Posts by fshute

Crap crypto crackdown coming as FBI boss testifies to US Congress

Re: them intertubes be dangerous

"Ignorance trumps maths."

Indeed. It's pitifully obvious that the lawmakers and the goon from the FBI don't have a clue as to how encryption works.

You're not going to get anybody (including the terrorists, paedophiles etc.) to use "backdoored" encryption. They'll know it's "backdoored" because it will be closed source.

All hard encryption has to be open for inspection and scrutiny if it's going to be used.

The maths is fairly trivial and common knowledge to anybody who has studied maths at degree level:

http://cacr.uwaterloo.ca/hac/

The FBI goon and the senators don't know that no matter how many laws they pass, you're still not going to be able to factor prime numbers and break encryption.

Yet these bozos are tasked with protecting us from terrorism? God help us.

Don't touch this! Seven types of open source to dance away from

Re: Long-term stewardship

Thanks for the informative post, Notas Badoff.

"we believe that empathy is a core engineering value"

They should have added not just "empathy" but "weasel-words" , "political correctness" and "wacky beliefs" too.

It's a long time since I studied engineering (mech/man) but "empathy" wasn't something on the course or for that matter considered a core value.

If I was a developer contributing to any OS project and that happened, I would have been out of there like a shot.