Let's take a look at a seemingly innocent practice of OCSP stapling. Basically it is a certification that your certificate is valid, with the certificate for the validity of your certificate being issued by your certificate authority and bundled with your original certificate. Sounds perfect! If only we could certify the validity of this second certificate too, with a third certificate issued by the same authority, would be enough, certainly, three certificates are enough for everyone. Right?

This practice stems from OSCP (an Internet protocol used for obtaining the revocation status) which is not nearly as funny, and far from «innocent».

The original OCSP implementation can introduce a significant cost for the certificate authorities (CA) because it requires them to provide responses to every client of a given certificate in real time. For example, when a certificate is issued to a high traffic website, the servers of CAs are likely to be hit by enormous volumes of OCSP requests querying the validity of the certificate.

Do you see what does this quote imply? That FOR EACH SSL CONNECTION YOU MUST ASK THE AUTHORITY'S PERMISSION. The certificate authority is now an authority that decides whether to allow or refuse your SSL connections. In real time. You no longer decide to connect to a host of your choice, this decision is moving to some authorities.

Let that sink in.

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P.S. Certificate revocation (without SSL) is not that dangerous and absurd. It was initially designed to work OFFLINE, i.e. all certificates, requests and answers are strictly timestamped — which makes revocation lists valuable and transferable — this is all designed to post-factum verification of documents and such.

Amendment 28

The U.S. govt has no right to interfere with any aspect of public education, neither institutionalized nor irregular. It is prohibited for the govt to fund a school, advertise education services, impose standards or requirements in any way related to public education, limit educational activities in any way shape or form (for example: by demanding licensing).

Amendment 29

A teacher has an absolute, unrestricted, unalienable right to choose his students as he sees fit. A teacher is free to enroll and dismiss students on a whim at any time without answering to anyone or explaining his motives. The right of a teacher to freely select his students can not be limited by any institution, this amendment overrides any contractual obligations in this regard.

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Simple as that. No more laws and «departments» and «committees» are needed. You can even send your department of education to a re-education camp in Siberia.

And by the way, these two clauses are sufficient to return MALE teachers to the schools.

I am failing to understand four simple things:
why do people always fail to know the limits of their individual reach?
why do people always believe everything authorities say?
why do people always think «it won't happen to us»?
why do people always prefer to lose everything in order to save a part?

All these four shine and glitter as they intricately weave into the topic of «cash vs plastic» (keep them in mind while reading).

It has become a popular fad to use «plastic» instead of cash… as usual people are completely unaware of the dangers of this fad. And for some reason they think that «plastic» is somewhat equivalent to cash — NOT EVEN REMOTELY!

The most important issue is (as usual) the simplest one and (as usual) the most ignored one — WHO COMMITS A TRANSACTION? You come to a store for a loaf of bread, you pay for it and take it away. Are you sure it was you who payed for it? I am sure, because I always use cash. When I give a banknote to a cashier I physically commit the transaction — this is MY FINAL SAY. When you type your PIN, you MERELY ASK a bank to commit the transaction for you. In the end of the day it is the bank's decision whether you gonna have this loaf of bread or not. Think about it for once! The bread you are having now is not a result of a free trade between you and a backer, it is a free will of an (undoubtedly honest) 3rd-party. The bank decided on their own volition to allow you to have this bread, and they can as easily decide to starve you at any time.

And when I am speaking about bread, I literally mean bread. It is a common practice in Ukraine and Russia to arrest bank accounts of family members of political dissidents, thus rendering them incapable of engaging in any trade, i.e. buying bread. When you are under a police investigation for political reasons, you are offered a choice: your family will starve unless you confess that you were digging a tunnel under Kremlin with a premeditated goal to assassinate the dear comrade Stalin. The most famous implementation of this tactics is the Ruslan Kotsaba case, his wife and kids have only survived thanks to the public campaign (launched by the defence attorney) encouraging people to trade with the wife for cash (she is a pastry chief).

But, of course! It can not happen to you! No way! (Ask The Lighthouse Project what methods do courts and prosecutors employ in USA and Canada to exert pressure on falsely accused.)

The banks do not bother with breaching your security, they took away your agency altogether.

(to be continued)

Picture that: You are a farmer.
You have grown a ton of potato and brought it to a marketplace.
You recon everybody sells potatoes for $1 and you decided to set the price to 0.9 so that you can return home earlier.
Presently, a group of well dressed respectable men with baseball bats approached you:
— Nice potato you have here, good sir. Do you know that the minimum price for potatoes here is $1?

QUESTIONS:
1. do you believe these respectable men helped you sell your potato for a better price?
2. do you wish the minimum price to be set higher (e.g. $1.1)?

Undoubtedly we live in the age of false dichotomies… Somehow people are all talking (and fighting) about subjects with no substance.

Dear vaxxers and anti-vaxxers, your fight is ridiculous, and it is not because you are both partially right, it is because you are both completely wrong.

Have any one of you ever tried to DEFINE the subject of your debate? What do you think a vaccine is? And what to you think the category «vaccines» is? How can you make a utility/risk claim about ALL vaccines, piling together a smallpox vaccine that demonstrably saved the humanity and a flu vaccine that have never entered any testing whatsoever! Do these two share any INNATE properties at all? Can you formulate a property that all vaccines possess on their own, a property that can be observed in the vaccines themselves, all vaccines and nowhere else? This would be a characteristic property that gives you the least moral ground to speak about the «vaccines» as an object (entity). Until then, both of you vaxxers and anti-vaxxers, are engaged into a typical case of false entitification — there is no such entity «vaccines» that you pretend to be talking about. Therefore ANY CLAIM ABOUT ALL VACCINES IS GUARANTEED TO BE WRONG.

But there is still more hilarity in the «debate». Here is a logical scheme of the anti-vaxxer standing:

In a government-run hospital my child was given a shot, that was documented as vaccination. Shortly after the event the child became sick (as never before).

Let's assume we have a sufficient amount of the episodes like that (properly documented («there is no evidence» fanboys can go fuck themselves)).

How is this a reason to blame the sickness on vaccines? Let's control for all other factors… all those kids were perfectly healthy before the injection and so on and so on. If we determine beyond reasonable doubt that the sickness was caused by this particular injection, how is it a reason to blame vaccines? In order to blame vaccines on the ground described above, you must assume that the government-run hospital DID NOT lie to you about the injected substance!!!

So the anti-vaxxers' claim of the vaccines' malice is based upon the trust to the govt! The same govt that under a false pretense of vaccination and medical treatment injected kids with plutonium, gave people syphilis, created a polio outbreak (not even for scientific nor military purposes, just for fun). The govt that has broken the trust of the people over 9000 times, this govt the anti-vaxxers trust! — «govt said it was a vaccine, duh, vaccines are bad» — what a joke!

Dear mr. Kelly,
do you realize that you lose the ability to attribute a suspect's social media account to the said suspect immediately after obtaining a password to the said account?
Once you own the password, the account is attributed to YOU, shithead, thus rendering all your claims about the suspect's alleged activity associated with the account completely inconsiderable.

Resign immediately! You know _NOTHING_ about security nor elementary logic, you are utterly unqualified for the Homeland Security Secretary position.

First was Brexit, then Trump, now The Italian referendum has happened… and Jean-Claude Junker is calling for EU leaders to infringe on the peoples' right to vote. This is the first manifestation of Internet working as an information system for the people.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, INTERNET WORKS! (wikileaks be upon him)

The simplest and most important fact about computers — COMPUTERS ARE TURING COMPLETE

Because of that, we can not know what program runs on a given computer (without disassembling this computer to atoms).

The only possible source of an answer to this question is the computer itself, which in turn can be programmed to give ANY ANSWERS (due to its Turing completeness). A system program+computer can present itself to an observer as anything arbitrarily far from the real internal state of the system.

That's enough for any amount of fraud to be completely undetectable. NO AMOUNT OF REGULATIONS CAN CHANGE IT!!! A program can always be invisibly replaced/altered.

The law defines the elections as a particular process. Computers arbitrarily change this process — this is not legal (in a very literal sense of «legal»). Computers make the regulations inapplicable and the entire electoral process unregulated — lawless!

The computers should be banned from the vote counting process regardless of the actual fraudulent activity of any parties.

Synopsis: There are no elections in USA.

It is not a hyperbole and it is not a political nor ethical statement. I am talking specifically about the procedure of elections as an information process. By using a «voting» machine you do not give your vote to any of candidates, you give your vote to whomever controls the machine. Giving your vote away is NOT electing.

In case you are concerned about data security or voter fraud issues: those concerns are irrelevant, the computerized procedure in use does not endanger the elections, it ELIMINATES them from existence. From the InfoSec perspective the information process that has taken place of the elections (be it hacked or not) is NOT the elections — not even a surrogate! — it is something else, that, most importantly, has nothing to do with your vote.
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