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I heard from Rupert Ursin that this is the longest free-space range on Earth that has significant infrastructure at both sides. This is to say, scientists can keep small optics labs in telescope buildings, and live in hotels. Also we had a 1 meter diameter telescope at the receiver station in Tenerife (normally used for optical communication with satellites), which is no small beast and it occupies its own dome. One could of course find many longer ranges between mountains, but logistics would become more expensive and difficult... we'd have to build and drive (or airlift) a container full of gear, and probably live in a tent for months.

Here is a picture of La Palma station sending a tracking beam to Tenerife, above clouds: http://www.vad1.com/lab/pictures/La-Palma-JKT-tracking-beam-4.jpg

By the way one doesn't get to clill out on beach very much. It's a long drive to the mountaintops where the observatories are situated. When I was there last April, we had snow in the mountains on both islands. I had, like, one day on beach and two weeks of night shifts in the labs. This still was a lot of fun :).

Hehe, that master student you will see at the second linked page is me ten years ago :-)

Here: http://media.vad1.com/temporary_url_20070929kldcg/v-anthem-sovietunion-1977-acapella-the_hunt_for_red_october_1990.mpg

proposing refundable microcharge for sending email (which is NOT fully refunded ONLY when the recipient subsequently marks incoming email as spam). Obviously my idea might be flawed, but those who have critiqued it never formulated why. At the present conversion rates, a refundable cent per email will do wonders. Possibly it will kill spam, or at least change its quality and quantity very considerably.

Just to explain this private exchange (sorry for a disclosure), this is a former student of my professor (well, a student of mine, too) who once chose to be a guitar player in Russia over taking a PhD in quantum optics. We could of course wonder what he thinks of allofmp3.com from a musician's position.

We haven't heard of you a while. Artem, I'd be glad if you contact me.

Thank you for the answer. I'm reposting the image you've reeferred to in an open access (its original location required some sort of academic or territorially-restricted access: I couldn't initially download it to Russia, had to browse through an external university server).

E.g. this and this pictures were licensed to Swedish firms for use as illustrations/ads.

E.g. this and this pictures were licensed to Swedish firms for use as illustrations/ads.

If they sell discs where the main feature (i.e. the movie itself) is crippled, for example by lower bitrate than on premium edition, by having no English language track, or by having forced subtitles to go with, this won't beat pirates.

If they sell discs with high-bitrate main feature (DVD-9 filled to the brink please), original-language soundtrack available and no UOP gimmicks, they win. Hell, if they do it consistently, they could sell such discs for a whopping $4.30 in Russia and I would gladly buy them over pirated ones. Besides I throw the box away, anyway, and pack the discs into a wallet to save space right away. Just give me the properly mastered stuff, no frills.

To bad I suspect the cheap licensed edition would be crippled. Then pirates, who care about customers more, get my business.

2. Piracy is a more complex problem than you Americans think. Many do not have money to buy licensed software. It's often simply not an option, period. This is why software piracy is so prevalent and accepted here.

3. If you want a personal perspective on video piracy, have a look at my review. When I did buy licensed DVDs, they were of lower quality than pirated ones more often than not.

I'm not advocating anything, just trying to state the state of the facts.

Indeed your site is targeted to nerds. My sites (a hodgepodge of non-nerdy international resources) have more general audience though, thus they have lower and, I deem, closer to the world average Mozilla stats. The actual Firefox share in the aggregate statistics is just below 10%. MSIE share is about 70%.

The entire point of the Russian paper is that while quantum cryptography is immune to man-in-the-middle attacks in theory, when you build the actual device, there are physical imperfections in the implementation that can be exploited (at least in existing designs). This paper might be more clear.

I'd like to point out that quantum cryptography (depending on the protocol) does not protect against man in the middle. Unsurprisingly, some guy in Russia already has
done research on this:

http://www.vad1.com/qcr/present-attacks-via-optica l-loopholes-erlangen-200409/present-attacks-via-op tical-loopholes-erlangen-200409.pdf

There goes my confidence for quantum cryptography.

I am going to post this link in every discussion commemorating the ongoing spam war until someone explains me why the outlined economic solution won't work.

Err... can you carefully rate my idea, please, if you have time?

I think, too, only economics can truly solve that. My idea is different from yours, but still... it looks like it's not going to be accepted. I'm not getting any response to it... what's wrong with my idea? I am surely overlooking something, but what exactly?

In the animal world analogy, if the economic solution is implemented the users who employ it become species without natural enemies in the habitat... like some large animals. In respect to spam, that is.

postage-based email?

Consider $0.1 average payment per spam email sent: P. Spammer has circa $27,000 in costs, $1280 in reveniue, no profit. He switches to something else, stops polluting the net. So does everyone else. Problem solved.

Yes I am curious to get the obligatiry "anti-spam checklist" on it, but hey... try to be constructive and positive please. We are here to find a solution, not to shoot everything down.

A year ago, spam titles were kinda fun to read.

Today, they're all like hasty business notes from dyslexic employees of a big American company.

The spam war ruined my day.

this encryption is only theoretical. By the time we can implement it, we may already be able to break it.

Actually, this has become considerably less theoretical over the last decade. Working models proving that this is possible have been constructed. Norway is one example.

As well, mathematically it is equivalent to a one-time pad. So I don't think there will be any "obvious" way to break it. IE. a mathematically sound way. There might be social engineering way s of doing it, or perhaps even ways of taking over the target machine and just reading the decrypted data.

But the encryption itself, since it is basically a one-time pad, is unbreakable.

Of interest though, the only major problem preventing large-scale implementation of this system is the distance the "key" can travel successfully with a respectable error rate. As well, if a way were discovered to do this without fiber-optics. I can guarantee you that the satellites in orbit would use this system since it can't be "captured" easily.

Those who test by FTPing large files and watching the transfer rate, should understand these limitations (kindly explained to me by J.Spencer Love).

I had a similar problem trying to host a large-bandwidth video clip. It turned out the bandwidth of my 10Mbps line did not saturate at all (in fact, it was utilized at mere 5%), so neither did the trans-Atlantic connection. The bottleneck was the internal buffer in client and server software.

This also means you may not need that much bandwidth to push the speed of your FTP/TCP-based tasks to its limit.

Those who test by FTPing large files and watching the transfer rate, should understand these limitations (kindly explained to me by J.Spencer Love).

I had a similar problem trying to host a large-bandwidth video clip. It turned out the bandwidth of my 10Mbps line did not saturate at all (in fact, it was utilized at mere 5%). The bottleneck was the internal buffer in client and server software.

This also means you may not need that much bandwidth to push the speed of your FTP/TCP-based tasks to its limit.

I'd be really interested in a reference to the research on active damage as a method of eavesdropping. We did study one of these strategies, but our experiment was limited to just interrogating Alice's (or Bob's) equipment, not damaging it. If somebod's doing further study, I'd like to hear about it!

One comment: even if you need to cool your detector to cryogenic temperatures, you don't have to have your customer pour liquid nitrogen (or did they say liquid helium?) into the commercial device. This is what compact no-maintenance closed-cycle coolers are for.

Plug #1: idQuantique
Plug #2: Magiq Technologies
Plug #3: Los Alamos lab (yes there used to be a site there)
Plug #4: Our own research (not commercially-oriented yet)

Quantum cryptography at other places:

Quantum Information at Los Alamos National Laboratory

Yup. "NNSA HQ has requested that LANL review all publicly accessible information".