[tptacek]

Thanks, but I'm not even asking him to trust me in this particular subthread. The point he made, about the NSA having better reverse engineers than everyone else, really does seem to me to be a non-sequitur.

Reverse engineering isn't zero sum. The benefit you get from reverse-engineering a closed platform doesn't vanish when someone else reverse-engineers the platform, just like your ability to read open source code isn't damaged by NSA's ability to read it faster.

[jhlgkhkhil]

Please provide some references to back up any of your claims in this or other threads. By references I mean articles by other reputable researchers (preferably peer reviewed). Blog posts and summaries of your chat logs do not count. As you are a researcher this will not be hard (a quick search in your reference manager software should suffice) - or a link to one of your articles from which I can follow the citations.

[bmelton]

It was more of a meta-comment for the whole thread to attempt to end the "nuh unh" "yeah huh" back and forth.

As I said, I don't know who's right and who's wrong, but the argument seemed to involve a lot of effort for being so unproductive.