- A USENIX Security ’12 paper revealed that 0.75 % of TLS certificates and 0.50 % of TLS hosts reuse weak RSA keys created with insufficient entropy, making large-scale private-key recovery feasible; the full paper is available at http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/064.  
- Cambrian Genomics’ early-stage SOMA lab uses Scala for its strict type system, bootstrapped with friends-and-family capital, and struggles with space because conventional lab gear is too heavy for simple 80/20 aluminum framing.  
- For scraping JavaScript-heavy web archives, mitmproxy is recommended to reverse-engineer the underlying HTTP/JSON API, with PhantomJS + CasperJS as a fallback when full JS execution is unavoidable.  
- Rationalist communities (e.g., LessWrong) were argued to offer better Schelling points for second-opinion medical services than traditional consensus medicine, alongside Robb Wolf’s new “Specialty Health” paleo risk-assessment consultancy.  
- There is a push to migrate DIYbio mailing-list archives off deteriorating Google Groups to email-centric, backup-friendly systems like Mailman 3 or Sympa, explicitly rejecting Discourse and other web-only platforms.  
- Informal hardware recycling is common: two decommissioned UV–Vis spectrophotometers were removed in a car’s back seat, and replacement deuterium bulbs and power supplies are “pretty cheap on Alibaba,” enabling low-cost DIY lab builds.  
- Participants observed that Portland, Oregon has almost no biotech presence and advocated starting a strategic push to establish open-science biotech in PDX.