SHA-1 Broken

Nanolith writes "From Bruce Schneier's weblog: 'SHA-1 has been broken. Not a reduced-round version. Not a simplified version. The real thing. The research team of Xiaoyun Wang, Yiqun Lisa Yin, and Hongbo Yu (mostly from Shandong University in China) have been quietly circulating a paper announcing their results...'" Note, though, that Schneier also writes "The paper isn't generally available yet. At this point I can't tell if the attack is real, but the paper looks good and this is a reputable research team."

Comments

Re:And they scoffed at my continued reliance on MD

[mlyle]

BTW:

Disabled US vets 10 yrs after Viet Nam: 10%
12 yrs after Gulf War: 89%
Stop uranium inhalation poisoning!

What exactly is your source on this? According to an anti-military news source quoting the DoVA:

Of the 504,047 eligible for VA benefits, 149,094 (29%) are now considered disabled by the VA eleven years since the start of the Gulf War; and...

29% is a big number, but 29% != 89% last time I checked. Also, there are many other explanations other than uranium dust, like chemical weapons in theatre. But I don't think facts probably matter very much to you.

Re:And they scoffed at my continued reliance on MD

[js7a]

Wild yes, but the source is here and it's apparently not a lie.

Re: [OT U poisoning]

[js7a]

What exactly is your source on this?

Heads roll at Veterans Administration -- Mushrooming depleted uranium (DU) scandal blamed

Writing in Preventive Psychiatry ... Arthur N. Bernklau, executive director of Veterans for Constitutional Law in New York, stated, "... Out of the 580,400 soldiers who served in GW1 (the first Gulf War), of them, 11,000 are now dead. By the year 2000, there were 325,000 on Permanent Medical Disability. This astounding number of 'Disabled Vets' means that a decade later, 56% of those soldiers who served have some form of permanent medical problems." The disability rate for the wars of the last century was 5 percent; it was higher, 10 percent, in Viet Nam....

"Terry Jamison, Public Affairs Specialist, Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, Department of Veterans Affairs, at the VA Central Office, recently reported that 'Gulf Era Veterans' now on medical disability, since 1991, number 518,739 Veterans," said Berklau.

I asked vet-advocate Dan Fahey about this and here's what he wrote back:

> Are those figures right? From what I can find in Medline, I was
> expecting something like 35,000 on permanent disability, based
> on mortality rates, which are reported to be quite low. If these
> people are getting sick nine times more than Viet Nam vets, but
> are only dying 1.2 times as often, that's just hard for me to
> believe.

Yes, the figures are right, but their connection to DU is incorrect. This covers all injuries--broken leg, hurt back, as well as Gulf War illnesses.

I thought 'Gulf Era Veterans' could perhaps be including everyone who served anywhere 1990-1994, but it's still too big to believe.

29% is a big number, but 29% != 89% last time I checked.

Yeah, well, apparently a lot can change in two years. Compare to the graph of birth defects per 1000 live births reported in Basrah.

Also, there are many other explanations other than uranium dust, like chemical weapons in theatre.

The incidence rate differences observed in cohort studies between combat and non-combat veterans who got the same immunizations and drugs, used the same pesticides, and breathed the same amount if not more smoke from Kuwaiti oil field fires, have ruled out everything but uranium poisoning. The increase in brith defects observed in Basrah mirrors that of the male U.S. and U.K. troops' children's birth defects over time. The only hypothesis capable of explaining that is uranium inhalation, leading to spermatid genotoxicity from accumulation in the testes.

Having said that, it is very hard to explain how the contamination of Basrah occured, because almost all the time during and after the 1991 battles when uranium was being released, the prevailing winds would have been blowing them away from the city. Some people have suggested some kind of food-chain contamination, relating to either goats or birds.

But I don't think facts probably matter very much to you.

There is a collection of peer-reviewed medical research on the subject here.

Re:Sigh

[skids]

Ignore me. Way past bedtime.

Re:GNAA?

[cortana]

Presumably it's the same motivation they have for trying to ruin Slashdot.

Re:Well...

[Phleg]

(being pedantic) Actually, you mean UTF-16. Unicode is just a set of code points; it doesn't actually specify how many bits are used to encode them.