The ARPANET IMP Program: Retrospective and Resurrection (PDF). “In 2013 a faded 1973 line printer listing of the IMP program from 1973 was run through a special OCR program optimized to process such historical artifacts; an assembler was recreated to assemble the IMP code (looking like the modified PDP-1 Midas assembler used in 1973); and a software emulator of the original IMP hardware platform was created.”

ChaCha20 and Poly1305 in OpenSSH, and there was much rejoicing.

Catena: A Memory-Consuming Password Scrambler, by Christian Forler, Stefan Lucks, and Jakob Wenzel. Catena supports client-independent updates and a server relief protocol.

Why Marpa works: table parsing, “I was surprised to find that the academic literature contained a major improvement to table parsing by Joop Leo, an improvement which nobody had ever made a serious attempt to implement. Marpa is the first implementation of Joop Leo’s 1991 improvement to table parsing which, as far as theory goes, makes Marpa as fast any parser in practical use today.”

Horner’s Rule, for a linear-time algorithm for the maximum segment sum.

mdb support for Go, good to know.

True X-Mouse Gizmo for Windows (TXMouse), saved should I ever need it. (Also, getting halfway there with on-board tools.)

Zit, the git-based single file content tracker.

UTC might be redefined without Leap Seconds

Short Errol Morris film on Benoit Mandelbrot

For Nearly Two Decades the Nuclear Launch Code at all Minuteman Silos in the United States Was 00000000

Coffee Maker Cooking: Brew Up Your Next Dinner

The owner of Lavabit tells us that he's stopped using email and if we knew what he knew, we'd stop too.

There is no way to do Groklaw without email. Therein lies the conundrum.

What to do?

Here [PDF] it is! The opinion in Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc. striking down patents on naturally occurring human genes, even if they've been isolated. It was unanimous! I have done it as text for you. From the opinion:

... Myriad did not create anything. To be sure, it found an important and useful gene, but separating that gene from its surrounding genetic material is not an act of invention.

From the Syllabus:

Myriad's patent descriptions highlight the problem with its claims: They detail the extensive process of discovery, but extensive effort alone is insufficient to satisfy §101's demands.

No patent on sweat of the brow. You have to actually invent something. Details from SCOTUSblog here:

The Court held that a naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated, but manmade cDNA is patent eligible because it is not naturally occurring.

You can find all the earlier filings here and some analysis on what the case was all about by Lyle Denniston here. As you can see from the Petition for a Writ of Certiorari [PDF], this successful challenge was brought by Dan Ravicher and his Public Patent Foundation and the ACLU.

What does it mean? Our genes belong to us. Here's what Dan Ravicher tweeted when he heard the news:

Diagnostic genetic testing is now free from any patent threat, forever, and the poor can now have their genes tested as freely as the rich.

I lost two grandmothers to breast cancer, and I want to say thank you to Dan and ACLU for taking this on for us. I am very grateful. It's not just that we can now afford to have genes tested. We can now get a second opinion instead of having only one option. Can you imagine a patent blocking that, even when it was known that the Myriad test sometimes gave false positives? That would be a patent forbidding coming up with a better mousetrap, you could say.

It would be a great time to donate to PubPat, to show appreciation for all it does. It's community supported, and could there be a better time? There were patent lawyers who mocked them for even bringing the case. Remember?

Edward Snowden broke the law by releasing classified information. This isn't under debate; it's something everyone with a security clearance knows. It's written in plain English on the documents you have to sign when you get a security clearance, and it's part of the culture. The law is there for a good reason, and secrecy has an important role in military defense.

But before the Justice Department prosecutes Snowden, there are some other investigations that ought to happen.

We need to determine whether these National Security Agency programs are themselves legal. The administration has successfully barred anyone from bringing a lawsuit challenging these laws, on the grounds of national secrecy. Now that we know those arguments are without merit, it's time for those court challenges.

It's clear that some of the NSA programs exposed by Snowden violate the Constitution and others violate existing laws. Other people have an opposite view. The courts need to decide.

We need to determine whether classifying these programs is legal. Keeping things secret from the people is a very dangerous practice in a democracy, and the government is permitted to do so only under very specific circumstances. Reading the documents leaked so far, I don't see anything that needs to be kept secret. The argument that exposing these documents helps the terrorists doesn't even pass the laugh test; there's nothing here that changes anything any potential terrorist would do or not do. But in any case, now that the documents are public, the courts need to rule on the legality of their secrecy.

And we need to determine how we treat whistle-blowers in this country. We have whistle-blower protection laws that apply in some cases, particularly when exposing fraud, and other illegal behavior. NSA officials have repeatedly lied about the existence, and details, of these programs to Congress.

Only after all of these legal issues have been resolved should any prosecution of Snowden move forward. Because only then will we know the full extent of what he did, and how much of it is justified.

I believe that history will hail Snowden as a hero -- his whistle-blowing exposed a surveillance state and a secrecy machine run amok. I'm less optimistic of how the present day will treat him, and hope that the debate right now is less about the man and more about the government he exposed.

This essay was originally published on the New York Times Room for Debate blog, as part of a series of essays on the topic.