I’ld say “technology” should be able to evolve beyond copy-and-paste without having to knock on the doors of intellectual property like a thieve in the night in each and every frigging situation like a little “cry baby”. After all, there’s always the option to offer a payment to the copyright holder to get according usage licenses… which tends to pay the rent for most people, companies, organisations, and institutions – including the EFF itself.
If “copyright” were that limiting and/or superfluous, there wouldn’t be much sense for EFF's use of a CC-BY license ( or their elaborate copyright policy blurb at https://www.eff.org/copyright )
This is one of those times I’m wondering again: why doesn’t EFF put its stuff into PUBLIC DOMAIN to lead the way (like some of us do with some projects)? Being against something they use themselves (see CC-BY) seems to be somewhat hypocritical from my point of view. But that might just be me standing on the soapbox of an “unlicense” (aka Public Domain) developer… ;)
Let me guess – because linking to tweets (like you did at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11955823 ) is so much better? Any other media outlets you’ld like us to avoid? #FacePalm
As long as it’s not about politics, or crime, or sports… I don’t see any valid reason why the Washington post should generally be considered to be off-topic. (Details: “What to Submit” at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html )
To me, your post reads a bit like a “parenthetical remark”. Maybe you could enlighten us about your reasoning?
Erm, just in case of doubt: no, that’s not what cryptographers call a “One Time Pad”. Maybe “snake oil” would be a more fitting term? Whatever they call it, please be smart enough to refrain from using their “invention” if you expect cryptographic security. (Naming only one of many reasons: the complete lack of cryptanalysis.)
I definitely agree. If only a single cryptographer would have been part of the equation, no one would have had a reason to write “Bit shifting isn't encryption” . Looking at my comment again again, I guess it was simply too short to be understood as a cinical “read it with a smile” kind of thing. Just to be sure no one gets me wrong: I surely did not want to hype any of the bad guys, nor make fun of the victims… the innocent Turkish citizens involved. Yet, I can’t help to shake my head that a Turkish governmental agency was stupid enough to use a near to “xor-by-one” snakeoil crypto thingy instead of well-vetted and security proven cryptographic algorithms and protocols. If they would have, there wouldn’t be a problem – just a blob of encrypted data. Which is why I said: “cryptographers 1 – Idiots 0”… which was merely meant to be interpreted as “roll your own crypto, eat your own poison – no cryptographer would have stepped into the stupid pitfall of using home-brew toys instead of well-vetted algos & protocols”. Hope that somewhat is able to explain what I meant with my comment. If my cynical comment was misunderstood due to its minimalism – my bad. Downvotes correctly punished me accordingly for my comment being too short to be understood upon first glimpse – next time, I’ll be sure to be clearer.