I don't think they have any backdoors in the encryption itself in mind. They're thinking about particular implementations. Suppose, for instance, you make an encryption program. They will either force you to give them the source code so they can compile a backdoor version themselves or 'ask' you to put a backdoor in it. The backdoor will most likely be some key escrow. Unless it's made transparent in the first place, it's hard to detect this from the outside in an executable without extensive reverse engineering, or, in the case of open source software, without fully deterministic compilation results (which apparently isn't quite there yet for large and complex programs). Even worse, many encryption scenarios such as hard disk encryption already work with something similar to full key escrow in place anyway, so only a very small change is needed - instead of using and storing a randomly generated master key, you use a predetermined secret.
Your data is not safe in the EU. European laws and jurisdiction are fairly reasonable and overall much better than in the US, but it takes quite some effort to get something to the European level, and the local laws and jurisdiction differ vastly from country to country. But the real problem is that politicians and local authorities seem to always find a way around European legislation anyway.
And now that the European idea is crumbling due to a new rise in right-wing nationalism and Nazi movements in Germany, France, the UK and many other countries, I wouldn't count on the EU too much in the long run. If the current trends continue, some countries in Europe might nuke each other in 50 years from now.
I personally think that this whole concept of a Dyson Sphere and the civilisation 1-4 scale is misleading and implausible. There is no good reason to believe that any civilisation would harness all of the (centralized) energy of a whole sun rather than using many small energy sources like fusion reactors or whatever else might be possible in future.
Whom do you mean by "we", are you a climatologist? Scientists continue "the debate" (wrong word, btw) all the time, but if around 95% of experts in the field (=working climatologists, and no one else) agree that global warming is to a large extent man-made, as a recent large meta study showed, and many people (experts, politicians, and "Joe the Plumber") agree that the effects of this warming will likely be disastrous, it's just plain stupid not to act on the basis of the experts' knowledge. That doesn't mean that the experts cannot be wrong, but their assessments are the best information we currently have.
It is crazy, and perhaps a sign of how modern media have declined, that some groups seem to have managed to "ideologize" this issue, as if ongoing research in an area had anything to do with ideology, let alone cliches like "left" and "right". It's like saying "Yeah, 95% of all medical doctors agree, on the basis of their research, that substance X causes cancer, but we will not act upon this information, because it doesn't fit our world view". What kind of world view would that be? I can only attribute this stupidity to the modern TV culture which has apparently created the impression that it is enough to put one "expert" in front of a camera in order to cast doubt on theories on which thousands of real experts have previously converged.
Actually, you've got it totally wrong and the OP probably missed / silently corrected your mistake because it is so absurd. The longer Bitcoins are used, the more they will suffer from a massive deflation, not from inflation (unless the trust in them suddenly went to zero because of widespread prohibitions or a successful cryptographic attack of their design). This deflation is part of the design of the currency and intended but it is controversial whether that is good.
What you are referring to is a currency fluctuation. Bitcoins are very volatile.
No, don't buy into this argument. With probable cause and a warrant it is and has always been possible to bug an apartment or a machine, provided that the crime is serious enough. Moreover, the endpoints are technically insecure and this won't change any time soon, not with the contemporary lax security practises and expenses at companies like Microsoft and Apple, so it is also possible to do this in software (e.g. a trojan) if absolutely necessary.
It's perfectly feasible to have targeted surveillance with judicial oversight and within reasonable bounds without having any backdoors in encryption or collecting tons of metadata of non-suspects.
AMD is rapidly losing GPU market share despite having excellent products (both R9 380 and R9 390 rock).
What good is the hardware if the drivers suck and have virtually no settings? It would be so easy to fix and instead they make another wacky huge application with in-built social media, built-in advertisements and other nonsense. It seems to me that AMD don't understand and have never really understood what their buyers want.
Because the attacker will get the key in the same way as he would obtain the ciphertext. The good thing about ordinary symmetric encryption is that you can generate the key from a memorized passphrase by securely hashing and keystretching it. That's not possible with an OTP.
BTW, your Mom would have a problem, because in order to use an OTP correctly she'd have to immediately destroy her key after encrypting a message about her kittens for you. Only you copy should remain. But you cannot securely erase partial data from a 1 TB USB stick.
I'm assuming you're joking, but just in case you're not, allow me to explain.
You cannot brute-force an OTP without the key (or at least strong statistical cues for it), because every plaintext message of the same length is equally likely. If the OTP length is n that includes any part of that length of the works of Shakespeare, the Bible, the UK's constitution (if it still has one), and all texts or other messages of length n that have ever been written and will ever be written or transmitted. Likewise, any sequence of length n of the alphabet (e.g. 26 letters, 256 chars, or UTF16) is a valid key, so they cannot "ask" you for the key in any meaningful sense of the word.
Unfortunately, OTPs are of limited value in practice, since they key must be at least as long as the message.
What you can do legally, at least with Springer journals, is to put a "preprint"/draft version on your web site, and I've seen a neat trick recently. Somebody has put the page numbers of the printed publication in squared brackets into his drafts so people can cite his papers without having the "official" publication.
You're right that NATO is nothing without the US (the US made sure about that for obvious reasons), but the rest of your post is based on a common misconception. You confuse NATO with the various short-term alliances the US has formed for military interventions such as invading other countries, but the key clause of the NATO treaty, Article 5, has only been invoked once during its history, namely in response to 9/11. Perhaps you had ISAF as another larger alliance in mind, to which NATO has lent some of its C&C structure.
The military strength of NATO has never really been tested on a large scale so far, as the one and only invocation of Article 5 was not a full-fledged mobilisation. (It was mostly about a naval mission to intercept and check ships in the Mediterranean Sea and more or less a symbolic act of the member states to support the US after 9/11.)
People in the EU may have a problem with the place, but it is specifically for holding illegal combatants captured in the field by the military who are not POWs under the Geneva Convention. It's not a gulag or a concentration camp for political prisoners.
Uhm, that's exactly what it is, which is why people in the EU have problems with it. Kidnapping people from the soil of sovereign countries and then holding them without due process for indefinite time without trial, oversight by third parties (e.g. Red Cross), way to appeal the imprisonment or access to a lawyer on some remote military base is the hallmark of injustice. It couldn't possibly get worse -- well, it could, if you additionally hold some of them in cages and torture them with sleep deprivation and waterboarding.
If you can't see the atrocity of this then I feel very, very sorry for you.
It's hard to think of a solution that might help the US situation, apart from an agreement between the two major parties that, for major undertakings like the mission to Mars, if the other assumes power then it will continue.
Seems pretty easy to me. With consent from the current government, NASA outsources most of the development to a company staffed by former NASA employees and various other private companies. A contract is signed that 'orders' the Mars mission and when it is breached entitles the private companies involved to get high penalty payments.
Aren't these kind of contracts with private companies made all the time in large defence projects?
The government is not above the law. (Or at least shouldn't be).
I think the idea of this admittedly cryptic article is to have a laptop that is temporarily secure against certain spyware modifications so it can later still be used to download the encrypted data on the other side of the border. The alternative is to buy a new computer every time you travel.
Like Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker is also one of those guys who basically stopped doing academic work and started writing one popular science book after the other. It's an industry and doesn't have much to do with actual research. They are kept by their universities because they popularize difficult topics and attract students and funding, not because of their great contributions to science.
But young scientists are the busy researchers! It's "publish or perish", so the only thing that young researchers care about is how to get their papers past the reviewers. The competition on the academic job market has become insane and it's mostly about counting the number of publications in top journals.
My personal experience is that lucid and clear writing does not help at all, more technical and obscure papers seem to generally have a higher chance of being accepted. What helps is extensive proof reading and copy editing by a native speaker of English before you send your paper to a journal, but that service costs a lot of money in the long run and only few institutes and faculties provide it for their researchers. Where I work I can only dream of that, I can be happy if there is paper for our printer.
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I don't think they have any backdoors in the encryption itself in mind. They're thinking about particular implementations. Suppose, for instance, you make an encryption program. They will either force you to give them the source code so they can compile a backdoor version themselves or 'ask' you to put a backdoor in it. The backdoor will most likely be some key escrow. Unless it's made transparent in the first place, it's hard to detect this from the outside in an executable without extensive reverse engineering, or, in the case of open source software, without fully deterministic compilation results (which apparently isn't quite there yet for large and complex programs). Even worse, many encryption scenarios such as hard disk encryption already work with something similar to full key escrow in place anyway, so only a very small change is needed - instead of using and storing a randomly generated master key, you use a predetermined secret.
Your data is not safe in the EU. European laws and jurisdiction are fairly reasonable and overall much better than in the US, but it takes quite some effort to get something to the European level, and the local laws and jurisdiction differ vastly from country to country. But the real problem is that politicians and local authorities seem to always find a way around European legislation anyway.
And now that the European idea is crumbling due to a new rise in right-wing nationalism and Nazi movements in Germany, France, the UK and many other countries, I wouldn't count on the EU too much in the long run. If the current trends continue, some countries in Europe might nuke each other in 50 years from now.
I personally think that this whole concept of a Dyson Sphere and the civilisation 1-4 scale is misleading and implausible. There is no good reason to believe that any civilisation would harness all of the (centralized) energy of a whole sun rather than using many small energy sources like fusion reactors or whatever else might be possible in future.
Whom do you mean by "we", are you a climatologist? Scientists continue "the debate" (wrong word, btw) all the time, but if around 95% of experts in the field (=working climatologists, and no one else) agree that global warming is to a large extent man-made, as a recent large meta study showed, and many people (experts, politicians, and "Joe the Plumber") agree that the effects of this warming will likely be disastrous, it's just plain stupid not to act on the basis of the experts' knowledge. That doesn't mean that the experts cannot be wrong, but their assessments are the best information we currently have.
It is crazy, and perhaps a sign of how modern media have declined, that some groups seem to have managed to "ideologize" this issue, as if ongoing research in an area had anything to do with ideology, let alone cliches like "left" and "right". It's like saying "Yeah, 95% of all medical doctors agree, on the basis of their research, that substance X causes cancer, but we will not act upon this information, because it doesn't fit our world view". What kind of world view would that be? I can only attribute this stupidity to the modern TV culture which has apparently created the impression that it is enough to put one "expert" in front of a camera in order to cast doubt on theories on which thousands of real experts have previously converged.
Actually, you've got it totally wrong and the OP probably missed / silently corrected your mistake because it is so absurd. The longer Bitcoins are used, the more they will suffer from a massive deflation, not from inflation (unless the trust in them suddenly went to zero because of widespread prohibitions or a successful cryptographic attack of their design). This deflation is part of the design of the currency and intended but it is controversial whether that is good.
What you are referring to is a currency fluctuation. Bitcoins are very volatile.
Take it on the bright side, we will finally be able to enjoy a nice bottle of English wine.
No, don't buy into this argument. With probable cause and a warrant it is and has always been possible to bug an apartment or a machine, provided that the crime is serious enough. Moreover, the endpoints are technically insecure and this won't change any time soon, not with the contemporary lax security practises and expenses at companies like Microsoft and Apple, so it is also possible to do this in software (e.g. a trojan) if absolutely necessary.
It's perfectly feasible to have targeted surveillance with judicial oversight and within reasonable bounds without having any backdoors in encryption or collecting tons of metadata of non-suspects.
AMD is rapidly losing GPU market share despite having excellent products (both R9 380 and R9 390 rock).
What good is the hardware if the drivers suck and have virtually no settings? It would be so easy to fix and instead they make another wacky huge application with in-built social media, built-in advertisements and other nonsense. It seems to me that AMD don't understand and have never really understood what their buyers want.
So people can wait 10 years instead of 5 years before they replace their computer?
Sounds good to me.
When you do audio processing, for instance, the number of real cores makes a huge difference. If you use an Intel chip.
I also agree that the answer is no.
However, engineers who program should be called engineers.
Complete nonsense.
Because the attacker will get the key in the same way as he would obtain the ciphertext. The good thing about ordinary symmetric encryption is that you can generate the key from a memorized passphrase by securely hashing and keystretching it. That's not possible with an OTP.
BTW, your Mom would have a problem, because in order to use an OTP correctly she'd have to immediately destroy her key after encrypting a message about her kittens for you. Only you copy should remain. But you cannot securely erase partial data from a 1 TB USB stick.
I wouldn't call ROT-13 encryption, because it doesn't have a key. Perhaps you could call ROT-n encryption, where n is the key.
I'm assuming you're joking, but just in case you're not, allow me to explain.
You cannot brute-force an OTP without the key (or at least strong statistical cues for it), because every plaintext message of the same length is equally likely. If the OTP length is n that includes any part of that length of the works of Shakespeare, the Bible, the UK's constitution (if it still has one), and all texts or other messages of length n that have ever been written and will ever be written or transmitted. Likewise, any sequence of length n of the alphabet (e.g. 26 letters, 256 chars, or UTF16) is a valid key, so they cannot "ask" you for the key in any meaningful sense of the word.
Unfortunately, OTPs are of limited value in practice, since they key must be at least as long as the message.
What you can do legally, at least with Springer journals, is to put a "preprint"/draft version on your web site, and I've seen a neat trick recently. Somebody has put the page numbers of the printed publication in squared brackets into his drafts so people can cite his papers without having the "official" publication.
I'll do that with all my online papers. :-)
Why can't they just provide a working graphics card driver and a simple, straightforward and working settings manager for it? What is wrong with AMD?
My next graphics card will be an Nvidia for sure.
You're right that NATO is nothing without the US (the US made sure about that for obvious reasons), but the rest of your post is based on a common misconception. You confuse NATO with the various short-term alliances the US has formed for military interventions such as invading other countries, but the key clause of the NATO treaty, Article 5, has only been invoked once during its history, namely in response to 9/11. Perhaps you had ISAF as another larger alliance in mind, to which NATO has lent some of its C&C structure.
The military strength of NATO has never really been tested on a large scale so far, as the one and only invocation of Article 5 was not a full-fledged mobilisation. (It was mostly about a naval mission to intercept and check ships in the Mediterranean Sea and more or less a symbolic act of the member states to support the US after 9/11.)
People in the EU may have a problem with the place, but it is specifically for holding illegal combatants captured in the field by the military who are not POWs under the Geneva Convention. It's not a gulag or a concentration camp for political prisoners.
Uhm, that's exactly what it is, which is why people in the EU have problems with it. Kidnapping people from the soil of sovereign countries and then holding them without due process for indefinite time without trial, oversight by third parties (e.g. Red Cross), way to appeal the imprisonment or access to a lawyer on some remote military base is the hallmark of injustice. It couldn't possibly get worse -- well, it could, if you additionally hold some of them in cages and torture them with sleep deprivation and waterboarding.
If you can't see the atrocity of this then I feel very, very sorry for you.
It's hard to think of a solution that might help the US situation, apart from an agreement between the two major parties that, for major undertakings like the mission to Mars, if the other assumes power then it will continue.
Seems pretty easy to me. With consent from the current government, NASA outsources most of the development to a company staffed by former NASA employees and various other private companies. A contract is signed that 'orders' the Mars mission and when it is breached entitles the private companies involved to get high penalty payments.
Aren't these kind of contracts with private companies made all the time in large defence projects?
The government is not above the law. (Or at least shouldn't be).
I think the idea of this admittedly cryptic article is to have a laptop that is temporarily secure against certain spyware modifications so it can later still be used to download the encrypted data on the other side of the border. The alternative is to buy a new computer every time you travel.
Like Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker is also one of those guys who basically stopped doing academic work and started writing one popular science book after the other. It's an industry and doesn't have much to do with actual research. They are kept by their universities because they popularize difficult topics and attract students and funding, not because of their great contributions to science.
Well, that's because they call it "literary science" ;-)
But young scientists are the busy researchers! It's "publish or perish", so the only thing that young researchers care about is how to get their papers past the reviewers. The competition on the academic job market has become insane and it's mostly about counting the number of publications in top journals.
My personal experience is that lucid and clear writing does not help at all, more technical and obscure papers seem to generally have a higher chance of being accepted. What helps is extensive proof reading and copy editing by a native speaker of English before you send your paper to a journal, but that service costs a lot of money in the long run and only few institutes and faculties provide it for their researchers. Where I work I can only dream of that, I can be happy if there is paper for our printer.
Yes, but Windows 10 is harder to avoid. Unfortunately.