Greetings fellow Portlandian! I was at WLF last night too! Such a great atmosphere!

Years ago I got to visit the perfume lab at the Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC, where students learn about making perfumes.

It was kinda like this! They had rows and rows of little bottles all filled with concentrated oils of different aromas. Probably the weirdest one I remember is “money”. I cracked it open, and sure enough, it smelled just like a stack of well used bills.

Was a really cool experience. Maybe see if there’s a perfumer anywhere near you who would let you come explore their lab?

Important to note the “done and dusted” quote in the headline of this article (and most of the rest of the “content”) isn’t from anyone at any government agency. It comes from a guy who runs a “data encryption start-up” and is shilling his own product. Most of the “news” being covered here is just speculation from this one guy.

The only “reversed course” from the government, as alluded to in the article, is CISA encouraging government employees to use E2EE messaging since our telecom infrastructure is basically perma-pwn’d by the Chinese.

Government intelligence agencies would still VERY MUCH like to have backdoors in this encryption and there is nothing to indicate that has changed.