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User: Yvanhoe

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Comments · 4,176

  1. Re:interesting story, shit website on How Tutankhamun's DNA Became a Battleground · · Score: 1

    Don't forget all the present-day Egyptians who don't want Tut to have a too dark skin too. We would not want to revise all the depictions of Egyptians as almost totally white. There is supposed to be a clear border where Nubia starts.

  2. Re:Bad development on Facebook To Pay City $200K-a-Year For a Neighborhood Cop · · Score: 1

    Actually, is it only in Europe that "buying a cop" usually implies corruption (or a bankrupt state)?

  3. Re:Concerning... on Scientific Data Disappears At Alarming Rate, 80% Lost In Two Decades · · Score: 1

    On this fight, Aaron Swartz came very close to make the whole world totally different.

  4. Re:Harddrive firmware? Probably non-free, no probs on Free Software Foundation Endorses a "Truly Free" Laptop · · Score: 1

    Some hard drive controllers contain three cores and are able to run linux:

    http://hackaday.com/2013/08/02/sprite_tm-ohm2013-talk-hacking-hard-drive-controller-chips/
    Complete with a program to eavesdrop any data read from the disk.

  5. Re:Thanks, Jenny McCarthy on U.S. Measles Cases Triple In 2013 · · Score: 1

    Well, letâ(TM)s see. In March, there were 58 cases alone in Brooklyn, N.Y., tied to a Jewish community that refused or delayed vaccinations. In Texas, a megachurch that preached anti-vaccination views had an outbreak with at least 20 cases. In North Carolina, 23 cases were reported in one outbreak; most of them in a religious (Hare Krishna) community that was largely unvaccinated.

    There are usually around 60 cases per year. Religion accounts for more than half the rise.

    More to the point, why is this article quoting an astronomer? Why not some real internal medicine doctors.

    Because debasing irrational belief is a field of its own. Medical doctors can tell you exactly what happend during a vaccination but this is not the kind of things that help convince people to get vaccinated. A normal doctor of medical researcher will just shrug and stop debatting if faced with the regular anti-vaxx comments.

    Phil Plait has spent a lot of time comfronting irrational beliefs and that makes him more likely to become a spokerperson for this case.

  6. Re:PR Stunt at best on FSF Responds To Microsoft's Privacy and Encryption Announcement · · Score: 1

    To be certain of not being snooped, you would also need to use open source tool to generate the content you want to send and run that on an open source OS which guarantees that other process won't have access to the cleartext message you wrote.

    And here I am assuming no backdoor in hardware or firmware, which in 2013 is quite a leap of faith.

    Open Source has a hard time providing the minimum trustable stack (BIOS is the current obvious weak link) and I don't see microsoft doing that any time soon.

  7. Re:Better, but still flooded marketplace. on Neo900 Hacker Phone Reaches Minimum Number of Pre-Orders For Production · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The thing is, a rooted android phone is still very far from being an open platform.

  8. Re:Color me surprised. on Snowden Document Says Dutch Secret Service Hacks Internet Forums · · Score: 1

    This, however, answered a question I had: the NSA probably has access to half the forums in the world without needing any kind of attack. I was wondering if other services were happy to ask for NSA help or tried to independently get the information they needed.

  9. Re:Then 17 new ones appeared... on French Court Orders Search Engines, ISPs To Block Pirate Sites · · Score: 1

    Actually, I am not aware of the French courts being dissatisfied by something else than a simple DNS block. This is non news so far.

  10. Re:what makes this white hat? on European Parliament Culls Public Wi-Fi Access After Email Hack · · Score: 1

    You don't understand how abyssmal is the consideration for communication security here. People here really learned from Snowden that NSA intercepts internet traffic. Sarkozy and Merkel were exchanging information through f$cking SMS! MEPs have to be hit repeatedly and very hard with a cluebat to understand anything.

    This guy, before being a white hat, was a concerned citizen. Yes, it is more about education and public perception than security research, but we are talking about people who are highly valuable target to lobbyists and who don't understand that their smartphone are not a secure way to receive their emails.

  11. Re:Good on Creative Commons Launches Version 4.0 of Its Licenses · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is one case where competition is bad. It causes license fragmentation without adding anything to the community. CC is for works of art, designed for that and more likely to hold well in that case. GPL/LGPL/MIT/BSD are for software and are more likely to hold well in these cases. You should also consider public domain. It is a tested and proved "license" not very far from the BSD... ;-)

  12. Re:Sell now. on Bitcoin Tops $1,000 For the First Time · · Score: 1

    I did that when it peaked at 30$ and sold the 50 bitcoins I owned. I felt smart when the crash happened a few weeks later. I now regret this move deeply.

  13. Re:FP on NSA Planned To Discredit Radicals Based On Web-Browsing Habits · · Score: 1

    It is a bit subtler than that :

    incredibly relevant SMBC

  14. Re:Security is a tricky thing on Intelligence Officials Fear Snowden's 'Doomsday' Cache · · Score: 1

    I just wish people used the correct expression. It is not "doomsday switch" but "dead man's switch".

  15. Re:Should be legal, with caveat on Why Scott Adams Wished Death On His Dad · · Score: 1

    This requires another type of contract than a will.

  16. Re:Sweet sweet copyright justice on Image Lifted From Twitter Leads to $1.2M Payout For Haitian Photog · · Score: 1

    I'll be happy with this photographer getting zero dollars from his work when any copyrighted work can be copied without problem.

    Actually, I endorse a return to a sane copyright law: 5 to 20 years from first publication, then it becomes public domain.

    Copyright laws suck, because indeed information wants to be free. Today, however, it is not. So if someone makes money by claiming property over some information, at least do it by giving a part of the money to the guys with a minimum of merits.

  17. Re:Ghost transactions on 195K Bitcoin Transaction · · Score: 1

    They do. There are services (which require quite a lot of trust) who propose you to take a bitcoin payement, and will give you back this amount at a later time (a few days) on the address you desire or splitted in several addresses

    If done correctly, this can effectively "launder" bitcoins. However, the likelihood of some of these services being traps is quite hard.

    I think that people who believe that bitcoin is great for tax evasion of criminal transactions are there for a surprise. It is but one brick in the platonic society of ideas that idealistic cryptoanarchists try to build. First, there were cryptotools, and identities and pseudo identities could be verified, communication could be kept private. Then there were darknets, and ideas could be exchanged anonymously. Now with bitcoins, money can be exchanged. So right now, what you can do totally anonymously is buying dematerialized service or data. It is not a good tool for buying a yacht without the IRS knowing it, and it is not about that.

    More bricks will come: people are currently making schemes to create pseudonymous companies, to make some kind of contracts enforceable, to manage trust between entities with no history, etc... It is an interesting subject to follow.

  18. Re:Two things glossed over in the summary on US Government Embraces Bitcoin in Hearing on Virtual Currency · · Score: 1

    The fact that the content of every bank account and every transaction is public makes bitcoin a very bad tool for money laundering.

    It would give you a pseudonymous social network of criminals. A law enforcement firm then just has to play crosswords and make some honey pots to get the big picture.

    Bitcoin suppresses the need for extorsion fees during international wire transfers, not the need for suitcases full of cash during shady transactions.

  19. Re:Fuck off on Prison Is For Dangerous Criminals, Not Hacktivists · · Score: 1

    Sell it? Hammond did this? I think he just published them.

    And if you run a private spy company, complaining about getting your data stolen is just hypocrisy.

  20. Re:Tragic... on Sweden Is Closing Many Prisons Due to Lack of Prisoners · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Slavery had to be replaced by something.

  21. Re:What wouldn't Atlantic publish? on Critics Reassess Starship Troopers As a Misunderstood Masterpiece · · Score: 1

    The problem is that the movie director claims to make fun of the serious views of the novels the movie is based on. That's an interesting but risky take, and he can't really blame anyone for getting the wrong message.

  22. Re:Hmmm... on TrueCrypt To Go Through a Crowdfunded, Public Security Audit · · Score: 1

    Dor what it is worth, the version 6.0a of Truecrypt has been found clean by the ANSSI, the French public agency of computer security (which have a good reputation in cryptography, but who may set the paranoia cursor a bit too low) in 2009.

    It was considered adequate for military use. Depending on your political opinions, this may be a laughable audit or a solid claim.

    A famous French blogger made a binary comparison between the sources and the windows binaries given by Truecrypt and deduced that (unless the compiler itself adds backdoors automatically, as improbable as it is, we cannot totally dismiss that possibility nowadays) no backdoors have been hidden in the binary. So if the code is clean, the binary is clean.

  23. Re:Fine. on French Court Orders Google To Block Pictures of Ex-F1 Chief Mosley · · Score: 1

    As a French, I would endorse this action. Either we finally get an update of these laws (which date back from the WWII aftermath and the denazification period) or an alternative to Google pops up. Win-win.

  24. Re:so tell me again... on Microsoft, Apple and Others Launch Huge Patent Strike at Android · · Score: 1

    You can't imagine, being a developer in a country where software patents do not exist, how happy I am to see US firms shoot themselves in the foot and spend billions over an imaginary property issue.

  25. Re:Can it be used to print CPUs? on New Technology For Converting a Metal To a Semiconductor With a Laser · · Score: 1

    I agree that a chip factory does not want a machine that takes hours to print a single chip but fablabs do want a possibility to make only one or two chips of a custom design. It makes sense for this niche.