- A Guardian article (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/04/tor-attacks-nsa-users-online-anonymity) prompted discussion about NSA attacks on Tor; participants speculated that “timing analysis” might involve TCP timestamps or clock-skew techniques.  
- Several Tor hidden-service marketplaces were listed—BMR (5onwnspjvuk7cwvk.onion), Sheep Marketplace (sheep5u64fi457aw.onion), and Deepbay (deepbay4xr3sw2va.onion)—with the comment that their names are “terrible.”  
- A Science paper (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full) describing a sting operation against open-access journals was shared; the author’s NPR interview was criticized for omitting that reputable journals like PLOS ONE quickly rejected the fake papers while some Elsevier and Sage titles, plus a “Nigerian journal of ethnobotanicology,” accepted them.  
- Two neuroscience/BCI papers were retrieved via paperbot:  
  – “A review of methods for spike sorting” (doi:10.1016/j.patcog.2007.04.003)  
  – “Patterns of cortical activity during the observation of Public Service Announcements and commercial advertisings” (Journal of Neural Engineering 2008).  
- Discussion of automated server deployment covered tools such as Chef, Vagrant, Veewee, Linode StackScripts, and the expect utility for handling interactive CLI prompts; kanzure argued that shell scripts should be avoided in favor of configuration management defaults.  
- A GitHub project for transparent git encryption, git-crypt (https://github.com/AGWA/git-crypt), was highlighted as a way to secure sensitive configuration data in repositories.  
- An h+ Magazine piece claiming “the Catholic Church has declared war on transhumanism” (http://hplusmagazine.com/2013/10/04/the-catholic-church-has-declared-war-on-transhumanism/) was dismissed as sensationalist.