OK I'm glad we agree to that. Now I certainly agree that Python would feel much more natural to someone at first. But I'd argue that Scheme is easier to implement because asks you to remember so little. All you have to do is learn a few concepts and you understand there is to understand about Scheme. Moreover those concepts are consist with mathematics (like currying for example). So I would still argue that the non power user with low comp sci training would be more powerful in scheme after say 200 hours than in python. No question the first 20 hours are better in python.
wonderful transformational stuff in far more normal syntax, with e.g. python
Not really and not the same way. In python it is very difficult to pass between code and data. He's right about the tree structures. The data structure is the code structure which means you don't have to keep data and code structures in sync with one another it happens auto-magically.
Huh? The syntax of Python is simpler than Scheme? I can write a Scheme evaluator in radically different languages in at worst a few hundred lines of code, in fact writing a scheme is a standard comp sci 2 day exercise. Python would take a few thousand lines and moreover and probably months to write. Similarly with Lisp.
That's not been my experience at all. Because of Open Office requiring X11 lots of Apple end users now have it. That's besides the fact it is on by default in the last 4 months or so. I work with a bunch of design people and execs none of whom can program and all of whom use X11. I'm not sure they know what the X11 icon means but they use it no problem.
In a civil case the court can order you to co-operate with discovery requests. That's active assistance. I don't know how it would go in a criminal case though.
5th amendment doesn't apply to civil. Moreover they can't actually force you on pain of imprisonment, its just that refusing to cooperate can be taken into account with regard to verdict. So you lose money.
But it seems likely that if a court can compel you to state, say, your mother's maiden name on the basis that this is not an incriminating word, then they can use the same technique to compel production of a passphrase.
They can't force you to state your mother's maiden name either in a criminal case.
Doesn't the increase in computing power work also for the encryption part? It allows the use of longer and therefore more secure keys and possibly also other encryption methods that were impractical when computers were much less capable. So in the end it seems if an encryption from say 10 years ago took a hundred years to crack on then available computers, so now the best encryption done today will still take a 100 years to brute force on the best computers we have today. It seems to me that any attack on a cipher that is based on raw computing power IS a brute force attack.
Data is encrypted at a particular place and time. Once encrypted and captured the encryption can't later be strengthened. As for brute force the question is what percentage of possible keys are tested. The lower the percentage the less brute force the more elegant the solution (as well as the more practical the solution).
Yeah there is. There are strong laws against unlawful imprisonment. If you mean "there is nothing to keep them" in the sense of there is nothing to keep them from taking you out behind the station and just shooting you then of course you are correct, but its irrelevant. We are addressing the law.
That's not true. Its been pretty consistent with better anti cryptographic techniques and exponential gains in computing power the ability to decrypt is doing something like 100 fold increase every 3 years. I don't see any reason to believe that will stop. And please don't cite the brute force issues, no one uses brute force.
5th amendment protection doesn't apply if the contents of the laptop cannot be used in a prosecution. What you are arguing for would be fine providing the person is given full immunity regarding the contents of the laptop or any information derived from said contents (like for example if you got a name of a co-conspirator and then that person provided evidence). But no a person should not have to help the police convict him in any way.
That's not how its done. First off the passphrase has certain constraints and based on file contents (the encrypted ones) you can figure out certain geometric properties that the point of the elliptic curve has. That gets you down around 2^(2048/70). The problem is that 2^35 algebraic geometry computations is still too expensive to catch some guy for importing porn.
If prosecutors can jail reporters indefinitely until they hand over their sources, how is it that much different for the government to imprison someone for not turning over their encryption keys? The only difference I see is one may incriminate someone else and the other may incriminate you.
Yes but that difference is the one between testimony that is subject to 5th amendment protection and testimony that is not. You do not have a constitution protection against providing evidence against other persons (with some exceptions).
A properly encrypted file can be broken into, even the prosecution admitted that they could do it, it would just take years of effort. The 5th amendment does not protect you except when it is very expensive or highly annoying to the government.
I don't think that is the case at all. A court can issue a warrant to search for materials. They can't require you to actively assist the police on pain of imprisonment. There is some notion of inevitable discovery (like keys to a safe) but here again if you claim to have lost the keys you cannot be jailed.
If they did it I sure as hell hope they *can* be compelled to admit to it. If they can't then you're just using the law to help criminals, which is just stupid.
The debate here is whether the 5th amendment applies. You seem to be arguing that the 5th amendment does apply but that the 5th amendment is a bad idea. That's another topic entirely. I think you would find that roughly 2% or less of the American population would support repealing the 5th amendment. Not sure where you are from but your own county's history is probably filled with the lots of incidents which show why forcing people to self incriminate is a terrible idea.
Technically congress isn't amending the constitution the states are. Technically congress is voting to forward an amendment to the states for ratification. So technically grand parent was wrong.
There were some questions whether 1) They were the appropriate legal procedures 2) Whether there was any violation at all 3) Stallman had any standing in the issue at all 4) Whether Stallman was engaging in an unethical smear campaign against KDE
As a KDE supporter at the time my personal take was: No there was no forgiveness needed. The copyright owner needs to declare a breach before forgiveness is needed no breach declaration occurred. The violation was very very gray, Stallman didn't have standing. I never believed in (4) OTOH I think he lacked in diplomacy during the whole Gnome / KDE fiasco and it was in many ways the last great moment of FSF. He burned a lot of credibility on his anti KDE campaign.
KDE never linked QT to their code. QT was dynamic the end user did the linking. Debian had questions about whether they could legally redistribute KDE and QT there was never any question whether KDE could legally distribute its own code.
Actually Windows is a pretty good example. In the last 5 years Solaris has released 3rd major file system, OSX is making strong moves to adobt Solaris's file system and Microsoft pulled the plug in WinFS (which was really innovative) because they were scared of additional memory requirement. On security Microsoft has been plodding along where they have underneath the covers the VMS security model. On
On Office I see real lack of features and not infrequently downgrades. Microsoft Office 98 supported more web protocols then office 2007 does. The next version of Mac office will have the whole macro system yanked out. The delimiters system in Excel is much less flexible then it used to be. Drag and drop, OLE and cut and paste get much better with each major version but frankly I don't see much innovation here at all. Constrast the last 13 years of office with the last 13 years of Adobe's creative suite (to pick an app of roughly comparable complexity and cost) or if you think that's too much then compare the last dozen years of office's improvements to the ones in StarOffice / OpenOffic (to pick your Sun example).
Finally on visual studio I've been tracking this one very carefully. I actually follow the guys doing the language research at Microsoft for years. Back in the early 90's there were a huge range of GUI languages that were very innovative. Far and away the most conservative choice was C++. However Microsoft did innovate substantially with Visual Basic, and so you had a conservative low level language as the core language and a high level very innovative language which provided a "scripting language" for Windows. Finally Microsoft Java / J++ was a fantastically innovative Java. What's happened in the last 10 years? Now I'll grant the.NET compiler is innovative, probably the most innovative compiler since DEC/Compaq's GEM compiler. But what else have they done. C# looks to me like fundamentally a failure of nerve on Microsoft's part. C syntax, C++ / Java object structure.... "lets do what Sun did with Oak in 1991". Meanwhile they have really innovative languages like F# and Python for.NET, why not bundle them? Even in the area of Excel (arguably the world's most popular language) there have huge innovations they are holding back. Again to pick Sun (since you had originally picked them) Sun invented: platform independence that actually worked, J2EE which led to meaningful 3 tier architectures becoming standard via. application server / Java Beans concepts, J3EE and the possibility for a real replacement to SQL and lately AJAX. Those are huge.
I don't see how that matters. Assume 100k client businesses (far far in excess of what you could actually expect) how do you get your audit costs low enough with $30m / yr in revenue?
I don't know that you are being exactly fair here. Research.microsoft.com is certainly fantastic. But the fact is that when it comes to Microsoft's core products they are very very conservative about new features. Conversely apple aggressively puts technology out into people's hands. When people talk about microsoft they often don't mean the research division but rather their core products and here I do think product for product (apple has far fewer products) Apple is much more innovative.
Its highly questionable whether those terms are enforceable in terms of being a tortable copying violation. Burying a poorly understood restriction in the EULA and not taking other action to make someone aware of it is likely to be seen by a court as attempting to trick someone into a license violation which would not only prove their was no intent but might actually be a wrongful suit. Now I understand most small business don't want to fight but then it really doesn't matter what the license says.
Slashdot Mirror
OK I'm glad we agree to that. Now I certainly agree that Python would feel much more natural to someone at first. But I'd argue that Scheme is easier to implement because asks you to remember so little. All you have to do is learn a few concepts and you understand there is to understand about Scheme. Moreover those concepts are consist with mathematics (like currying for example). So I would still argue that the non power user with low comp sci training would be more powerful in scheme after say 200 hours than in python. No question the first 20 hours are better in python.
wonderful transformational stuff in far more normal syntax, with e.g. python
Not really and not the same way. In python it is very difficult to pass between code and data. He's right about the tree structures. The data structure is the code structure which means you don't have to keep data and code structures in sync with one another it happens auto-magically.
Huh? The syntax of Python is simpler than Scheme? I can write a Scheme evaluator in radically different languages in at worst a few hundred lines of code, in fact writing a scheme is a standard comp sci 2 day exercise. Python would take a few thousand lines and moreover and probably months to write. Similarly with Lisp.
You should watch Apply Eval from SICP.
That's not been my experience at all. Because of Open Office requiring X11 lots of Apple end users now have it. That's besides the fact it is on by default in the last 4 months or so. I work with a bunch of design people and execs none of whom can program and all of whom use X11. I'm not sure they know what the X11 icon means but they use it no problem.
In a civil case the court can order you to co-operate with discovery requests. That's active assistance. I don't know how it would go in a criminal case though.
5th amendment doesn't apply to civil. Moreover they can't actually force you on pain of imprisonment, its just that refusing to cooperate can be taken into account with regard to verdict. So you lose money.
But it seems likely that if a court can compel you to state, say, your mother's maiden name on the basis that this is not an incriminating word, then they can use the same technique to compel production of a passphrase.
They can't force you to state your mother's maiden name either in a criminal case.
Doesn't the increase in computing power work also for the encryption part? It allows the use of longer and therefore more secure keys and possibly also other encryption methods that were impractical when computers were much less capable. So in the end it seems if an encryption from say 10 years ago took a hundred years to crack on then available computers, so now the best encryption done today will still take a 100 years to brute force on the best computers we have today. It seems to me that any attack on a cipher that is based on raw computing power IS a brute force attack.
Data is encrypted at a particular place and time. Once encrypted and captured the encryption can't later be strengthened. As for brute force the question is what percentage of possible keys are tested. The lower the percentage the less brute force the more elegant the solution (as well as the more practical the solution).
The 5th amendment covers police which are following the law. The 2nd amendment addresses the situation you are describing.
Yeah there is. There are strong laws against unlawful imprisonment. If you mean "there is nothing to keep them" in the sense of there is nothing to keep them from taking you out behind the station and just shooting you then of course you are correct, but its irrelevant. We are addressing the law.
The penalties for child rape and incest are pretty strong. Lets not throw out red herrings.
That's not true. Its been pretty consistent with better anti cryptographic techniques and exponential gains in computing power the ability to decrypt is doing something like 100 fold increase every 3 years. I don't see any reason to believe that will stop. And please don't cite the brute force issues, no one uses brute force.
Domestic terrorists that are US citizens, yes they will be protected.
5th amendment protection doesn't apply if the contents of the laptop cannot be used in a prosecution. What you are arguing for would be fine providing the person is given full immunity regarding the contents of the laptop or any information derived from said contents (like for example if you got a name of a co-conspirator and then that person provided evidence). But no a person should not have to help the police convict him in any way.
That's not how its done. First off the passphrase has certain constraints and based on file contents (the encrypted ones) you can figure out certain geometric properties that the point of the elliptic curve has. That gets you down around 2^(2048/70). The problem is that 2^35 algebraic geometry computations is still too expensive to catch some guy for importing porn.
If prosecutors can jail reporters indefinitely until they hand over their sources, how is it that much different for the government to imprison someone for not turning over their encryption keys? The only difference I see is one may incriminate someone else and the other may incriminate you.
Yes but that difference is the one between testimony that is subject to 5th amendment protection and testimony that is not. You do not have a constitution protection against providing evidence against other persons (with some exceptions).
A properly encrypted file can be broken into, even the prosecution admitted that they could do it, it would just take years of effort. The 5th amendment does not protect you except when it is very expensive or highly annoying to the government.
I don't think that is the case at all. A court can issue a warrant to search for materials. They can't require you to actively assist the police on pain of imprisonment. There is some notion of inevitable discovery (like keys to a safe) but here again if you claim to have lost the keys you cannot be jailed.
If they did it I sure as hell hope they *can* be compelled to admit to it. If they can't then you're just using the law to help criminals, which is just stupid.
The debate here is whether the 5th amendment applies. You seem to be arguing that the 5th amendment does apply but that the 5th amendment is a bad idea. That's another topic entirely. I think you would find that roughly 2% or less of the American population would support repealing the 5th amendment. Not sure where you are from but your own county's history is probably filled with the lots of incidents which show why forcing people to self incriminate is a terrible idea.
Technically congress isn't amending the constitution the states are. Technically congress is voting to forward an amendment to the states for ratification. So technically grand parent was wrong.
There were some questions whether
1) They were the appropriate legal procedures
2) Whether there was any violation at all
3) Stallman had any standing in the issue at all
4) Whether Stallman was engaging in an unethical smear campaign against KDE
As a KDE supporter at the time my personal take was:
No there was no forgiveness needed. The copyright owner needs to declare a breach before forgiveness is needed no breach declaration occurred. The violation was very very gray, Stallman didn't have standing. I never believed in (4) OTOH I think he lacked in diplomacy during the whole Gnome / KDE fiasco and it was in many ways the last great moment of FSF. He burned a lot of credibility on his anti KDE campaign.
KDE never linked QT to their code. QT was dynamic the end user did the linking. Debian had questions about whether they could legally redistribute KDE and QT there was never any question whether KDE could legally distribute its own code.
Actually Windows is a pretty good example. In the last 5 years Solaris has released 3rd major file system, OSX is making strong moves to adobt Solaris's file system and Microsoft pulled the plug in WinFS (which was really innovative) because they were scared of additional memory requirement. On security Microsoft has been plodding along where they have underneath the covers the VMS security model. On
.NET compiler is innovative, probably the most innovative compiler since DEC/Compaq's GEM compiler. But what else have they done. C# looks to me like fundamentally a failure of nerve on Microsoft's part. C syntax, C++ / Java object structure.... "lets do what Sun did with Oak in 1991". .NET, why not bundle them? Even in the area of Excel (arguably the world's most popular language) there have huge innovations they are holding back.
On Office I see real lack of features and not infrequently downgrades. Microsoft Office 98 supported more web protocols then office 2007 does. The next version of Mac office will have the whole macro system yanked out. The delimiters system in Excel is much less flexible then it used to be. Drag and drop, OLE and cut and paste get much better with each major version but frankly I don't see much innovation here at all. Constrast the last 13 years of office with the last 13 years of Adobe's creative suite (to pick an app of roughly comparable complexity and cost) or if you think that's too much then compare the last dozen years of office's improvements to the ones in StarOffice / OpenOffic (to pick your Sun example).
Finally on visual studio I've been tracking this one very carefully. I actually follow the guys doing the language research at Microsoft for years.
Back in the early 90's there were a huge range of GUI languages that were very innovative. Far and away the most conservative choice was C++. However Microsoft did innovate substantially with Visual Basic, and so you had a conservative low level language as the core language and a high level very innovative language which provided a "scripting language" for Windows. Finally Microsoft Java / J++ was a fantastically innovative Java. What's happened in the last 10 years?
Now I'll grant the
Meanwhile they have really innovative languages like F# and Python for
Again to pick Sun (since you had originally picked them) Sun invented: platform independence that actually worked, J2EE which led to meaningful 3 tier architectures becoming standard via. application server / Java Beans concepts, J3EE and the possibility for a real replacement to SQL and lately AJAX. Those are huge.
I don't see how that matters. Assume 100k client businesses (far far in excess of what you could actually expect) how do you get your audit costs low enough with $30m / yr in revenue?
I don't know that you are being exactly fair here. Research.microsoft.com is certainly fantastic. But the fact is that when it comes to Microsoft's core products they are very very conservative about new features. Conversely apple aggressively puts technology out into people's hands. When people talk about microsoft they often don't mean the research division but rather their core products and here I do think product for product (apple has far fewer products) Apple is much more innovative.
$20-30 / month to audit a small business's software usage. You would bleed red ink forever at that price.
Its highly questionable whether those terms are enforceable in terms of being a tortable copying violation. Burying a poorly understood restriction in the EULA and not taking other action to make someone aware of it is likely to be seen by a court as attempting to trick someone into a license violation which would not only prove their was no intent but might actually be a wrongful suit. Now I understand most small business don't want to fight but then it really doesn't matter what the license says.