cdjk

And before anyone thinks about disrupting the step stool market, it's been done:

http://www.squattypotty.com/

Complete with puns.

That is why I always travel with caffeine pills. Yes, I feel like an addict, but it beats the alternative of withdrawal.

He could shut down external access, deploy changes to capture plain text passwords, then turn everything off. Technically he's complied...

But that additional access would probably include various keys that would let them decrypt previous communication. Maybe the order was to log passwords on login, or something like that, that would allow recovery of the key and decryption of stored data, which may not be possible depending on the original architecture of the system.

I have a hunch that mentioning jury nullification as a potential juror will get you removed from the pool pretty quickly.

Most QRP work is at frequencies less than 30MHz. While 6m might work, tropospheric ducting, sporadic E, etc are touchy enough that adding in QRP operation wouldn't be pleasant. The RF upconverter would help with that, however.

Power is easily solved by an external amplifier.

Increased bandwidth would be nice, but 20MHz is plenty. While you might need that for microwave experiments (wifi, gsm, etc, and spread-spectrum experiments), the big advantage of the bandwidth is being able to listen in to everything at once, and see where signals are at a glance, without tuning through frequencies. Being able to glance at an entire band, and immediately see where QSOs are happening is pretty cool. Or you could record all of the FM broadcast spectrum, and decode it at your leisure later. That's not too practical, but is pretty cool. And 20Mhz is wider than every ham band 2m and lower.

And 500 MHz isn't quite enough for voice - SSB is generally 2.3 - 3 kHz. 300-500 Hz is ideal for CW (morse code), and digital modes can use even less.

What if you want to do something between "everyone can access it" and "only local host can access it?". For example, I have to run a recursive DNS resolver on a port other than 53 because my ISP intercepts DNS traffic. I've limited access to only my ISPs IPs at the software firewall, so as not to unwittingly take part in a DNS amplification attack.

Or what if I want to run a mail relay but only allow machines I control to access it. Or block a user who's doing something nefarious?

Sure, most services allow you to control access by ip, but I'd much rather manage it all in one place. And the ports show up as closed if you block at the firewall.

Unfortunately the legal is perfectly clear... to lawyers. I've thought that it would be nice to simplify things, but it already is simple to the people for whom it matters (i.e. lawyers and judges). It would be kind of like trying to make a scheduler clear and obvious to someone who isn't a kernel developer, or at least very technical. You could get the basics across, but there'd be plenty of corner cases you'd miss.

You can do IP over DNS today:

http://code.kryo.se/iodine/

There is TLS for SMTP, which admittedly doesn't protect the email once it gets to the server, but at least helps en-route.

Also, I don't think there's a problem around the fact that most of the time you don't communicate directly with the recipient's smtp server - relaying is definitely a part of SMTP. It would work in the case of running your own SMTP server that you use to relay mail (assuming you encrypt your own SMTP sessions), but you'd need smtp servers to recursively query for the public key if you want to enable relaying.

This is starting to sound suspiciously like DNS, so why not just store the keys there? There are already ways to do that:

http://www.gushi.org/make-dns-cert/HOWTO.html

Add in DNSSEC records and you can be pretty certain you have the right key.

I'm waiting for the widespread adoption of DNSSEC so we can just start adding TLSA records with the public key fingerprint. Yes, it means you have to trust whoever has access to create DNS records, but you already have to trust them.

I don't know much about undersea cables (although it is a fascinating subject), but I imagine there's no need to tap a cable in the middle of the ocean. If instead you tap it a couple miles offshore (even tens of miles), suddenly have a lot less undersea fiber to run. And if multiple cables come ashore at the same place, you can probably disguise it as just another fiber.

Of course, this requires a friendly country at one end of the cable, but that's probably not too big a problem.

The fallout products of an atomic bomb generally have short half lives. Wikipedia has some interesting graphs comparing the radiation dose of a fission bomb and Chernobyl:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fallout#Half-life

Reliability for incoming mail, sure. But there's making sure outgoing mail is delivered and not spam filtered, making sure your ip isn't on any blacklists, managing and testing backups, keeping up to date on security issues, etc. All of which are doable, but that's not really how I want to spend my time.

I've thought about doing this, but email is important enough I don't trust myself to provide as much uptime as a commercial email provider.

You probably should add SPF records too, if you don't want your outgoing mail marked as spam.

CPU mining is pretty much pointless now. And unless you're not paying for power GPU mining is pretty much a wash. Assuming an ATI 5870 uses 200W, and can do 400MH/s (which looking online seems about correct), you can expect to generate about .01 BTC/day, which is about $1 at current rates. You'd be looking at profitability if your marginal power costs are less than $0.20/kWh. And that's not factoring in the cost of the graphics card.

For comparison, 2 USB asic miner erupters will hash at about 650MH/s, and use about 3W.

So in short, if you already have a fast graphics card and don't have to pay for power, it might be worth mining.

The Ford/Tesla example is completely different. Booz is a government contractor, and so is already sharing information with the NSA. If it is true that he took the job just to get the documents, he probably already knew about PRISM, but just didn't have access to all the details.

A better example would be someone from Ford getting a job at one of their suppliers (e.g. the brake manufacturer) to expose something.

Or you could get a job where you can bring your dog to the office. That's what I do - he likes going to work more than I do, since he gets to see all of his friends at the office.

Corporate personhood is the easiest way to allow corporations to enter into contracts and engage in civil litigation. I'd be interested in what opponents of corporate personhood propose as ways around those problems, which I think are goods. Having to renegotiate all contracts with a business if the owner dies doesn't seem very efficient.

With regard to tax law, accounting is generally different between corporations and individuals. Specifically, individuals use cash accounting while businesses frequently use accrual accounting. Furthermore, businesses can deduct far more in expenses than an individual. One can argue about that, but I think it makes sense when you realize that corporations are ultimately owned by individuals, but individuals cannot be owned by other individuals or corporations. Individuals are ultimately the "base case" of ownership, so I think the different tax treatment of revenue/profit/income makes sense.

Ah, thanks. I learned something new today.

If Edward Snowden does have a pgp key (I can't find one online), it hasn't been revealed in this message. It looks like the signing and encryption keys are the same:

  gpg: armor: BEGIN PGP MESSAGE
  gpg: armor header: Version: GnuPG/MacGPG2 v2.0.19 (Darwin)
  gpg: armor header: Comment: GPGTools - http://gpgtools.org
  :pubkey enc packet: version 3, algo 1, keyid 5B50940B79DEBE35
          data: [4096 bits]
  gpg: public key is 79DEBE35
  :encrypted data packet:
          length: unknown
          mdc_method: 2
  gpg: encrypted with RSA key, ID 79DEBE35
  gpg: decryption failed: secret key not available

Of course, they could have used --hidden-encrypt-to, but I think it's more likely a publicity stunt.

Oh, and if you do find a key claiming to be for Edward Snowden online, verify that it's actually him, ideally through the web of trust, and that it isn't just a key that was created after the news was leaked. I'd be wary of any keys on keyservers claiming to be him that have been uploaded after he went public with this.

Limit access in the firewall/load balancer/webserver to whitelisted ip addresses. If you don't have static ips at your office or a vpn, include the ip of a VPS or dev server, and use ssh forwarding (-D for a socks proxy) to access the admin site. And if you're running everything from one server, you can even limit connections to localhost and tunnel connections through there.

Good point. Managing cash for a vending machine with high-value items seems like it might be a pain. I know there are various ipod vending machines around, but I assume most people use a credit card for those. But I suppose feeding some 20s isn't too hard.

A bitcoin-accepting vending machine would be very cool, but that requires that you live near one. Setting up shipping seems a lot easier than creating a nation-wide vending machine network.

Other people have commented on the payment issue - I'm glad you're looking into bitcoin.

I'd be worried about delivery, too. I know you say you destroy customer information immediately, but if I'm truly paranoid I'm not going to trust that statement - I'd rather pay someone on craigslist to buy a bunch of prepaid phones for me.

I'm just brainstorming, but would it be possible to set up some sort of physical tor/mixmaster style forwarding that would keep the final destination of the phone from ever being known to you? I'm not entirely sure how that would work, and it would probably be open to abuse, but it's an interesting thought.

Also, could you consider posting something like rsync.net's warrant canary?

http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt

It's not perfect, but it is a nice touch.

There's a difference between US and UK law that's interesting. In the UK, article 8 of the human rights act states that "Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence." A strict interpretation of this is that a company that monitors emails and intercepts an email between a husband and wife on a work email account violates article 8 [1].

In the US, I believe the government employees have more privacy rights with regard to email and communication than private employees, since private employers are not subject to the same constitutional restrictions - instead they're bound by contract law.

I do agree with you, however. Instead of the front page of the New York Times, however, my personal test is whether I'd be ok with it being projected in a congressional hearing, which actually happened to someone I know. It amounts to the same thing, however.

[1] It's mentioned in an appendix to "Unauthorised Access: Physical Penetration Testing For IT Security Teams," which is an interesting read. There's a particularly good story about an RSA SecurID key fob and a webcam...

There has been a shift in privacy with cloud storage. When everyone was using POP3 to get email with a 2MB quota on the mail server email didn't stick around on the ISP's computers for long - it was generally stored on a device owned by the recipient, and searching that required all the usual fourth amendment protections.

The Stored Communications Act [1] makes a distinction between unread mail stored on a server for more than 180 days, and does not require a warrant to access such email. It appears that read email still does require a warrant, however, as it is considered a "Remote Computing Service." I didn't know that until just now, and am not sure how the legal requirements for accessing that differ from a hard drive sitting on my desk at home.

A secure email product would be interesting. I'd be interested to know where deniability (i.e. OTR) would fit into your plans.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stored_Communications_Act

PGP would not be a good choice for this. The mail archives are still discoverable, and I imagine the decryption keys would be as well.

Something closer to OTR would be a better choice. Deniability and forward secrecy are the important properties here.

My mom got appendicitis on a cruise ship while it was about three days from port. They have lots of antibiotics, but surgery on board was never an option, although she was immediately transferred to an ER when they got into port.

In other cases passengers have been airlifted either to shore, or in one case a navy aircraft carrier, which is equipped to do surgery. That implies that reasonably advanced medical care is available ona ship, even if cruise ships are not setup to offer it. I'd link to the article, but I'm on a tablet and it's easy to find.

The two I've seen recently are optar [1] and paperkey [2]. Paperkey is just for pgp keys, however. Optar claims to get about 200kB per A4 page, which seems fairly dense.

[1] http://ronja.twibright.com/optar/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5746625