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Dingo was here in the UK with Purpleris and I a couple weeks ago. I'm sure we discussed PD.com in our interviews, both because that's how we met and because I went on a long rant about how wrong I was in my initial observations on BiP and some other stuff. I personally think its absurd to request that the website not be mentioned when some (but not all) of the Discordians interviewed know each other because of this forum and it plays a part in their life directly related to the topic being discussed.

Also, having met Dingo and talked about this entire mess... well I'm sorry some of you decided not to be involved, because thus far, its looking like lots of good material from many Discordians, Discordian history and Discordian groups... Based on what I know at this point, it looks like IF RL gets mentioned, it would be in a small email interview that's pretty much nothing. Fears that it would somehow taint everyone else seem, to me, absurd. I was impressed with Dingo and with some of the material I looked at. It may well end up being a damned good snapshot of Discordia in the 21st century and I'm sorry that some rather smart and cool Discordians chose not to participate.

Yeah, fuck off.

Oh for fucks sake, man. I'm not trying to say you are wrong. I'm just sorry it ended up the way it did.

I love this piece, but I don't see the nihilism spoken of.  Am I having one of those moments when you open a drawer to look for a pair of scissors, but even though you're looking right at them you can't see them?  Perhaps my personal take on nihilism is flawed.

I think the OP seems a bit more in line with Absurdism, rather than nihilism.

Mistre, it sounds like you're speaking of trancendent experience.

This is an experience that is impossible to accurately describe, because it is beyond words, beyond communication.  It is, some try to say, beyond self.

A close reading of the BIP suggests that while some of the BIP is based upon history, bias, and psychological barriers, a not-insignificant part is literally physical.  It's your own body.  And an enormous part of what it takes for us to exist are limitations.   

So, when you have a transcendent experience, you may stretch a metaphor to say that you've stuck your head through the bars.  Congrats.  It can be a pretty nice feeling.  It can also be a nightmare of eldrich horrors, but that's another story.

Do I really need to say that a human can't live like that?  That trancendent experience is only a moment.  It usually doesn't last that long without the use of drugs; and even then, you can't hold onto it.  (Incidentally, if you want evidence that you can't hold on to that moment, look at what happened to Syd Barrett.)

You're going to have to live almost the entirety your life in that prison/submarine/elevator/gimp mask; the amount of time in trancendence is miniscule.  Which means, if you want to be happy, and if you want to be the best human you can, you're going to have to figure out how to make your prison cell the best it can be.

And even then, we can't really say if a transcendent experience IS being out of the BiP or a temporary 'larger window' in your cell... or (IMO, more likely) an experience that is just as much a part of your BiP as anything else, based on your interpretation of stuff going on in your neurological system.

As far as we know, PGP encryption is still not cracked by the NSA.  RSA's looking shaky, but PGP is the tough stuff, and is readily available for anyone sufficiently geeky to install and run the programs, which Snowden most definitely is.

What's making me question a lot of this is partly this:
http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php/topic,31946.0.html

I would assume that a considerable amount of further work has been done in this area so I'd have to guess at it being insecure just on probabilities. If not now, then soon certainly.

The other side is the rubber hose aspect. You're still trusting meat with information and there's nasty men with tenderisers. Say with a straight face the NSA has no idea who these "password holders" are.

Rubber hose method is more likely than the NSA breaking PGP. Phil Zimmerman seems to think they have not yet found a weakness and I'd throw more weight on his views than unnamed sources and past employees... It seems likely that they may have built something specific to brute force some algorithms like the 3DES or AES128 Keyspace, maybe even AES-256, but I doubt they're breaking 2048 or 4096 bit keys like the ones used by PGP.

Its possible they found a flaw in asymmetric algorithms like those used by PGP, but since the government is still using those algorithms (and AES-256) it seems unlikely that they would be easily broken.

I can see the beauty of viewing the "prison" as a submarine or a space ship, but isn't illumination the unlimited perception of the self and the universe? Don't the walls... get in the way? Shouldn't we try to go beyond them?

Extending the metaphore, while I want to get out of it, I want to be prepared for what's coming. Although an astronaut in a space suit isn't in direct contact with the space, he is a lot closer, at least personally, than he was within his spaceship. I want to be able to wear a space suit.

And that sounded a lot less silly in my head.

The spacesuit is just a modified BiP. 

As for Illumination, I direct you to the Zen Story on page 5 of the PD. 

There are a lot of questions about how mono/polytheistic the original Jewish faith was. And there is some question about exactly how to properly translate the First Commandment. It can be read as supporting polytheism, but it can also be read to mean that the Jews were not to interact or pay respect to the gods of the nations around them. Its very difficult to know for sure and there are arguments on both sides. Sadly the arguments hinge on how Jews worshiped before the region was sacked by Babylon, and from the archaeological record we have no evidence that there was an Israel or a united Jewish Kingdom during that time leaving it all as conjecture.

Some Christian faiths claim that 'gods' included all spiritual beings (God, Archangels, other angels, Satan, demons etc). So if an Angel showed up with a message from God you would show him respect, but not venerate him above God. In a couple stories in the Bible, angels actually tell the humans to stop when they bow before them.

Christmas adverts have been running in the UK since I got back.

So the start of November.

That means I have to suffer another month of this, every single ad break.

I am lucky then that I don't have a TV and only listen to the radio in the car. I've heard/seen nothing Christmas-ish.

I am very happy that so far in the UK I have not seen any evidence of Christmas madness. I really hope it stays that way.

The Prison is a Prison if you see it as a Prison. It does mean we have a limited perception of the universe and ourselves... It does mean that there are walls and windows between us and Reality.

However, a submarine has walls and a limited view. A spaceship has walls and a limited view. Its those walls and limited view that allow humans to explore the seas and sky... just as its our self, our perception, our walls and windows that allow us to explore this reality. We perceive a limited amount of the data around us with our senses. Without those limits, we'd be crushed like a poor sod that just jumped out of his submarine a thousand feet below the surface, or suffocated like the astronaut that took his dog for a walk outside the airlock without his spacesuit. The Prison can be a Prison, especially if you don't see it, if you never challenge it or if you never change it. It can also be the vehicle for your adventure through this life, which really isn't a bad thing at all

Very nice, Adam. Looking forward to more.

As far as we know, the NSA hasn't broken any of the current 'strong' encryption algorithms. There is speculation that they influenced a specific Random Number Generator based on elliptic curve crypto. The CC RNG is slow and only one of many options for RNG. Most systems don't use that library, but RSA's BSafe suite of crypto tools had that set as the default (which is fishy since its been suspect foryears and is slow).

If the system protecting Snowden's stuff is PGP/GPG or a home brew app using known good standard algorithms, then its as safe as anything else we know of at this point. In fact, NSA's attempt to influence and introduce non-randomness into new standards indicates that they likely haven't found a way around current crypto.

Unless they have a quantum computer...

For the ignorant and interested, what's the deal with Uncle BadTouch? Various allegations make him seem less than savoury to say the least and if any of them have any substance then it makes some of the decisions taken ITT very strange indeed.

Uncle BadTouch is a guy that says many things... some of those things appear to be real, some appear to be bullshit... indeed verylarge% seems to be bullshit. One of his pet things to rant about is that its not right/fair for there to be an age of consent, since he had a good first sexual experience as an underaged person with an adult. He sadly takes this opinion and stretches beyond the realm of credulity and it seems to be a pretty huge bar in his personal BiP. This led to normal PD fistacuffs and Uncle BadTouch went way too far trying to defend the idea and came off sounding like a pederast. He may or may not be a pederast, but it was squicky enough that his Golden Apple got Black Balled.

On top of that he often sticks his name on other work, takes credit for stuff he hasn't done or has only had a small hand in... added other peoples name to his stuff and generally behaves in a way that makes the little 17th century British guy in my head say "Bad Form, Sir!"

All in all, some guy who has his name plastered all over the Internet as being a big part of Discordia... but in reality he seems more like a blow hard to me.

Dingo was here in the UK with Purpleris and I a couple weeks ago. I'm sure we discussed PD.com in our interviews, both because that's how we met and because I went on a long rant about how wrong I was in my initial observations on BiP and some other stuff. I personally think its absurd to request that the website not be mentioned when some (but not all) of the Discordians interviewed know each other because of this forum and it plays a part in their life directly related to the topic being discussed.

Also, having met Dingo and talked about this entire mess... well I'm sorry some of you decided not to be involved, because thus far, its looking like lots of good material from many Discordians, Discordian history and Discordian groups... Based on what I know at this point, it looks like IF RL gets mentioned, it would be in a small email interview that's pretty much nothing. Fears that it would somehow taint everyone else seem, to me, absurd. I was impressed with Dingo and with some of the material I looked at. It may well end up being a damned good snapshot of Discordia in the 21st century and I'm sorry that some rather smart and cool Discordians chose not to participate.

Wow you squeezed that for all it was worth Alty...

Plagiarism is an ethical question, not a legal copyright one. It's not just borrowing an idea or image and remixing it into a new piece of art, its simply stealing the expression of one author and presenting it as your own without proper attribution. Its two distinctly different issues.