What would be the motivator for such a malicious act?
4chan would do it for lulz in a heartbeat. And people who honestly believe in personal responsibility (those of us who believe in being a responsible parent to our own children) probably wouldn't care if they did.
As far as I'm concerned, the only malicious act takes place when the government starts trying to parent my kids for me. Anything that destroys that infrastructure is pretty much deserved. While I won't actively help the channers, I'll certainly applaud whatever they do to disrupt this bullcrap.
I also expect rule 34 will kick in regarding friendly dolphins before the end of the day, if it hasn't already. I'd check Encylopedia Dramatica right now, but that site is about as NSFW as you can get.
You know, if the police were after you, and you had a police band scanner, or some other way to see what the police were doing in their efforts to track you down, I think you wouldn't be able to resist the temptation to use it. A lot.
Great point. And he did dive headlong into paranoia, and not without justification; the whole country WAS paid to get him! I certainly can't fault him for watching.
But if you knew in advance that your police scanner actively reported your location every time you turned it on, you think you'd be more careful. And he was, at first. The laptop TOR setup was a brilliant idea (if poorly executed, as the hunters still used anti-tor tricks to learn his real IP.) But he stopped using tor because it was clumsy and slow (no argument here) not because it was ineffective. His real IP being traced to the New Orleans pizza shop directly contributed to his getting caught.
If nothing else, there were several good lessons for people who want to hide from the general public while living online. 1. Tor is somewhat effective, but you should run it from behind a NATting firewall to avoid giving away your real IP. 2. Embrace noscript, and be sure to kill third party javascripts that report your activity, such as google analytics. It won't stop a collaborating host site from providing your IP, but it will stop the easy third party trackers that are so common. They're like drift-nets that catch everything as it flows by thousands of sites. 3. Allow cookies to persist only as long as your session, and don't cache stuff. Private browsing would be a fast way to do the right thing (but be sure to end your session at least every single day.) 4. Don't run flash; if you must, be sure to set it to store 0KB of data locally. 5. Run zone alarm and keep an eye out for any unexpected outbound traffic. 6. Stay away from facebook toys, or any of the goofy social networking crap. (It'd probably be best to avoid social networking sites altogether, as they tend to have a pretty incomplete picture of security.) 7. Use an email cutout service. They're common enough as spam fighters, but can keep the curious from getting too close, too. 8. Avoid sites that require registration for no real reason. 9. Use tools such as BugMeNot to get an anonymized login for sites that require registration, or create a login that you use for only a session, no more. 10. If you use a disposable ID or email address, DISPOSE of it after use. Register a new one with your next session.
If they could add a plug-in interface to dynamically load Inkscape functionality into the GIMP, that'd be great for GIMP users. But please don't change anything in Inkscape to do it. To curse Inkscape with the GIMP interface would kill it dead.
Most people will get lazy or lonely and slack off on this, and that's when they get found.
Yep. According to TFA, he overheard some searchers looking for him at the soccer game. And he was ultimately undone by his uncommon need for gluten free foods. Both of those were ties to his "old life". (Not that he could give up having celiac disease.)
The other trick is: don't look back. He gave up instantly on people who could and would have helped (girlfriend, family) but not on the dedicated searchers. He seemed to have a need to keep track of the people tracking him, and he certainly got sloppy with tor. That might have been necessary for the "interesting story" aspect of this, but he could have gotten all the emails and facebook stuff after the fact from his editor. As it was, it was this aspect of his paranoia that led to his failure.
I did like that he was somewhat clever enough to use a "hard-to-google" alias (but not impossible: googling for "gatz -gatsby -fitzgerald" would remove much of the noise.) I'm envious of a friend (last name Smith) having a name that is completely invisible on line. If you want to search for him, you have to know more about him than just his name.
If you take a look at Ross Anderson's work in this area, you'll see that the picture quality on a Van Eck rig can range from almost static to highly legible black and white imagery. I'm sure it's installation dependent among other factors, but it can be very readable. Remember that it doesn't have to be machine readable, either. When you're talking about elections you're talking about a kiloton of money, which can likely buy a whole lot of people to sit there and watch the screens with their eyes.
Remember the reason for secret ballots is fraud prevention, to prevent you from being coerced or bribed into voting a certain way. Eavesdropping isn't about seeing how "J. Random Citizen" voted -- that's an exit poll. Eavesdropping is about the third-party verification of a paid vote, or verification of a vote cast under duress. If I am offering $10 to anyone who votes for Candidate Johnson, you could take the money and still vote for Candidate Olson because I have no way of knowing how you voted. But if I have a Van Eck receiver, I can say "I'll watch how you vote. On the first screen, change back and forth from Johnson to Olson three times. That way I know it's you. Then, if I see you vote for Candidate Johnson, I'll pay you $10 when you get out." An ineffective bribe has become an effective bribe if I can verify how you voted. Similarly, if I belong to Thugs Unlimited, I can threaten you with harm if you fail to vote how I ordered you to vote.
Also, consider that an eavesdropper could be a "part of the system". I could offer my business' conference room as a polling place, and install the Van Eck receivers in the next room over, or in the attic or basement. I could volunteer as an election judge, or just sit in a van in the parking lot.
I think a lot of people are overlooking an obvious question - what about legitimate demolition of buildings with this material? If the owners had put a layer or two on, it seems like it's gonna be pretty hard to take down a building; and if you can destroy the load bearing structures and it collapses, it seems like this could make clean up extremely difficult
Because this demonstration was done using a metal ball about the side of a bowling ball, not an actual wrecking ball. A typical wrecking ball used by demolition workers weighs in at over a ton, and would have smashed their entire test rig, not just their block walls.
It's a news article featuring small sound bites and quotes. It's not an in-depth technological review. Nobody quoted the environment in which they benchmarking their tests: AES-128, 3DES, DES, or whatever.
And yes you certainly could test 4 million passwords a second on these machines, but again it really depends entirely on what algorithm you're attacking.
I have to agree with you about disc space though. Why worry about what bitrate is "enough" for MP3s when you can buy 2TB of hard drive dirt cheap and store everything as a FLAC?
Because the portable players don't have that same kind of unlimited storage. I have a 4GB SDHC chip for my little Sansa player. (Yay Rockbox!) I can fit about a thousand MP3 files on it but less than two hundred FLAC files.
Although I would be the first to agree that there is a lot of snake-oil around in the so-called "audiophile" market, there is a place for everything.
Snake oil? Nonsense.
Everybody calls stuff they don't understand "snake oil", and it's kind of a mistake in the high end audio market. Snake oil is the preferred suspension media for high-end tweeter frames. It is used to fill the struts that mechanically isolate the speaker from the cabinet, ensuring the only hiss you get is that which was on the original recording.
And despite what the so-called audiophiles say, you only have to replace it annually, not quarterly. Snake oil doesn't break down as fast as the other common organic oils (cod or shark liver oil is what most manufacturers recommend,) so it retains its useful viscosity for up to several years. It's absolutely a good idea to replace it before it degrades, but since it's only slightly more expensive than fish oils (at $16.00/ounce) when you change it annually it's actually a bargain.
The only problem with snake oil is that since it is an organic oil, it is susceptible to bacterial infection. An infected cylinder doesn't really affect the sound, but the oil tends to give off a foul odor if you let it sit around too long. Some people have tried smearing vaseline around the exposed ends of the inner cylinders to seal the oil so it won't stink, but I think that can affect the sound and I wouldn't recommend it.
Oh, and be sure to get a good quality measuring syringe to change the oil. Being off by more than a few mL can affect the travel of the struts, and that either leaves a mess on the shelf, or raspy highs.
Real-world architecture, engineering and construction is designed around those measures of imprecision. There's a reason the architect specifies a dimension to be 3' 0" and not 3.000 +.000 / -.005. Saws aren't that precise. Tape measures aren't that precise. Carpenters aren't that precise. So the architect leaves trade practices to make up the difference. Instead of trusting the lengths of the boards are exact and will make the walls perfectly plumb, he uses a level. Or since finished wall boards never actually touch the floor, he covers the gap with trim boards. That permits expansion and flexing without cracking the walls. As a result, your house is nice and straight, and yet it isn't "brittle". The trim boards at the interfaces better look nice and fit nice, even though the ragged edges they cover are certainly rough.
Software can be designed and built the same way. Typeless languages are one method, and exception handling is another. Encapsulation is all about hiding ugly details behind a precise interface. Design by Contract is one way to ensure the interface itself is precise, regardless of the code behind it.
They still have to be "pretty close" to be acceptable. A 2x4 can't be completely twisted like a corkscrew, nor can a floor be a bubble off from level. You can't use a 2x8 when a 2x10 is specified. Likewise, your calculations still have to work. But if your calculation is almost instant 99% of the time, and marginally slow but still OK the other 1% of the time, it might be good enough for your application.
At the end of the day, software interfaces better look nice and fit nice and do their jobs. But the internal workings of the tasks can be ragged and yet still function effectively (most of the time.)
It's not just the masses commenting on articles that are incredibly stupid, their (CNN) reporters and correspondents aren't much better (and their talking heads are nearly as bad).
That's where Slashdot has a distinct advantage. Our great unwashed masses still have a common underlying technical bent. Even a weak story (such as something about Twitter crawls on news programs) is going to get a lot of relevant and possibly insightful commentary from a technical viewpoint - moreso than a statistically random source such as the TV news audience.
Of course that's also our biggest weakness. We are all blind to the technical problems that plague the average Joe. About the extent of our concern with that crap happens when our sisters-in-law call us to ask us to help them get their network connection back up. We don't share in their pain, and have a bias as a result.
Not that we need my sister-in-law's opinions on technology on Slashdot, mind you.
Getting rid of downmods on Slashdot sounds great in theory but it would just result in GNAA posts lingering at 1 (or 2 if the guy doing it has good karma). Which means I'd have to set my threshhold even higher to avoid seeing them, which would bury comments that are actually useful.
First of all the Greater Nashville Apartment Association has a right to their opinion like everyone else.;)
But seriously, in case you haven't noticed there are a lot of legitimate posts buried by moderators who simply can't stand reading something they disagree with. Especially when the topic is political or similarly divisive topic. So that's already going on. Slashdot has never been particularly fair and balanced. Of course, neither is the news media these days.
The news isn't as unbalanced as Faux News tries to claim. They've long been shills for the extreme right wing zealots, and whine when they're not taken seriously. They do have some fairly honest news programs, but they live in the shadow of the loudmouth hatemongers, and end up tarred with the same brush as a result.
Their viewers may claim that it's not a fair association, but it's the presumption of everyone else who does not share their "values".
What year did MVS get sudo? We didn't even have RACF, we had ACL-2. And how many companies had security policies that strong in the 1980s? And who bothered following them on a midnight phone call? Certainly not ours.
What the hell, Sherman? Were you there? Was that your password, and you're still posting anonymously? That was 20 years ago, so get over it already. Besides, we already knew, you just confirmed it that night. And it's not like there's anything wrong with that, you're just different. It's OK.
A guy I used to work with told me a story about a late-night support call with the operations center. He figured out that they needed to run a job that was under someone else's account. So they conference-called in this other guy at home in the middle of the night, and asked him for his password. He refused to give it over the phone, and the operations people were getting madder and madder because the night's jobs were being held up. Finally, he agreed to give them the password but only if they turned off the speaker phone.
The guy's password was BigBlackDonkeyDick.
Hilarity ensued. I'm pretty sure the whole shop knew the guy's password by the next morning (hell, I still remember it and I didn't even know the guy!)
If nothing changes, producers will stop producing when they realize they'll never make back their $250 millon in production costs. The cable companies won't be able to keep subscribers if all they're showing are Gilligan's Island reruns. They'll be poorer and we'll be richer as a result. Is there still a problem?
Go back and reread what I said. "Consider the value of the outcome." That means you should make sure that what you're spending energy on is worth it, not that you shouldn't use energy.
I don't feel particularly guilty about consuming energy (certainly not enough to do anything more serious about it than to use mass transit.) But I seriously question the wisdom or validity to use energy to confirm that it's going to take roughly 50% of 2^72 tests to brute force the RC5-72 challenge. This after already proving that it took about 85% of 2^56 tests to brute force the RC5-56 challenge, and a similar percentage of 2^64 tests to brute force the RC5-64 challenge. It is an insane waste of energy.
At least SETI@home has the unknown factor that some people can believe in. Folding@home and the World Computing Grid may provide actual scientific or humanitarian benefits. Rendering WoW at 72 frames per second gives the player an immersive experience. All those offer benefits (or potential benefits) to one or more people.
So is cracking PGP providing a benefit? In TFA's case, yes, they're trying to recover some lost files for a client. For us to repeat the experience, just to prove we can copy their efforts to brute force a PGP passphrase? Sheer waste.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the clarifications, I'm obviously not an expert on 4chan taxonomy.
What would be the motivator for such a malicious act?
4chan would do it for lulz in a heartbeat. And people who honestly believe in personal responsibility (those of us who believe in being a responsible parent to our own children) probably wouldn't care if they did.
As far as I'm concerned, the only malicious act takes place when the government starts trying to parent my kids for me. Anything that destroys that infrastructure is pretty much deserved. While I won't actively help the channers, I'll certainly applaud whatever they do to disrupt this bullcrap.
I also expect rule 34 will kick in regarding friendly dolphins before the end of the day, if it hasn't already. I'd check Encylopedia Dramatica right now, but that site is about as NSFW as you can get.
Show me where on the dolphin he touched you.
You know, if the police were after you, and you had a police band scanner, or some other way to see what the police were doing in their efforts to track you down, I think you wouldn't be able to resist the temptation to use it. A lot.
Great point. And he did dive headlong into paranoia, and not without justification; the whole country WAS paid to get him! I certainly can't fault him for watching.
But if you knew in advance that your police scanner actively reported your location every time you turned it on, you think you'd be more careful. And he was, at first. The laptop TOR setup was a brilliant idea (if poorly executed, as the hunters still used anti-tor tricks to learn his real IP.) But he stopped using tor because it was clumsy and slow (no argument here) not because it was ineffective. His real IP being traced to the New Orleans pizza shop directly contributed to his getting caught.
If nothing else, there were several good lessons for people who want to hide from the general public while living online.
1. Tor is somewhat effective, but you should run it from behind a NATting firewall to avoid giving away your real IP.
2. Embrace noscript, and be sure to kill third party javascripts that report your activity, such as google analytics. It won't stop a collaborating host site from providing your IP, but it will stop the easy third party trackers that are so common. They're like drift-nets that catch everything as it flows by thousands of sites.
3. Allow cookies to persist only as long as your session, and don't cache stuff. Private browsing would be a fast way to do the right thing (but be sure to end your session at least every single day.)
4. Don't run flash; if you must, be sure to set it to store 0KB of data locally.
5. Run zone alarm and keep an eye out for any unexpected outbound traffic.
6. Stay away from facebook toys, or any of the goofy social networking crap. (It'd probably be best to avoid social networking sites altogether, as they tend to have a pretty incomplete picture of security.)
7. Use an email cutout service. They're common enough as spam fighters, but can keep the curious from getting too close, too.
8. Avoid sites that require registration for no real reason.
9. Use tools such as BugMeNot to get an anonymized login for sites that require registration, or create a login that you use for only a session, no more.
10. If you use a disposable ID or email address, DISPOSE of it after use. Register a new one with your next session.
Please don't say merge!
If they could add a plug-in interface to dynamically load Inkscape functionality into the GIMP, that'd be great for GIMP users. But please don't change anything in Inkscape to do it. To curse Inkscape with the GIMP interface would kill it dead.
Most people will get
lazy or lonely and slack off on this, and that's when they get found.
Yep. According to TFA, he overheard some searchers looking for him at the soccer game. And he was ultimately undone by his uncommon need for gluten free foods. Both of those were ties to his "old life". (Not that he could give up having celiac disease.)
The other trick is: don't look back. He gave up instantly on people who could and would have helped (girlfriend, family) but not on the dedicated searchers. He seemed to have a need to keep track of the people tracking him, and he certainly got sloppy with tor. That might have been necessary for the "interesting story" aspect of this, but he could have gotten all the emails and facebook stuff after the fact from his editor. As it was, it was this aspect of his paranoia that led to his failure.
I did like that he was somewhat clever enough to use a "hard-to-google" alias (but not impossible: googling for "gatz -gatsby -fitzgerald" would remove much of the noise.) I'm envious of a friend (last name Smith) having a name that is completely invisible on line. If you want to search for him, you have to know more about him than just his name.
Sharing your connection using Joiku with a file-sharing felon might tar you with the same brush. 3 strikes and you're all out.
Due process? We flushed that crap down the toilet years ago.
Fox wants to pull out of the news business? And we're supposed to complain?
I don't thinks this means what he thinks it means.
If you take a look at Ross Anderson's work in this area, you'll see that the picture quality on a Van Eck rig can range from almost static to highly legible black and white imagery. I'm sure it's installation dependent among other factors, but it can be very readable. Remember that it doesn't have to be machine readable, either. When you're talking about elections you're talking about a kiloton of money, which can likely buy a whole lot of people to sit there and watch the screens with their eyes.
Remember the reason for secret ballots is fraud prevention, to prevent you from being coerced or bribed into voting a certain way. Eavesdropping isn't about seeing how "J. Random Citizen" voted -- that's an exit poll. Eavesdropping is about the third-party verification of a paid vote, or verification of a vote cast under duress. If I am offering $10 to anyone who votes for Candidate Johnson, you could take the money and still vote for Candidate Olson because I have no way of knowing how you voted. But if I have a Van Eck receiver, I can say "I'll watch how you vote. On the first screen, change back and forth from Johnson to Olson three times. That way I know it's you. Then, if I see you vote for Candidate Johnson, I'll pay you $10 when you get out." An ineffective bribe has become an effective bribe if I can verify how you voted. Similarly, if I belong to Thugs Unlimited, I can threaten you with harm if you fail to vote how I ordered you to vote.
Also, consider that an eavesdropper could be a "part of the system". I could offer my business' conference room as a polling place, and install the Van Eck receivers in the next room over, or in the attic or basement. I could volunteer as an election judge, or just sit in a van in the parking lot.
I think a lot of people are overlooking an obvious question - what about legitimate demolition of buildings with this material? If the owners had put a layer or two on, it seems like it's gonna be pretty hard to take down a building; and if you can destroy the load bearing structures and it collapses, it seems like this could make clean up extremely difficult
Because this demonstration was done using a metal ball about the side of a bowling ball, not an actual wrecking ball. A typical wrecking ball used by demolition workers weighs in at over a ton, and would have smashed their entire test rig, not just their block walls.
Hey, at least SOMEBODY is thinking of the children!
It's a news article featuring small sound bites and quotes. It's not an in-depth technological review. Nobody quoted the environment in which they benchmarking their tests: AES-128, 3DES, DES, or whatever.
And yes you certainly could test 4 million passwords a second on these machines, but again it really depends entirely on what algorithm you're attacking.
I have to agree with you about disc space though. Why worry about what bitrate is "enough" for MP3s when you can buy 2TB of hard drive dirt cheap and store everything as a FLAC?
Because the portable players don't have that same kind of unlimited storage. I have a 4GB SDHC chip for my little Sansa player. (Yay Rockbox!) I can fit about a thousand MP3 files on it but less than two hundred FLAC files.
Although I would be the first to agree that there is a lot of snake-oil around in the so-called "audiophile" market, there is a place for everything.
Snake oil? Nonsense.
Everybody calls stuff they don't understand "snake oil", and it's kind of a mistake in the high end audio market. Snake oil is the preferred suspension media for high-end tweeter frames. It is used to fill the struts that mechanically isolate the speaker from the cabinet, ensuring the only hiss you get is that which was on the original recording.
And despite what the so-called audiophiles say, you only have to replace it annually, not quarterly. Snake oil doesn't break down as fast as the other common organic oils (cod or shark liver oil is what most manufacturers recommend,) so it retains its useful viscosity for up to several years. It's absolutely a good idea to replace it before it degrades, but since it's only slightly more expensive than fish oils (at $16.00/ounce) when you change it annually it's actually a bargain.
The only problem with snake oil is that since it is an organic oil, it is susceptible to bacterial infection. An infected cylinder doesn't really affect the sound, but the oil tends to give off a foul odor if you let it sit around too long. Some people have tried smearing vaseline around the exposed ends of the inner cylinders to seal the oil so it won't stink, but I think that can affect the sound and I wouldn't recommend it.
Oh, and be sure to get a good quality measuring syringe to change the oil. Being off by more than a few mL can affect the travel of the struts, and that either leaves a mess on the shelf, or raspy highs.
Real-world architecture, engineering and construction is designed around those measures of imprecision. There's a reason the architect specifies a dimension to be 3' 0" and not 3.000 +.000 / -.005. Saws aren't that precise. Tape measures aren't that precise. Carpenters aren't that precise. So the architect leaves trade practices to make up the difference. Instead of trusting the lengths of the boards are exact and will make the walls perfectly plumb, he uses a level. Or since finished wall boards never actually touch the floor, he covers the gap with trim boards. That permits expansion and flexing without cracking the walls. As a result, your house is nice and straight, and yet it isn't "brittle". The trim boards at the interfaces better look nice and fit nice, even though the ragged edges they cover are certainly rough.
Software can be designed and built the same way. Typeless languages are one method, and exception handling is another. Encapsulation is all about hiding ugly details behind a precise interface. Design by Contract is one way to ensure the interface itself is precise, regardless of the code behind it.
They still have to be "pretty close" to be acceptable. A 2x4 can't be completely twisted like a corkscrew, nor can a floor be a bubble off from level. You can't use a 2x8 when a 2x10 is specified. Likewise, your calculations still have to work. But if your calculation is almost instant 99% of the time, and marginally slow but still OK the other 1% of the time, it might be good enough for your application.
At the end of the day, software interfaces better look nice and fit nice and do their jobs. But the internal workings of the tasks can be ragged and yet still function effectively (most of the time.)
It's not just the masses commenting on articles that are incredibly stupid, their (CNN) reporters and correspondents aren't much better (and their talking heads are nearly as bad).
That's where Slashdot has a distinct advantage. Our great unwashed masses still have a common underlying technical bent. Even a weak story (such as something about Twitter crawls on news programs) is going to get a lot of relevant and possibly insightful commentary from a technical viewpoint - moreso than a statistically random source such as the TV news audience.
Of course that's also our biggest weakness. We are all blind to the technical problems that plague the average Joe. About the extent of our concern with that crap happens when our sisters-in-law call us to ask us to help them get their network connection back up. We don't share in their pain, and have a bias as a result.
Not that we need my sister-in-law's opinions on technology on Slashdot, mind you.
Getting rid of downmods on Slashdot sounds great in theory but it would just result in GNAA posts lingering at 1 (or 2 if the guy doing it has good karma). Which means I'd have to set my threshhold even higher to avoid seeing them, which would bury comments that are actually useful.
First of all the Greater Nashville Apartment Association has a right to their opinion like everyone else. ;)
But seriously, in case you haven't noticed there are a lot of legitimate posts buried by moderators who simply can't stand reading something they disagree with. Especially when the topic is political or similarly divisive topic. So that's already going on. Slashdot has never been particularly fair and balanced. Of course, neither is the news media these days.
The news isn't as unbalanced as Faux News tries to claim. They've long been shills for the extreme right wing zealots, and whine when they're not taken seriously. They do have some fairly honest news programs, but they live in the shadow of the loudmouth hatemongers, and end up tarred with the same brush as a result.
Their viewers may claim that it's not a fair association, but it's the presumption of everyone else who does not share their "values".
What year did MVS get sudo? We didn't even have RACF, we had ACL-2. And how many companies had security policies that strong in the 1980s? And who bothered following them on a midnight phone call? Certainly not ours.
What the hell, Sherman? Were you there? Was that your password, and you're still posting anonymously? That was 20 years ago, so get over it already. Besides, we already knew, you just confirmed it that night. And it's not like there's anything wrong with that, you're just different. It's OK.
Not sure about your example of a basalt cliff... How exactly does a cliff evolve?
Look at his nick: BadAnalogyGuy. What did you expect from him, a car analogy?
A guy I used to work with told me a story about a late-night support call with the operations center. He figured out that they needed to run a job that was under someone else's account. So they conference-called in this other guy at home in the middle of the night, and asked him for his password. He refused to give it over the phone, and the operations people were getting madder and madder because the night's jobs were being held up. Finally, he agreed to give them the password but only if they turned off the speaker phone.
The guy's password was BigBlackDonkeyDick.
Hilarity ensued. I'm pretty sure the whole shop knew the guy's password by the next morning (hell, I still remember it and I didn't even know the guy!)
People justify making pirated copies of copyrighted works because
A) Their works are overpriced
B) It's easy to do
C) They can't stop us with their puny DRM
D) Uhh... what's wrong with that?
And this Comcast genius thinks that by getting everybody on board* with solving D that he'll make more money^H^H^Hsave the cable industry?
Somebody drive* this MPAA shill to the funny farm.
*Obligatory vehicle analogies.
If nothing changes, producers will stop producing when they realize they'll never make back their $250 millon in production costs. The cable companies won't be able to keep subscribers if all they're showing are Gilligan's Island reruns. They'll be poorer and we'll be richer as a result. Is there still a problem?
I've had 2 outages on my land line in the last 10 years, but I have never had an outage on my cellphone.
Never had a dropped call? Never got the "redial, network busy" tone? Never got a "Call failed" displayed on the face of the phone? Those are outages.
Horses are not omniscient.
In other words,
"You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him think."
Thanks, I'll be here all the week. Try the fish.
Go back and reread what I said. "Consider the value of the outcome." That means you should make sure that what you're spending energy on is worth it, not that you shouldn't use energy.
I don't feel particularly guilty about consuming energy (certainly not enough to do anything more serious about it than to use mass transit.) But I seriously question the wisdom or validity to use energy to confirm that it's going to take roughly 50% of 2^72 tests to brute force the RC5-72 challenge. This after already proving that it took about 85% of 2^56 tests to brute force the RC5-56 challenge, and a similar percentage of 2^64 tests to brute force the RC5-64 challenge. It is an insane waste of energy.
At least SETI@home has the unknown factor that some people can believe in. Folding@home and the World Computing Grid may provide actual scientific or humanitarian benefits. Rendering WoW at 72 frames per second gives the player an immersive experience. All those offer benefits (or potential benefits) to one or more people.
So is cracking PGP providing a benefit? In TFA's case, yes, they're trying to recover some lost files for a client. For us to repeat the experience, just to prove we can copy their efforts to brute force a PGP passphrase? Sheer waste.