Quantum cryptography is a "key-growing" technology. The problem with quantum cryptography is that all scenarios begin with, "Given an authenticated connection." Well, in cryptography, the problem has almost always mandated authentication solutions, not key-growing solutions.
If I can hand someone a secret key that will let us authenticate with each other, then I can just as easily hand them a dvd full of random data for perfect one-time-pad encryption of our communication. Any solution without authentication is no better than the original problem, because authentication reduces to the original problem of getting some secret information from one person to the other.
To understand the problem, imagine this scenario. Alice wants to connect to Bob, so Alice establishes a quantum cryptographically secure connection with Bob. Wonderful, but what if Eve is sitting in the middle, and from the very beginning of the connection, Alice ACTUALLY establishes a quantum cryptographically secure connection with Eve, and then Eve establishes a quantum cryptographically secure connection with Bob. How do they know the difference? They can't, because individual photons are by the laws of quantum mechanics indistinguishable. There's no "signature" by which they can know who they're really talking to.
All quantum cryptography does, is tell you when someone begins evesdropping on a connection that has previously been secure. There will be applications for such a means of secure communication, but without resolving the classic man-in-the-middle attack, quantum cryptography cannot be applied to the bulk of cryptography uses.
On principle, I prefer opt-in, and I think respectable websites choose this approach.
But as far as legislation goes, you have to be pretty careful making opt-in the only legal method. If you have a server that collects standard logs, which contain which ip address requested which file, then you're collecting non-sensitive identification without your users "opting-in". A judge may choose to redefine loading a website as opting-in to that particular server, but then what about images or ads served from a different server than the hosting site? It's a complex enough issue just to avoid making everyday things that really don't bother many people illegal.
Heheh, some of the comments on here show that people have spent far too much time at a keyboard. For Joe Schmoe who is running a website on fish mating habbits, physical security is nothing, because the only attack will come from random network attacks. But for a serious computer system, physical security is perhaps MORE important than network security, because it's already known exactly how to get past physical safeguards if you can access a machine.
In summary, all the comments being mentioned like locking the bios, making sure it doesn't boot to floppy, etc, is "nice", but all it does is buy you a few extra minutes worth of physical security. And for a serious system, minutes are nothing. If you want physical security for a system, lock the thing in a vault and don't even let your janitors near it.
And how can China afford to piss off the US? Who do you think buys most of the crap they make? China will need a much richer population before they have enough consumers to support their own industries.
Give them a few decades, there's nothing standing in the way of their growth to that level.
If this film wasn't a "Star Wars" movie,... would I feel it is a good film?
And if Odysseus was just some dude on a ship, would it be as good of a story? Would Terminator II be as good of a movie without the first one? It's tough to analyze a story out of context.
All the neutrinos are born Catholic, but only a third of them are Catholic by the time we detect them. The rest oscillate to other faiths, which are also known to have mass, just in different amounts.
At the same time, maybe procrastinators will come across this article and think, "hey, maybe I should be coding."
Worked for me...
You need to come up with more clever ways to deceive yourself. I came across this article and thought, "Maybe I should spend lots of time reading this carefully in order to motivate myself to do the work that I need to complete by yesterday."
It's amazing how religious "computer scientists" can be about technology.
Perhaps you would understand this better if you contemplated the fact that open source software follows the philosophies of science, while closed source software follows the philosophies of industry. Science is about gaining understand, improving humanity, and making things much better. Industry is about increasing profit. So why would it be a surprise that "computer scientists" show a great preference toward "science"?
What's most surprising is that we've managed to construct a society where there are a notable collection of people for whom individual profit is more important than improving humanity and making things better.
He really seems to think that the cost of Windows is trivial
He probably also thinks the cost of a new house is trivial. Keep in mind the man has around a 50 billion dollar portfolio to work with. Given that, he could buy one copy of windows for each person in America.
But for a little comparison, America Online is able to give around 4 or 5 copies of ITS software to each person in America. So which one is prohibitively expensive?:)
BTW RMS has said things to me in person that are way wierder than anything in the article, anything Gates has said to me personaly
*chuckle* Name dropping on Slashdot.:)
Like the time he suggested building particle accelerators in space because there is lots of free vacum there...
This would be extremely expensive to undertake at the moment, but it's something that will probably happen eventually. Not because of the vacuum, but because of byproducts. From my "personal conversations" with particle experimentalists, there are some accelerator designs that would yield useful data, but would produce lethal beams of neutrinos as a byproduct. You can't exactly put an accelerator like this outside of Chicago.
Sorry to be a physics geek here, but there's no such thing as "centrifugal" force, unless you're talking about the force caused by a centrifuge dropped from a height.
Centrifugal force is not a "physical" force, but it does exist as a "fictional" force, which means we use the concept to make certain problems easier. For example, picture an elevator on a rope being spun around an axis. If we take a guy named gdyas and put him in this elevator on a rope, from his perspective (reference frame) there will be a force pulling him downward toward the bottom of the elevator. If you want to calculate the motion of a ball that gdyas drops, you use the simplest abstraction available, namely, centrifugal acceleration (which can also be thought of as a centrifugal force dependent on mass). So it doesn't matter that it isn't one of the four basic forces, it's still a useful construct for solving problems, which is really all a "force" is.
You could also try saying that the electric force isn't a force, because it's just an exchange of momentum mediated by the probabilities of certain paths of photon exchange (QED). The electric "force", however, is a much simpler way of thinking about this particle interaction.
For all our computer learnin', it's surprising that so few paid attention in physics 101.
There are higher level physics classes than 101. In later mechanics classes you should learn the usefulness of fictional forces and alternative reference frames.
We have just as much right to MAKE MONEY as THEY DO.
And by "just as much right to make money", you mean NO right to make money. There is no explicit right to make money anywhere, and I'm sick of this delusion that the right to profit is somehow granted by government. You only have the right to TRY to make money. Whether or not you succeed should be determined by free market forces based on the quality of what you are able to offer your customers, NOT by legislation trying to assure this mystic "right to profit" that is starting to become a dangerous ideology.
Now there's a promising movie plot... In a billion years, humanity would become the extremely technologically and genetically evolved caretakers of newly developing sentient life in the universe. And how would we treat it?
If only there were some way for us to get water out of the sky... Perhaps if we could develop a device that made water undergo a phase change to liquid, form droplets, and then be propelled downward by the force of gravity...
So in short they are denying you to use information. And of course that would just mean, that every Open Source development in projects that are related to what MS is "disclosing" have to stop immediately, otherwise MS could claim that the developers violated their license. And the question is if Open Source then has to prove if they are innocent or if MS has to prove that they are guilty. Anyway, legal affairs cost much more than many Open Source developers can afford.
Let's try a little mathematical argument here, for the sake of our own personal amusement. Let's begin by numbering open source developers. We shall say that developer 1 creates a product which competes with a Microsoft program in an area where it could have gotten information from this source, and then Microsoft files suit against developer 1.
This suit costs Microsoft money.
Now say that developers 2 and 3 have both forked off a copy of developer 1's program. Now developers 2 and 3 are both independently releasing different copies of a program that Microsoft disapproves of, so Microsoft files suit against developers 2 and 3.
Now let's say that developers 4-7 fork off copies of the programs released by developers 2 and 3...
Perhaps you see where this is going. Legislating against open source software is really an untested battlefield, and it may just be one that big money finds hard to win.
Slashdot Mirror
# A form of martial arts
Sensei Stallman might disagree.
Quantum cryptography is a "key-growing" technology. The problem with quantum cryptography is that all scenarios begin with, "Given an authenticated connection." Well, in cryptography, the problem has almost always mandated authentication solutions, not key-growing solutions.
If I can hand someone a secret key that will let us authenticate with each other, then I can just as easily hand them a dvd full of random data for perfect one-time-pad encryption of our communication. Any solution without authentication is no better than the original problem, because authentication reduces to the original problem of getting some secret information from one person to the other.
To understand the problem, imagine this scenario. Alice wants to connect to Bob, so Alice establishes a quantum cryptographically secure connection with Bob. Wonderful, but what if Eve is sitting in the middle, and from the very beginning of the connection, Alice ACTUALLY establishes a quantum cryptographically secure connection with Eve, and then Eve establishes a quantum cryptographically secure connection with Bob. How do they know the difference? They can't, because individual photons are by the laws of quantum mechanics indistinguishable. There's no "signature" by which they can know who they're really talking to.
All quantum cryptography does, is tell you when someone begins evesdropping on a connection that has previously been secure. There will be applications for such a means of secure communication, but without resolving the classic man-in-the-middle attack, quantum cryptography cannot be applied to the bulk of cryptography uses.
Freespace 2 was one of my favorite games, and I wasted many hours playing it.
Weakling. It isn't a good game unless you have wasted YEARS playing it. %-)
You are aware the "Nuclear Family [columbia.edu]" has nothing to do with nuclear weapons, right?
You are aware the word "pun" has nothing to do with such witty retort, right?
Why can't it require things to be opt in?
On principle, I prefer opt-in, and I think respectable websites choose this approach.
But as far as legislation goes, you have to be pretty careful making opt-in the only legal method. If you have a server that collects standard logs, which contain which ip address requested which file, then you're collecting non-sensitive identification without your users "opting-in". A judge may choose to redefine loading a website as opting-in to that particular server, but then what about images or ads served from a different server than the hosting site? It's a complex enough issue just to avoid making everyday things that really don't bother many people illegal.
Heheh, some of the comments on here show that people have spent far too much time at a keyboard. For Joe Schmoe who is running a website on fish mating habbits, physical security is nothing, because the only attack will come from random network attacks. But for a serious computer system, physical security is perhaps MORE important than network security, because it's already known exactly how to get past physical safeguards if you can access a machine.
In summary, all the comments being mentioned like locking the bios, making sure it doesn't boot to floppy, etc, is "nice", but all it does is buy you a few extra minutes worth of physical security. And for a serious system, minutes are nothing. If you want physical security for a system, lock the thing in a vault and don't even let your janitors near it.
Heheheh. I just contemplated someone designing the first self-replicating nanobot and getting it stuck in an infinite loop. :)
allow the sysadmin to have errors sent to ... cell phone
Because I want my cell phone slashdotted?
Such discussion is a red herring to get more government funding as well as to push for even more laws - like we don't have enough already.
And precisely what new draconian laws would a cyber threat from China promote?
the U.S. government should NOT develop mini-nukes
We've had them for a long time. It's Russia that supposedly lost 100 of them, not us.
technology is a double-edged sword and thus we should not rely solely on it to solve our problems.
...
Ok, I really rambled on here,
Correct on that last part.
And how can China afford to piss off the US? Who do you think buys most of the crap they make? China will need a much richer population before they have enough consumers to support their own industries.
Give them a few decades, there's nothing standing in the way of their growth to that level.
the sis 3d/2s blows this ATI away
Dude, my Trident 8900 will rock your sis's world.
If this film wasn't a "Star Wars" movie,... would I feel it is a good film?
And if Odysseus was just some dude on a ship, would it be as good of a story? Would Terminator II be as good of a movie without the first one? It's tough to analyze a story out of context.
Who'd have imagined that they were Catholic?
All the neutrinos are born Catholic, but only a third of them are Catholic by the time we detect them. The rest oscillate to other faiths, which are also known to have mass, just in different amounts.
At the same time, maybe procrastinators will come across this article and think, "hey, maybe I should be coding."
Worked for me...
You need to come up with more clever ways to deceive yourself. I came across this article and thought, "Maybe I should spend lots of time reading this carefully in order to motivate myself to do the work that I need to complete by yesterday."
it's not the technology, but how you use it, that counts
Precisely. I was just contemplating how to use this new surveillance technology for personal amusement.
I bet a pound I can convince it that I'm about to mug myself...
The Independent News? Wot's that thar then? The newspaper is called 'The Independent'.
Did you bother to click on the link before complaining? The browser title is "Independent News".
It's amazing how religious "computer scientists" can be about technology.
Perhaps you would understand this better if you contemplated the fact that open source software follows the philosophies of science, while closed source software follows the philosophies of industry. Science is about gaining understand, improving humanity, and making things much better. Industry is about increasing profit. So why would it be a surprise that "computer scientists" show a great preference toward "science"?
What's most surprising is that we've managed to construct a society where there are a notable collection of people for whom individual profit is more important than improving humanity and making things better.
He really seems to think that the cost of Windows is trivial
:)
He probably also thinks the cost of a new house is trivial. Keep in mind the man has around a 50 billion dollar portfolio to work with. Given that, he could buy one copy of windows for each person in America.
But for a little comparison, America Online is able to give around 4 or 5 copies of ITS software to each person in America. So which one is prohibitively expensive?
BTW RMS has said things to me in person that are way wierder than anything in the article, anything Gates has said to me personaly
:)
*chuckle* Name dropping on Slashdot.
Like the time he suggested building particle accelerators in space because there is lots of free vacum there...
This would be extremely expensive to undertake at the moment, but it's something that will probably happen eventually. Not because of the vacuum, but because of byproducts. From my "personal conversations" with particle experimentalists, there are some accelerator designs that would yield useful data, but would produce lethal beams of neutrinos as a byproduct. You can't exactly put an accelerator like this outside of Chicago.
Sorry to be a physics geek here, but there's no such thing as "centrifugal" force, unless you're talking about the force caused by a centrifuge dropped from a height.
Centrifugal force is not a "physical" force, but it does exist as a "fictional" force, which means we use the concept to make certain problems easier. For example, picture an elevator on a rope being spun around an axis. If we take a guy named gdyas and put him in this elevator on a rope, from his perspective (reference frame) there will be a force pulling him downward toward the bottom of the elevator. If you want to calculate the motion of a ball that gdyas drops, you use the simplest abstraction available, namely, centrifugal acceleration (which can also be thought of as a centrifugal force dependent on mass). So it doesn't matter that it isn't one of the four basic forces, it's still a useful construct for solving problems, which is really all a "force" is.
You could also try saying that the electric force isn't a force, because it's just an exchange of momentum mediated by the probabilities of certain paths of photon exchange (QED). The electric "force", however, is a much simpler way of thinking about this particle interaction.
For all our computer learnin', it's surprising that so few paid attention in physics 101.
There are higher level physics classes than 101. In later mechanics classes you should learn the usefulness of fictional forces and alternative reference frames.
We have just as much right to MAKE MONEY as THEY DO.
And by "just as much right to make money", you mean NO right to make money. There is no explicit right to make money anywhere, and I'm sick of this delusion that the right to profit is somehow granted by government. You only have the right to TRY to make money. Whether or not you succeed should be determined by free market forces based on the quality of what you are able to offer your customers, NOT by legislation trying to assure this mystic "right to profit" that is starting to become a dangerous ideology.
Maybe ... we're a few billion years too early.
Now there's a promising movie plot... In a billion years, humanity would become the extremely technologically and genetically evolved caretakers of newly developing sentient life in the universe. And how would we treat it?
Detail #2: Water is a potent greenhouse gas.
If only there were some way for us to get water out of the sky... Perhaps if we could develop a device that made water undergo a phase change to liquid, form droplets, and then be propelled downward by the force of gravity...
Oh, who am I kidding, that would never work.
So in short they are denying you to use information. And of course that would just mean, that every Open Source development in projects that are related to what MS is "disclosing" have to stop immediately, otherwise MS could claim that the developers violated their license. And the question is if Open Source then has to prove if they are innocent or if MS has to prove that they are guilty. Anyway, legal affairs cost much more than many Open Source developers can afford.
Let's try a little mathematical argument here, for the sake of our own personal amusement. Let's begin by numbering open source developers. We shall say that developer 1 creates a product which competes with a Microsoft program in an area where it could have gotten information from this source, and then Microsoft files suit against developer 1.
This suit costs Microsoft money.
Now say that developers 2 and 3 have both forked off a copy of developer 1's program. Now developers 2 and 3 are both independently releasing different copies of a program that Microsoft disapproves of, so Microsoft files suit against developers 2 and 3.
Now let's say that developers 4-7 fork off copies of the programs released by developers 2 and 3...
Perhaps you see where this is going. Legislating against open source software is really an untested battlefield, and it may just be one that big money finds hard to win.
Lindows isn't selling their distribution yet, reall--they're letting people pay for the privilege of being beta-testers;
And how would this be different from them letting people pay for the priviledge of being final-version-testers?