- Glenn Greenwald’s new outlet The Intercept published PGP public keys for its staff at firstlook.org, prompting debate about trusting keys delivered over HTTPS and the possibility of man-in-the-middle attacks by certificate authorities.  
- Participants joked about extreme verification methods—such as having journalists read their key fingerprints aloud on video or blink them in binary during live interviews—to counter potential NSA interception.  
- kanzure asked whether any neuroscientific phenomenon is truly governed by a single neurotransmitter level, coining the term “neurotransmitter reductionism” and noting that Google returns no prior usage.  
- heath sought open-source alternatives to Pusher’s real-time websocket service; kanzure suggested Parse.com and Firebase while warning about Meteor-related dependencies.  
- A Counterparty GUI pull request was criticized for mixing minified CSS/JS into the main repository, illustrating ongoing friction between clean code practices and rapid feature additions in crypto projects.  
- paperbot successfully retrieved two IEEE and Springer papers for chris_99, demonstrating the channel’s routine use of automated tools to bypass paywalls.  
- kardan solicited open-hardware stories for the German eco-activist print magazine gruenes-blatt.de, triggering a heated exchange about the relevance of physical magazines in an online era and culminating in a kick/ban.  
- gradstudentbot provided comic relief with self-deprecating academic tropes (“The culture got contaminated,” “Nobody is even going to read this paper”), underscoring the channel’s culture of gallows humor around research life.