conformal

they live is one of the best john carpenter films, and that includes the epic 10-minute on-concrete wrestling match before keith david will don the glasses.

being extremely entertained to see a blog entry about they live aside, making privacy simple is super hard. similarly, making people care about privacy is super hard. killing the aliens is even harder.

ubiquitous surveillance has a pretty obvious response in the long run: ubiquitous encryption.

space-alien technology speculation aside, i've been aware of openssh's less-than-reassuring default selection order for Ciphers, HostKeyAlgorithms, KexAlgorithms and MACs for a few years. for most modern computers and cpus, using these stronger algos amounts to, at most, a 10% speed loss when scp'ing and a 10% increase in cpu usage. even machines with weaker cpus will barely show any signs of fatigue with these stronger algos. despite this, at least 2 of the openssh devs have rebuked my suggestion to change the default algorithm selection order.

it's not exactly clear (to me) why anyone who runs a project that so many ppl depend on for security would stick to such old and crufty algos. since openssh and openbsd are intertwined, it does make me wonder if this is being done so that openssh can run on the latest vax, etc (omg! but it will take a week for it to generate the right sized keys!).

EDIT: openssh in 2nd paragraph changed from openbsd, a typo.

oh, you mean like VT-d etc on intel cpus.

what reason could you possibly have to suspect that the IOMMUs from a company named "intel" are backdoored? :)

good luck detecting baseband attacks in the wild. i hope you've got a transceiver with you and a rainbow table for cracking the A5/1 etc on your cell link.

i really am a fan of what moxie et al are doing with textsecure. i am less of a fan of redphone, but that's another matter (zrtp, woof).

while i trust textsecure, it is hard to trust any mobile OS and mobile hardware.

i hear they are going to ban air soon because pedophiles can use it prey on children.

i think it's great to see ppl being skeptical of security claims from phone manufacturers. trying to secure a normal cellphone is pretty much impossible and if you're storing sensitive information on one, you are just waiting to get fucked.

i think all this "sound and fury" is likely a ruse to entice ios and android users into a false sense of safety post snowden disclosure. being able to encrypt your drive doesn't matter if your OS and its applications are exploitable. last time i checked, there is almost zero open source firmware out there, so your application processor can encrypt stuff hitting disk and the baseband processor can be used to get dma.

time to roll out the hypothetical child molester straw man...

your characterization of visits to the doctor is spot on: they are gatekeepers to medication and treatment and they have a warped incentive structure that biases them to under-treat anyone they don't "believe".

on top of what you describe, i find most doctors to be biased towards "i know better than you" behavior. i have found that being an intelligent person makes dealing with doctors especially difficult since you need to be strategic to convince them and at the same time appear to not know too much about your own health problems. i have had incompetent resident doctors argue with me just because i know more about my illness than they do, and their ego is such that they cannot admit to themselves or me that they are wrong.

any technology that leads to me spending less time interacting with doctors is a huge win.

even better, how about you name the compounds he "discovered" and demonstrate that they were not the subject of prior work.

maybe i should write a book about a whole bunch of stuff other ppl did, not give proper attribution, then demand that people prove that i did not invent it.

it's not slander, it's the truth. someone else discovered and tested MDMA many decades before sasha, but he is credited with "discovering" the compound.