It's a bit of both. RISC architectures try to make the instructions easy to decode, more like the microcode on a CISC architecture, if you've ever examined a CISC microcode listing. They also jettison complex instructions and addressing modes that take multiple cycles and screw up pipelines. The VAX POLY instruction is my favorite example. That doesn't stop them from adding a bunch of new, simple, easy to decode instructions.
Could this just be a case of poor receiver design? I've seen this is VHF/UHF receivers. A strong signal will produce intermodulation distortion in the front end and wipe out any weak signals. A good receiver will have a linear front end with a wide dynamic range. This costs money, which probably means that the receivers in consumer grade equipment are a major cause of the problem.
There may be a misunderstanding in terminology. A monoalphabetic substitution cipher, assuming a 26 letter alphabet with a randomly chosen 26 letter key, has a keyspace equal to log2(26!) bits, or about 88 bits. A Caesar cipher (c = (p + k) modulo 26) has a much smaller keyspace, log2(26) bits, or about 4.7 bits. See the lecture notes from Prof. Schneider's Introduction to Cryptography for a longer explanation.
A large keyspace is necessary but not sufficient to ensure security. It is easy to design a weak cipher with an arbitrarily large keyspace. Think of a simple polyalphabetic substitution cipher with N alphabets. Increasing the number of alphabets adds to the size of the keyspace but it is still vulnerable to pencil and paper attacks by decomposing it back into N simple substitution ciphers.
Also, are there any ways to encrypt the data in physical RAM, in any OS?
The Dallas Semiconductor 5002FP encrypts the address and data buses. It's an Intel 8051 compatible microprocessor, so forget about running Linux or *BSD.
I'm surprised that more people aren't using Skipjack. The algorithm is relatively simple and doesn't need much memory. I've read that it has been approved for the protection of SECRET information in the Defense Messaging System (DMS) by the NSA. As far as I know, this is the only public algorithm that has received the NSA's approval for the protection of classified information.
A 40-bit keyspace is MUCH larger than any of the cryptograms that just use letter substitutions.
Wrong. A simple substitution cipher has a keyspace equal to 26!, or about 88 bits.
Re:What disappoints me...
on
Mattel Spyware
·
· Score: 4
The problem with any "code of ethics" is that you can't have responsibility without authority. A civil engineering project has to be reviewed and approved by a Professional Engineer (P.E.), this is a matter of law in many places. There is no analogous law for software engineering. Even though most employers categorize them as "exempt", using the rationale that they are professionals, like doctors or lawyers, programmers and software engineers rarely have the authority associated with the traditional professions.
I believe the usual procedure is for the case to be heard by a three judge panel. That decision can be appealed and heard by all ten judges (en banc) if the court grants an appeal of the original decision. Otherwise, they have to petition the Supreme Court, which can refuse to hear the case. Three judges have disqualified themselves, leaving seven judges to hear the case.
Re:Learn to speak fucking English
on
Napster Wars
·
· Score: 1
That usage of ilk, as in "kind or sort", has been around for over 200 years. Do we have to drag you kicking and screaming into the nineteenth century?
There is a huge difference between understanding the concepts and having the hard numbers, engineering and fabrication skills needed to construct a weapon. The concepts tell you that it is possible, actually designing and building a weapon is the hard part. The first thermonuclear device (Mike) weighed 164,000 pounds and had a cryogenic system to keep the deuterium in a liquid state. The W-47 warhead for the Polaris missile weighed about 600 pounds. It took a lot of money and talent to get from proof-of-concept to a light weight thermonuclear weapon suitable for use on a missile.
I don't understand how anyone can be so sloppy with classified information, not to mention nuclear weapons information. When I was a peon in the military, we were always told of the exciting career opportunities in Alaska that awaited anyone who was negligent in handling classified information.
The field strength is inversely proportional to the square of the distance. A one milliwatt transmitter at a distance of 10 meters has the same field strength as a 1000 watt transmitter at a distance of 10 kilometers. This means that nearby emitters can easily jam navigation receivers that are receiving distant navigation beacons.
p = transmitter power d = distance s = power flux density
I propose that we colonize Alpha Centauri. Marketing people, being so essential to our society, get to leave on the first ship, along with the telephone sanitizers and record company executives.
Many years ago, DEC used to distribute the source code for the RSX-11M executive (kernel) as part of the media kit for the operating system. This was probably done just to enable customers to generate custom kernels, but it was very nice to be able to read the source code. If the documentation for a system call was was unclear or incorrect, you could look at the source code. Plus it was educational to see how things were implemented.
The original IBM PC was designed to use cheap, 8-bit, Intel chips that were available in large volumes. The 8259A PIC supported 8 interrupts. 2 interrupts were used up by the keyboard and timer chip. The 6 remaining interrupts could have been mapped to ISA slots. This would have caused several problems. The interrupt priority of an ISA card would have slot dependent. The ROM BIOS was hard coded to associate certain interrupts with specific I/O devices. This would mean that, for example, the parallel port card could only be installed in the slot that was wired to IRQ 7. It would also have prevented a card from using more than one interrupt, such as a multi-io with 2 serial, 1 parallel and a floppy interface (4 interrupts).
The Microsoft Applications Company drops all support for the Macintosh. They view it as a fringe platform that can't generate enough revenue to justify continued support of Internet Explorer, Outlook Express and Office. The programmers are redeployed to more profitable Windows projects. Microsoft executives later reveal that they only spent money on Macintosh development because of antitrust considerations. They needed to be able to point to the Macintosh as proof that Microsoft did not have a monopoly on desktop computer operating systems.
The current ATSC modulation standard (8-VSB) doesn't work in the real world. There have been vague promises of "magic chips" to fix the problems, but nobody has delivered on their promises. I have to conclude that 8-VSB is dead, even though many people claim that it is "just pining for the fjords".
COFDM and DVB-T work today, the hardware is in mass production, and it looks like it will become the international standard for DTV.
Since many of these abuses are perpetrated under the guise of "freedom of contract", why not change the rules on what constitutes a valid contract or license?
Here are some possibilities:
All contracts and licenses must be written out by hand, by an employee of the company who is authorized to bind the company to a contract.
All contracts and licenses must be signed in duplicate, by the purchaser and the vendor, with one copy returned to the purchaser, before any goods change hands.
All contracts and licenses must be signed in blood, by the purchaser and the vendor, before any goods change hands. (There is a precedent for this one, you know, the other Prince of Darkness.)
According to the technical specs, it meets FCC Part 15 emission standards. Still, it is transmitting in the 4.3 - 20.9 MHz frequency band over non-twisted, non-shielded, copper power wiring. This has the potential of trashing important shortwave broadcast and amateur radio frequency bands. Widespread deployment of these devices could be a disaster for HF radio users. Noise is already a severe problem in many places.
I think the Justice Department may have avoided major antitrust cases because the IBM and AT&T cases went on for so long and consumed huge amounts of resources.
I'm not sure what Judge Jackson did differently from previous judges, but it prevented the case from turning into a decade long battle of legal armies.
One approach is conformance testing. In the USA, this has been done by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Electronic Data Systems, and other private and government organisations. One problem is that a product can pass the test and also be a bloated, slow and buggy piece of junk.
Nobody reads the license agreement before they hit 'OK'.
I'll admit that I usually don't bother reading license agreements. What's the point? Do you think that anyone would actually be willing to negotiate changes in the license? Most of them contain the same verbiage, as if they were all written by the same lawyer. They boil down to:
You own nothing.
You waive all your rights.
We disclaim all warranties.
What are you going to do if the product is defective? Sue them? The civil court system is reserved for rich people and corporations who can afford lawyers. Lawyers will not take contingency cases that don't offer the prospect of large judgements.
Falsely representing yourself as someone else, its a crime. As in illegal.
It's a bit more complicated than that. It is legal, at least in the USA, to use aliases instead of your legal name. It's illegal to use an alias to deceive someone, with intent to defraud.
In the old days, every type of system had its own operating system, often several. When I had a PDP-11, it could run RT-11, RSX-11M/M+, IAS, RSTS and a large number of obscure commercial and research operating systems. Operating systems, for the most part, were written in assembler or obscure systems programming languages.
Later, when the VAX and BSD UNIX became popular, companies stopped writing new operating systems for new hardware. Instead of writing a new operating system, they ported UNIX to the new hardware. That was much cheaper and safer than designing and writing a new operating system. Universities still did operating system research, but little of it was commercialized. UNIX and UNIX clones were taking over the world.
The IBM compatible PC is now the generic hardware platform. What operating systems does it support?
MS-DOS
OS/2
Windows 95/98
Windows NT/2000
Linux
FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD
UNIX (SCO, Solaris, etc.)
BeOS
QNX
Notice the large number of UNIX, and UNIX clone operating systems. Even the proprietary operating systems have been influenced by UNIX, for example, the new features introduced in MS-DOS 2.0 show a strong UNIX influence. From the command line, they all look a lot like UNIX. They all support C and something close to POSIX.
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It's a bit of both. RISC architectures try to make the instructions easy to decode, more like the microcode on a CISC architecture, if you've ever examined a CISC microcode listing. They also jettison complex instructions and addressing modes that take multiple cycles and screw up pipelines. The VAX POLY instruction is my favorite example. That doesn't stop them from adding a bunch of new, simple, easy to decode instructions.
Could this just be a case of poor receiver design? I've seen this is VHF/UHF receivers. A strong signal will produce intermodulation distortion in the front end and wipe out any weak signals. A good receiver will have a linear front end with a wide dynamic range. This costs money, which probably means that the receivers in consumer grade equipment are a major cause of the problem.
There may be a misunderstanding in terminology. A monoalphabetic substitution cipher, assuming a 26 letter alphabet with a randomly chosen 26 letter key, has a keyspace equal to log2(26!) bits, or about 88 bits. A Caesar cipher (c = (p + k) modulo 26) has a much smaller keyspace, log2(26) bits, or about 4.7 bits. See the lecture notes from Prof. Schneider's Introduction to Cryptography for a longer explanation.
A large keyspace is necessary but not sufficient to ensure security. It is easy to design a weak cipher with an arbitrarily large keyspace. Think of a simple polyalphabetic substitution cipher with N alphabets. Increasing the number of alphabets adds to the size of the keyspace but it is still vulnerable to pencil and paper attacks by decomposing it back into N simple substitution ciphers.
The Dallas Semiconductor 5002FP encrypts the address and data buses. It's an Intel 8051 compatible microprocessor, so forget about running Linux or *BSD.
I'm surprised that more people aren't using Skipjack. The algorithm is relatively simple and doesn't need much memory. I've read that it has been approved for the protection of SECRET information in the Defense Messaging System (DMS) by the NSA. As far as I know, this is the only public algorithm that has received the NSA's approval for the protection of classified information.
Wrong. A simple substitution cipher has a keyspace equal to 26!, or about 88 bits.
The problem with any "code of ethics" is that you can't have responsibility without authority. A civil engineering project has to be reviewed and approved by a Professional Engineer (P.E.), this is a matter of law in many places. There is no analogous law for software engineering. Even though most employers categorize them as "exempt", using the rationale that they are professionals, like doctors or lawyers, programmers and software engineers rarely have the authority associated with the traditional professions.
I believe the usual procedure is for the case to be heard by a three judge panel. That decision can be appealed and heard by all ten judges (en banc) if the court grants an appeal of the original decision. Otherwise, they have to petition the Supreme Court, which can refuse to hear the case. Three judges have disqualified themselves, leaving seven judges to hear the case.
That usage of ilk, as in "kind or sort", has been around for over 200 years. Do we have to drag you kicking and screaming into the nineteenth century?
There is a huge difference between understanding the concepts and having the hard numbers, engineering and fabrication skills needed to construct a weapon. The concepts tell you that it is possible, actually designing and building a weapon is the hard part. The first thermonuclear device (Mike) weighed 164,000 pounds and had a cryogenic system to keep the deuterium in a liquid state. The W-47 warhead for the Polaris missile weighed about 600 pounds. It took a lot of money and talent to get from proof-of-concept to a light weight thermonuclear weapon suitable for use on a missile.
I don't understand how anyone can be so sloppy with classified information, not to mention nuclear weapons information. When I was a peon in the military, we were always told of the exciting career opportunities in Alaska that awaited anyone who was negligent in handling classified information.
p = transmitter power
d = distance
s = power flux density
s = p / (4 * Pi * d^2)
I propose that we colonize Alpha Centauri. Marketing people, being so essential to our society, get to leave on the first ship, along with the telephone sanitizers and record company executives.
Many years ago, DEC used to distribute the source code for the RSX-11M executive (kernel) as part of the media kit for the operating system. This was probably done just to enable customers to generate custom kernels, but it was very nice to be able to read the source code. If the documentation for a system call was was unclear or incorrect, you could look at the source code. Plus it was educational to see how things were implemented.
The original IBM PC was designed to use cheap, 8-bit, Intel chips that were available in large volumes. The 8259A PIC supported 8 interrupts. 2 interrupts were used up by the keyboard and timer chip. The 6 remaining interrupts could have been mapped to ISA slots. This would have caused several problems. The interrupt priority of an ISA card would have slot dependent. The ROM BIOS was hard coded to associate certain interrupts with specific I/O devices. This would mean that, for example, the parallel port card could only be installed in the slot that was wired to IRQ 7. It would also have prevented a card from using more than one interrupt, such as a multi-io with 2 serial, 1 parallel and a floppy interface (4 interrupts).
The Microsoft Applications Company drops all support for the Macintosh. They view it as a fringe platform that can't generate enough revenue to justify continued support of Internet Explorer, Outlook Express and Office. The programmers are redeployed to more profitable Windows projects. Microsoft executives later reveal that they only spent money on Macintosh development because of antitrust considerations. They needed to be able to point to the Macintosh as proof that Microsoft did not have a monopoly on desktop computer operating systems.
COFDM and DVB-T work today, the hardware is in mass production, and it looks like it will become the international standard for DTV.
Here are some possibilities:
All contracts and licenses must be written out by hand, by an employee of the company who is authorized to bind the company to a contract.
All contracts and licenses must be signed in duplicate, by the purchaser and the vendor, with one copy returned to the purchaser, before any goods change hands.
All contracts and licenses must be signed in blood, by the purchaser and the vendor, before any goods change hands. (There is a precedent for this one, you know, the other Prince of Darkness.)
According to the technical specs, it meets FCC Part 15 emission standards. Still, it is transmitting in the 4.3 - 20.9 MHz frequency band over non-twisted, non-shielded, copper power wiring. This has the potential of trashing important shortwave broadcast and amateur radio frequency bands. Widespread deployment of these devices could be a disaster for HF radio users. Noise is already a severe problem in many places.
I'm not sure what Judge Jackson did differently from previous judges, but it prevented the case from turning into a decade long battle of legal armies.
One approach is conformance testing. In the USA, this has been done by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Electronic Data Systems, and other private and government organisations. One problem is that a product can pass the test and also be a bloated, slow and buggy piece of junk.
I'll admit that I usually don't bother reading license agreements. What's the point? Do you think that anyone would actually be willing to negotiate changes in the license? Most of them contain the same verbiage, as if they were all written by the same lawyer. They boil down to:
- You own nothing.
- You waive all your rights.
- We disclaim all warranties.
What are you going to do if the product is defective? Sue them? The civil court system is reserved for rich people and corporations who can afford lawyers. Lawyers will not take contingency cases that don't offer the prospect of large judgements.It's a bit more complicated than that. It is legal, at least in the USA, to use aliases instead of your legal name. It's illegal to use an alias to deceive someone, with intent to defraud.
Later, when the VAX and BSD UNIX became popular, companies stopped writing new operating systems for new hardware. Instead of writing a new operating system, they ported UNIX to the new hardware. That was much cheaper and safer than designing and writing a new operating system. Universities still did operating system research, but little of it was commercialized. UNIX and UNIX clones were taking over the world.
The IBM compatible PC is now the generic hardware platform. What operating systems does it support?
Notice the large number of UNIX, and UNIX clone operating systems. Even the proprietary operating systems have been influenced by UNIX, for example, the new features introduced in MS-DOS 2.0 show a strong UNIX influence. From the command line, they all look a lot like UNIX. They all support C and something close to POSIX.