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the things FAQs were made for by ah42 · 2000-05-02 00:41 · Score: 1 · on Ask Douglas Adams About...Everything

So you don't ask questions that have already been asked, here is the alt.fan.douglas-adams FAQ and the alt.fan.douglas-adams MFAQ

HTH HAND

Use the other kind of 'munitions'... by costas · 2000-04-27 21:07 · Score: 2 · on Laptop Lojack?

...cryptography. Cheap, easy and truly secure (coz the 'black helicopters' always have bomb experts on board :-)... For the truly paranoid, there are several utilities that will use strong encryption to secure whole disk partitions (and some work flawlessly and transparently with Windows and/or Linux).

Some utilities:

Scramdisk (my personal favorite)

BestCrypt

PGP Disk

E4M

And to ease day-to-day operation: SecureTray (Windows tray utility to manage encrypted partitions).

engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.

virtual lojack by cardcounter · 2000-04-27 19:52 · Score: 1 · on Laptop Lojack?

If your goal is to protect your sensitive data, which for most people ought to represent more value than the physical computer, then something like Scramdisk or pgp disk should help greatly. The truly security conscious should probably go with something like Cerberus's software.

If you want to try to nab a clumsy thief, Cyberangel calls home as soon as you connect to the net.

Of course, these solutions work only with Windows. What would the corresponding solution for other OS's be?

Crypto And Crypto Law by DaveHowe · 2000-04-06 01:22 · Score: 2 · on Information On Cryptography And Effects On Society?

Hmm. for a good foundation in Crypto, I would recommend a look at PGP and Scramdisk (not only for the programs but for the information on the sites. In addition, the excellent Applied Cryptography is available online, as is the author's regular crypto newsletter CryptoGram.
I don't have much on the USA legal stuff (but that can be found on the above sites) but for the UK, currently fighting against one of the worst "Big Brother" Violation of the right to secrecy in communications bills known in the world, the UKCrypto discussion list archive would be worth a look...

Finally, here are further links to, for example, the crypto law survey which will give you an idea of the legality of Crypto in various countries.

Good luck, and we will look forward to seeing your report if you choose to post it to the web.
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Time for Slashdot to take a stand... by Anonymous Coward · 2000-04-05 03:12 · Score: 4 · on MPAA Files Another Injunction Against 2600

The following is a list of all the mirrors from the 2600 site.

El Gamal is simpler by David+Jao · 2000-03-09 22:01 · Score: 1 · on Mozilla With Crypto Code Released

I will not say anything in defense of the NSA-developed Digital Signature Algorithm, but El Gamal is a different matter. El Gamal is by no means more convoluted than RSA; in fact my experience is that El Gamal is a good deal simpler.

Diffie-Hellman is extremely simple and was discovered a good deal earlier than RSA. El Gamal is a totally obvious extension of Diffie-Hellman, in which the Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol is made into a public key cryptosystem in the simplest way possible: replace the predetermined secret exponent with an on-demand random one!

The only reason it took seven years to develop El Gamal's algorithm is that the scientific culture at the time was predominantly convinced that algorithms (even cryptographic ones) had to be deterministic. If you had tipped off any researcher in the field about run-time randomization of Diffie-Hellman, they could have produced El Gamal's 1984 paper off the top of their head. RSA is deterministic, requiring no random numbers at run time. Ironically, nowadays all RSA implementations introduce randomization in some form because it is obvious that a purely deterministic algorithm is not secure: Would you trust an encryption algorithm where the messages "Yes" and "No" always encrypt to the same two output messages?

As for your implication that RSA is more trustworthy than El Gamal, you might want to read Question 2.14 of the PGP DH vs. RSA FAQ, where various well-known experts assert that (as far as we know) all known ideas for solving the discrete log problem have direct applicability to factoring, whereas the reverse is not true. We know that factoring does not allow you to take discrete logs, whereas on the flip side there is strong evidence that if you can take discrete logs you can factor. All this and more is explained in the FAQ; the upshot is that most mathematicians, if forced to pick one of the two, would say that the factorization problem is likely to succumb before the discrete log problem succumbs. Of course the underlying hard problem is not the whole story, since neither RSA nor El-Gamal have been proven equivalent to the underlying hard problems, but it's the best we can do so far considering that no one has demonstrated any way to break the algorithms except through the underlying hard problems.

Finally, the very simplicity of using the same key for both encryption and signing is also a liability, in that if both keys are the same then anyone who is able to get one key (for example by a court order) is then able to forge the other operation as well. In the current political climate, I'd certainly like my signature key to remain valid even if the government seizes my encryption key.

ELITE, I want ELITE darn it! by jonr · 2000-03-02 17:11 · Score: 1 · on Parsec Demo For Linux Released

IMNSHO still the best game written ever. ELITE is the king! Ah, all those nights on my trusty old BBC Model B, using an Apple green monitor in the computer lab. "Hey there is a system we havent vistited, I wander if we run into any Thargoids?"
David Braben and Ian Bell, where are you now?
(Oops, looks like troubl e!)
Jón
(No, I did NOT put that space in "trouble")

ELITE, I want ELITE darn it! by jonr · 2000-03-02 17:11 · Score: 1 · on Parsec Demo For Linux Released

IMNSHO still the best game written ever. ELITE is the king! Ah, all those nights on my trusty old BBC Model B, using an Apple green monitor in the computer lab. "Hey there is a system we havent vistited, I wander if we run into any Thargoids?"
David Braben and Ian Bell, where are you now?
(Oops, looks like troubl e!)
Jón
(No, I did NOT put that space in "trouble")

Re:Bluth & Disney by seoman70 · 2000-02-27 21:04 · Score: 1 · on Movie Reviews: Fantasia 2000

Yes, Bluth was a Disney animator originally, but he left Disney while they were working on The Fox and the Hound due to artistic constraints. You can find a lot of information about Bluth here and here.

Re:Amiga again? by c=sixty4 · 2000-01-30 19:57 · Score: 2 · on Amiga DirectoryOpus 4 Released Under GPL

This is news because Directrory Opus is one of the two reasons I kept using my Amiga even when it went way outdated, and why I could use it to feed my /. addiction even this week when my usual Linux box went down.

For those who don't know what DirOpus does, it's a file managment tool in the vein of Norton / Midnight commander, except it's everything those tools ever wanted to become. A port of it would be a Good Thing (TM).

Besides, I feel more manufacturers should set their software free when the commercial value of it has run dry. After all, that's not the only kind of value a program has. A good example is Ian Bell's release of Elite.

Re:I wonder... by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-28 06:27 · Score: 0 · on Encryption Debate at Mitnick Trial

Dude!

I bet a nickel he used plain old PGP 2.x command line. And you can get *much* better stuff than that for file storage these days.

How about Scramdisk? (http://www.scramdisk.clara.net/ ) Not only can you make encrypted container files that act as individual drives when mounted, you can put them inside big ole .wav files using the steganography option. If Kevin had had Scramdisk, the Feds would not be able to prove that there was any encrypted data on his hard drive in the 1st place.

God I love modern cryptography!

Re:What is steganography? by DaveHowe · 1999-11-25 00:30 · Score: 2 · on Waiting for the Knock

Steganography is the method of "conceiling" an encrypted file inside another, larger file that has redundancy (for example, a .wav sound file or a .gif). There are utilities that will do this for you, and at least one crypto package (Scramdisk) that allows you to set aside such space in a .wav and use it as a virtual drive letter.
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Password archives by DaveHowe · 1999-11-12 20:37 · Score: 2 · on How do you Remember Your Passwords?

Hmm. I keep mine on a Scramdisk (a free virtual disk encryptor available from Here. I also encrypt the data with PGP every so often and email it home, so I have a backup if I lose the scramdisk or forget IT's password
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-=DaveHowe=-

Quote by Anonymous Coward · 1999-10-03 06:18 · Score: 0 · on Israelis Crack RSA 512 Bit in Microseconds

"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." -- Bill Gates from The Road Ahead, p265

(from this page)

Re:PGP is junk by David+Price · 1999-09-17 03:05 · Score: 2 · on Encryption Exports: Small Step Forward, Big Step Back

According to the PGP DH vs. RSA FAQ, one of the primes used to generate DH keys is selected from a limited set, but the preselection does not severely impact security, and you're given the option to spend the time to generate your own prime.

Alternatives to RSA: DH, and elliptic curve crypto by David+Jao · 1999-05-13 06:06 · Score: 1 · on Against Arbitrary Intellectual Property Rights.

I have reservations with your definition but I will work with it. Even accepting your definition, RSA is not by any stretch of the imagination "state of the art."

Alternatives to RSA include El-Gamal/Diffie Hellman (currently used by OpenPGP and SSHv2, and supported by SSLv3). It is interesting to note that in all three cases, the need to avoid the RSA patent was a primary motivation for the switch to DH.

Now you may think that RSA must be superior to DH because it was discovered later. That's not the case. If you read the PGP-DH-RSA FAQ, you'll find (question 8.1) that the consensus among experts is that DH is possibly better, and not worse, than RSA from a security and practicality standpoint. Also note that the El-Gamal variant of DH was discovered after RSA (in 1984) and never patented.

Perusing through the same document, you'll find a reference to how elliptic curve cryptography, now being researched, appears to offer the same level of security as RSA with much smaller key sizes. The only reason EC cryptography is not yet mainstream is because researchers have not had enough years to thoroughly thrash it for possible holes.

In conclusion, between Diffie-Hellman (in use now) and elliptic-curve based methods on the horizon, there are most certainly alternatives that are set to displace RSA. Moreover, as noted above, DH has already displaced RSA in many major applications of public-key cryptography. Therefore, RSA is not state of the art.

Given this new information, do you still defend the RSA patent as "a good thing" for society? I'd like to know.

Get RA converter source code here by Anonymous Coward · 1999-02-14 07:42 · Score: 0 · on Ask Slashdot: Can you Convert RealAudio to MP3?

http://www.matrix.clara.net/Acorn/ra/
http://www.members.tripod.com/~ladsof t/ra.htm
http://csc.smsu.edu/~strauser/RA.html

Many RA files are just G.728 files with funny headers, so you can use any G.728 decoder on them. Here is the source to one: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/local/mosaic/common/o mega/Web/groups/AI/areas/ speech/systems/ldcelp/

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