https://medium.com/@NafeezAhmed/how-the-cia-made-google-e836...

if you haven't read this, it's a long but great read.

the best thing google ever did was create go (golang). huge props to robert griesemer, rob pike and ken thompson for getting it all going.

to effect a classic double flashback, fight club style, here's a dose of bread and circus from juvenal from CE 100:

"'It is scarcely possible that the eyes of contemporaries should discover in the public felicity the latent causes of decay and corruption. This long peace, and the uniform government of the Romans, introduced a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire. The minds of men were gradually reduced to the same level, the fire of genius was extinguished, and even the military spirit evaporated.' Now that no one buys our votes, the public has long since cast off its cares; the people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions and all else, now meddles no more and longs eagerly for just two things----Bread and Games!"

http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/juvenal_satires_10.htm

being extremely entertained to see a blog entry about they live aside, making privacy simple is super hard. similarly, making people care about privacy is super hard. killing the aliens is even harder.

ubiquitous surveillance has a pretty obvious response in the long run: ubiquitous encryption.

it's not exactly clear (to me) why anyone who runs a project that so many ppl depend on for security would stick to such old and crufty algos. since openssh and openbsd are intertwined, it does make me wonder if this is being done so that openssh can run on the latest vax, etc (omg! but it will take a week for it to generate the right sized keys!).

EDIT: openssh in 2nd paragraph changed from openbsd, a typo.

http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2011/05/following-whi...

what reason could you possibly have to suspect that the IOMMUs from a company named "intel" are backdoored? :)

while i trust textsecure, it is hard to trust any mobile OS and mobile hardware.

he was a truly revolutionary mathematician and his contribution to the (hard) science of mathematics cannot be overstated. people who live on principle are rare, and those willing to go without salary as part of that protest are even rarer [1].

[1] - http://www.fermentmagazine.org/Quest88.html

i think all this "sound and fury" is likely a ruse to entice ios and android users into a false sense of safety post snowden disclosure. being able to encrypt your drive doesn't matter if your OS and its applications are exploitable. last time i checked, there is almost zero open source firmware out there, so your application processor can encrypt stuff hitting disk and the baseband processor can be used to get dma.

time to roll out the hypothetical child molester straw man...

on top of what you describe, i find most doctors to be biased towards "i know better than you" behavior. i have found that being an intelligent person makes dealing with doctors especially difficult since you need to be strategic to convince them and at the same time appear to not know too much about your own health problems. i have had incompetent resident doctors argue with me just because i know more about my illness than they do, and their ego is such that they cannot admit to themselves or me that they are wrong.

any technology that leads to me spending less time interacting with doctors is a huge win.

maybe i should write a book about a whole bunch of stuff other ppl did, not give proper attribution, then demand that people prove that i did not invent it.

try them out yourself, see what happens.

there is nothing so american as downvoting the truth.

sasha almost exclusively synthesized compounds that were already in the academic literature. he reproduced others' work and gave minimal attribution.

that said, he is typically over-attributed as being the 'godfather' of this field in an academic context when nearly every single compound he synthesized was originally synthesized and researched by someone else. there are thousands of researchers from the pharma industry and academia who spent huge parts of their adult lives just synthesizing a few of these compounds who often receive zero attribution for their life's work. knowing this, i find it rather offensive that an academic institution would provide such a trumped-up tribute to sasha shulgin.

oh, and for the record, a lot of the syntheses in tikhal and pikhal have _intentional_ omissions and errors, which makes those texts mostly useless from a synthetic standpoint.

in reality, the point of introductory level math and science courses in college is to show you a rather narrow skillset: you are given what amounts to a toolbox with a couple dozen tools and asked to use this small set of tools to solve problems that require application of, at most, 2 or 3 of these tools in succession. a fair analogy is that it is a multistep "put the round peg in the round hole" problem.

if assembling a small toolbox of skills and trying to apply the correct tools in short succession is too much for you, just quit university and code some stupid app. is it really that hard to understand why basic math and science is relevant?

DISCLAIMER: i was a teaching assistant for undergrads for 3 years during undergrad and grad school.

for the related blog entry with some more details, check out

http://markgoldenstein.com/building-websocket-client-btcwall...

we just recently released a small library that makes using the JSON-RPC much easier, and it should work with both bitcoind and btcd

https://github.com/conformal/btcrpcclient

this makes some of the things mark mentioned a bit less painful, e.g. marshal/unmarshaling the JSON, error handling, async replies. it is in go, so it might not be immediately useful to scala devs.