from the Abelson report (pg 53, https://swartz-report.mit.edu/docs/report-to-the-president.p...):

"With regard to substance, MIT would make no statements, whether in support or in opposition, about the government’s decision to prosecute Aaron Swartz"

Am I missing something? Been a while since I read the report in full.

"While MIT did not conform precisely to this rule, in this sense of similar responses MIT—broadly speaking—did not side with the prosecution, nor did it side with the defense. In consequence of the differences in the powers, timing, and goals of the two parties in the case, neutrality in responses was not consistent with neutrality in outcomes, and MIT was not neutral in outcomes."

I agree that MIT was not trying to make an example out of him. But it wasn't that "they didn't push back harder on the prosecutor", it was that they didn't push back at all. The Ableson report correctly criticizes MIT for this.

It's been a while since I read the report too, thanks for linking to it.

I had thought there was more detail in the report about the private conversations between MIT's Office of General Counsel and the prosecutors, referred to on p. 52, where it says that after a June 21, 2011 discussion, "OGC inferred that further presentations of MIT’s opinions were unlikely to have an effect on the prosecution: the views of both potential victims had already been taken into account". My understanding during previous discussions here (which was quite a while ago) had been that OGC did push back in private conversations with the prosecutor (and the "further presentations" in what I just quoted also can be read that way), but the prosecutor was not receptive, and the June 21 conversation was basically the end of MIT's private attempts to influence the prosecutor. However, since the report does not give any more details about that, I might have gotten that impression from other sources around that time. Clearly, even if MIT did make such attempts, they weren't successful, and could not have been all that emphatic.

for reference: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4bxf6f/im_curtis_yarv...

They are not talking about the same kind of timing attacks. Deanonymization attacks require vastly less latency consistency.

It's only the wrong funding model if there is a superior alternative. It's a non-ideal funding model, but as is the main point of the article, they are and have been actively looking for alternative sources of funding without success. I hope your gripe is not directed at OpenSSL but at those who could be supporting it financially.

That "sticks shaped these ways" happen to affect neurotransmitter levels is a great guide to finding others, especially the great moves in safety from MAO inhibitors -> trycyclics and the like -> 3rd generation started with Prozac, is sort of besides the point. That they make a really significant difference for lots of people is.

Not that wikipedia is the last word, but, "[...] companies such as Pfizer continue to promote drugs like Zoloft with advertisements asserting that mental illness may be due to chemical imbalances in the brain, and that their drugs work to "correct" this imbalance. Most academics believe that the advertisements are oversimplified and don't fully explain what is happening."

Oversimplifications

>Notice that it didn't say, "Academics disregard the chemical balance explanation because it lacks evidentiary support."

A lack of explicit critique in a rephrasing on wikipedia should not be used as evidence.

The cited article for that sentence (http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/516262) is from 2005 and includes the following:

> Numerous studies to identify reproducible changes in neurotransmitter levels in the cerebrospinal fluid of clinically depressed patients, or to induce or correct depression by manipulating brain serotonin levels, were inconclusive and fraught with methodological limitations.

> Gordon McCarter, PhD, an assistant professor of biological sciences at the College of Pharmacy of Touro University in Vallejo, California, agreed that the evidence for an "imbalance" in neurotransmitters causing depression is "circumstantial" and "more and more tenuous." He noted the dearth of studies showing any measurable difference in serotonin or norepinephrine between depressed patients and controls

> "The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders does not list serotonin as a cause of any mental disorder; it is simply one neurotransmitter that continues to be investigated. And the prescribing information for the SSRIs does not claim that their mechanism of action is to correct a chemical imbalance, although this is exactly what the advertisements claim."

> "We suspect that many consumers believe the serotonin theory to be more scientifically based than it is, and that they might have chosen an alternative approach to their distress if they were fully informed.

Not that I necessarily think having Eich as CEO would make Mozilla unable to welcome LGBTQ employees, but this argument is absurd. It is not at all difficult to imagine a rule set that permits free speech while still discriminating against LGBTQ employees in some other way.