Back in the late 90s, there was a huge collaborative effort to break DirecTV's content controls. People would hack DTV smart cards, and then DTV would break the hacks, and there was an arms race for several years, during which, if you wanted, you could reprogram your DTV smart card to get all the local channels in every DTV market, and then program your DVR to record 18 episodes of The Simpsons every day, and I digress.

Anyways: for the DTV hackers, the adversary, DTV and its security contractors, were called "Dave".

I always liked that, so I figured, let's give our global adversary a name.

In small (11px), light-ish (#777777) next to the first paragraph:

> If I call NSA “Clyde Frog” long enough, eventually other people will too. Someone has to start the meme! I think Dual_EC is a backdoor.

First time I've ever seen sidenotes done like that.

BTW, screen reader users (i.e. blind people) can't possibly miss the sidenotes; in fact, each sidenote will interrupt the text at the point where the note is most relevant. So a screen reader will render the first sentence like this:

Did Clyde Frog If I call NSA “Clyde Frog” long enough, eventually other people will too. Someone has to start the meme! subvert crypto standards with a backdoored random number generator called Dual_EC?

A little jarring when first encountered. (In my case, because I have some usable vision, I could tell what was going on.) I'd suggest sticking with more conventional footnotes, but I can see why this form of sidenote was appealing.

Proper support for footnotes / sidenotes in HTML itself would be dandy. There's not, so people write hacks.I've done a few myself.

Presently footnoting is either manual or requires a preprocessor -- LaTeX, Markdown, CMS, etc.

It also happens if you use "Reader" mode in Safari. It was very strange, but I caught on once I looked at the article in regular mode and it wasn't there.

Do screen readers do any special handling of parentheticals? For a note that short, I wouldn't have been surprised if it were inserted inline in parentheses.

South Park reference the author is making for fun.

I'm actually a South Park fan and I was chuckling when I read Clyde Frog initially (before the side notes) because I assumed it was an employee/contractor who was involved with these developments. My initial reaction was to wonder how much he hated South Park after they introduced CF. I could get behind Clyde Frog being an NSA alias for shits and giggles.

Wow I am a lot less lost after reading the explanation