Given the governments current record on large IT projects, I think that there is little to worry about here. The NHS IT system has cost something like £20 billion (I think) so far, and it still doesn't work properly. Considering how much larger this would have to be, and how little money the government has, I don't think that it will get far off the ground. (Unless it forces the ISPs to do all the work.)
While I am no expert in the area, nor do I know a huge amount about mathematics, wikipedia says that there are:2,220,819,602,560,918,840 primes below 10^20, which is 20 digits long. Considering that the largest known prime is almost 13 million digits long,and most of these numbers are unimaginably vast, it appears that it is not trivial to find the prime factors of a number.
For instance, If a computer can test 10 billion primes a second (which is more than a consumer grade computer can (I think)), then it would take ~2 billion seconds to go test all the primes from 2 to the 10^20. While this would be far faster on a supercomputer, if all primes up to 2^(43,112,609) â' 1 are taken into account, it is not hard to appreciate that this will take a huge amount of time.
Let's say you have a 500MB volume. In that you put 20MB of financial records, and 80MB of business data/pictures/other innocent but valuable stuff. All of this is put at the "front" of the volume. If you then create a 100MB hidden volume, it is placed at the "back" of the main volume. Since all of unused space in the decrypted main volume looks like random data already, the hidden volume is now invisible.
Sorry, but I couldn't quite follow your line of argument.
Using encryption does not make you a criminal in the eyes of law enforcement, unless you refuse to hand over a password when the law requires you to. There are many uses for encryption, such as (as others have suggested elsewhere in this comment section)financial records and almost anything to do with business clients/other peoples data (encryption should have been in use on the disks which were lost in the UK fairly recently).
If you have an encrypted volume, and hand over the password to it when you are required to by law, and it does not contain anything illegal, then you have not committed a crime.
Law enforcement has no way of knowing whether a hidden volume exists in your encrypted volume, so you have plausible deniability.
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Did they have dedicated graphics cards?Because I read somewhere that aero uses the gpu instead of cpu, if it is available.
That already happens. (I don't know about amazon, but I et a link to the iTunes store)
Given the governments current record on large IT projects, I think that there is little to worry about here. The NHS IT system has cost something like £20 billion (I think) so far, and it still doesn't work properly. Considering how much larger this would have to be, and how little money the government has, I don't think that it will get far off the ground. (Unless it forces the ISPs to do all the work.)
While I am no expert in the area, nor do I know a huge amount about mathematics, wikipedia says that there are:2,220,819,602,560,918,840 primes below 10^20, which is 20 digits long. Considering that the largest known prime is almost 13 million digits long,and most of these numbers are unimaginably vast, it appears that it is not trivial to find the prime factors of a number. For instance, If a computer can test 10 billion primes a second (which is more than a consumer grade computer can (I think)), then it would take ~2 billion seconds to go test all the primes from 2 to the 10^20. While this would be far faster on a supercomputer, if all primes up to 2^(43,112,609) â' 1 are taken into account, it is not hard to appreciate that this will take a huge amount of time.
I was recently looking at notebooks on a website, which only sold vista machines, but most of them came with a XP "backup" disk.
Let's say you have a 500MB volume. In that you put 20MB of financial records, and 80MB of business data/pictures/other innocent but valuable stuff. All of this is put at the "front" of the volume. If you then create a 100MB hidden volume, it is placed at the "back" of the main volume. Since all of unused space in the decrypted main volume looks like random data already, the hidden volume is now invisible.
Sorry, but I couldn't quite follow your line of argument.
Using encryption does not make you a criminal in the eyes of law enforcement, unless you refuse to hand over a password when the law requires you to. There are many uses for encryption, such as (as others have suggested elsewhere in this comment section)financial records and almost anything to do with business clients/other peoples data (encryption should have been in use on the disks which were lost in the UK fairly recently).
If you have an encrypted volume, and hand over the password to it when you are required to by law, and it does not contain anything illegal, then you have not committed a crime.
Law enforcement has no way of knowing whether a hidden volume exists in your encrypted volume, so you have plausible deniability.
I was just about to post a similar reference...