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Considering your claim to be interested in producing a quality analysis of the various services and clients, and in other reviews you took pains to point out that connections were made to Google analytics servers, I found it pretty disappointing that you didn't explain what the servers that PIA were pinging actually are.

Are they, as I suspect (as a PIA user), pinging their own servers worldwide, to find the fastest options available? Are they pinging third parties?

Your review basically says "pings are bad m'kay" without demonstrating any understanding of what the client is doing.

Furthermore, your questioning of the use of port 80 makes me wonder about your own security knowledge. You really don't understand why a commercial VPN product designed to be used by portable devices in unexpected environments might commence a connection on port 80?

These 'objections' you have make me sceptical of your attention to detail in general.

> Open source baseband only won't be enough,

Not sufficient, perhaps, but necessary. A 0-day in baseband firmware seems a helluva lot more attractive a target than in a battery controller MCU.

Implausible deniability, perhaps?

I am genuinely curious in wondering what proportion of the open standards in technology begin as innovative evolutions of existing standards with only limited support at introduction, like this is. Isn't this essentially one of the accepted pathways to open standards, build the system, invite collaborators, and see if it gains acceptance and traction?

Just because the Nearby Connections API layer is neither authenticated nor encrypted, doesn't mean the developer isn't free to implement it. If I tell you an Ethernet cable requires neither authentication nor encryption, you aren't going to tell me it's impossible to authenticate or encrypt over Ethernet.

I Am Not An Expert.

If I understand correctly, these are a way to automate the execution of the financial part of normal contracts without the need for undue trust between parties. Some simple examples that might help (and I invite correction):

• I and a few investors agree to buy into an enterprise in several installments. A contract can be written to the blockchain that automates these payments. Should a majority of the investors decide to withdraw support, the payments will cease, but while more than 50% wish to continue support, everyone will continue.

• I have an enterprise that I am highly confident will generate profit. I can establish a smart contact that guarantees my investors a minimum ROI at specific intervals; should the balance fail to grow by the agreed margin, all investors will instead be refunded (in full or part) based on a scheme agreed a priori to be fair — say, a function of shares owned for how long.

• I and several other Ethereum miners agree to develop a scheme built on top of Ethereum for, say, a specific method of interoperability between the Ethereum blockchain and traditional futures markets. We have a specific idea for this, but agree we need to ensure that there is momentum in the project, and want those participating to have 'skin in the game'. We build a tontine such that all of us invest a non-trivial amount, and any investor becomes ineligible for payout if their hash power abandons the protocol. If this falls below a certain threshold, remaining investors can vote to continue or divide the pot and abandon the project.

Side note: Publications like this not clearly dated in the document are very frustrating.

The parent posts here are talking about the admin interface to the router, not the wireless password. While it's technically true that anyone within range can connect, they can't authenticate without the wireless password, and so cannot access the admin interface.

Well, yes, and as your sibling commenters contributed useful and insightful replies it indicates the question is interesting enough, at least to them, to be worth contributing thought to.

If you're really just looking for an unsubtle way to point out there is some better term of art that isn't salient enough to me to presently recall, perhaps you might wish instead to helpfully point it out for my benefit and that of other readers.

Very interesting. I'd like to see this simulation run with different (pseudo-)RNGs. I wonder if and how the quality of the randomness impacts the outcome.

Can anyone with insight offer comment?

Is Multics like The Ring? You have to give it to someone else to free yourself of the curse?

From what I can gather from a quick look at the 802.11e QoS spec* this is pretty much spot on. Many wireless clients (e.g. many phones) ping in order to discover networks faster than the access point's broadcast interval and to connect to 'hidden' APs that might not broadcast. In response, a malformed WME packet could be sent that the wireless chipset would listen to and parse.

*I am definitely not deeply familiar with WME.

... and IFTTT, Tasker, and any number of of automation apps that require the user to both be aware of and be bothered to set up correctly.

Developer preview 3 of Android O includes a great option in WiFi settings to automatically turn WiFi back on when you are in a location where you've connected to a 'high quality' WiFi network before (such as home or work), though I've not dug deep enough to find out what constitutes high quality, and it doesn't appear to be paired with a converse option to turn it off elsewhere.

I, uh... I didn't expect those kinds of icons.

There are constraints on how quarks combine, according to the standard model, which mean (among other things) that you won't get three of the same quark combining to form a particle. The cc subscript indicates the presences of two charm quarks, and the ++ indicates the particle has an electric charge Q=+2. The subscript values show the presence of heavy quarks: charm (c), bottom (b) or top (t) quarks are heavy. The superscript is electric charge (Q), a value between -1 and +2 (-, 0, +, or ++).

Signing in from a different machine.

My god yes. I get caught up in this with Steam maybe once a year — frequently enough that I grimace in irritation at every Steam login prompt. Repeated logins using my email address and password, increasingly obscenely expressed frustration, follow the password reset process — emailing me a reset password link, at which point I usually remember why this keeps happening and go back to login with my username.

I mean, I understand that one could make a case for such a high-value target as Steam to not allow email/password pairs considering the high rate of password reuse. But I have 2FA enabled as well for heaven's sake. And I cannot believe that simply insisting on username/password pairs instead is better enough to justify it, compared to real best practice password policies. I mean jeez, how many username are just the pre-@ portion of the email address anyway??

Yes. Opinions are important in interpreting whether or not a historical case can be interpreted as a precedent in a current one. That's one of the principal concepts in common law systems.

Original EFF blog post without Medium's login interstitial: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/06/provider-fought-secret...

That's an excellent brief answer, thank you for your perspective and time!

Could you unpack your statement about the careful code writing, or link to an explanation? We would usually expect a formal third-party audit to substantiate such a claim, but if there is other good evidence for their code's secure implementation I'd love to see it.

Those examples you give are good large-scale ones. But the impact of society on science is universal and pervasive, down to the observational biases of the individual humans handling instruments. It is a major project within science to eliminate subjective biases in research, right? That wouldn't be necessary if it wasn't universal and pervasive.

As far as how I 'want' it to be influenced, I think civil society should be entitled to discuss the implications and validity of research that is done (in this case, racial or ethnic factors in 'standardised', culturally based tests of 'intelligence'), as well as set large scale priorities as to where effort should best be focused, like in your examples.

So the only possible positions are the extremes? By acknowledging that science and society have an unavoidable structural relationship you give yourself a framework for developing tools to improve that relationship. There are plenty of problems with anti-science politics and the antidote is not to insist that they should just leave science alone just because.

You want science better represented in society and politics? Get more scientists involved in society and politics. http://www.314action.org/home

> "be able not to forget who I am, have some money to live, and not shit my pants"

Seems like those deserve a place in all of the 6 months, 3 years, 5 years, 10 years and 30 years goals. At least one of them is achievable? Right?

Perhaps you would find the original article https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/5/18/15655638/charles-... has the weighty facts that this response-to-criticism lacks.

I strongly disagree with the rationalist fallacy that science must progress unfettered by social or political 'ideology'. The very notion that science is ideologically blanched, that it exists in some asocial vacuum, is naive at best, disingenuous​ at worst, and misguided always.

To paraphrase John Wheeler on spacetime: Society tells science how to move; science tells society how to curve.

He allows for the likely possibility that government(s) will want to be a part of a civilization-altering grand enterprise, but he's not assuming it in his planning (at least, not in the paper here presented). He explicitly addresses costing and funding from private sources.

Not wanting public funds to be spent this way is a perfectly reasonable position — and it is against your government that that assertion must be made, not the private citizen holding the blueprints.

Absolutely, I'm not criticising the construction of solar system models. I'm simply pointing out that if you lack a deeper understanding of the system they represent (or don't interrogate your understanding adequately), the simplifications of any model can quickly become understood as truth.

"IT security is just like driving on the highway in the sense that anyone going slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster is clearly a maniac"

Excellent metaphor!

Non-PDF version: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7546536/

Semantics aren't silly in science, nor in education. I don't think it's so uninteresting as to be worthy of ridicule. It is not, in fact, obvious to the layperson that the Jupiter-Sun System would have a barycenter that doesn't lie inside the mass of the sun. The casual mental model (and all physical models I've ever seen) of the solar system we all share puts a metaphorical or mechanical axis through the center of the sun, around which we all the revolve.

What may be a shorthand for you is the obscuring of deeper truth for others, and discovering that deeper truth is a wonderful 'Aha!' moment for those who experience it.