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No. The entire purpose of RSA is providing the illusion of security.

Fixed. The problem with security is that you can't actually sell it; the customer has no way to tell if they are really secure, or just feeling secure. But the customer can certainly tell if they feel secure. So all security vendors tend to major on the warm fuzzy feelings. That means a lot of "trust us, we're the experts" and "you don't need to know the details, put your mind at ease" and not a lot of "here is the exact proof that you are secure, including every line of our source code and every mask in our circuitry, run the analysis yourself".

The other problem is that despite the free-market view that "they wouldn't be in business if they were faulty", proprietary security vendors actually have an extremely strong perverse incentive: the stronger the illusion of security, and the more powerful and secretive the clients, the more gain there is in working with an intelligence organisation to subvert that security. And since, when the clients are nation-states and militaries, working with intelligence agencies may be a requirement for getting the sales contract... and refusing to work with those agencies may result in treason charges and jail time... well, you don't need a doctorate in either cryptoanalysis or economics to see where those incentives might lead.

It's the classic confidence-trickster problem. You have a secret. You want to keep your secret. To keep your secret and come out ahead of the game you have to deal with someone who has bigger secrets, a bigger bankroll, and is smiling a lot. You sit down at the table, and look around. Do you see who the mark is? Even if you think you do, there's no guarantee that you're not all marks for the house.

And it is actively telling people not to use it.

Sure, now RSA are, now that the beans have been spilled by Edward Snowden and the NIST themselves are reopening the standard for discussion. If they didn't say anything it would look even more suspicious and whatever tattered remnants of trust they had would be gone.

Unfortunately the illusion's pretty much torn at this point. By the way, how are Crypto AG doing?

Crypto AG with their backdoors are also based in Switzerland. More information.

In a nutshell, you cannot trust such companies unless they open source all their software and make the way they operate very transparent. Even then, you should better think twice to whom you give away your trade secrets.

"NSA urged Mr. Clark not to write about Mr Friedman's 1957 trip and two others, suggesting that such revelations could hurt the agency's ability to read foreign secrets, the author wrote."
His trips where to the UK, others to Sweden and Switzerland. The http://cryptome.org/jya/nsa-sun.htm link is good background reading on methods.
More at http://biphome.spray.se/laszlob/cryptoag/crypto_ag.htm

Meh.
2 hands - 26 fingers: http://biphome.spray.se/masterlink/pics/scrsh/handy.jpg

I've tried, I've even registered here but no babes. Well I meet a girl but she wasn't sufficient ;D

It isn't a matter of honest vendors. It can generally assumed that most/all cryptography companies are owned and run by the various security services. For decades a US/Swiss/Israli firm Crypto AG sold a cryptology machine with a secret built in backdoor. At least until Pres. Reagan announced on television that they were reading Gaddafi's coded messages.

There has also been speculation why Windows requires three unique signing keys. The disengenious reason given being that in case the first one got lost in a fire.

http://biphome.spray.se/baxtrom/t1000/

This similar Swedish spam-hitting screensaver has been around for some time now. (site in swedish though)

http://makelovenotspam.spray.se/

This whole idea was published on the Swedish website Spray.se (A swedish ISP/Free email/Portal) about a month or so ago here:

http://makelovenotspam.spray.se/

Spray is in turn owned by Lycos, which explains both the development of the screensaver (in Sweden as per your info) and it's propagation through Lycos via Spray...

This is a straight carbon-copy of a system that a Swedish ISP launched a couple of months ago.

The campaign goes under the name "Make Love Not Spam", and you can find it here.

T1000?

That link says 512k, but I think it's wrong - IIRC, it was the T1200 that had 512k (as well as a 20Meg HD!). I'm pretty sure the T1000 did only have 256k...

Funnily enough, I have a T1200 next to me at the moment. No good as a server, but makes a nice serial terminal / console for various things around the place (you'd be amazed how many things in the modern household have some sort of serial connectivity!). Besides that, it holds my ever-evolving version of the old "Trek" game, written in Turbo Basic ;-)

Who needs to pay attention to audio with graphics like these? This Quake 3: New Edition sure looks to be excellent. Drool.

How can you have a post on graphic novels without including Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" series? ;)

Seriously, this is some of the most amazing stuff ever to come out, both with respect to storyline and art. Gaiman is a master wordsmith and weaves elements of ancient religion, existential philosophy, and wry british humor into his works. More here, here, and at Gaiman's Blog.

Seriously, check it out. This stuff is awesome :)

-JT

A long time ago (1986 I think), Activision published a game called Portal, and C64, PC, Amiga, Mac, etc. It is an interactive novel where an intelligent computer pieces together the story of why nobody is left on the Earth. The pieces come as memos, effectively e-mails, and you can browse other parts of the system for various bits of information on characters, events, etc. It's very absorbing and is obviously predates this "new" thing by nearly 20 years!

There are other excellent games from around the same time like The Fourth Protocol which, although much more interactive, effectively work in the same manner via an icon-based system. A brilliant game, by the way, highly recommended.

VirtualDub users can try Deshaker, which sounds like it does exactly what you want it to do. If you want to see the type of output it produces, here's a page where someone actually tests it out on real camcorder footage...alternately, you could just try it yourself.

Sampled vs Synth.

I havent found a speech synth that could do a good Maniacal Laugh yet, either...

Sampled vs Synth.

I havent found a speech synth that could do a good Maniacal Laugh yet, either...

This project was conceived as an exercise in forward thinking: what will the future of recreational transportation be like?

Apparently, a lot like the anime Venus Wars (here for a better picture).

A rocket? Capsule? Training? What a waste of money.

Think about it. According to the CIA Factbook China has about 1,286,975,468 people. Figure the average person is 5' tall and you've got 1,218,726 miles worth of people. The moon at apogee is about 251,655 miles away, so they've got enough people to build a ladder to the moon with a nice stable base, even figuring in the inevitable attrition. Hell, take a look at the prototype. Just start passing up building supplies and poof! Instant colony!

I've tried a good deal of the stuff listed. The following are the most intuitive, free, software products I have encountered. They increase productivity, and are stable.

Freeware List: If you can think of it, it's in here.
OpenCD: Precompiled CD with all open source software.
Doom9.org: Famed site for lots of media tools.
Trillian: AIM, ICQ, IRC, MSN, Yahoo! IM software all in one.
AVG Anti-Virus: Free AV
SpyBot (Spam Remover): Free Spam Remover/Search & Destroy
Firebird: Web browser w/ adblock & popup control.
FileZilla FTP: FTP Client
Smart FTP: Free Client, better looking, faster
Kerio: Personal Firewall, better than ZoneAlarm
Textpad: Text Editor.
PuTTY: SSH Client.
CygWin: Linux emulation.
FFDshow: DivX/XVid decoder.
TweakUI: Microsoft's famed Powertoy for Windows XP.
WinAce: Fast, high-compression (40% smaller, faster compression than ZIP).
WinAmp: MP3 player, with this skin.
dBpowerAMP: Music Converter (copies CDs to MP3)

One last thing, don't use Outlook. Find a better program: Eudora, Thunderbird, or PegasusMail (in that order) are safer/more powerful. Windows comes bundled with great software, just like Mandrake - but their internet package leaves much (security) to be desired.

Where else?

Osama bin Laden was among the Mujahiddin that fought against the Russians. Wahabis were running all over the place. If you can't see the connection between the Wahabi Muslims (Mujahiddin) fighting against the Soviet invasion in the 80s and the current al Qaeda and Taliban, then you're not paying attention.

Moreover, what's so intuitive about these impossible newfangled CD-RWs

Yup, not having to deal with eight year-old technology is as good a reason as any to shy away from computer manufacturer . Hard drives in the gigabyte range? Ten... one HUNDRED network cards? Eep! A nineteen inch screen!!

Then you imagine a car with too much horsepower, with Quake controlled by the wheel, the gas pedal, etc. All of which are still connected to their usual stuff as well. And the engine is running, the tank is filled.

Man, what a ride. :)

Then for the ultimate rush, the magic mushroom and the extra life, try navigating out from an ugly, cluttered and foreign-tounged bloat-portal. using Konquerer attached to the same navigation system. :)

I read an article about swedish internet radio station SPRAYdio. They said they were switching over to storing all music in a non-lossy compression format online on harddisks so that they could more easily support new compression formats. But that sounds expensive, and it was before the dot-com death.

I've seen it mentioned in other posts here, but I don't think enough attention is being put on the subject.

How does the US government plan to block files hosted in other countries?

Lets follow the process...
First, they go to Altavista, google, metacrawler, et al and demand that they remove those links from theyre search directory. Lets say, for arugements sake, that they succeed. So now no US search engine can return anything about illegal drugs, not even if youre using google from Amsterdamn.

Then, people will start using search engines hosted in other countries, like swedens own http://www.spray.se.(My current place of employment) They will NOT back down.

Does the US government really think that they can control the internet? They are completely forgetting the fact the its not theirs to control. Ack. Im very disturbed right now. Ive had it up to my farhead with the US believing they own the internet.

Those are my proud 2 kronors.
/nutt