Heartbleed - Major Internet security flaw

[Snarky]

Selmiak, if you want to discuss Ukraine, please make a separate thread. It's too big an issue to glance upon without major risk of derailment.

Is there noone even a little bit disgusted? Or are you so far that you don't care anymore? This make me so fucking angry I can't describe!

Well, it's just loose speculation at this point, isn't it? The NSA's snooping in general pisses me off, certainly.

I remember two or three years back I took a graduate course in legal and economic aspects of computer science, where each class was given by a different guest lecturer. A US professor with ties to the government came in to speak about electronic surveillance etc. She had the nerve to claim that (a) the legal scope of wiretapping in the US was extremely limited, and the intelligence agencies wouldn't exceed it, and (b) that they valued the privacy and ability for dissidents to securely communicate offered by TOR and similar encrypted services above their desire to snoop, and therefore would never weaken the security of these systems. This was a while before all the leaks proved the extent of US wiretapping, but her argument was met with well-deserved scoffing, to which she responded that as Europeans (never mind that the class included a number of American students), we simply did not understand America's reverence for the protection of privacy and free speech, or for the Constitution protecting these rights.

Utter bullshit such as that almost made me drop the class, although it otherwise dealt with a lot of interesting issues (from piracy/copyright law to net neutrality). To this day, what I wonder most is whether she was knowingly lying to our faces or was just a deluded dupe.