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It's worth noting that there are known attacks against RC4 (especially SSL using RC4). While these aren't quite practical yet, it is clear that RC4 is obsolete, and that current programmers should choose other stream cyphers (AES). Even supposing the patent was legitimate, the technology it covers has become obsolete well within its lifetime.

This illustrates one of the key reasons software (that is, algorithms) shouldn't be patentable: the field moves so fast that 20-year patent protection isn't useful. Even supposing the authors of software need patent protection to recoup their "investment" in inventing the algorithm, 20-year protection is effectively an infinite term, since by the time the protection ends, the technology is obsolete.

As an aside, note that patenting a protocol (such as RC4) automatically ends its usefulness. Protocols are only useful if the other party to the communication can participate, and interoperability is very important in software. Patents are ill-suited for this. Copyright, on the other hand, works well: the code you write is protected, but anyone else can write their own code to implement the protocol and communicate with you.

Skip the regergitated article and go strait to the press release to see the map, and a video (and a link to the paper if you have access or are willing to pay $30).

According to Lancet, nearly 1 million people have been killed in Iraq beacause of fake allegations of weapons of mass destruction, so It's a reasonable conclusion for muslims to confront spread of haterad by United states. I would like to remind you that even now, us has a military base in Japan and ever since, there has neumerous reports of rape and torture of Japanese women by US military personnel.

No - photons cannot account for the "missing mass". It's called "dark matter" because we know that it (whatever it is) does not interact with the electromagnetic force.

Indirectly, we can experimentally confirm that photons have a rest mass of zero from the fact that unless EM is exactly inverse square then there would be an electric field inside a hollow conductor. (proving this is relatively straight forward for a perfect sphere - I understand that it can be proved for a general closed conductor but that's maths far beyond what I'm capable of)

http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/UHAP/027/PH2420/PH2420_files/notes/04.pdf (page 6)

Basically it's a galvanometer connected between an isolated conductor that is inside a closed conductor and the closed conductor. The conductor is then driven with a few kV at the resonant frequency of the galvanometer. Any deflection at all would indicate that EM isn't exactly inverse square and one possible explanation would be that photons do not propogate at c.

However, any result like this would be so disruptive to all known physics that pretty much every physicist would assume that there was a fault with the experiment.

Tim.

I can think of many good reasons for this; yes, good, privacy-protecting reasons; even good, anonymity-protecting reasons.

Out with it, then. What are these reasons?

How about this for starters: Securing Peer-to-Peer Networks using Trusted Computing (Google cache). This technology can make P2P networks much more immune to attack and surveillance from outside, protecting the privacy and anonymity of participants.

Yesterday I received an email from someone who used to be a researcher at CCRMA at Stanford about this:

---
You may find interest in following the discovery of a possible large-scale hoax in classical music.

I have been analyzing the performances of Chopin Mazurkas (http://mazurka.org.uk) and have been noticing an unusual occurence: the performances of the same two pianists always matched whenever I do an analysis for a particular mazurka. In fact, they matched as well as two different re-releases of the same original recording.

We were keeping the identity confidential due to strict libel laws in the UK and slowly building up a case. One CD set being a match could possibly be an innocent mistake, and if the record label lost business due to insinuations related to our findings... However, the story broke this past Thursday afternoon on the Gramophone website:

http://www.gramophone.co.uk/newsMainTemplate.asp?s toryID=2759&newssectionID=1

Last week, a music critic of Gramophone put a CD of Joyce Hatto's performance of the Liszt Transcedental Etudes into his CD-rom drive. The iTunes program then informed him that the pieces on the CD were correct, but the performer was different. He had that other CD and listened to both and could tell that the sounded very similar to each other. He then found using iTunes another match with Joyce Hatto playing Rachmaninov piano concertos, and again he had the original CD and could not tell a difference between them. He sent them to Pristine Audio to be analyzed by Andrew Rose, who confirmed the matches:

http://www.pristineclassical.com/HattoHoax.html

Andrew subsequently discovered that the Hatto performances of the Godowsky Chopin Etude Studies were also from a previously released commercial CD (although recent reports indicate that some of the tracks on the CD set are by an additional performer Marc Hamelin).

The day after the initial disclosure on the Gramophone website, CHARM (http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk) released their findings which it had been collecting on the similarities of the Chopin mazurkas, since there was no longer any legal concerns related to releasing our corroborating findings.

http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/content/contact/hatto_ cover.html
http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/content/contact/hatto_ article.html

It is interesting to note that the Mazurka performances of Joyce Hatto could not be identified by the CDDB method used by iTunes to uncover the first two matches found by the Gramophone critic. The ordering of the mazurkas had been changed on the CDs, and the mazurkas were allocated differently on the two discs so that the track counts did not match. In addition, each track was timestreched by differing amounts. In the three mazurkas that I have examined in detail, the time stretching was -0.7%, -2.8%, and +1.2%. The fact that different amounts of time stretching was applied to the separate tracks leads to juicy circumstantial conclusions. It is interesting to note that Andrew Rose discovered that the Godowsky Studies had been slowed down by an incredible 15%.

Six of Joyce Hatto's CDs have been identified as copies of existing commercial recordings (as of Sunday night): three by Gramophone/Pristine Audio; one by CHARM; one by arec.music.classical.recording contributor 12 hours after the Gramophone news (so his claim to have know earlier is most likely correct); and 1 additional matching on Sunday for a source to the Chopin Etude CD set.

Hatto's mostly complete Concert Artists discography and a list of the currently identified original sources are available on her entry in

Yesterday I received an email from someone who used to be a researcher at CCRMA at Stanford about this:

---
You may find interest in following the discovery of a possible large-scale hoax in classical music.

I have been analyzing the performances of Chopin Mazurkas (http://mazurka.org.uk) and have been noticing an unusual occurence: the performances of the same two pianists always matched whenever I do an analysis for a particular mazurka. In fact, they matched as well as two different re-releases of the same original recording.

We were keeping the identity confidential due to strict libel laws in the UK and slowly building up a case. One CD set being a match could possibly be an innocent mistake, and if the record label lost business due to insinuations related to our findings... However, the story broke this past Thursday afternoon on the Gramophone website:

http://www.gramophone.co.uk/newsMainTemplate.asp?s toryID=2759&newssectionID=1

Last week, a music critic of Gramophone put a CD of Joyce Hatto's performance of the Liszt Transcedental Etudes into his CD-rom drive. The iTunes program then informed him that the pieces on the CD were correct, but the performer was different. He had that other CD and listened to both and could tell that the sounded very similar to each other. He then found using iTunes another match with Joyce Hatto playing Rachmaninov piano concertos, and again he had the original CD and could not tell a difference between them. He sent them to Pristine Audio to be analyzed by Andrew Rose, who confirmed the matches:

http://www.pristineclassical.com/HattoHoax.html

Andrew subsequently discovered that the Hatto performances of the Godowsky Chopin Etude Studies were also from a previously released commercial CD (although recent reports indicate that some of the tracks on the CD set are by an additional performer Marc Hamelin).

The day after the initial disclosure on the Gramophone website, CHARM (http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk) released their findings which it had been collecting on the similarities of the Chopin mazurkas, since there was no longer any legal concerns related to releasing our corroborating findings.

http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/content/contact/hatto_ cover.html
http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/content/contact/hatto_ article.html

It is interesting to note that the Mazurka performances of Joyce Hatto could not be identified by the CDDB method used by iTunes to uncover the first two matches found by the Gramophone critic. The ordering of the mazurkas had been changed on the CDs, and the mazurkas were allocated differently on the two discs so that the track counts did not match. In addition, each track was timestreched by differing amounts. In the three mazurkas that I have examined in detail, the time stretching was -0.7%, -2.8%, and +1.2%. The fact that different amounts of time stretching was applied to the separate tracks leads to juicy circumstantial conclusions. It is interesting to note that Andrew Rose discovered that the Godowsky Studies had been slowed down by an incredible 15%.

Six of Joyce Hatto's CDs have been identified as copies of existing commercial recordings (as of Sunday night): three by Gramophone/Pristine Audio; one by CHARM; one by arec.music.classical.recording contributor 12 hours after the Gramophone news (so his claim to have know earlier is most likely correct); and 1 additional matching on Sunday for a source to the Chopin Etude CD set.

Hatto's mostly complete Concert Artists discography and a list of the currently identified original sources are available on her entry in

as nonproductive leeches that might be considered necessary in medieval medical practice.

You may want to rethink your attitude on leeches, research is being done on the use of leeches in medicine. Here's a page on Hirudo medicinalis, medical leech from University of Michigan Museum of Zoology. And another one on Molecular Genetics and Gene Therapy of Neuromuscular, Cardiovascular and Neurodegenerative Diseases from Royal Holloway, University of London, School of Biological Sciences

as nonproductive leeches that might be considered necessary in medieval medical practice.

You may want to rethink your attitude on leeches, research is being done on the use of leeches in medicine. Here's a page on Hirudo medicinalis, medical leech from University of Michigan Museum of Zoology. And another one on Molecular Genetics and Gene Therapy of Neuromuscular, Cardiovascular and Neurodegenerative Diseases from Royal Holloway, University of London, School of Biological Sciences

I'm coming to the end of my first year (of two) at a part-time MSc Information Security at the Royal Holloway, University of London. The course is based at the Egham campus in Surrey (about 30 mins from London). We have a Smart Card research partnership with Vodafone cellular and some very strong industry ties including Oracle.

IMHO, the lecturers are excellent. They include a former police inspector who founded the UK's computer crime unit plus a former director of GCHQ's CESG (GCHQ is the UK equivalent of NSA).

The majority of students are from China, the Middle East and the US/Canada. Apparently we have a course link between us & Purdue, but I'm not quite sure what is involved in that.

I highly recommend RHUL. As I work in InfoSec already, I am aware that the material they send you away with is a great foundation for a career in the industry.

GOOD LUCK!

Contrary to popular belief amongst security professionals in the United Kingdom, port scanning is in fact illegal under UK law - Computer Misuse Act (1990). I am currently studying for an MSc in Information Security at the Royal Holloway, University of London and this matter actually came up during one of our lectures. It was hotly argued and debated, but our lecturer John Austen (Former head of the Metropolitan Police Computer Crimes Unit, New Scotland Yard) assured us that it was the case.

Warn those students not to scan UK-based systems, or they could end up in hot water. The UK's law states that either the offender or the system must have a "signifcant link" to the UK, so an American scanning a UK system but from the US would still fall foul of this law. The UK & US have a bilateral extradition treaty for computer related offenses, as has been demonstrated in the past.

Contrary to popular belief amongst security professionals in the United Kingdom, port scanning is in fact illegal under UK law - Computer Misuse Act (1990). I am currently studying for an MSc in Information Security at the Royal Holloway, University of London and this matter actually came up during one of our lectures. It was hotly argued and debated, but our lecturer John Austen (Former head of the Metropolitan Police Computer Crimes Unit, New Scotland Yard) assured us that it was the case.

Warn those students not to scan UK-based systems, or they could end up in hot water. The UK's law states that either the offender or the system must have a "signifcant link" to the UK, so an American scanning a UK system but from the US would still fall foul of this law. The UK & US have a bilateral extradition treaty for computer related offenses, as has been demonstrated in the past.

This may or may not be useful to you, but here's a list of current research projects my college (in the UK) is undertaking at the moment. It might give some idea of what's considered interesting areas in crypto:

http://www.isg.rhul.ac.uk/research/projects.shtml# current

Personally, I think protocol analysis is pretty interesting, as the world gets increasingly networked up. Or investigate the practical effects of the recent breaks in hashing algorithms on other products that use the hashes (like digital signatures).

If I did you wouldn't know the difference, apparently. This is ok reference on the East Africa Rift. And this talks about abandoned arms. This talks about membrane stresses and fault angles. I could go on. Just google on "triple junction", "failed arm", "rift system", etc. What I said really is geology 101. You simply can't spread along 3 axes. Afar may flood with sea water, but it will never be an ocean basin as the original article suggests.

Here's the Milka cow enforcing their copyright:

http://fermat.ma.rhul.ac.uk/laurence/movies/Milka% 20Matrix.asf

Does Sun own ECC? "Sun's elliptic curve cryptography in OpenSSL"
Neal Koblitz gave a talk about ECC at one of the CCC conferences. From here, we find
Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) was proposed by Victor Miller and Neal Koblitz in the mid 1980s.

So what does Sun have to do with all this?

The question is "how many people would be interested in using them?"

Not too many, because of the high cost involved in applying such techniques. So, usually you find governemnts more interested in them rathar than civil companies. Governments can afford cost, and the "usuability" issue since "highly" secure systems aren't really developed with "usuability" in mind!

it is TIME to SWITCH to ELLIPTIC curve CRYPTOgraphy Which has PROVEN itself to be more secure than STANDARD NUMBER theory.

For physics (especially particle physics), Statistical Data Analysis by Glen Cowan is very good at the grad student level. The book has its own home page here.

For those interested, Sue Clayton is a British film director, and also Lecturer, Library Co-ordinator at the Royal Holloway College.
From her site it appears that she is very much a film person, more so than an academic economist with an econometric background. It would be intersting to see if the empirical part of the research does in fact stand up to scrutiny.