the family doctor (similar to the UK: referrals are controlled via your GP).

I don't see any poor doctors here, or poor insurers either (insurance, behind banking, is a massive business here). So it is entirely possible to design a system that includes a large amount of private insurance that also doesn't randomly try to bankrupt people for getting stitches.

Also if you do commute to work every day by train, it probably makes sense to buy a GA (a yearly ticket that gives you unlimited travel on all swiss public transport for that year) for 3800chf. Almost anyone I know commuting some distance does this.

Of course if you work in Geneva that's a different matter. There aren't any trains in Geneva as it just isn't big enough, but unireso's tram network is widely used.

This is particularly timely because right now there's a hole in the line between Lausanne and Geneva. Consequently you can't currently take a train either way and have to use a replacement bus. The autoroute is seeing stupid levels of traffic right now as a result as all the people who usually take the train get in cars instead.

Chamonix is almost certainly slower by train unless there are traffic issues. This is also likely true of the Swiss resorts too because personal motorised transport avoids the inconveniences of waiting and changing that trains inevitably have. But the article is about eliminating short haul flights in Europe, not this.

I'll second this. I am very familiar with latex. I have even done similar things to my neovim configuration (I use ultisnips) and have a few custom latex 'sty'les to include various commands to do stuff I do frequently but is a pain otherwise.

This however is and was for end-product stuff: my own personal collection of condensed notes, assignments that needed to be typed, and so on (I also use ultisnips for coding). I studied mathematics as a undergrad (I have a first class degree in Mathematics from a UK university) and I hand-wrote my lectures, and I know many mathematicians that are frankly much better than I am who find computers frankly difficult and avoided LaTeX as long as they possibly could.

What matters (if you are studying mathematics) is doing mathematics (exercises, experimentation, understanding proofs etc). There is no substitute. This is a nice to have, but will not make you a better mathematician. If you want to know how to be a good student, IMO this is a nice guide: https://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/system/files/attachments/study_pu...

User mode code is a different scenario. There are three possibilities:

- unsigned code pops up with a big warning 'your pc will explode' or something like that when you try to run it. - signed code does not need a cross signed certificate. Any CA can include the code signing oids and voila. This displays as yellow but the CN is extracted as the publisher name. - Finally EV certificates give you 'instant reputation' i.e. no orange warning. The difference is entirely audit related and the OIDs you may include. The crypto is identical to normal certs.

This I'm fine with. I understand Microsoft wanting to protect their kernel and the user experience and I'm on board with that but I like the fact that windows has traditionally been a very open system. It is a real shame it is heading the other way.

I haven't developed windows drivers for years though, or used windows as my daily machine for years either (it was Linux at home, windows at work, now Linux for both).

That's really good news and I'm glad they decided to do that.

There are two sides to this coin. Firstly there's the hardware vendors who make firmware, who decided to incorporate UEFI presumably because intel pushed it hard (original efi booted itanium and is also found in older Macs).

But it was certainly possible for a Linux vendor to have got a key into the kek and dB lists: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/12368.html

That's from Matthew Garrett, who along with Peter Jones, were responsible for the first shim.

A central authority like the Linux foundation could have stepped up here and could have since, actually. I understand why fedora/redhat preferred not to be in a privileged position but I can't help but feel someone ought to have stepped up.

The other side of the coin is the windows logo program, that requires secure boot be turned on by default. For x86 I'm fairly sure it also requires that the user can take control of the platform key and therefore evict Microsoft keys from the firmware. It also requires that secure boot should be disabled. I'm fairly sure Microsoft did this because they realised there would be objections otherwise

Microsoft's ARM hardware _is_ locked down with no such options and I object to that wholeheartedly. But then I also don't buy Apple kit for daily driver use for the same reason. Also luckily Microsoft are currently irrelevant in the arm space, although that might change with the serverready profiles.

I am sure the process was onerous, but someone could have done it. Linux is big business in the server hardware space and intel for example contributed the thunderbolt code to the kernel. I am fairly sure they could between them organise a foundation and throw a few 100ks per year at maintaining a signing key for other distros independently to Microsoft.

I don't believe any entirely locked down firmware ever made it into any x86 board.

The article mentions Process Explorer. Since Sysinternals were bought by Microsoft many years ago and the tools are distributed directly via Microsoft, such tools are unlikely to have an issue being signed.

A brief history of the process for those not following it. Originally for kernel-mode drivers, you needed a code signing certificate cross signed by Microsoft's root. This means that the certificate follows a chain up to a standard CA _and also_ one Microsoft use to approve that CA to issue kernel-mode certificates. It was not sufficient to have a certificate capable of signing code, even with MS' OIDs for that.

Then, around Windows 10 I think, Microsoft announced that one would need to acquire an EV certificate. You would then be required to submit the driver package via sysdev.microsoft.com and after spending time in Ballmer's Brewery, it would come out signed by Microsoft.

It was technically possible to use the old mechanism at this stage too, provided the end user did not have UEFI secure boot enabled. IF secure boot were enabled, the kernel would: a) if the driver was signed pre-Win10, accept it, b) if it was signed post win-10 RTM date and by Microsoft, accept otherwise reject.

Thus the only mechanism to realistically get your driver working on all Windows out of the box is to submit via sysdev. You can't realistically ask users to disable secure boot, even if this is entirely possible on all x86 motherboards.

Finally, the cross signed roots expire soon and I think some already have. Microsoft have decided that this mechanism will now be retired, and all drivers must be signed via sysdev from now on. You still require an EV certificate as well, to sign the package.

This is a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, Microsoft have repeatedly signed the shim maintained by redhat in order to allow Linux distributions to boot directly on secure boot-enabled hardware (UEFI binaries also go through this process and always have). Microsoft have their keys in the default keychain because they bothered to be involved in the process, unlike linux companies like Redhat. So on the one hand, they're being quite friendly to open source.

On the other hand, the push to EV certs rules out individual developers like myself[1]. I could register a company but... that entails effort and expense for a hobby project. And now hobbyist projects like this run the risk of being rejected by MS.

I mostly believe this is an attempt to reduce the number of code signing cert leaks that result in people writing malware, and lock down the Windows kernel a bit more, but still. It is a shame.

[1] This is because most CAs won't issue EV certificates to individuals, even if those individuals happen to have detailed knowledge of cryptography and all the pkcs.

Slight nitpick I know but decrypt here is the not quite the right word. The communications are still encrypted in flight but they are necessarily decrypted (by WhatsApp) on the end (your device). This unencrypted file is then provided to drive if you select back up with Google drive in WhatsApp.

I'm in two minds about this one. I'm not really a fan of Google but realistically we're talking about backing up messages from a Facebook app. It is also possible to opt out and I know non technical people who have done so on the basis they don't want "more Google".

A maintenance window doesn't necessarily have to mean downtime either, it could just mean time you can make changes where people are on hand to fix it if things go wrong.

To extend your analogy, it might be a terrible idea to start doing maintenance on a single line track that sees high usage in a holiday season just before those holidays where everyone wants to get away or get home as do your staff. So you might implement what is usually called a change freeze.

On the other hand you might have a different time where demand is low. Shutting down the line if it comes to that will annoy some people but not as many. So you plan your maintenance then and have people ready in case things go wrong.

The remarkable 2 still doesn't support pdf bookmarks? Seriously?

I use a Fujitsu Quaderno (was from Sony). Similar idea, no epub support but pdf links and bookmarks, on device search? These all work.

Another aspect to consider: this is all a very US-centric view. In the UK, getting hired without a degree is not impossible (I did it) but very difficult, and some processes will simply filter you out. Large employers like IBM want a 2.2 equivalent degree from a good-ish university, doesn't matter what, and you can potentially go and work for them. Even FAANG, those that are here, e.g. Google, Amazon, Facebook, will primarily recruit people with degrees.

Ditching the degree will also make it harder to move abroad if you want to in the future, since most immigration formalities evaluate education level. This is definitely true when it comes to emigrating _into_ the US, for example.

Also, if you ever decide you need to go back to university (school) to learn about something in the future, I don't know about the US, but in Europe, a condition of entry to masters programmes is always holding a bachelors degree. So if you have to go back to school here, likely you'll be going back to bachelors level. I don't even know how valuable your existing credits would be - I can tell you that they tend to expire in the EU.

So, there are some consequences to this choice. I'm not judging, each to their own, but if it were me, I'd say life isn't a race and unless you are already sat on a potential unicorn and it 'has to be now' Bill-Gates-style, a couple more years while you finish your degree is nothing.

Very true, but the role exists by long standing convention, which in the UK is almost as good ;)

Whereas the role of deputy PM is much more nebulous.

I guess I really wanted to contrast this against the US VP, which while that also hasn't always existed, does mean something, e.g. the next in line of succession and senate tie breaker.

I forgot about that. I think they wanted proportional representation / single transferable vote and alternative vote was already a compromise.

They also promised tuition fees would be abolished. As a junior partner they were unlikely to achieve that, but the government they were part of ended up tripling them. So they didn't even 'prevent things from getting worse'.

Further clarification: deputy prime minister is not a position that exists as a matter of constitution in the UK. The position was created for Clegg as the junior partner in a coalition government. I think it has existed before and no doubt will again, but you don't need to have a deputy PM.

He also reneged so hard on a campaign promises as part of the 2010 coalition his Liberal Democrat party was wiped out in the 2015 election and is now a non-entity in British politics. They went from 57 seats to 8.

I'm British. I used to be able to name the leader of the lib dems in the same way I knew the leaders of labour and the conservatives. I now no longer know who they are and I don't think anyone else cares either.

So yeah the guy that brought that about is earning 4MM/yr.