Yes, technically it should be possible to map out a compression algorithm and reverse it to recompress its own output. But that's a completely different algorithm than just running the compressor a second time -- different inputs will yield different outputs.
I like to demonstrate the recompression effect to non-computer friends by opening up a picture in an editor and saving it as JPEG with something like 50% compression. I close and reopen the picture, then save it again. If I repeat this just a few times, instead of a picture of their dog we have something that looks like weather radar with a cloud layer in the shape of a shih-tzu. That's the point at which they get it.
"Bounced" is the term used by the slashdot submitter in the headline. However, most of these emails were actual humans clicking "reply". They were not originally bounced.
Some of them are sad and pitiful, and read a lot like, "Please accept these plans to repay my credit so I can buy my children food this week! I am waiting anxiously to hear from you and your Reply Here link wasn't working so I sent this email instead."
So quick to leap to judgment, with no actual facts and starting from a faulty assumption. (Well, this is Slashdot, so I suppose that's par for the course.) For the record, I am extremely cautious in neighborhoods (driving below the posted limits because we have a stupid minimum-30-MPH-posted-speed law in this state, even in residential neighborhoods) and as a former biker I give them wide berth; I even try to offer them a bit of "protection" in dense traffic. I do speed occasionally on freeways in order to keep up with traffic, not to weave through it. And you wouldn't believe how paranoid I am about not driving drunk.
I was simply using bad traffic laws as an example that our country now accepts the idea of a pre-crime. Even if a speeder cut you off, passed you on the shoulder, or did whatever else seems to piss you off, you did not get hurt, (other than your feelings.) But if someone were to hit your car causing you damage, or worse, physically injure you, then I'm all for the full judgment. Notice that it shouldn't matter if the "crasher" was speeding when he hit the "crashee" -- it should be all about results, the actual damages caused should be the full responsibility of the person who caused them. And those damages can include the costs of delays, the costs of a spouse leaving work to pick you up at the shop, all those things should be a part of the price of the accident.
Yes, we've heard that "speed kills" for many years now, but that's a really incomplete statement. It's the difference in speeds that kills. A 70MPH car hitting a 55MPH car will cause less damage than a 55MPH car will cause to a stopped car. The risk you take when you speed is that you'll cause more damage. But there is no damage caused until an actual collision occurs.
That depends greatly on the quality of the printer, the quality of the scanner, and the quality of the scanning job. Higher resolution printers and higher resolution scanners may actually reproduce the noise accurately enough to be picked up. A Xerox "watermarking" method proposed in the 1990s consisted of color regions being rendered by tiny diagonally oriented color bars. These were designed specifically to survive photocopying and scanning.
I'd guess that modern printers and scanners would probably not 'normalize' the noise at their default settings. You'd probably be more successful if you tried to digitally correct the noise. Resolution changing, format changing (GIF to JPG), compression (higher JPG) all will somewhat smooth out some of the artifacts, but they are certainly not guaranteed protection against forensic analysis.
Not that all vacuum cleaners were called "hoovers", but your parents or grandparents may have hoovered the rugs more than once in their lifetimes. It's also possible that "to hoover" was regional slang, perhaps more so here in the Midwest. Either way, it's definitely fallen into disuse over time, and never stuck like kleenex or xerox.
*BZZT* Wrong, but thanks for playing. You were spot on until your last line, where you referred to "illegal" activities.
There is absolutely nothing illegal about hacking your iPhone. Nothing. Many of the image problems hackers get come from people associating anything hacking with "illegality". We owe it to ourselves to not perpetuate that foolishness.
There are actually quite a few crimes that are based on the fact that you were about to attempt to break other laws - attempted murder, conspiracy to commit fraud et al.
Or speeding on a freeway, or drunk driving. Neither activity actually causes harm, it's just that both lead to increased risk of harm. But both are really "pre-crimes".
For the record, I think they're crap laws -- what should take place is harsh punishment for damages caused if an accident results, not for some imagined possibility. The world is substantially safer from a professional driver going 100MPH on the freeway rather than my 80-year-old uncle driving a single mile to the store. Even stone sober, my uncle's driving poses a far greater risk to life and property than your average drunk driver.
Not that I want them to proceed with a plan like this, but anonymising it's a good idea, at least from the standpoint of selling it to the MPs. Think about plotting a graph of a suspect's travels. Now, compare that against a similar graph of everybody else's travels. You don't need the names of everybody else in order to compute their graphs or perform the comparisons. But once you find a set of suitable matches, then you can start more closely examining only those particular people.
Of course anyone with even a tiny measure of tradecraft will not synchronize their travels with co-conspirators, and the crazies they've been dealing with are all receiving enough training to take simple countermeasures. They'll disembark from other stations and walk the remaining distances. They won't travel at the exact same times, or will put extra time on the beginning and/or ends of their trips.
Anyway, this map is going to be so vast as to be utterly worthless -- adding 500,000 people to the suspect list just because they happen to have work schedules that match the conspirators' meeting times just isn't going to help anyone.
Let's say I discovered you had logged on to Facebook with the username of "fluch" and a password of "blather". The next thing I'm going to try is to log on to gmail and try signing on as "fluch@gmail.com" with a password of "blather". After that, I'm going to try the same attack on paypal.com, amazon.com, bankofamerica.com and a thousand other places that you might be foolish enough to use the same ID and password and have the authority to spend money.
For over 50% of the people out there, this is going to work.
And if you're not one of those 50%, I'm simply going to try my attack again on someone else because the chances are good that they're one of the stupid people. There are a lot of fish in the ocean.
The astronauts are issued one set of silverware per mission. It's not just a spoon. But because they cannot do dishes, they wipe them down with a disinfectant towlette at the end of each meal.
And since there is no money, as they approach the end of the mission whoever has squirreled away enough m&m's or tortillas has the most "bargaining power" to trade for whatever else is left.
That's a really good point. However, for now anyway it really is the NSA museum more than anything else. As I recall, the only cryptologic displays they have that are not NSA related are government-related cryptography projects that existed prior to the creation of the NSA.
But yeah, it'd be neat if they had a big-screen graphical DES engine, or the stories of Lucifer/DES/FIPS-49, RSA, AES, etc.
But until your "folks in charge" change something, it's likely to remain the "National Cryptologic Museum" instead of the "National Cryptologic Museum"
Actually, the whole world seems to have reduced us to one school of thought. Most non-US citizens seem to have a hard time telling our two parties apart. The common analogy I hear from British friends is that the Republicans are exactly like the Tories, and the Democrats are almost exactly like the Tories.
And for as much as you don't like the two party system, voting in this country is pretty linear -- you get to choose exactly one candidate for each job, and all those jobs are tied to geographic regions only. Nobody's come up with a two-dimensional model of government, but I could imagine just how interesting that would be.
The House of Representatives would have to be sliced up into issues, instead of geographic regions. You'd vote for dozens of different representatives: a Transportation candidate, a Ways and Means candidate, an Ethics candidate, a Defense candidate, and so on. That way you wouldn't have to worry if your Defense candidate was pro-life or pro-choice, because they'd never cast a vote on the subject. It'd force a complete change how bills get written: they'd have to be categorized, shopped around differently, it'd actually be quite refreshing.
(Oh, God, now I'm refactoring Congress! Somebody help me get Martin Fowler out of my head!!!)
I doubt they're likely to cover civilian advancements in cryptography any time soon.
First, the museum typically trails history by about 50 years -- the time period for automated declassification of all but the most sensitive secrets (i.e. news of cracking the German's Enigma isn't going to affect the current war.) But serious civilian work in cryptography didn't really begin to take place until 1972 with IBM's invention of Lucifer / DES. Prior to that, civilian cryptography, if it was ever considered by civilians at all, was still seen as either a code book translating words to numbers used to save money on telegrams, or as a Hagelin machine, some complicated clockwork box that ambassadors bought from Swiss gnomes. (News of the NSA's role in strengthening Lucifer was eventually revealed in 1992 after Biham and Shamir published their (re-)discovery of differential cryptanalysis.)
The other reason is: civilian cryptography is NOT the NSA's story. Civilian cryptography was developed in the vacuum remaining after NSA scooped up all the math talent they could. Bruce Schneier aptly described the NSA as "a kind of alien race, leaving behind bits of beneficial technology that we humans could use, but never fully understand."
Besides, nobody ever seriously considered the neighbor's 10-year-old kid in his mom's basement with his elementary school's copy of "Codes and Ciphers" was learning anything about actual cryptography. They still don't today.
It was scraped. Now, the residents of Sderot want it back.
"Oy, for you, only the best lasers will do. You don't want this one, it's scraped. Let me get you one with a fresh paint job, good as new, I'll have my brother Manny bring it around Tuesday."
When you are in one, you never notice any security until you do something not allowed ("Sir, children under 18 are not allowed in the slots area")
No kidding.
I was drinking at a bar in the old Aladdin's a couple years back. After getting yet another, I went back to the table with my friends, and as I sat down I missed the chair. A round of general laughter went around but as I got up, they stopped laughing. Apparently two security guys had materialized behind me in less than five seconds, and if I hadn't made it back up as quickly as I had, they'd have been nice enough to show me the door. And I never even saw them myself -- they just appeared behind me, and then evaporated (according to my friends, who were presumably slightly less drunk than I was.)
Anyway, I may not know what my limit is, but I learned that night that it's less than 14.
Well, G.W. Bush promised putting a man on the moon in 20 years, but by the time he thought that would attract our attention he was already the least popular president since Richard Nixon. I think his idea maybe made it all the way from his mouth to the podium mic, but never went much beyond that.
Besides, most of us are so cynical we see a Mars shot as only as another ploy to enrich Cheney's cronies in the industrial-military complex at the expense of taxpayers, rather than accomplish any noble scientific or social goal.
I love the idea of terraforming Mars, of settlers and colonists heading off to new planets. But a Mars mission with our current technology is going to give us a few tiny bubbles of greenhouses, and a dozen people who murder each other once they utterly realize there's no going back to Earth. (Oops, sorry for stealing your ideas, Kim Stanley Robinson!)
Absolutely. We're locked in to a lot of Microsoft licenses, and because we're locked in to them any project, team, or pyramid that wishes to use a non-Microsoft platform is going to have to come up with a lot of financial justification to switch just because our company does not have the infrastructure to support a Linux desktop.
Combine that with the fact that we have to pay for support of the desktop regardless of what desktop it is makes switching a financially unattractive option. Yes, we'd have to pay for Linux support -- our business forte is not that of kernel development, but of our business. And both SuSE and RedHat want more for desktop licenses for support than Microsoft wants to support XP!
Fox definitely doesn't have their fingers on the pulse of the viewers.
They do, it's just that the handful of us that thought the Tick was great also have Tivos and ReplayTVs. Our opinions don't mean squat because we blow by their commercials.
Not that you aren't capable of hunting them down by yourself, but I recommend the PC Decrapifier for friends and family after they install a new machine. (It was formerly known as the Dell Decrapifier until Dell contacted him.) It works quite well, but there are still some of those off-label PCs that seem to bring in other bits of shovelware that slip by it.
Anyway, when helping a friend it's much easier to run a tool than to sit down for an hour with a handful of diagnostic tools and try to figure out which bits are important, and which ones are not.
Why is yours or anyone else's business if I or someone else chooses to have children?
Thats a fully personal choice and no one outside of the two people deciding should have any say-so. People need to mind their own business.
Why? Because every human uses a fraction of this planet's finite resources. Every human born into America today will likely be personally responsible for 20 tons of trash to be added to the waste stream, will be responsible for the consumption of thousands of barrels of oil and dump most of it into the atmosphere (the rest will head into landfills as non-degradable plastics), and eat many tons of food and produce as many tons of sewage. They'll demand more land for more housing, or crowd more people into the finite spaces of our cities.
Having a kid is the most environmentally irresponsible act a human can perform, but I won't argue that some procreation is required. Having two, three, or more is selfish, wasteful, and does not improve our society. Screw this personal choice bullcrap -- society is made worse by people having more unsustainable children, we are not better off. Since people can't seem to voluntarily limit themselves to a sustainable level of reproduction, society is going to have to step in sooner or later. China's already hit that wall and the results have been exceedingly unpleasant for everyone during the transition.
Can you imagine what it's going to be like when America recognizes it's crossed the point of unsustainability? In nature, the uncompetitive die of starvation, and overcrowded colonies typically die off due to disease. Imagine that game played out with human beings and tell me just how many kids you should put onto that chess board.
[ Here's a fun game for those of you playing the home edition: Can you tell the bitter old guy who was just at Tony Roma's with his wife and had a young couple with a pair of noisy children seated right next to them in an otherwise empty restaurant? Stupid idiot hostess. ]
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Grandma is protected at the bottom of the ocean.
That reminds me: when I die, I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather, not screaming in horror like his passengers.
Oh, then I guess we don't read the same kind of novels.
I like to demonstrate the recompression effect to non-computer friends by opening up a picture in an editor and saving it as JPEG with something like 50% compression. I close and reopen the picture, then save it again. If I repeat this just a few times, instead of a picture of their dog we have something that looks like weather radar with a cloud layer in the shape of a shih-tzu. That's the point at which they get it.
Some of them are sad and pitiful, and read a lot like, "Please accept these plans to repay my credit so I can buy my children food this week! I am waiting anxiously to hear from you and your Reply Here link wasn't working so I sent this email instead."
I was simply using bad traffic laws as an example that our country now accepts the idea of a pre-crime. Even if a speeder cut you off, passed you on the shoulder, or did whatever else seems to piss you off, you did not get hurt, (other than your feelings.) But if someone were to hit your car causing you damage, or worse, physically injure you, then I'm all for the full judgment. Notice that it shouldn't matter if the "crasher" was speeding when he hit the "crashee" -- it should be all about results, the actual damages caused should be the full responsibility of the person who caused them. And those damages can include the costs of delays, the costs of a spouse leaving work to pick you up at the shop, all those things should be a part of the price of the accident.
Yes, we've heard that "speed kills" for many years now, but that's a really incomplete statement. It's the difference in speeds that kills. A 70MPH car hitting a 55MPH car will cause less damage than a 55MPH car will cause to a stopped car. The risk you take when you speed is that you'll cause more damage. But there is no damage caused until an actual collision occurs.
I'd guess that modern printers and scanners would probably not 'normalize' the noise at their default settings. You'd probably be more successful if you tried to digitally correct the noise. Resolution changing, format changing (GIF to JPG), compression (higher JPG) all will somewhat smooth out some of the artifacts, but they are certainly not guaranteed protection against forensic analysis.
Not that all vacuum cleaners were called "hoovers", but your parents or grandparents may have hoovered the rugs more than once in their lifetimes. It's also possible that "to hoover" was regional slang, perhaps more so here in the Midwest. Either way, it's definitely fallen into disuse over time, and never stuck like kleenex or xerox.
There is absolutely nothing illegal about hacking your iPhone. Nothing. Many of the image problems hackers get come from people associating anything hacking with "illegality". We owe it to ourselves to not perpetuate that foolishness.
Or speeding on a freeway, or drunk driving. Neither activity actually causes harm, it's just that both lead to increased risk of harm. But both are really "pre-crimes".
For the record, I think they're crap laws -- what should take place is harsh punishment for damages caused if an accident results, not for some imagined possibility. The world is substantially safer from a professional driver going 100MPH on the freeway rather than my 80-year-old uncle driving a single mile to the store. Even stone sober, my uncle's driving poses a far greater risk to life and property than your average drunk driver.
Of course anyone with even a tiny measure of tradecraft will not synchronize their travels with co-conspirators, and the crazies they've been dealing with are all receiving enough training to take simple countermeasures. They'll disembark from other stations and walk the remaining distances. They won't travel at the exact same times, or will put extra time on the beginning and/or ends of their trips.
Anyway, this map is going to be so vast as to be utterly worthless -- adding 500,000 people to the suspect list just because they happen to have work schedules that match the conspirators' meeting times just isn't going to help anyone.
Let's say I discovered you had logged on to Facebook with the username of "fluch" and a password of "blather". The next thing I'm going to try is to log on to gmail and try signing on as "fluch@gmail.com" with a password of "blather". After that, I'm going to try the same attack on paypal.com, amazon.com, bankofamerica.com and a thousand other places that you might be foolish enough to use the same ID and password and have the authority to spend money.
For over 50% of the people out there, this is going to work.
And if you're not one of those 50%, I'm simply going to try my attack again on someone else because the chances are good that they're one of the stupid people. There are a lot of fish in the ocean.
The astronauts are issued one set of silverware per mission. It's not just a spoon. But because they cannot do dishes, they wipe them down with a disinfectant towlette at the end of each meal.
And since there is no money, as they approach the end of the mission whoever has squirreled away enough m&m's or tortillas has the most "bargaining power" to trade for whatever else is left.
But yeah, it'd be neat if they had a big-screen graphical DES engine, or the stories of Lucifer/DES/FIPS-49, RSA, AES, etc.
But until your "folks in charge" change something, it's likely to remain the "National Cryptologic Museum" instead of the "National Cryptologic Museum"
And for as much as you don't like the two party system, voting in this country is pretty linear -- you get to choose exactly one candidate for each job, and all those jobs are tied to geographic regions only. Nobody's come up with a two-dimensional model of government, but I could imagine just how interesting that would be.
The House of Representatives would have to be sliced up into issues, instead of geographic regions. You'd vote for dozens of different representatives: a Transportation candidate, a Ways and Means candidate, an Ethics candidate, a Defense candidate, and so on. That way you wouldn't have to worry if your Defense candidate was pro-life or pro-choice, because they'd never cast a vote on the subject. It'd force a complete change how bills get written: they'd have to be categorized, shopped around differently, it'd actually be quite refreshing.
(Oh, God, now I'm refactoring Congress! Somebody help me get Martin Fowler out of my head!!!)
First, the museum typically trails history by about 50 years -- the time period for automated declassification of all but the most sensitive secrets (i.e. news of cracking the German's Enigma isn't going to affect the current war.) But serious civilian work in cryptography didn't really begin to take place until 1972 with IBM's invention of Lucifer / DES. Prior to that, civilian cryptography, if it was ever considered by civilians at all, was still seen as either a code book translating words to numbers used to save money on telegrams, or as a Hagelin machine, some complicated clockwork box that ambassadors bought from Swiss gnomes. (News of the NSA's role in strengthening Lucifer was eventually revealed in 1992 after Biham and Shamir published their (re-)discovery of differential cryptanalysis.)
The other reason is: civilian cryptography is NOT the NSA's story. Civilian cryptography was developed in the vacuum remaining after NSA scooped up all the math talent they could. Bruce Schneier aptly described the NSA as "a kind of alien race, leaving behind bits of beneficial technology that we humans could use, but never fully understand."
Besides, nobody ever seriously considered the neighbor's 10-year-old kid in his mom's basement with his elementary school's copy of "Codes and Ciphers" was learning anything about actual cryptography. They still don't today.
"Oy, for you, only the best lasers will do. You don't want this one, it's scraped. Let me get you one with a fresh paint job, good as new, I'll have my brother Manny bring it around Tuesday."
I was drinking at a bar in the old Aladdin's a couple years back. After getting yet another, I went back to the table with my friends, and as I sat down I missed the chair. A round of general laughter went around but as I got up, they stopped laughing. Apparently two security guys had materialized behind me in less than five seconds, and if I hadn't made it back up as quickly as I had, they'd have been nice enough to show me the door. And I never even saw them myself -- they just appeared behind me, and then evaporated (according to my friends, who were presumably slightly less drunk than I was.)
Anyway, I may not know what my limit is, but I learned that night that it's less than 14.
Besides, most of us are so cynical we see a Mars shot as only as another ploy to enrich Cheney's cronies in the industrial-military complex at the expense of taxpayers, rather than accomplish any noble scientific or social goal.
I love the idea of terraforming Mars, of settlers and colonists heading off to new planets. But a Mars mission with our current technology is going to give us a few tiny bubbles of greenhouses, and a dozen people who murder each other once they utterly realize there's no going back to Earth. (Oops, sorry for stealing your ideas, Kim Stanley Robinson!)
Combine that with the fact that we have to pay for support of the desktop regardless of what desktop it is makes switching a financially unattractive option. Yes, we'd have to pay for Linux support -- our business forte is not that of kernel development, but of our business. And both SuSE and RedHat want more for desktop licenses for support than Microsoft wants to support XP!
Anyway, when helping a friend it's much easier to run a tool than to sit down for an hour with a handful of diagnostic tools and try to figure out which bits are important, and which ones are not.
At least I hooked a few people. And I'm much better now, thanks for asking.
Why? Because every human uses a fraction of this planet's finite resources. Every human born into America today will likely be personally responsible for 20 tons of trash to be added to the waste stream, will be responsible for the consumption of thousands of barrels of oil and dump most of it into the atmosphere (the rest will head into landfills as non-degradable plastics), and eat many tons of food and produce as many tons of sewage. They'll demand more land for more housing, or crowd more people into the finite spaces of our cities.
Having a kid is the most environmentally irresponsible act a human can perform, but I won't argue that some procreation is required. Having two, three, or more is selfish, wasteful, and does not improve our society. Screw this personal choice bullcrap -- society is made worse by people having more unsustainable children, we are not better off. Since people can't seem to voluntarily limit themselves to a sustainable level of reproduction, society is going to have to step in sooner or later. China's already hit that wall and the results have been exceedingly unpleasant for everyone during the transition.
Can you imagine what it's going to be like when America recognizes it's crossed the point of unsustainability? In nature, the uncompetitive die of starvation, and overcrowded colonies typically die off due to disease. Imagine that game played out with human beings and tell me just how many kids you should put onto that chess board.
[ Here's a fun game for those of you playing the home edition: Can you tell the bitter old guy who was just at Tony Roma's with his wife and had a young couple with a pair of noisy children seated right next to them in an otherwise empty restaurant? Stupid idiot hostess. ]