Oh man, you DELETED your comment! I was replying and lost it, so it will be reproduced here due to quoting, as it is important to me that your backpedal of the century be committed to the historical record.

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First off, my comment wasn't out of spite or anything. I would call it a friendly jab. I'm guilty of reaching temporary frustration in some previous discussions with you over civil liberties and privacy, which may have colored a few comments, but I totally respect you and don't generally disagree with you on technical matters. I'm not even going to pretend I have a leg up on you anywhere related to security. I'm sure when the day comes that there is an obscure subtopic of security for which this is the case, it will quickly become known though! (The civil liberties issues are another story, because your opinion is in fact wrong on all issues related to civil liberties, along with seemingly everybody in your "must read" list. Yes, that's a joke. Kind of.)

> Nobody does use it. How important a product do you think this is? Isn't it basically a commercial packaging of rsaref?

> Name a piece of crypto technology that you or, say, Moxie Marlinspike or, I don't know, Jacob Appelbaum relies on that uses Dual_EC.

I don't know who uses it, but that's kind of the point. I don't think anyone can really have a good idea of who uses it or who ships it as a default, we can just know who doesn't. It's in the standard, so my assumption is that it's not unlikely that someone chose it, perhaps in a proprietary implementation in corners of the internet that are not the most obvious. The fact that RSA sell it strongly reinforces my suspicion that it's in more places than you think.

> What's frustrating are the people who insist on taking the wrong message away from what I'm saying. I'm not defending Dual_EC. I imagine that I have the exact same perspective on it that Matthew Green does.

I don't think anyone thinks you're defending it (I certainly don't), just that you think that it's not a concern worthy of paying attention to. On the other hand, Matthew Green seems rather disturbed by the recent revelations. The interest in this topic involves more than a specific backdoor that got into a widespread implementation and who isn't likely affected by that particular instance.

> Also: how was this comment helpful? Yours will obviously be the top comment on this thread, and it's basically about, what are the implications of this blog post on the 'tptacek HN persona?" Is that all you have to talk about?

Yes, that was all I had to talk about. It was just a casual comment, and I didn't intend nor expect it to be the top. But I did have a point:

You are the most well-known commenter around here. and everybody looks to you for crypto and security expertise. Sometimes you get rather adamant about whichever position you adopt, which might mix opinion in with fact from time to time. You know what you're talking about dan you're usually right. However, forces that govern our universe guarantee that if one makes bold and authoritative claims on the internet that turn out to be less than correct, the strength of the claim and the number of times it is repeated are proportional to the promptness with which someone else will present something to challenge the claim. (Edit: I wrote this before noticing all of the top comments in this thread came to say the same thing. Come on, you have to chuckle...) I know you understand this because you do it all the time :P Do you want to hear about my 100% undetectable rootkit?

Anyway, I just disagreed with your dismissive comments on other threads as though it's nothing that we need to discuss. I get why one of your missions is to be the Outrage Police, but I think you're overzealous about it from time to time. I know, I'm sure I'm overzealous with my pitchfork as well...

> How many threads have you and I managed to find something to argue about in information security and privacy? How many times have I top-commented a thread about you? I don't because wow, is that ever boring.

I'm not really sure why you're making it personal. For one thing, I'm not important enough to get a top comment about in a thread I haven't yet posted in ;) I don't think I have a habit of dominating those discussions, nor do I think I have enough credibility to do. It probably has more to do with that than being boring. But why do your questions take for granted that your commenting habits are the benchmark for appropriate behavior? Is that not just a tad arrogant?

> Later edit: BSAFE is apparently used in some way by some popular consumer electronics products that I've never taken a close look at, so I was wrong about that. My point about the pervasiveness (or lack thereof) of Dual_EC stands.