Bewarethewumpus

Gou Miyagi does not skateboard how most people skateboard. previously

Riccardo sez, "Snake is an end-to-end encrypted social network running in a browser (standard Web page or plugin) or as a mobile application. We already have a prototype but we are launching a crowdfunding campaign to make it real, and we need your help! Our aim is to make it easy for *everyone* to have one-to-one and many-to-many secure communications, using an interface similar to classic social networks such as Facebook."

This is not only an UI problem, but also more structural: we started from something similar to PGP but improved its scalability in group communication, usability and privacy. For instance, we worked on a way to authenticate public keys without requiring to meet the other end in person (through the Socialist Millionaires' Protocol, a method similar to the one OTR uses) and without disclosing relationships to the public, as happens with PGP's Web of Trust.

Moreover, our implementation of the storage server provides anonymity of data: this means that in case of seizure not only the contents of the messages is protected, but also the metadata and it's therefore impossible to understand who is the sender of a message or whether two users are friends or not.

We chose the state of the art cryptographic primitives in each area: for encryption we use AES in GCM mode, for digital signatures we use ECDSA over secp256r1 and for the key agreement we use FHMQV-C. If you want to know more, take a look at the "Features" page and at the FAQ.

Snake: the privacy-aware social network

On January 1st, around 1:30 in the morning, astronomers spotted an asteroid heading straight for Earth. The good news is that it was probably only between 6.5 and 14 feet long. In fact, the International Astronomical Union says that the asteroid — 2014 AA — has most likely already hit us and burned up in the atmosphere. But here's the cool part: This is just the second time in history that we've spotted an asteroid before it hit us.

(484): He sent me nudes and then a text asking if I tried the new Cantina Bowl from Taco Bell. He sure does romance right, doesn't he?

(+70): I have bad memories with every alcohol but we manage to work through the problems for the good of the relationship.

On Christmas day, former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden appeared in a televised Christmas message on Britain’s Channel 4 in which he urged the people of the world to demand governments put an end to mass surveillance.

Okay, seriously. They're just trolling us now, right?

Author : Jae Miles, Staff Writer

They came from heaven, or hell, or outer space, or under the sea. Earth has been invaded in every way imaginable, thanks to the imaginations of authors over the last three centuries. You would have thought, with such a rich base from which to draw inspirational tactics, that mankind would have done better when it finally happened.

“Commander! They’re reinforcing on the left flank!”

“Captain Yaeger, abandon the dugouts and trenches. Return to the bastion with everyone you have, bringing everything you can.”

They came from a long way away, arriving without warning. It was midday on a beautiful summer day. By three minutes past, most of our continents were in the shadow of spaceships of every imaginable shape and size. Their bombardment was swift, devastating and surprisingly inaccurate. They missed military bases and levelled universities. Warships were ignored while schools and libraries vanished in waves of searing energy. Hospitals were reduced to craters while missile silos stood untouched.

“Commander! They’ve brought up snipers! We’re getting murdered here!”

“Captain Durov, abandon your positions. Withdraw to the bastion with as much gear as your people can carry.”

It took us a few days to realise that they had obliterated ninety percent of humanity between the ages of four and seventeen. They had removed generations of prospective resistance fighters along with our advanced medical capabilities. The strategic analyses turned from bleak to grim.

The raids to take infants and babies were something the analysts didn’t predict. Caught by surprise, our hopes for the future were whisked away. It was a devastating blow. Suicides peaked during the subsequent week.

“Commander! Looks like they’re massing for something!”

“Captain Sung, abandon your positions. Retire to the bastion with your troops and as much gear as they can manage.”

Then the invasion started. They used no area-effect weapons. They came without mercy, solely for the surviving humans. Professor Grey of Roehampton produced and circulated a document after the first week that may as well have been humanity’s epitaph. I remember the final paragraph so well:

‘Our stolen children will be vassals, without history

or knowledge. Our civilisation may form part of the

mythology that they tell each other around the cooking

fires of their simple culture. Apart from that, the

works of man will be forgotten.’

They stalk through this world, killing everyone who remains. You can see how careful they are with the environment, and how uncaring they are of anything created by us.

“Commander. Everyone is here.”

I turn from the bar and drop my cigarette end into the empty shot glass. The last of the Lagavulin is inside me. The Captains of every group are here: the finest, and the last, soldiers in the world.

“Ladies and gentlemen. Eight months ago they came to take our planet. It swiftly became inevitable. We have been fighting desperate battles and saving nothing. So, I propose an all-out attack. Simply because my dear, departed grandfather would be gutted if his bonny lad didn’t go out moving forward with a whiskey inside him, a smoke between his lips and a blazing automatic in his hand. Who’s with me?”

They looked at each other.

Captain Brewster stepped forward: “My dad always said that when it all goes to Hell, you want a Tommy at your side. While everyone else is getting weepy, he’ll be the one having a brew, checking his weapon and lighting a smoke, before asking when we’re going to stop pussyfooting about and get stuck in.”

There were nods and grins. Hands started to rise.

Pour me a shot, grandpa. I’ll be there soon.

On February 4, Bill Nye "The Science Guy" will debate Ken Ham, Creation Museum founder and Answers In Genesis president/CEO, at The Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky just across the river from Cincinnati, Ohio. The event is titled "Is creation a viable model of origins?" This is gonna be good. Tickets are $25 from the Creation Museum. I hope the museum makes a full video available but I bet that will depend on how it plays out. Hopefully an audience member will record and post the whole thing online. "Bill Nye to Visit Creation Museum for Debate" (ABC News, thanks, Bob Pescovitz!)

(image: CC-licensed photo of Creation Museum exhibit by Anthony5429)

Author : David Stevenson

“Once there was a ship, travelling through space. There was a terrible accident. The reason for this is not important. What is important is that one man got suited up in time and was able to survive the immediate aftermath of the ship’s destruction.

Of course, he now had bigger problems. The priorities of anyone lost at sea haven’t changed since antiquity; find the largest piece of wreckage, and head for the nearest landmass. The AI inside the suit looked around itself in the first few milliseconds of booting up and immediately burned the smallest amount of fuel necessary to grab onto a large piece of wreckage, and then burned another small amount of fuel to nudge its course in the direction of a convenient stellar system. The reasons for this are twofold. If rescue comes quickly then they can more easily find a survivor attached to a large object and heading for a logical destination. Should rescue come not at all, then at least you have a large lump of metals and plastics to play with, and you’re heading for a source of energy.

It should be stressed that this was not some government issue, special order, experimental suit. This was an ordinary, off-the-peg, standard issue suit which could be bought for a modest sum by anyone who wanted one. This fact will be very important later on.

There was no rescue, or, if there was, it was too late to make any difference. After a short while the suit conferred with its occupant and they went into hibernation mode.

Have you any idea how long you might drift in these circumstances before coming across a handy stellar system? It’s all been worked out. Going at those sort of speeds, pointing in a random direction, and in that part of the galaxy you’re looking at tens of millions of years. If you get lucky and end up travelling towards the nearest star, maybe just ten thousand. It took half a million years before this suit came close enough to a star to wake up and start repairing the damage of the centuries.

It took another few thousand years to loop around the star in huge cometary orbits and eventually end up in the asteroid belt, close enough to collect solar radiation, and with a plentiful supply of raw materials.

Solar panels, microwave emitters, ion drives. It’s amazing what you can do with a determined AI, emergency nano-manufactories, and a lot of time. You can build a simple spaceship, which only really needs some basic propulsion and a big heat shield, and then you can land on the nearest planet, while the hardware you left in orbit beams down power and launches manufactured goods at you.

Again, I should stress that this was a standard survival protocol, in a standard suit.

The occupant of the suit awoke to a new world. Every human need was catered for. The bio-vats had come online just before he was woken up, and the next twenty humans were due to be born, fully adult, and with personalities supplied from the vast storage capabilities of the suit’s AI.

Within a few centuries the entire planet was habitable and occupied and these new humans spread outwards once more.

Every other race who tried to conquer us announced their intentions and turned up with a huge fleet of ships. Not only did your people seize half the planets in this sector, they did it by accident. This story is the one we tell our children when they ask why we kill all humans at first sight.”

Bravo, New York Times!

Considering the enormous value of the information he has revealed, and the abuses he has exposed, Mr. Snowden deserves better than a life of permanent exile, fear and flight. He may have committed a crime to do so, but he has done his country a great service. It is time for the United States to offer Mr. Snowden a plea bargain or some form of clemency that would allow him to return home, face at least substantially reduced punishment in light of his role as a whistle-blower, and have the hope of a life advocating for greater privacy and far stronger oversight of the runaway intelligence community.

BE THE FIRST ON YOUR BLOCK to see Tom the Dancing Bug, by @RubenBolling, every week! Members of the elite and prestigious INNER HIVE get the comic emailed to their inboxes at least a day before publication -- and much, much MORE!

JOIN!! (or don't.)

Nacho Punch created a contrafactual Star Wars/1980s anime adaptation from an alternate timeline that is pretty funny and eerily plausible (especially given the poor grade of animation adaptations undertaken by Lucas in that period).

Star Wars: The Lost 1980's Anime

ecnamor-lacimehc-ym:

gallifrey-feels:

sociopathic-italian-grandmas:

millshouse:

meganiun:

happyvegetable:

kennilworthy-thisp:

derinthemadscientist:

lumoslouis:

soloontherocks:

amour-vengeance:

later-homenuggets:

my friend left her window open in her bedroom and came back to find this

look at his self-satisfied little face, the cheeky shit

motherfucking australia

if there was a post to describe australia, this is it

wait. 

you mean to tell me this isn’t even a pet bird?

that in australia, you have wild birds that just fly from house to house with the express purpose of fucking shit up?

fucking HELL australia, what is wrong with you?

wake up australia 

That’s what birds do

They fly around and fuck shit up

Do you have some kind of mysterious nice birds in your weird foreign country

Do birds in America and England fly into your house and make the bed and tidy up the living room a little bit

It’s cold here, so they just bounce off the windows and lie there and twitch spasmodically while you look for the shovel.

Basically hurling themselves at windows is the worst thing birds do

yeah man a kookaburra literally flew into a classroom at my high school and just sat his smug ass down on top of the desk for a good 20 minutes

why has nobody mentioned the fact that in australia there are 3-4 months a year where everybody just accepts that they’re going to get attacked by magpies. It is literally called “swooping season” and these birds will fly down to peck your fucking face, and people get their eyes ripped out and shit, it’s fucking brutal.

My teacher had to go to hospital and have surgery because of swooping season. It was in the parking lot of school and all the kids would do a mad dash towards the car as the magpies tried to kill us.

no but when you’re 12 years old and riding your bike like mad on the way home from school with an icecream bucket on your head with like branches and shit sticking out if it to scare them off and none of this is considered strange

what the actual fuck australia 

Whee!

Geeks! A friend of mine is working on a project that involves parasitic brain control. She's raising funds for an experiment. Please give it a look if you have a moment. Thanks!

I woke up this morning keenly aware that I was in no state to resume the actual game session coherently, so instead of driving myself nuts I’m gonna embrace the spirit of the holidays and figuratively loaf on the figurative couch and reheat some figurative leftover smoked turkey.

So, from my running notes on the strip: this was gonna be a throwaway joke around the end of the first session, but it didn’t end up fitting in the flow of things right and so I had to let it drop. Was too late to really go back for in any good way since Riker and Bev have ended up a bit at odds in terms of character and character-as-proxy-for-player interactions and I’ve made at least one joke as a result that contradicts the idea of this happening even aside from the silliness of this idea itself, and so blah blah blah no way to incorporate it naturally.

But, figurative smoked turkey. I labeled this #1, there might be a #2 and so on depending on where my head is next week. Hope y’all are having a good holiday-ish time of the year.

(708): what better way to celebrate the birth of jesus christ than to get embarrassingly intoxicated and make poor decisions!?

Benjamin Franklin was a leaker of government secrets, who circulated intercepted letters from the colonial lieutenant governor of Massachusetts Bay to the British government. The letters detailed a scheme to take away colonists' legally guaranteed freedoms "by degrees" and called for more troops to keep order during the process. After the letters were published, Franklin admitted to leaking them, but refused to give up his source. The crown called it "thievery and dishonor" and he was fired from his postmaster general gig (thankfully, there was no Espionage Act on the books at the time). (via Techdirt)

The ACLU has spent years in court trying to get a look at a top-secret FBI interrogation manual that referred to the CIA's notorious KUBARK torture manual. The FBI released a heavily redacted version at one point -- so redacted as to be useless for determining whether its recommendations were constitutional.

However, it turns out that the FBI agent who wrote the manual sent a copy to the Library of Congress in order to register a copyright in it -- in his name! (Government documents are not copyrightable, but even if they were, the copyright would vest with the agent's employer, not the agent himself). A Mother Jones reporter discovered the unredacted manual at the Library of Congress last week, and tipped off the ACLU about it.

Anyone can inspect the manual on request. Go see for yourself!

The 70-plus-page manual ended up in the Library of Congress, thanks to its author, an FBI official who made an unexplainable mistake. This FBI supervisory special agent, who once worked as a unit chief in the FBI's counterterrorism division, registered a copyright for the manual in 2010 and deposited a copy with the US Copyright Office, where members of the public can inspect it upon request. What's particularly strange about this episode is that government documents cannot be copyrighted.

"A document that has not been released does not even need a copyright," says Steven Aftergood, a government secrecy expert at the Federation of American Scientists. "Who is going to plagiarize from it? Even if you wanted to, you couldn't violate the copyright because you don't have the document. It isn't available."

"The whole thing is a comedy of errors," he adds. "It sounds like gross incompetence and ignorance."

Julian Sanchez, a fellow with the libertarian Cato Institute who has studied copyright policy, was harsher: "Do they not cover this in orientation? [Sensitive] documents should not be placed in public repositories—and, by the way, aren't copyrightable. How do you even get a clearance without knowing this stuff?"

You'll Never Guess Where This FBI Agent Left a Secret Interrogation Manual [Nick Baumann/Mother Jones]

(via Techdirt)

(Image: FBI, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from 10542402@N06's photostream)

"As a key part of a campaign to embed encryption software that it could crack into widely used computer products, the U.S. National Security Agency arranged a secret $10 million contract with RSA, one of the most influential firms in the computer security industry," reports Joseph Menn at Reuters in an exclusive today:

Documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show that the NSA created and promulgated a flawed formula for generating random numbers to create a "back door" in encryption products, the New York Times reported in September. Reuters later reported that RSA became the most important distributor of that formula by rolling it into a software tool called Bsafe that is used to enhance security in personal computers and many other products.

"Secret contract tied NSA and security industry pioneer" [Reuters.com]

@Veronica @warrenellis @scalzi @jjsaul @swordandlaser @StephenBrust @doctorow @neilhimself Assaulted BitCoin & invaded Libertopia, SAME DAY.

— Charlie Stross (@cstross) December 18, 2013

Charlie Stross's Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire presents a set of scorching denunciations of Bitcoin based on its technical, political, and economic demerits. On the way, Stross takes some vicious shots at libertarianism. It's one of those Christmas-season hornet's-nest kickings that are fun to watch -- at a great distance.

Mining BtC has a carbon footprint from hell (as they get more computationally expensive to generate, electricity consumption soars). This essay has some questionable numbers, but the underlying principle is sound.

Bitcoin mining software is now being distributed as malware because using someone else's computer to mine BitCoins is easier than buying a farm of your own mining hardware.

Bitcoin violates Gresham's law: Stolen electricity will drive out honest mining. (So the greatest benefits accrue to the most ruthless criminals.)

Bitcoin's utter lack of regulation permits really hideous markets to emerge, in commodities like assassination (and drugs and child pornography).

It's also inherently damaging to the fabric of civil society. You think our wonderful investment bankers aren't paying their fair share of taxes? Bitcoin is pretty much designed for tax evasion. Moreover, The Gini coefficient of the Bitcoin economy is ghastly, and getting worse, to an extent that makes a sub-Saharan African kleptocracy look like a socialist utopia, and the "if this goes on" linear extrapolations imply that BtC will badly damage stable governance, not to mention redistributive taxation systems and social security/pension nets if its value continues to soar (as it seems designed to do due to its deflationary properties).

Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire

submitted by JuicyFarts [link] [440 comments]

Submitted by Brad R.