cdf2theworld

It's true, I've only been on the military side of the IC, so everything I've been exposed to has been offensive in nature. That being said, the attitude of everyone I've met in the IC has been "we need to be able to access everything, at any cost". This attitude comes from the top (how else would it be so pervasive), and it is completely at odds with any sense of security for the average citizen. I think that this overall attitude is what really skews me. I'm familiar with SELinux, and why it was made open source; but I'm also familiar with Dual_EC_DRBG. Seems SELinux release may have been more a red herring or PR stunt than an actual attempt to protect security of the average person, given how much effort they put into defeating the security of the average person.

You're right, there's no existing solution to exempt US citizens from these exploits. However, with the massive resources available to them, if they focused on enhancing our security rather than fouling it, I very much believe we would be better off. Think about how much crime occurs in the modern era through electronic hacks and exploits. Would it be better to have these intel back channels, or to stop these crimes? Their priorities are in the wrong place, through tradition more than anything else.

There are many, many platforms that are "occasionally used by adversaries". The Intelligence Community has put exceptional resources towards one that has a very significant market share among it's citizens. And given the wholesale surveillance we are already under, I can't accept that this was an innocuous decision.

Trust is built through positive actions over time. I have zero trust for our Intelligence Community as is; and I've actually worked with US intelligence. If they devoted a majority of their efforts to finding and patching security risks through public and open source means, I would slowly start to trust them again.

And even that was not declassified, in the normal sense. Documents were burgled by patriots and released to the public.

"the enemy's devices"

Which enemy?

Tell us what you really think

Regarding the DMCA, I think you need to insert the word "intended" in there, in order to make it a try statement. The DMCA was intended to provide those protections... It has become a channel for baseless abuse.

Information loss is inevitable when that information isn't used enough to become inately retained. When we focus on a particular area of study, what we learn is self-reinforcing. If I study calculus and discrete math, my understanding and retention increases in each subject, because the overlap between them connects mental pathways. If I study calculus and eastern Asian religions, retention suffers because my brain cannot make meaningful connections between the two. This lack of coherence in what I'm learning means that I'm wasting my time with one of those subjects ;)

I'm sorry, I don't understand what you are getting at. With the internet in it's current state, notes from college years 1&2 are useless... I could go on Wikipedia and YouTube and get the same, if not higher quality, information about those subjects. FWIW, I still have all of those notes. The understanding and intuitive development is what suffers, not having the information available.

It adds a new discussion! That discussion is titled, "Is sk0g an overbearing asshole?" Let's jump in and find out what HN thinks!

Exceptional explanation!

Student here - I was struck by the "summer learning loss" quoted in the article. Everyone I talk to has this, myself included. The greatest reason for this, personally, is subject diffusion. This is especially true from freshman to junior year; we are required to take a dizzying number of classes that not only have nothing to do with our job field, but also have nothing to do with each other. I understand that it's important to "gain broad interests", but I retained very very little until my junior year, when all of the irrelevant courses had been completed. This issue may be coupled with the signaling problem, in that not only is the senior year the only year of college that employers care about (because you get handed a credential), but also because you take so little away from school until that point.

I'd say that paying for college should be scaled with the earning benefit it imparts, freshman year costing very little, and senior year costing a majority of the total degree. Thoughts?

Well that's a recipe for success!

I believe CS degrees require discreet math (and highschool algebra 2), which means they've done permutations and combinatorics, so yes they've done these types of problems before. The real question is how long has it been?