"Asimov didn't write stories about the billions of robots who didn't jump their programming rails and cause problems, because that would've been boring."
That's certainly true. Just as we don't have novels and news stories about no murders occurring.
" But on the other hand, the fact that RSA had backdoored itself was sort of understood by the community at large as far back as 2006, shortly after they issued the compromised tool."
"Backdoored itself" is a singularly apt way to put it. But apparently they were engaged in trying to "backdoor" other people, too, which is not a victimless crime.
Personally, after their "SecureID" debacle and now this, I'm not inclined to "trust" RSA at all. Fool me once, and all that.
And the same can be said about DropBox. They promised end-to-end encryption, but instead they were "de-duping" files to save storage, which means that entirely contrary to what they told their customers, they actually had direct access to your raw files. Sure, they fixed that (so they say), and said "Sorry, we won't do it again." But how much can you trust them, considering that they blatantly lied to you before?
And here is the announcement of the release of that data, direct from the Met Office. Note that the date given for the release is July, 2011.
You can download the data yourself HERE, compare it to previous HadCRUT data that was available, and see what information is new in this release. If you count, you will find approximately 5,000 weather stations that weren't in previously-released data.
"Previously, you could have used your ignorance as an excuse. Now you're just lying. And apparently neither you or Lonny Eachus have enough intellectual integrity to retract your latest steaming pile of civilization-paralyzing misinformation. This flood of misinformation isn't just staining "Jane Q. Public's" sock puppet legacy. It's also staining Lonny Eachus's real human legacy. Please stop."
I'm "lying"? WTF?
That's straight from EAU's own website!
Further as I wrote elsewhere, all this is STILL irrelevant to the point I was trying to make. It was YOU who wanted to argue about it. Well, suck it up, read the goddamned article from EAU's own website, and stop accusing people of "lying" when they're pointing you to clearly documented facts.
I really don't think I -- or that other person -- have anything to worry about, from simply telling the truth.
"Sigh. If only there were some historical document written, perhaps by the author I quoted that explained other remedies available to citizens"
Thank you for your comment (which should be modded up).
But I would like to offer a suggestion that may be helpful:
It seems to me from experience that the majority of people on Slashdot won't bother to click on the link, much less read the whole thing.
In order to forestall arguments over points that should already (in any reasonable debate) have been settled, I've found it be usually worth my while to quote a specific passage, as well as provide the link, in order to save those intellectually lazy people from actually having to click on something or search for what I meant.
I don't always do it, but when I forget or I just don't want to bother, I've often ended up spending even more time arguing the same point over and over.
"If our government commits an illegal act, who is able to enforce it?"
But you passed over explaining why this might be an illegal act.
With very few exceptions, government has no copyright to its papers and works. If something is not classified, it is public domain. (After all... it was produced with taxpayer dollars, and quite literally belongs to the public.)
It is EXTREMELY unlikely that DoD has any authority to "license" information or paperwork to anybody.
This study almost certainly does not show what OP claims and what TFA implies.
The survey asked whether IP laws were important to their business. Not whether they were "important", as in "important to society".
That is a VERY major difference, and one TFA seems to have completely missed. In fact this appears to be an excellent example of "lying with statistics"... even if it wasn't done intentionally. It all depends on how survey questions were asked.
For example, here's a quote from the NSF about this [emphasis added]:
"Fifteen percent of all businesses reported trademarks as very important (6%) or somewhat important (9%) to their business in 2008,"
I'll give you 99 to 1 odds that when asked this question, a respondent will think, "Well, my business is not involved in patenting, or trademarking, or any of that stuff, so no, it was not important to us in 2008."
Which means, as I wrote above: this study probably does not show -- even a little -- what somebody is trying to claim it shows.
"Asimov's stories were all about how the three laws were not sufficient for the real world. The article recognises this, even if the summary doesn't."
Yes, the point was missed, but not for that reason.
Asimov's stories were not about how the 3 Laws were "insufficient". They were about how no set of rules is immune from being broken.
Would you say murder laws are "insufficient"? They get broken once in a while, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have them. Every attempt to improve our definition (and therefore laws) about things like murder have always had unintended consequences, sometimes quite severe.
Even further, the article tries to make the point that the 3 Laws are "insufficient" because at this time we have no way to actually implement them. But so what? Why not adopt them now, in anticipation of the future?
"I eagerly await your formulation for flexible rubber or plastic that can survive the vacuum of space for months, then the harsh unfiltered UV on the surface of Mars and wild swings of temperature as the wheel turns between light and shadow."
Ahem... effective and robust wheels to survive those conditions -- at a pretty darned good rate of speed, with 2 human passengers -- were built about 40 years ago for the lunar rovers.
"I bet if they are to send up any more space equipment (rover, dune buggy or whatever) they will put more emphasis on the parts that might face the issue of wear and tear / abrasion / friction."
I have to wonder: who chose aluminum as the material for the wheels in the first place? I'm not a mechanical engineer but just off the cuff that strikes me as a remarkably bad choice.
Aluminum has little resilience. If it strikes something hard (especially something hard and pointy) it's going to bend, and not rebound. This is pretty much a given. Make it thin enough to be lightweight and it's also going to puncture or break.
It sure seems like a gross waste of resources to give it a long-life nuclear power pack, then equip it with wheels which (is appears from TFA) they knew to be fragile.
"It just wouldn't be easy. For many purposes it would be sufficient."
But that's the whole point. Crypto is a statistical exercise. The goal is to make it "too difficult" to bother trying to crack it. Not necessarily impossible.
Most crypto (if we exclude one-time pads and other oddities) is not even an NP problem; it's just difficult.
For many years, it was fashionable to assign password lengths (given a particular subset of characters) a number representing "bits of entropy".
Except experience has taught it that it is not. Certain patterns are more common than others, rendering it easier (on average) to perform dictionary- and pattern-based crypto attacks... i.e., predicting the next letter based on those that came before.
So the "theoretical" bits of entropy in a character string do not represent the "effective" bits of entropy, in many cases.
The important thing is the effective entropy. (Granted... "truly" random numbers also maximize the effective entropy, but are not strictly required for effective randomness.)
"Pure" randomness is not nearly as important as "effective" randomness: the fact that the next output is not predictable by means of calculation based on past outputs.
An "effectively" random generator should still pass all the spectrum filter tests, in order to be useful. But "pure" randomness is not required.
Just to avoid an argument over something I'm NOT saying, I would like to just clarify my point again:
1. Correctly, or incorrectly, there was a perception that data was missing or being withheld.
2. The importance of original data, which was perceived to be missing, was why people were raising a stink over it.
I'm not trying to say data was actually "missing", but it is true that some of it was not available. And CRU's documented attitude regarding requests about it contributed to an atmosphere of distrust.
"Most of the data was already in the public domain, which is why the FOIA blizzard against CRU was so hysterically pointless."
I agree with you that much of the data was already in the public domain. However, CRU could have avoided the FOIA requests if they'd simply handled things in a professional, reasonable manner, as opposed to one that was blatantly arrogant and dismissive.
They needlessly pissed a lot of people off. When you do that, you should not expect them to not piss you off in return.
That's a straw-man. A really great straw-man, but a straw-man nevertheless.
Repeat: access to the RAW DATA was NOT available. Only data that has already been "massaged" (to an unknown degree) was available before the "official" release, and that release was prompted by complaints about this very (and very valid) issue.
Whether the Muir-Russel review managed to come up with similar results is irrelevant to the point being discussed here: the fact that access to original data is vital to verifying and reproducing results.
The fact that results might have been reproduced in one (or however many) cases makes no difference to that point whatever.
I will correct myself, however: the phrase "went missing" was probably not the right one to use.
For a while there was a perception that original data was "missing", but as you correctly point out, it was uncovered that most of the original data could (later) be obtained from the original sources. But it wasn't without a bit of a struggle with some of those sources.
"That's why it was "impossible" for CRU to have withheld access to the raw data. Because they didn't collect it in the first place. Anyone who was actually interested in the data could always have gotten them from the same sources that CRU did."
I didn't claim that it was withheld. I merely stated that it was missing.
Further, initially others could NOT access that data, because National Meteorological Services in various countries refused to release the data to anyone else.
Granted, that situation has been largely fixed, but it WAS the situation when the "uproar" over the data was originally taking place. And without access to that data, there was simply no way to evaluate the quality of CRU's work.
According to the record, it is only because some people made a big stink about the original data, that it is available now at all.
"We are not in a position to supply data for a particular country not covered by the example agreements referred to earlier, as we have never had sufficient resources to keep track of the exact source of each individual monthly value. Since the 1980s, we have merged the data we have received into existing series or begun new ones, so it is impossible to say if all stations within a particular country or if all of an individual record should be freely available. Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites, only the station series after adjustment for homogeneity issues. We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (i.e. quality controlled and homogenized) data."
"Who's going to invade China to seize their launch assets?"
There are other means to achieve those goals.
For example, there are already international agreements regarding the Moon, and "property" on it. China may not be signatory to those agreements, but economic sanctions if China ignores them is a real possibility.
To be honest, I think we should all be using economic sanctions against China already, though that has little to do with the Moon.
"1. The data may not support their results. Without it, you can't verify that.
2. The data may be, let's say, 'adjusted' to give better results without admitting it. You may be able to show that by statistical checks, but you can't do that without the data."
And lots of people didn't seem to understand or care that this is why others caused an uproar when "original data" went missing from EAU and CRU right around the time of "climategate".
Without the original data, there is no way to reproduce the science to see if it was done responsibly. Without pointing fingers at anybody in particular, we know that in at least some cases, it is not.
Slashdot Mirror
"Asimov didn't write stories about the billions of robots who didn't jump their programming rails and cause problems, because that would've been boring."
That's certainly true. Just as we don't have novels and news stories about no murders occurring.
" But on the other hand, the fact that RSA had backdoored itself was sort of understood by the community at large as far back as 2006, shortly after they issued the compromised tool."
"Backdoored itself" is a singularly apt way to put it. But apparently they were engaged in trying to "backdoor" other people, too, which is not a victimless crime.
Personally, after their "SecureID" debacle and now this, I'm not inclined to "trust" RSA at all. Fool me once, and all that.
And the same can be said about DropBox. They promised end-to-end encryption, but instead they were "de-duping" files to save storage, which means that entirely contrary to what they told their customers, they actually had direct access to your raw files. Sure, they fixed that (so they say), and said "Sorry, we won't do it again." But how much can you trust them, considering that they blatantly lied to you before?
And here's another source, if for some reason you don't like your own:
OK, climate sceptics: here's the raw data you wanted
And here is the announcement of the release of that data, direct from the Met Office. Note that the date given for the release is July, 2011.
You can download the data yourself HERE, compare it to previous HadCRUT data that was available, and see what information is new in this release. If you count, you will find approximately 5,000 weather stations that weren't in previously-released data.
Met Office Announcement of new data release.
"Previously, you could have used your ignorance as an excuse. Now you're just lying. And apparently neither you or Lonny Eachus have enough intellectual integrity to retract your latest steaming pile of civilization-paralyzing misinformation. This flood of misinformation isn't just staining "Jane Q. Public's" sock puppet legacy. It's also staining Lonny Eachus's real human legacy. Please stop."
I'm "lying"? WTF?
That's straight from EAU's own website!
Further as I wrote elsewhere, all this is STILL irrelevant to the point I was trying to make. It was YOU who wanted to argue about it. Well, suck it up, read the goddamned article from EAU's own website, and stop accusing people of "lying" when they're pointing you to clearly documented facts.
I really don't think I -- or that other person -- have anything to worry about, from simply telling the truth.
Snort. It seems I have committed the cardinal sin of not reading OP thoroughly. "My bad", as the kiddies say.
"Sigh. If only there were some historical document written, perhaps by the author I quoted that explained other remedies available to citizens"
Thank you for your comment (which should be modded up).
But I would like to offer a suggestion that may be helpful:
It seems to me from experience that the majority of people on Slashdot won't bother to click on the link, much less read the whole thing.
In order to forestall arguments over points that should already (in any reasonable debate) have been settled, I've found it be usually worth my while to quote a specific passage, as well as provide the link, in order to save those intellectually lazy people from actually having to click on something or search for what I meant.
I don't always do it, but when I forget or I just don't want to bother, I've often ended up spending even more time arguing the same point over and over.
"If our government commits an illegal act, who is able to enforce it?"
But you passed over explaining why this might be an illegal act.
With very few exceptions, government has no copyright to its papers and works. If something is not classified, it is public domain. (After all... it was produced with taxpayer dollars, and quite literally belongs to the public.)
It is EXTREMELY unlikely that DoD has any authority to "license" information or paperwork to anybody.
The survey asked whether IP laws were important to their business. Not whether they were "important", as in "important to society".
That is a VERY major difference, and one TFA seems to have completely missed. In fact this appears to be an excellent example of "lying with statistics"... even if it wasn't done intentionally. It all depends on how survey questions were asked.
For example, here's a quote from the NSF about this [emphasis added]:
"Fifteen percent of all businesses reported trademarks as very important (6%) or somewhat important (9%) to their business in 2008,"
I'll give you 99 to 1 odds that when asked this question, a respondent will think, "Well, my business is not involved in patenting, or trademarking, or any of that stuff, so no, it was not important to us in 2008."
Which means, as I wrote above: this study probably does not show -- even a little -- what somebody is trying to claim it shows.
"Asimov's stories were all about how the three laws were not sufficient for the real world. The article recognises this, even if the summary doesn't."
Yes, the point was missed, but not for that reason.
Asimov's stories were not about how the 3 Laws were "insufficient". They were about how no set of rules is immune from being broken.
Would you say murder laws are "insufficient"? They get broken once in a while, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have them. Every attempt to improve our definition (and therefore laws) about things like murder have always had unintended consequences, sometimes quite severe.
Even further, the article tries to make the point that the 3 Laws are "insufficient" because at this time we have no way to actually implement them. But so what? Why not adopt them now, in anticipation of the future?
"Eight or twelve smaller wheels might be a good idea for the next similarly-sized rover."
No. The diameter of the wheels has a very large effect on the terrain the vehicle can navigate without strain or damage.
To illustrate: ride a bike with a 28" wheel over a sidewalk curb. Then try the same thing on a skateboard with 3" wheels. See how far you get.
"I eagerly await your formulation for flexible rubber or plastic that can survive the vacuum of space for months, then the harsh unfiltered UV on the surface of Mars and wild swings of temperature as the wheel turns between light and shadow."
Ahem... effective and robust wheels to survive those conditions -- at a pretty darned good rate of speed, with 2 human passengers -- were built about 40 years ago for the lunar rovers.
How quickly we forget.
"I bet if they are to send up any more space equipment (rover, dune buggy or whatever) they will put more emphasis on the parts that might face the issue of wear and tear / abrasion / friction."
I have to wonder: who chose aluminum as the material for the wheels in the first place? I'm not a mechanical engineer but just off the cuff that strikes me as a remarkably bad choice.
Aluminum has little resilience. If it strikes something hard (especially something hard and pointy) it's going to bend, and not rebound. This is pretty much a given. Make it thin enough to be lightweight and it's also going to puncture or break.
It sure seems like a gross waste of resources to give it a long-life nuclear power pack, then equip it with wheels which (is appears from TFA) they knew to be fragile.
"It just wouldn't be easy. For many purposes it would be sufficient."
But that's the whole point. Crypto is a statistical exercise. The goal is to make it "too difficult" to bother trying to crack it. Not necessarily impossible.
Most crypto (if we exclude one-time pads and other oddities) is not even an NP problem; it's just difficult.
To elaborate on what I mean:
For many years, it was fashionable to assign password lengths (given a particular subset of characters) a number representing "bits of entropy".
Except experience has taught it that it is not. Certain patterns are more common than others, rendering it easier (on average) to perform dictionary- and pattern-based crypto attacks... i.e., predicting the next letter based on those that came before.
So the "theoretical" bits of entropy in a character string do not represent the "effective" bits of entropy, in many cases.
The important thing is the effective entropy. (Granted... "truly" random numbers also maximize the effective entropy, but are not strictly required for effective randomness.)
"... but it clearly isn't purely random. "
"Pure" randomness is not nearly as important as "effective" randomness: the fact that the next output is not predictable by means of calculation based on past outputs.
An "effectively" random generator should still pass all the spectrum filter tests, in order to be useful. But "pure" randomness is not required.
Just to avoid an argument over something I'm NOT saying, I would like to just clarify my point again:
1. Correctly, or incorrectly, there was a perception that data was missing or being withheld.
2. The importance of original data, which was perceived to be missing, was why people were raising a stink over it.
I'm not trying to say data was actually "missing", but it is true that some of it was not available. And CRU's documented attitude regarding requests about it contributed to an atmosphere of distrust.
"Most of the data was already in the public domain, which is why the FOIA blizzard against CRU was so hysterically pointless."
I agree with you that much of the data was already in the public domain. However, CRU could have avoided the FOIA requests if they'd simply handled things in a professional, reasonable manner, as opposed to one that was blatantly arrogant and dismissive.
They needlessly pissed a lot of people off. When you do that, you should not expect them to not piss you off in return.
That's a straw-man. A really great straw-man, but a straw-man nevertheless.
Repeat: access to the RAW DATA was NOT available. Only data that has already been "massaged" (to an unknown degree) was available before the "official" release, and that release was prompted by complaints about this very (and very valid) issue.
July 2011, and 5,113 weather stations, to be more precice, in that particular release. Even then, some countries were holding out. (Most notably Poland.)
Whether the Muir-Russel review managed to come up with similar results is irrelevant to the point being discussed here: the fact that access to original data is vital to verifying and reproducing results.
The fact that results might have been reproduced in one (or however many) cases makes no difference to that point whatever.
NSA has customers?
Not any more.
They probably do have "customers", in a sense: foreign governments with whom they've made deals.
I would like to answer the question asked in OP, though: SSL has weaknesses, but they are not related to this.
I will correct myself, however: the phrase "went missing" was probably not the right one to use.
For a while there was a perception that original data was "missing", but as you correctly point out, it was uncovered that most of the original data could (later) be obtained from the original sources. But it wasn't without a bit of a struggle with some of those sources.
"That's why it was "impossible" for CRU to have withheld access to the raw data. Because they didn't collect it in the first place. Anyone who was actually interested in the data could always have gotten them from the same sources that CRU did."
I didn't claim that it was withheld. I merely stated that it was missing.
Further, initially others could NOT access that data, because National Meteorological Services in various countries refused to release the data to anyone else.
Granted, that situation has been largely fixed, but it WAS the situation when the "uproar" over the data was originally taking place. And without access to that data, there was simply no way to evaluate the quality of CRU's work.
According to the record, it is only because some people made a big stink about the original data, that it is available now at all.
"We are not in a position to supply data for a particular country not covered by the example agreements referred to earlier, as we have never had sufficient resources to keep track of the exact source of each individual monthly value. Since the 1980s, we have merged the data we have received into existing series or begun new ones, so it is impossible to say if all stations within a particular country or if all of an individual record should be freely available. Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites, only the station series after adjustment for homogeneity issues. We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (i.e. quality controlled and homogenized) data."
Source: www.cru.uea.ac.uk
"Who's going to invade China to seize their launch assets?"
There are other means to achieve those goals.
For example, there are already international agreements regarding the Moon, and "property" on it. China may not be signatory to those agreements, but economic sanctions if China ignores them is a real possibility.
To be honest, I think we should all be using economic sanctions against China already, though that has little to do with the Moon.
"1. The data may not support their results. Without it, you can't verify that. 2. The data may be, let's say, 'adjusted' to give better results without admitting it. You may be able to show that by statistical checks, but you can't do that without the data."
And lots of people didn't seem to understand or care that this is why others caused an uproar when "original data" went missing from EAU and CRU right around the time of "climategate".
Without the original data, there is no way to reproduce the science to see if it was done responsibly. Without pointing fingers at anybody in particular, we know that in at least some cases, it is not.