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As rjh also pointed out, the ANSI-X9.17 pseudo-random number generator (a 3-DES based PRNG) is a high quality PRNG. So if you lack a good hardware random source, or if your hardware random source cannot deliver quality values fast enough for your purposes, then the ANSI-X9.17 might be your next best choice.

Longevity of CD-R's has been studied, and a preliminary government study of DVD-CD lifetimes indicates that you should keep multiple copies, check the media for errors annually and create new dups as bit rot occurs. This is also mentioned in this article on archival life for DVD's.

There doesn't seem to be a single method that is known to last 20 years. Of note, optimal storage conditions for optical media is 50-59 degrees F or 10-15C. That's a bit cooler than your average living space and certainly cooler than "human-optimal" office temperatures of around 77F (vs. the 68F "standard" adopted for heating during the first energy crisis).

US and Imperial measures do not differ in measuring lengths. See NIST Handbook 44 Apendix B Section 2.3.

...to refer people to more information on Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC):

BEC wikipedia page
BEC home page at Colorado
BEC at NIST
What is a BEC?

Why am I not surprised at this? First, they decide that a kilobyte = 1000 bytes, rather than the correct value of 1024. This leads the megabyte to be 1000 kilobytes, again, rather than 1024. The gig is likewise 1000 megabytes. You might think, ok, big deal, right?

The Standards

Although computer data is normally measured in binary code, the prefixes for the multiples are based on the metric system. The nearest binary number to 1,000 is 2^10 or 1,024; thus 1,024 bytes was named a Kilobyte. So, although a metric "kilo" equals 1,000 (e.g. one kilogram = 1,000 grams), a binary "Kilo" equals 1,024 (e.g. one Kilobyte = 1,024 bytes). Not surprisingly, this has led to a great deal of confusion. In December 1998, the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) approved a new IEC International Standard. Instead of using the metric prefixes for multiples in binary code, the new IEC standard invented specific prefixes for binary multiples made up of only the first two letters of the metric prefixes and adding the first two letters of the word "binary". Thus, for instance, instead of Kilobyte (KB) or Gigabyte (GB), the new terms would be kibibyte (KiB) or gibibyte (GiB).

Here are brief summaries of the IEC Standard:

bit bit 0 or 1
byte B 8 bits
kibibit Kibit 1024 bits
kilobit kbit 1000 bits
kibibyte (binary) KiB 1024 bytes
kilobyte (decimal) kB 1000 bytes
megabit Mbit 1000 kilobits
mebibyte (binary) MiB 1024 kibibytes
megabyte (decimal) MB 1000 kilobytes
gigabit Gbit 1000 megabits
gibibyte (binary) GiB 1024 mebibytes
gigabyte (decimal) GB 1000 megabytes
terabit Tbit 1000 gigabits
tebibyte (binary) TiB 1024 gibibytes
terabyte (decimal) TB 1000 gigabytes
petabit Pbit 1000 terabits
pebibyte (binary) PiB 1024 tebibytes
petabyte (decimal) PB 1000 terabytes
exabit Ebit 1000 petabits
exbibyte (binary) EiB 1024 pebibytes
exabyte (decimal) EB 1000 petabytes

WHY are you people so keen on bit-level dumps? Forensics?

Yes!

EnCase Enterprise Edition costs $10,000 per license. This software basically mimmicks EnCase's functionality for free.

If der Mouse were to port this to the Windoze world, and get CFTT (http://www.cftt.nist.gov/ to validate it's forensic soundness, he could make a fortune undercutting Guidance Software.

muon-catalyzed fusion would only viably occur in a particle accelerator setup, which I already mentioned (where else are you getting the muons from). In any case (as far as I know) no such thing is actually used today at neutron facilities.

For examples of neutron-beamline research facilities that exist today, I refer you to NIST [nist.gov], HMI [www.hmi.de], and the Spallation Neutron Source [sns.gov] (still being built).

I'm sorry if my original post sounded arrogant or accusatory. I'm honestly interested in knowing more about this technology. I'm happy to be corrected when I'm wrong, but it really helps to have sources to check.

With regard to flux, as far as I can tell, no one has reported a Fusor-style setup with a flux higher than 1E8 neutrons/second or perhaps 1E10 neutrons/second (example, example). Assuming an operating distance of 1 m, that's less than 1E5 n/(cm^2 s).

By comparison, modern reactor setups achieve 2E15 n/(cm^2 s) flux, and spallation sources can achieve 1E17 n/(cm^2 s) (see Fig 1 here). This is why I characterized a Fusor as "low flux." The flux of a Fusor is useful for some things, but for most applications of neutron beamlines, it is too weak. (Of course, more than flux matters: energy distribution also matters.)

From what I know, Fusors are great for studying some aspects of fusion reactions and maybe conducting experiments on neutron properties. I've also heard of using it for neutron interrogation (example), where you irradiate a sample and see what happens (for instance for characterizing nuclear samples, material identification, bomb detection). So, yes, it is a neutron source. However, it is not competitive with high-flux sources, and is (I think!) too weak for neutron scattering, diffraction, and imaging experiments. This is why I claimed that a fusor was not a general-purpose neutron source.

This is also why no Fusor sources are listed on any "worldwide neutron source" lists, as far as I can tell:
http://neutron.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/links.html
http://www.ncnr.nist.gov/nsources.html
http://www.neutron.anl.gov/facilities.html
http://neutron.neutron-eu.net/n_users/n_where_the_ facilities/n_worldwide
http://www.sciner.com/Neutron/neutron_facilities_w orldwide.htm

With regard to the universities you mentioned, it looks like the PULSTAR at North Carolina State is a reactor. The TRIGA at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is also a reactor. If those were not what you were referring to, then I apologize.

To recap: I relent and agree that a Fusor is indeed a viable neutron source. However, I would like to point out that its flux is much lower than other sources, making it unsuitable for many types of neutron beamline experiments. If I'm wrong about any of this, please correct me.

It is commonly available as a neutron source.

Can you provide me references on that, please? I use neutron sources in my research, and I'm not aware of a Fusor setup being used at any real neutron beamlines around the world. They are all either particle accelerators that produce neutrons via spallation (such as the upcoming Spallation Neutron Source), or are radiological/nuclear reactors (such as NIST, HMI, etc.). Despite the simplicity of the Fusor, it is not actually used as a neutron source by anyone. As far as I know, the flux is much too low and the system not efficient.

muon-catalyzed fusion would only viably occur in a particle accelerator setup, which I already mentioned (where else are you getting the muons from). In any case (as far as I know) no such thing is actually used today at neutron facilities.

For examples of neutron-beamline research facilities that exist today, I refer you to NIST, HMI, and the Spallation Neutron Source (still being built).

Yotta is at the other end of the scale, you want yocto.

What the complainers don't realize, is that they only make up a small percentage of the users, and the other 95% use the system and are fairly happy.

How do you know? I don't ask to be trite. I've worked tech support and having been in your position myself I do really sympathize with having to deal with that annoying 5%. But there is a huge difference between offering a free service (like you do - and bravo for it) and a for-profit company like Microsoft. A free service doesn't have to care about that 5%. Use it or don't. It doesn't matter. But if you genuinely are interested in providing a service your users find valuable (and Microsoft is), how do you know what they want?

This isn't an idle or easy question. The entire field of marketing is the art/science of finding out what it is people want. (As opposed to sales which is figuring out how to convince them you have what they want - and yes, they overlap) While there are a lot of people who have a severely outsized sense of entitlement (more that a few are here at /.) companies need to listen very carefully to their customers, especially those who are actually speaking up. Most customers don't tell you they are unhappy, they simply stop using your product and never say a word. Sure you run into the occasional jack-ass who thinks you are his personal butler. But it's still worth listening to such people because sometimes they tell you something worthwhile. Apple has done a remarkably good job of this lately with online music whereas the RIAA companies have done a really poor job.

I've worked as a Malcolm Baldrige examiner and one of the things we ask companies is how they know what their customers want. WAY too many firms basically take the approach of "well, no one has complained so we must be doing something right". That approach is usually a swift route to poor performance if not bankruptcy. The firms that do well go WAY out of their way to figure out what customers want, even before the customers are conciously aware of it.

Of course in the case of Microsoft the motives are a bit more sinister. They're almost certainly more interested in customer lock via proprietary formats than anything else. We know it and MS knows we know it. So people are giving them a hard time about it. After all, it really isn't in my best interest as an end user to use a proprietary Microsoft format if there are any alternatives. So it shouldn't be at all surprising that people are complaining. It's in their (and likely your) interest to do so.

As I recall (yes, I was one of those kids waiting for my school bus during that era), many loved it, except for the schoolchildren that got run over while crossing the street to get to their bus stop in the dark during the deep winter mornings.

The cheapo stuff usually uses WWVB broadcasts, which includes bits indicating whether Daylight Saving Time is in effect, as well as leap seconds, and leap year, so those devices usually just have a setting for the local time zone and whether to obey the WWVB DST indicator.

Yikes. Err, okay, last time I checked, recordable optical media really wasn't so great for longevity. It depends on the dyes used, but if you're just using basic off the shelf CD-Rs, stop, and go find out how long they'll last.

Googled for articles, and found:

Care and Handling of CDs and DVDs
Measures of CD-R Longevity

The first in particular goes into a lot of detail, and references of lot of articles which may make good further reading.

Is there a way for AC's to opt out of the "Take this servey" portion of /.? Cool, it's news but if those types of postings are ok around here now then does that mean that I can use /. to distribute my efforts to collect marketing data? (Not that I handle marketing but that seems like what is underway here.)

Oh, the group's membership is listed on the left here: http://www.itl.nist.gov/div895/gipwog/

Take the personal out of computing, and most companies would grind to a halt.

Isn't this what a good expect script is for? ;-)

Here are the tips of the Digital Data Preservation Program from the north-american National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Nice trick, but how much money does that number of unbounded knapsack problems represent?

Or did you mean GBP?

This is a play to keep the U.S. Government as their customer. Microsoft has a bunch of API's for handling smart cards for a really long time, so this isn't new.

The U.S. Government (NIST) is creating a standard for identification and authentication and any vendor wanting to keep those government contracts going will need at least the appearance of compliance. The NIST url is http://csrc.nist.gov/piv-project/

A related comment:
I agree with another post that the smart card is a good way to make some kind of super-DRM, but the cost of a USB dongle would be prohibitive and not very marketable and I don't think the mobo makers would play Microsoft's game by allowing a surface mounted smart card module on the mobo that *only* Microsoft controls.

"algorithms from the NSA are considered a sort of alien technology: They come from a superior race with no explanations."

If you think Belgians are alien, you are right. However there ARE explanations for the algoritms used: AES Algorithm (Rijndael) Information

Some cool things, autoexpect, this will basically record a session you do (like the script command), and right an expect script for it. Also if you use the -p (I think, check the man) option, it won't make the prompts strict, just in case there is a datestamp in there.

You want LUNAR. It's especially cool because it uses an underlay network called selnet (ARP forwarding instead of straight-up IP routing). Also, there are a bunch of normal layer 3 ad-hoc multihop protocols designed especially for highly dynamic/mobile nets that you can install for free (I can verify that they work on 2.4 kernels, anyway):

NIST AODV
unik OLSR
US NAVY labs OLSR
CLICK modular router (contains a DSDV and DSR implementation, provides a framwork for rapid prototyping of stack behaviors)

These all might be nice for a smallish office as a way to extend and enhance the probable coverage area of the network without getting more APs.

Recommended Elliptic Curves for Government Use, NIST document (PDF file)

The Biometric Consortium is chaired by Jeffrey S. Dunn, the Technical Director of the Secure Network Technology Office, U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), and Fernando L. Podio from the Convergent Information Systems Division in the Information Technology Laboratory of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST/ITL)

Exactly what are you claiming is incorrect? Need a paper on the subject of the interlinks? How about one on the tensile strength tests? (not the same study that I saw before - they got even lower numbers, but were testing on small ropes instead of individual tubes)

In short: What exactly are you challenging?

Are you saying this has been done? Multics had better buffer overflow protection

40 F#%îng years ago! thats right, *before unix existed*, four decades ago, thats before gates had pubic hair! (Okey, I didn`t fact check that one, but this is a long time, and I am not just talking in Internet or doggy years.)

So, where are the lines before compusa to buy one of these computers that may not have the most megahurts and marchitecture, but that doesn`t get new viruses/spyware/script kiddy zombie code every week while mailing personal files to random strangers?

I will tell you where these people are, they are right around the corner at the newsstand waiting for the latest issue of "screenshots, colors, windows and screensavers monthly". While there are billion dollar (memory) price fixing and (os) monopoly scams going on the trade media wonders what the color of Microsoft's next operating system is and where to get the newest megahurts this month....

The reason multics was secure, the people designing it figured security would make a nice feature so the designed it in by default... Ofcourse others tried that but once you add a huge piece of shell/browser/e-mail client/media player, mix in a bunch of rpc accesible administrative tools and have all this code monkey C code run with administrative privileges.... then you are gonna need systems to tell you when your remaining security is gone. (virus signature addiction systems, packet filters and intrusion detection systems).

The babysteps taken in todays "security addons" that descent from the tools dos admins used to clean out the few know viruses are pathetic. The worst part, the people making money of it. These people are evil even by atheist standards (keeping people addicted to virus signatures while selling telephone tapping equipment by comverse/the mossad, while playing "trusted" third party by selling expensive cert`s (Want a microsoft.com one? here go right ahead).... while screwing everyones DNS over just for a few quick bucks. )

The people selling computer security are snakeoil/ducttape sales scumbags

If people had just read the US DoD stuff on computer security (multics, orange book) and used it as a starting point for a one step more secure OS we could just worry about how to make computer do new usefull stuff instead of fending of the spyware/worms/ddos and god knows what people who stay out of log files do. Anyway, one can always start from scratch

It's not a question of the giga part, everyone knows the metric system by now (I hope)

Really, do you? Last time I looked, G or giga is defined as exactly 10^9 (1,000,000,000).

Here's the important part you were ignoring:
---
Hard drive manufacturer: One GigaByte = 1000 bytes

Wrong. Hard drive manufacturers and everyone else who knows how to use SI prefixes correctly knows that one gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 bytes.

Software/everyone else: One GigaByte = 1024 bytes

Wrong again. If in this case you mean 2^30 bytes, 1 GiB = 1,073,741,824 bytes. What about network people? To them, 1 GB is certainly 1,000,000,000 bytes. Does a 100 Mb/s Ethernet operate at 1,000,000 bits per second (10^6) or is is 1,048,576 (2^20)? More and more people are becoming aware of this issue and moving from the old ambiguous use of prefixes representing powers of ten to represent powers of two to the new more percise and seperate binary SI prefixes. Case in point. Bittorent. Download the client, use it, and you'll notice that bytes, in binary multiples are correctly refered to as KiB, MiB, etc.

If you had actually read the link I posted on SI prefixes for binary multiples, you might know the following historical context:

Once upon a time, computer professionals noticed that 2^10 was very nearly equal to 1000 and started using the SI prefix "kilo" to mean 1024. That worked well enough for a decade or two because everybody who talked kilobytes knew that the term implied 1024 bytes. But, almost overnight a much more numerous "everybody" bought computers, and the trade computer professionals needed to talk to physicists and engineers and even to ordinary people, most of whom know that a kilometer is 1000 meters and a kilogram is 1000 grams.

Then data storage for gigabytes, and even terabytes, became practical, and the storage devices were not constructed on binary trees, which meant that, for many practical purposes, binary arithmetic was less convenient than decimal arithmetic. The result is that today "everybody" does not "know" what a megabyte is. When discussing computer memory, most manufacturers use megabyte to mean 2^20 = 1 048 576 bytes, but the manufacturers of computer storage devices usually use the term to mean 1 000 000 bytes. Some designers of local area networks have used megabit per second to mean 1 048 576 bit/s, but all telecommunications engineers use it to mean 10^6 bit/s. And if two definitions of the megabyte are not enough, a third megabyte of 1 024 000 bytes is the megabyte used to format the familiar 90 mm (3 1/2 inch), "1.44 MB" diskette. The confusion is real, as is the potential for incompatibility in standards and in implemented systems.

Faced with this reality, the IEEE Standards Board decided that IEEE standards will use the conventional, internationally adopted, definitions of the SI prefixes. Mega will mean 1 000 000, except that the base-two definition may be used (if such usage is explicitly pointed out on a case-by-case basis) until such time that prefixes for binary multiples are adopted by an appropriate standards body.

In December 1998 the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), the leading international organization for worldwide standardization in electrotechnology, approved as an IEC International Standard names and symbols for prefixes for binary multiples for use in the fields of data processing and data transmission.

It's not a question of the giga part, everyone knows the metric system by now (I hope)

Really, do you? Last time I looked, G or giga is defined as exactly 10^9 (1,000,000,000).

Here's the important part you were ignoring:
---
Hard drive manufacturer: One GigaByte = 1000 bytes

Wrong. Hard drive manufacturers and everyone else who knows how to use SI prefixes correctly knows that one gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 bytes.

Software/everyone else: One GigaByte = 1024 bytes

Wrong again. If in this case you mean 2^30 bytes, 1 GiB = 1,073,741,824 bytes. What about network people? To them, 1 GB is certainly 1,000,000,000 bytes. Does a 100 Mb/s Ethernet operate at 1,000,000 bits per second (10^6) or is is 1,048,576 (2^20)? More and more people are becoming aware of this issue and moving from the old ambiguous use of prefixes representing powers of ten to represent powers of two to the new more percise and seperate binary SI prefixes. Case in point. Bittorent. Download the client, use it, and you'll notice that bytes, in binary multiples are correctly refered to as KiB, MiB, etc.

If you had actually read the link I posted on SI prefixes for binary multiples, you might know the following historical context:

Once upon a time, computer professionals noticed that 2^10 was very nearly equal to 1000 and started using the SI prefix "kilo" to mean 1024. That worked well enough for a decade or two because everybody who talked kilobytes knew that the term implied 1024 bytes. But, almost overnight a much more numerous "everybody" bought computers, and the trade computer professionals needed to talk to physicists and engineers and even to ordinary people, most of whom know that a kilometer is 1000 meters and a kilogram is 1000 grams.

Then data storage for gigabytes, and even terabytes, became practical, and the storage devices were not constructed on binary trees, which meant that, for many practical purposes, binary arithmetic was less convenient than decimal arithmetic. The result is that today "everybody" does not "know" what a megabyte is. When discussing computer memory, most manufacturers use megabyte to mean 2^20 = 1 048 576 bytes, but the manufacturers of computer storage devices usually use the term to mean 1 000 000 bytes. Some designers of local area networks have used megabit per second to mean 1 048 576 bit/s, but all telecommunications engineers use it to mean 10^6 bit/s. And if two definitions of the megabyte are not enough, a third megabyte of 1 024 000 bytes is the megabyte used to format the familiar 90 mm (3 1/2 inch), "1.44 MB" diskette. The confusion is real, as is the potential for incompatibility in standards and in implemented systems.

Faced with this reality, the IEEE Standards Board decided that IEEE standards will use the conventional, internationally adopted, definitions of the SI prefixes. Mega will mean 1 000 000, except that the base-two definition may be used (if such usage is explicitly pointed out on a case-by-case basis) until such time that prefixes for binary multiples are adopted by an appropriate standards body.

In December 1998 the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), the leading international organization for worldwide standardization in electrotechnology, approved as an IEC International Standard names and symbols for prefixes for binary multiples for use in the fields of data processing and data transmission.

It's not a question of the giga part, everyone knows the metric system by now (I hope)

Really, do you? Last time I looked, G or giga is defined as exactly 10^9 (1,000,000,000).

Here's the important part you were ignoring:
---
Hard drive manufacturer: One GigaByte = 1000 bytes

Wrong. Hard drive manufacturers and everyone else who knows how to use SI prefixes correctly knows that one gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 bytes.

Software/everyone else: One GigaByte = 1024 bytes

Wrong again. If in this case you mean 2^30 bytes, 1 GiB = 1,073,741,824 bytes. What about network people? To them, 1 GB is certainly 1,000,000,000 bytes. Does a 100 Mb/s Ethernet operate at 1,000,000 bits per second (10^6) or is is 1,048,576 (2^20)? More and more people are becoming aware of this issue and moving from the old ambiguous use of prefixes representing powers of ten to represent powers of two to the new more percise and seperate binary SI prefixes. Case in point. Bittorent. Download the client, use it, and you'll notice that bytes, in binary multiples are correctly refered to as KiB, MiB, etc.

If you had actually read the link I posted on SI prefixes for binary multiples, you might know the following historical context:

Once upon a time, computer professionals noticed that 2^10 was very nearly equal to 1000 and started using the SI prefix "kilo" to mean 1024. That worked well enough for a decade or two because everybody who talked kilobytes knew that the term implied 1024 bytes. But, almost overnight a much more numerous "everybody" bought computers, and the trade computer professionals needed to talk to physicists and engineers and even to ordinary people, most of whom know that a kilometer is 1000 meters and a kilogram is 1000 grams.

Then data storage for gigabytes, and even terabytes, became practical, and the storage devices were not constructed on binary trees, which meant that, for many practical purposes, binary arithmetic was less convenient than decimal arithmetic. The result is that today "everybody" does not "know" what a megabyte is. When discussing computer memory, most manufacturers use megabyte to mean 2^20 = 1 048 576 bytes, but the manufacturers of computer storage devices usually use the term to mean 1 000 000 bytes. Some designers of local area networks have used megabit per second to mean 1 048 576 bit/s, but all telecommunications engineers use it to mean 10^6 bit/s. And if two definitions of the megabyte are not enough, a third megabyte of 1 024 000 bytes is the megabyte used to format the familiar 90 mm (3 1/2 inch), "1.44 MB" diskette. The confusion is real, as is the potential for incompatibility in standards and in implemented systems.

Faced with this reality, the IEEE Standards Board decided that IEEE standards will use the conventional, internationally adopted, definitions of the SI prefixes. Mega will mean 1 000 000, except that the base-two definition may be used (if such usage is explicitly pointed out on a case-by-case basis) until such time that prefixes for binary multiples are adopted by an appropriate standards body.

In December 1998 the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), the leading international organization for worldwide standardization in electrotechnology, approved as an IEC International Standard names and symbols for prefixes for binary multiples for use in the fields of data processing and data transmission.

1 trillion bits is 125 GB, whether you're a hard drive manufacturer or not, as "G" is exactly defined as 10^9. If you're interested in representing this quantity in terms of multiples of 2^(30), as in your 116, 1 trillion bits is more correctly stated as 116.5 GiB, 116.5 gigabinary bytes, or 116.5 gibibytes. See the SI spec on prefixes for binary multiples for more information.

1 trillion bits is 125 GB, whether you're a hard drive manufacturer or not, as "G" is exactly defined as 10^9. If you're interested in representing this quantity in terms of multiples of 2^(30), as in your 116, 1 trillion bits is more correctly stated as 116.5 GiB, 116.5 gigabinary bytes, or 116.5 gibibytes. See the SI spec on prefixes for binary multiples for more information.

You sure? The NIST still has the definition in terms of the distance traveled by light: basic units.

This is kind of unrelated, but I think nobody here has said it yet.

The seven base units can be divided into smaller and smaller parts - a tenth of a meter, half a Kelvin, a zillionth of a second, etc. You can't do this with a byte, it just wouldn't work. Sure, you can have kilobytes and megabytes, but a millibyte?

As for the inconsistency with base-10 and base-2 units, I once read somewhere that they defined a new set of prefixes for the binary units, so a kilobyte would equal 1000 bytes while a "kibi"byte would be 1024.

BTW Physorg is stealing and Zonk is in bed with them.

Here is the original article: http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/newsfromnist_re def_kilogram.htm

c = 299,792,458 m/s

This

It's true that it was once defined that way, however, it has been redefined.

Standards document for SHA-1/256/384/512 in pdf http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/fips/fips180-2/f ips180-2.pdf

Having said that, I will note that this evaluation was to an actual protection profile (the CAPP), so the evaluation means something, unlike some other evaluations that I could mention.

You can get a CD with the checksums from the National Software Reference Library. They even have some tools for automating this. You can also use sleuthkit to automate the checks.
www.nsrl.nist.gov

I'm not sure if this post is news or what, but for more info, click here:

http://www.itl.nist.gov/fipspubs/fip180-1.htm

For those interested, here is the actual detailed/lengthy FIPS PUB 180-1 from NIST, as typical, Wikipedia has a nice summary, and the W3 Folks have a short snippet ...

I don't know if you remember the Clipper Chip initiative from the Clinton Administration -- '93/'94, but the NSA was pushing to get a key-escrow encryption chip in production and mandated for use when communicating sensitive data with the Feds.

Of course, nobody outside the US would use it, since the gov't would keep a backdoor key...

Here's some info from NIST about it that plainly talks about the NSA's involvement.

You need to use an error-correcting code that has a Hamming distance between code words that is great enough to allow for the correction of N bit errors. You need a Hamming distance of 2N+1 for N bits of error correction.

"Currently we are using Message Digest 5 (MD5) to calculate the hashed result, however
this may change in the future to SHA1 (or stronger) if MD5 is found to be too weak."

MD5 has been broken. (http://csrc.nist.gov/hash_standards_comments.pdf)

Has it become "too weak"? I don't know. NIST doesn't say. I guess part of the equation involves what you are protecting. If it is armadillo porn, then no sophisticated attack is likely. If you are protecting a bank account; well maybe the effort would be woth it.

Just some thoughts. I appreciated your detailed explanation of your protection protocol (not unlike GSM, I think).

You should be able to find plenty of starting points here.

While Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft continue to develop "search relevance technologies", someone out there needs to develop and bring to market a cognitive search engine that can actually understand the content of a page

The problem with bringing a cognitive search engine to market is that no-one has invented a cognitive anything, let alone a useful search engine. Cyc has been around for a long time, and has been used in search engine tasks, and hasn't done much. That should tell you how successful that kind of approach is. I assure you that the big 3 of search would bring out cognitive search if they could. Meanwhile, information retrieval hueristics with no pretensions to intelligence continue to do the job in a surprisingly robust way.

and i think you forgot to add and a pony too.

that's kilobytes, not kilobits. I have road runner and I get around 45-50 KiB/s (kilobytes/sec) upload, or 400 Kibit/s (kilobits/sec)--many times what a modem can do.

I wish everyone would just use the standard to end the confusion. Sure the standard is a little weird, but tough bananas.

actually, it can be a useful thing to know, if you want to access/use old legacy code (e.g. GAMS, &al.) -- there's a lot of old code that was written in FORTRAN that you can take advantage of, if you are a maschochist (FORTRAN doesn't really play well with other languages e.g. passing arguments, linking, &c.).

myself, I haven't had to use FORTRAN in over 3 years, and hope to never have to load up another FORTRAN compiler again. I'd sooner re-write the old code in ANSI C (I've done this in several cases).

It would be better if your article didn't ruin your credibility by ranting about hard drives in apparent ignorance of SI units. "kilo" is 1000, and "mega" is 1000000; there are special units for binary if you want to use them.

How fast is your 256kbps network connection? It's not 256 * 1024 bps. A 200MHz system bus? It doesn't go through 200*1024*1024 clock cycles per second. No, the practice of measuring RAM and disk in base 2 units but writing them as if they were base 10 units was an anomaly even in the computer industry, and it's way overdue for it to stop.

Those of us doing alot of short run CDr find the cheapest and easiest method is still paper labels through a color laser printer.

I've never had a label peel off inside a drive... heck, I can't even get 'em loose when I misplace them for 1/8 of a sec, so that isn't my worry.

Now according to the NIST (Care and Handling of CDs and DVDs the 2 worries wrt to CDr and labels are the label adhesive eating into the dye layer and the label peeling off (Page 23).

For what it's worth I moved to spending the extra pennies on inkjet (or thermal) printable media that has an extra coating on the CDr to provide protection against the adhesive affecting the dye as well as peeling removing the reflector.

I would be interested in hearing any knowledgeable comments regarding the effectiveness of the extra layer on printable CDr. (Trolls need not apply)