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Nah. People freely give away boring data. Like photos of their lunch.

For the interesting data - location history, call history, contents of your messages, live mic/camera feeds - they still have to collect it surreptitiously.

At this point, pretty much everyone knows that Big Brother Google is always watching, and that Creepy Facebook just wants to stalk you. They don't even hide their data slurping anymore.

But there are dozens of other companies that make their money by snooping and stealing your data. Try the Exodus Privacy scanner - it's FOSS - for some enlightening results. https://exodus-privacy.eu.org/

I find FF on Android slow too.

Maybe it because it needs to contact DoubleClick first:

https://reports.exodus-privacy...

I assume all Google Store applications track and use the camera, after running an Application I'll go into settings > apps and force stop the application. The Front camera has electrical tape over it, fingernail polish keeps coming off.

A game I'll switch to airplane mode as well.

I'm also inputting the info from https://exodus-privacy.eu.org/ into my router.

It's the best I can do...

This is a great help! Thank you. https://freelancerfaithkarin.w...

Even Firefox for mobile contains two trackers: https://reports.exodus-privacy.... That's disappointing.

The linked page states that the detection rules are:
mng-ads\.com
doubleclick\.net

You could easily get false positives if it's plain string matching and the program contains those strings. The only other reason I see for Firefox to have those strings besides tracking that they are in a preloaded database of some kind.

I'm also inputting the info from https://exodus-privacy.eu.org/ into my router.

I had to type it out for myself, so posted for others use. https://slashdot.org/journal/2...

Even Firefox for mobile contains two trackers: https://reports.exodus-privacy.... That's disappointing.

Interesting site. I hope they aren't also tracking. Here's the list of applications they have reports for: https://reports.exodus-privacy...

I assume all Google Store applications track and use the camera, after running an Application I'll go into settings > apps and force stop the application. The Front camera has electrical tape over it, fingernail polish keeps coming off.

A game I'll switch to airplane mode as well.

I'm also inputting the info from https://exodus-privacy.eu.org/ into my router.

It's the best I can do...

Why not link to the source of the story instead of some commercial middleman? Is it all about kickbacks? Here's the list: https://reports.exodus-privacy...

The Yale and Exodus investigation resulted in the creation of a dedicated website that now lists all apps using tracking code and a list of trackers, used by these apps. In total, researchers said they identified 44 trackers embedded in over 300 Android apps.

Why mention this if you're not even going to link to it?! Here's the URL that should have been plastered in the summary, and made more visible in TFA

... look at these Android apps that either track shit or have extraordinary permissions.

For Instagram: android.permission.GET_ACCOUNTS

find accounts on the device
        Allows the app to get the list of accounts known by the phone. This may include any accounts created by applications you have installed.

I never found the time to share and explain my firefox configuration, but this thread had the incentives to do it. Now you can check http://www.trek.eu.org/text/fi... with a downloadable user.js tuned just for security and privacy in mind.

In the abstract, the main measure of encryption that matters is that it has passed enough scruitiny based on currently known attack techniques. You really have to get your stuff out there before you know how good it is.

To this end, this person isn't a fly-by-night encryption designer, but somone who has a stream cipher accepted into the eSTREAM portfolio. AFAIK, ChaCha is a derivative of the Salsa20 stream cipher and can be used similarly to RC-4 (although the similarities are only superficial to RC-4).

Poly1305 is really a just a MAC (message authentication code) technique which relies on an underlying cipher (usually AES). It's more sophisticated than the standardized CMAC (cipher-based MAC) but more simiilar to GMAC (the galois-field MAC that is part of the GCM encryption technique used by WiGig).

Cite? The source below seems to say otherwise. It's just a pie chart and that sector includes all transport, but it still seems a lot larger than you're claiming. http://www.whatsyourimpact.eu.org/co2-sources.php

Another option is eu.org which was created by a founder of Gandi when .org domains stopped being free.

The actual website indicates it hasn't even been done yet, and is lighter on details than white bread.

It is complete BS, the website has no details and tons of press releases. Here is how much work they have done so far, about a dozen lines of text:

http://puffin.eu.org/WP1.html
http://puffin.eu.org/WP2.html
http://puffin.eu.org/WP3.html

I think they posted the release in hopes of letting the online community discuss ideas, and will then harvest those.

Lame.

The actual website indicates it hasn't even been done yet, and is lighter on details than white bread.

It is complete BS, the website has no details and tons of press releases. Here is how much work they have done so far, about a dozen lines of text:

http://puffin.eu.org/WP1.html
http://puffin.eu.org/WP2.html
http://puffin.eu.org/WP3.html

I think they posted the release in hopes of letting the online community discuss ideas, and will then harvest those.

Lame.

The actual website indicates it hasn't even been done yet, and is lighter on details than white bread.

It is complete BS, the website has no details and tons of press releases. Here is how much work they have done so far, about a dozen lines of text:

http://puffin.eu.org/WP1.html
http://puffin.eu.org/WP2.html
http://puffin.eu.org/WP3.html

I think they posted the release in hopes of letting the online community discuss ideas, and will then harvest those.

Lame.

From:

http://puffin.eu.org/WP1.html

the best I can figure is they're doing something like shutting off memory refresh and seeing what the cells look like. That's the most best source of random mfgr "stuff" I can think of.

Other than that, I'm mystified how they're doing it. There just shouldn't be that much mfgr variation.

It could be that there's only a couple bits of randomness (like they're reading out the model number and calling it good). The fact they aren't advertising the details implies the details are less than impressive. For example this ancient box has a Radeon HD 4350, so my "real" /. UID is not VLM, its RadeonHD4350-VLM. Unimpressed... so far.

My guess is the idea is to use the device characteristics as a REALLY crude second factor for authentication. So if I log in on my phone, or any of the other dozens of machines I have access to, it'll pester me for my pet dogs mother's maiden name, the city name where I got my first pedicure, the month of the year that I was divorced in, the usual BS authentication questions that anyone with access to facebook can crack in a few minutes.

seeing how simple it is to set up the Android qemu/kvm based SDK in a virtual machine on Linux, I don't know if that itch is really very scratchy.

BlueStacks got over $10m funding, so some people think it's a good idea. It should be really easy to do, too - all the source required is open and already runs on Linux/Android, it just needs porting to Linux/desktop.

please tell us more about this debian chroot solution.

http://www.mayrhofer.eu.org/debian-on-android http://www.saurik.com/id/10

Such tools existed for years, thanks to Google's open API. I wrote one of the first example scripts and the idea was then used in many other tools:
http://wanted.eu.org/en/computers/linux/uploading_photos_to_picasaweb

I personally like this one best:
http://code.google.com/p/upload2picasa/

Even if this gets modded up to +5, it's going to be buried under a dozen pointless and irrelevant posts about imperial vs. metric ...

From the ISS Flight Director briefing on NASA TV at 1:30pm today:
http://www.space-multimedia.nl.eu.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5693:sts-130-iss-flight-director-update-fd-7-8&catid=1:latest
[transcribing] "Crew was able to use their eyes and hands and gave good info on interference along with photos, Jeff has had a lot of hands on the hardware and he's given us the best info. His info allowed us to validate what he's seeing with our records on the ground. Actual interference is just a bolthead, that caused us to question our clearance analysis. We went back and looked at it since we don't want clearance issue when we install Cupola on nadir, and found that we have more clearance than originally expected."

From the Flight Day 8 "execute package" sent up around 3pm to the Endeavour astronauts:
( http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/426345main_FD08.pdf )
"Because of your excellent work in checking interferences, we are now comfortable with
proceeding with cupola depress and relocate today!!! Thanks so much!!!"

From the NASA TV schedule, Tuesday:
CUPOLA MLI REMOVAL 10:39 PM EST / 03:39 UTC

After that the windows can be opened, which is what we're all waiting for!

Amazing indeed. I just wish NASA TV showed a bit more of this kind of footage -- advocate for NASA to hire a couple of good video editors?

For those who don't know it, a good source of NASA video archives (besides Youtube) is http://www.space-multimedia.nl.eu.org/.

Last fall during the run-up to the original launch date, NASA conducted their usual round of press briefings on this mission, 30 days prior to launch. The briefings included the usual information about the mission, the crew, the scheduled spacewalk work, etc.

In addition to those briefings typical for any shuttle flight, they conducted a "science briefing" to explain what the work of this servicing mission was going to do for the scientific capabilities of Hubble. In the briefing was an all-star cast of astronomical scientists:

• Ed Weiler, NASA administrator
• David Leckrone, Hubble senior scientist
• Robert O'Connell, committee chair for one of the two new instruments
• James Green, principal investigator for the other new instrument
• Heidi Hammel, scientist representing users of Hubble

Each of them made a short speech and then the rest of the briefing was turned over to questions from the press. I would encourage anyone with even a fleeting interest in science or astronomy to take the time to download and watch the entire briefing, as it is truly fantastic stuff they're talking about, and these guys do a great job of explaining it to regular people. Certainly science could use a bit of a pep talk after weathering the last 8 years of the Bush administration's hostility to science and objective truths.

In particular, the last person on the dais, Dr. Hammel, give an impassioned 10-minutes speech on the impact of Hubble on science and indeed on culture. It's an astonishing and beautiful statement on where we are in astronomical science and where we may be headed if this shuttle mission goes as planned. I'm surprised the press room didn't erupt in applause when she finished.

Dr. Hammel's speech starts at the 38:50 mark in the first half of the briefing that I've linked below. If you don't have time to watch the entire 90-minute briefing, at least watch her 10 minutes.

download page for first half of briefing

download page for second half of briefing

The above is adapted from an entry that I made to my personal blog back in September (not linked here). Sadly, I see that the above download links no longer work. I have not been able to find the briefing on Youtube, and the repeat briefings from a couple weeks ago did not include Dr. Hammel. FORTUNATELY, I did find most of Dr. Hammel's speech incorporated into a nice 5 minute video right here. Please check it out!

Last fall during the run-up to the original launch date, NASA conducted their usual round of press briefings on this mission, 30 days prior to launch. The briefings included the usual information about the mission, the crew, the scheduled spacewalk work, etc.

In addition to those briefings typical for any shuttle flight, they conducted a "science briefing" to explain what the work of this servicing mission was going to do for the scientific capabilities of Hubble. In the briefing was an all-star cast of astronomical scientists:

• Ed Weiler, NASA administrator
• David Leckrone, Hubble senior scientist
• Robert O'Connell, committee chair for one of the two new instruments
• James Green, principal investigator for the other new instrument
• Heidi Hammel, scientist representing users of Hubble

Each of them made a short speech and then the rest of the briefing was turned over to questions from the press. I would encourage anyone with even a fleeting interest in science or astronomy to take the time to download and watch the entire briefing, as it is truly fantastic stuff they're talking about, and these guys do a great job of explaining it to regular people. Certainly science could use a bit of a pep talk after weathering the last 8 years of the Bush administration's hostility to science and objective truths.

In particular, the last person on the dais, Dr. Hammel, give an impassioned 10-minutes speech on the impact of Hubble on science and indeed on culture. It's an astonishing and beautiful statement on where we are in astronomical science and where we may be headed if this shuttle mission goes as planned. I'm surprised the press room didn't erupt in applause when she finished.

Dr. Hammel's speech starts at the 38:50 mark in the first half of the briefing that I've linked below. If you don't have time to watch the entire 90-minute briefing, at least watch her 10 minutes.

download page for first half of briefing

download page for second half of briefing

The above is adapted from an entry that I made to my personal blog back in September (not linked here). Sadly, I see that the above download links no longer work. I have not been able to find the briefing on Youtube, and the repeat briefings from a couple weeks ago did not include Dr. Hammel. FORTUNATELY, I did find most of Dr. Hammel's speech incorporated into a nice 5 minute video right here. Please check it out!

Here's a much better link: (ASF format, 313MB, 640x480px)

http://files.filefront.com/Tour+2009+zip/;13005092;/fileinfo.html

(Link taken from here)

They already did prosecute him:
http://www.heise-online.co.uk/news/DDOS-attackers-appear-in-US-court--/111667

Btw.:
http://ago.bastart.eu.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi
http://de.netlog.com/MegaAgo

French authorities are smart. In order to speed up creating the database, they put up an online petition against it, so people are giving their names themselves :)

In my final year in CS, I wrote a lengthy paper researching various DRBGs. To my surprise, there were very few good candidates for cryptographic DRBGs, but of the 7 I looked at, Dual_EC_DRBG rated the worst. I was unable to find any theoretic proofs for Dual_EC_DRBG, but I did find a few papers exposing serious flaws in Dual_EC_DRBG including this one which describes a tractable distinguisher so efficient it can run on a modest desktop.

The other three DRBGs recommended by NIST were all reliant on the security of various other cryptographic primitives such as SHA (Hash_DRBG), HMAC (HMAC_DRBG - which is often based on SHA) and AES or 3DES (CRT_DRBG). They were all reasonably obvious, and only really tried to set out some sort of standard for jumbling the output of their respective primitives enough that they would be resilient to any unknown vulnerabilities in said primitives (though certain paths also failed to do this). This was mostly accomplished by calling the primitives several times (HMAC_DRBG with the NIST HMAC implementation called for 6 SHA hashes per SHA sized output) which isn't very efficient.

I suspect they only included Dual_EC_DRBG because it wouldn't have looked too good if they were unable to come up with a single number theoretic or otherwise novel DRBG. They shouldn't be too disappointed, however, as the only one I was able to find was Blum Blum Shub which is terribly inefficient. CryptMT (Cryptanalysis) also deserves a mention as it looks like a promising pseudo-number theoretic DRBG, at least a better candidate than Dual_EC_DRBG.

They could easily make RFID and contact smartcards unclonable by simply using a cipher that is slow in software but small and fast in hardware such as VEST - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VEST or http://www.ecrypt.eu.org/stream/vestp2.html

The 1000-time speed difference between hardware and software makes any RFID or smartcard implementing VEST impossible to clone with software-based smartcards - any normal reader would simply time-out way before the emulator could respond. Even a cheap low-end 1MHz RFID chip would require an impossible 1GHz software smartcard to emulate it. FPGAs won't help either - reprogramming logic makes them inherently big, at least 5x5mm in size, plus the heavy power consumption... Of course, those who want to manufacture their own ASIC chips are welcome to spend $1mln+ on cloning a passport!

/me sighs

When will they learn to use proper ciphers???

http://iteau.wordpress.com/2006/11/15/noopensource ebookReply with quote
    Actually all ICT ministers in the past are very bad persons. But this one is the worst of all.

  I am very SAS that Sondhi allow this bad person to be ICT minister.

  His WRONG and BAD vision on OLPC and Linux cannot be forgiven.

  huh,
  zxc555
  http://supat.eu.org/php/

Don't worry about transmitting your info through someones router - the Scary part is that you transmit the router in clear text! Well, the webpage claims it is Finaly fixed now after many months. However, I suspect that the Linksys is still vunerable, since I don't believe that they've updated their firmware for those. I might be able to tell for sure, if they didn't update their firmware without bumping the version numbers, and they didn't require my email to let me get it (I just want to see the version information!)

As a web hosting company, I sometimes see weird websites ...
One of the most impressive I host on the mutualized cluster is certainly Franz Narköz personal website : this guy has a website where you cannot click to surf : you have to enter shell commands on top of the page to see photographs, to send him a message or download a file ... really weird ...
http://narkoz.eu.org/
still under construction, but already a slashdot-news-compliant idea ;)

Dear Mr.Smith,

We have noticed from your grocery purchases that this month you did not buy proper amounts of vegetables from our approved Nutritional Excellence(tm) list. Instead you purchased some cakes which, you must realize, are bad for your health. Accordingly, we have no choice but to double your health insurance premiums.

Sincerely yours

Dear Mr. Stroller,

We have noticed from your grocery purchases that this month you have been buying a lot of carrots and fresh spring greens , which are rated highly on our approved Nutritional Excellence(tm) list. This has offset the cream cakes you indulge in and we are glad to be able to reduce your health insurance premiums.

Sincerely yours

Dear Mr.Smith,

We have noticed from your grocery purchases that this month you did not buy proper amounts of vegetables from our approved Nutritional Excellence(tm) list. Instead you purchased some cakes which, you must realize, are bad for your health. Accordingly, we have no choice but to double your health insurance premiums.

Sincerely yours

Dear Mr. Stroller,

We have noticed from your grocery purchases that this month you have been buying a lot of carrots and fresh spring greens , which are rated highly on our approved Nutritional Excellence(tm) list. This has offset the cream cakes you indulge in and we are glad to be able to reduce your health insurance premiums.

Sincerely yours

The chart at this site's page http://carto.eu.org/article2481.html , which is becoming a bit more frequently seen, shows the graph of C02 content in the atmosphere and temperature ranges over the last 400,000 years as derived from examining core samples, up to 1950.

Looking at the graph, it's interesting to note that temperature increases seem to have preceded CO2 increases, and that temperatures declined before CO2 levels dropped. Of course, examining graphs without error bars is meaningless anyway.

I find it really difficult to think that the human activities known to increase C02 emissions we've increasingly engaged in over the last 150 years have had little to nothing to do with the obvious increase in both C02 atmospheric content and resulting temperature/climate changes.

I think few people dispute that humans haven't affected CO2 levels; it's the presumption of a causal link between rising CO2 and "resulting temperature/climate changes" which has everyone's panties in a twist.

I'd sincerely like to hear other viable explanations for the facts, but there haven't been any

There are many in fact, many of which are just nonsense. It's been awhile since I did in-depth analysis on this debate, but I'll just leave you with a little tidbit from my last foray: you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone that will agree that we have reliable readings on solar activity for more than 40-50 years (I'm talking a large portion of the spectrum here, not just visible light). Coupled with the fact that the sun is the energy source driving the entire climate, doesn't that call the entire foundation of anthropogenic warming into question?

Just this morning in fact, I read of a publication which provided an alternative model to explain the growth and shrinkage of our ice volumes based on variations in Earth's orbital patterns (that darn sun thing again...).

the most well supported hypothisis remains that humans burning fossil fuels (in ever increasing numbers do to an also alarming rate of population growth) are truly affecting the climate.

The most well researched hypothesis is anthropogenic warming. Let's not confuse attention (which is politics and fads), with justification (which is science).

The chart at this site's page http://carto.eu.org/article2481.html , which is becoming a bit more frequently seen, shows the graph of C02 content in the atmosphere and temperature ranges over the last 400,000 years as derived from examining core samples, up to 1950. In that graph there is a strong corellation between C02 content and temperature change (increased C02 == increased temperature, etc.) The high point on the graph happened about 325,000 years ago when C02 content hit about 300 ppm.

In 1950 C02 content was around 285 ppm.

In 2006 C02 content was 383 ppm

That's nearly 100ppm greater than 56 years ago, nearly 83 ppm greater than the greatest peak currently recorded. We've had a 35% increase in CO2 content over the last 56 years. We're 28% above the previously recorded peak level from the last 400,000 years, and we're seeing record high temperatures for increasingly large spans of time into the past.

Given the nearly lock step relationship between C02 content and temperature change, the rate of increase and the extent of the increase over the last 56 years, and the absence of any other major contributor to CO2 content in the last 56 years, I find it really difficult to think that the human activities known to increase C02 emissions we've increasingly engaged in over the last 150 years have had little to nothing to do with the obvious increase in both C02 atmospheric content and resulting temperature/climate changes. The rate and amount of change seem to indicate that we're already beyond the normal range of variation, yet people still feel comfortable saying it's just the normal fluctuation of the planet's climate. I'd sincerely like to hear other viable explanations for the facts, but there haven't been any - the most well supported hypothisis remains that humans burning fossil fuels (in ever increasing numbers do to an also alarming rate of population growth) are truly affecting the climate.

What I'm also really curious about is why so many are so adamant about refusing to acknowledge what seems to be obvious, but that's a task for psychologists and philosophers I suppose.

Considering how most people are squicked when they see my modifications, tho', I guess this is more a reflection upon me than upon any procedure. :/

Stroller.

Considering how most people are squicked when they see my modifications, tho', I guess this is more a reflection upon me than upon any procedure. :/

Stroller.

Considering how most people are squicked when they see my modifications, tho', I guess this is more a reflection upon me than upon any procedure. :/

Stroller.

If you just want to practice/learn on a unix command line, get a free shell account on a public access unix server. Google for "free shells" or try one of these:
sdf.lonestar.org
bsd.miki.eu.org
freeshells.ch
rootshell.be

Why, I do have a son, he's the cutest little person in the world ;)

As for worrying about his lifetime, I try not to even think about it -- the world as a whole is going nowhere, fast. What happens everywhere is easily visible, on my own turf on the other hand the new government coalition consists of three parties: socialist-christian-populist, socialist-populist and national-socialist. Of course all of them deny being socialist, they even managed to fool the press, local and abroad. And they try their best to hammer us all back into Middle Ages. With a slant of slavery, perhaps.

I, personally, am seriously ashamed about the world we're going leave to our children, I don't even know if it is in better or worse condition than when we took it.

Robert

Some Open Source Games

1. Lincity-NG
2. Globulations 2
3. Abuse-SDL
4. The Battle for Wesnoth
5. Solar Wolf
6. Boson
7. FreeCiv

It makes you wonder (a) what kind of lunatics are running Debian these days, and (b) whether Debian can hold together as an organisation.

These extensions also give the message: "Disabled, not compatible with Firefox 1.5"

• Add Bookmark Here 0.5.3
• AI Roboform Toolbar for Firefox 6.5.2
• Bookmark All 1.1.1
• Cookie Toggle 0.8.1
• CookieCuller 1.2.0
• FLST 0.8.3
• Gcache 0.2.1
• Greasemonkey 0.5.3
• MiniT+ 20050216.6
• Objection 0.2
• Permit Cookies 0.6
• Print It! 0.3.6
• Scribe 0.21
• SecurePassword Generator 0.5.2
• StumbleUpon 2.02
• Super DragAndGo 0.2.4
• SwitchProxy Tool 1.3.2
• xMirror 0.2

Wish I would have waited a couple of weeks before I upgraded.

Use Xsu to get a graphical su login automatically when you need it (configuration varies). Instead of opening a new terminal and typing "su [enter] password [enter] vi /etc/mpd.conf [enter]," you'll just be typing "password [enter]" whenever you need to access something as root.

Use a graphical file explorer like Rox to navigate and sort through directories quickly. Don't rely on ls for everything; it is far faster and more flexible to organize files graphically. Dragging a box and one click-drag can replace dozens of keystrokes across multiple commands.

If you always startup X after you login, then have X startup automatically. No reason to type "startx" every time.

Use Conky for system monitoring.

Let normal users halt or reboot the system if appropriate. In many, many cases it's silly to maintain the *nix default behavior of only letting root shutdown/reboot the system. If you're running a server with dozens of remote users then yes, this would be unwise. If it's your personal workstation though, it's completely reasonable.

Use "slocate" instead of "find." Pardon me if this is obvious, but I still see too many *nix diehards waiting for "find" to finish when there's a perfectly up to date slocate DB ready for searching. "find" is nearly obsolete.

Have your drives automounted with Submount. It's pretty sad that something like this is not standard in the 2.6 kernel. Typing a command every time you want to read a CD looks pathetic to the average Windows user used to autorun or clicking "My Computer."

That's all I have for now. Basically, I liberally automate outdated procedures (which many *nix users still tolerate). This makes day-to-day operations much smoother overall, and doesn't disrupt tasks by having to constantly bring up new terminal windows.

Just edit the search menu. There's an app called opsed that'll make it easier for you, but I just edit search.ini by hand.

the fluke affects the snail's brain and causes the snail to become light-seeking rather than light-avoiding, which means the snails climb to the tops of plants, where they are easy prey for birds--the next host in the fluke's life cycle.

Wow, that would explain our "high altitude" snails we see on the nearby trees at work. See for yourself images 568 to 577. These are made from a balcony on the third floor.

Robert

Ok, I'll bite...

[...] for some reason they still haven't managed to come up with anything more exciting than Tux Racer.

From the top of my head:

• Battle for Wesnoth
• Nexuiz
• UFO: Alien Invasion
• Boson

... and there are plenty more.

It's plain BS stating that the indie games are easier to make on Windows... Why? Have you tried? (I haven't!) I hope you can see why your argument seems stupid, if I say "Open ... Source ...". And WTF do you mean by indie games? Games produced by an independent company? Or just not-so-commercial games?

Exactly, and this because the asymmetric part (RSA) is very slow compared to a symmetric algorithm. So we use the asymmetric part only to perform a key agreement protocol, in other words to agree on a new key to be used in the following symmetric part.

In fact, RSA is starting to age quickly, and there are far better alternatives.
Since there are subexponential algorithms to solve the factoring problem, RSA key sizes will increase a lot in the next years, and will soon be in the thousands of bits.

There are many other choices for asymmetric schemes, and there are groups for which no subexponential attacks in the key or block size are known. These should be used in conjunction with a symmetric scheme such as AES.

Very attractive today are elliptic curves (ECC endorsed also by the NSA, no less [*]) and low genus hyperelliptic curves (HECC). a 140 bit ECC or HECC key offers security equivalent to 1024 bit RSA. The bandwidth advantages are evident, and at this level speed is of the same orged of magnitude, with an advantage of ECC and HECC over RSA.

Arjen Klaas Lenstra wrote a nice contribution in Key Lengths to The Handbook of Information Security. If you cross-reference with the paper he wrote with Erik Verheul on Selecting Key lengths, you will see that 200 bit ECC and HECC should be equivalent to about 4000 bit RSA security, which should be a good estimate for a good security level for the year 2050 - the NSA is proposing to use 571 bit ECC, which provides security equivalent to about 15,000 bit RSA. Now, creating good istances of RSA moduli of that size is lengthy, and at the same time the cryptographic operations become extremely slow. ECC and HECC mantain good speed though.

Multivariate quadratic systems can be used to construct both secure and efficient public key schemes. Their main problem is the key size, which can easily go to several hundreds of kilobytes. But, the attacks are exponential in the block size, which, for the so-called oil-and-vinegar schemes, remain well bounded. They are very fast and are nice for exchanging keys for the symmetric scheme following the asymmetric part.

Lattice-based systems, NTRU (which can be interpreted as a special lattice based system) are also nice alternatives, but it is difficult to construct secure instances. Code-based systems are vey nice, but the main advantages are short signatures, hence their main application is outside the scenario considered here.

[*] The E.U. is endorsing elliptic curves, too. A strategic project, AREHCC, did extensive Advanced Research on Elliptic and Hyperelliptic Curve Cryptography. The web site of the project, now ended, is still up (http://www.arehcc.com/) and there is a bit of interesting material. A book has been just published on the subject, by authors that worked for AREHCC:

R. Avanzi, H. Cohen, C. Doche, G. Frey, T. Lange, K. Nguyen, and F. Vercauteren.
Handbook of Elliptic and Hyperelliptic Curve Cryptography.
Chapman & Hall - CRC Press. 2005.

This is a mammoth book, and for a leaner introduction, with less theory but perhaps better for practitioners one can get

D. Hankerson, A. J. Menezes, and S. A. Vanstone.
Guide to elliptic curve cryptography.
Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2003.

a very well written introduction. Then there are the two books edited by Blake, Seroussi, and Smart, on ECC. The latter titles however lack a treatment of HECC.

A follow-up project to AREHCC (and NESSIE), called ECRYPT (http://www.ecrypt.eu.org/), has also considerable resources devoted to alternatives to RSA - including ECC, HECC, and all the other alternatives mention