Hacking and Cracking, Internet security, Cypherpunk. I find these topics fascinating as well as completely over my head.
Yet, there are still some things that can be said to a layman, especially by the ever-poignant Randall Munroe:
I'm guilty on both charges (reusing poorly formulated passwords, not stealing them).
These arguments may be just be the tip of the iceberg of a much larger problem that needs optimizing: Social Engineering, or mainly how it can be used against our interests (to quip Person 2, "It doesn't matter how much security you put on the box. Humans are not secure."). I get the feeling that I'm not managing my risks on the Internet as well as I should.
So the questions I ask are: In what ways do our cognitive biases come into play when we surf the Internet and interact with others? Of which of these biases can actively we protect against, and how? I've enforced HTTPS when available, as well as kept my Internet use iconoclastic rather than typical, but I doubt that's a comprehensive list.
I don't know how usefully I can contribute, but I hope that many on Less Wrong can.
This is shock level stuff? It's just making a petting zoo out of entities man were never meant to know possessing no physical form, selected for driving some humans mad in interesting but relatively harmless ways!
Edit: checked the numbers again... seriously you're suggesting this is higher check level than the singularity? This stuff is age old, and fairly mainstream, Lovecraft wrote about it quite specifically. The SCP foundation is full of it.