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FWIW, I wrote and published this steganography/cryptography app:

http://mangocats.com/stegamail...

and got it registered/approved via "the system." Granted, I did follow all the rules, encryption is only 56 bits, but nobody ever questioned the truth of that claim, nor requested any technical information beyond the simple claim of conformance.

I'm sure if it were more widely used, like Twitter or something, it would come under closer scrutiny. But, there are two points here:

First - if you don't use mainstream stuff, you can be as secure as you like, there's nobody to stop you.

Second - hide in plain sight tech like steganography doesn't seem to be getting serious consideration by these agencies.

I put myself on "the list" by direct application about 8 years ago: http://mangocats.com/stegamail...

nothing bad has happened, yet.

See also: Steganography: http://mangocats.com/stegamail... (and many others)

"The company doesnâ(TM)t reveal how it works, but they appear to be flooding clients with fake information, masquerading as legitimate peers."

All it would take is for a client to verify to data in the chunk (probably by it's MD5 or SHA), and if it's busted then try and download it again from the same peer. If it fails the second time then just ban the peer.

But I imagine they already do this, don't they?

I never looked deep into BitTorrent protocol - I did examine Gnutella/Limewire, and you might be surprised just how horridly lame and insecure that protocol was. BitTorrent is the next generation after Gnutella, I assume it's better, but I doubt it's the last word in P2P.

The value of P2P is in the user pool, the protocol can be tincans on strings and it is still an impressive and valuable resource.

Pirate Pay is aiming to piss in the user pool, forcing the issue of trust... I assume that will be addressed now.

Some thoughts from, oh, maybe 10-15 years ago on the subject.

I am surprised that more people don't take the time to make a custom 404 - it's very easy to do.

Nothing special about neural networks... I achieved similar results with a made up scheme of decision weight equations that were "genetically developed" in a big breeding tank.

Basically, behavior that allows greater procreation tends to appear spontaneously, and behavior that cuts procreation short tends to disappear. My "bugs" exhibited a clear shift in behavior to collision avoidance because collisions resulted in death for one of them. I was watching for "sniper bugs" that got good at colliding without getting themselves killed in the process, but I never managed to make the reward high enough for that trait to emerge, probably because there wasn't strong "species differentiation" built in, cross breeding was a matter of choice, and most of the randomly evolved bugs seemed not to be picky about mating, so without species, predators became self defeating.

A GPS-based system kept track of the in-state mileage driven by the volunteers. When they bought fuel, a device in their vehicles was read, and they paid 1.2 cents a mile and got a refund of the state gas tax of 24 cents a gallon.

So, this only benefits people who get less than 20mpg - since my car gets about 24mpg on average, I think I'd rather save the money _and_ keep my privacy intact.

There is a rapidly growing suite of "tool" software that's free and works on all major OSs - these are probably the most powerful tools for the kids to learn because they can transfer their knowledge anywhere in "computerland."

As others have said, good teachers are key. I've found lots of cheerleaders in education that just go flat when you leave the room - all of their enthusiasm for what you're doing to help evaporates in the face of the daily grind.

Central... some places in the everglades, and really all the way up to just south of I-4, there are places you can get a several miles away from the nearest roads with 40MPH+ traffic. We've got a place in Desoto county where we camped out one new year's eve and listened to a couple have a screaming fight over 1/2 mile away, they were just a little louder than the passing jets.

My new Eee Box tops out at 17W power consumption, and it can play games just as advanced as the Wii can...

It would be a shame if journal article authors never looked past the default MS Excel graphs for their presentation.