mirhagk

I do believe we need to discourage hard drug use, but criminalization simply isn't doing that.

You mention cigarettes, and cigarette usage has actually been dropping pretty dramatically over the last few decades. This is because instead of prohibition (like was tried and failed with alcohol) the government took the approach of educating people and creating social pressures to get people to stop.

The same could absolutely be done with heroin et al. Create places where people can legally buy and consume heroin (under the supervision of nurses) and all the while advertise how terrible it is and offer addiction counselling etc.

The problem is that such a system would have to be run with the explicit goal of getting people to stop and the US's fondness for running everything privately would be disastrous in this case.

Microsoft has been amazing at legacy support. The fact that they had an OS be supported for 12 years is pretty amazing. In contrast Ubuntu's LTS are only 5 years

I'm curious, why can't you use VSOnline?

Depends on your definition of works. Hangouts is the only piece of software that is less reliable than visual studio.

It's sad and true. FB messenger is such a crappy thing but google still manages to be worse than it. I think the last time I used a messaging app that doesn't consistently crash and fail on the basics (scrolling, pasting text) was when I used MSN messenger. That was also the last time I could use a single messaging app to message everyone

Is there an efficient diff algorithm for bloom filters?

That's not true

That won't solve the problem

> Slapping unbreakable crypto onto more and more packets is just going to make matters worse > > The IT and networking communities overlooked a wise saying from soldiers and police officers: "Make sure the other side has an easier way out than destroying you."

Who is developing this stronger encryption? The development of encryption has a huge incentive to build backdoors for payouts by government or corporate or worse groups. Then you have the people implementing the encryption that could also introduce backdoors (who knows if heartbleed was intentional or not). Then you have lots of other ways to backdoor the system, from default software installs, viruses, or even compiler or CPU backdooring. There is no such thing as a system that has perfect security. Even if you build everything yourself and are perfect at doing so, the tools you use could easily have backdoors.

By increasing usage of encryption for more and more mundane things all we're doing is increasing the incentive to break that encryption.

Not necessarily. You don't need to introduce compromised crypto (that's exactly the problem that's happening currently). I think the point of the article more shows that by using TLS everywhere the government is incentivized to attack it a lot more.

This isn't just governments either. Corporations do things like proxy HTTP traffic to cache pages and save on bandwidth (some ISPs do it too). By moving that to HTTPS traffic you are removing the ability to do this, and that gives them an incentive to do things like install root certificates for all their devices. Now your banking website has it's traffic sniffed as well, all in the name of caching the youtube videos that get distributed around the office.

One thing I find good about Microsoft's libraries is that for the most part they do a good job of working as magic and working with someone with understanding.

XNA is the example I always use. You can use XNA and make games without understanding anything about the graphics card but you can also dig in and write your own shaders and basically go however deep you want to/need to.

There are some things in .NET that do seem kinda magic, and razor is one of them. Not because it's a templating engine but just in how lightweight it is and how surprisingly decent intellisense can be with it. Most templating engines feel so verbose and ugly after working with razor.

The difference was that the russian government did actively attack them, it merely was trying to block illegal content. Github didn't remove the repo, they simply blocked that page for russian users. Also the material they were blocking was a suicide poem, and while free speech was being minorly impacted, all in all it's removal didn't affect very many people.

In this case china is attacking them directly, and removing the repos in question would affect people's ability to use that software, greatly affecting freedom from censorship for many many people.

Interestingly enough they have succeeded in pulling those projects down.

I'm not familiar with US law to really say much, but under Canadian law it'd be illegal for a company to keep the canary if they received a section 215, and I presume it'd be the same in the US. I wonder if this would overwrite that law, and provide them with the ability to lie in their transparency report.