For instance tightening the restrictions on how registered guns are stored (the gun in this shooting was registered by the father but was not locked away -- had it been, this particular shooting certainly would have been much more difficult).
Had there been some armed teachers at the school, it never would have happened at all. Shooters like this choose places where no guns are allowed for a reason. And, if he'd chosen to do it anyway, his rampage would have been very brief.
It's impossible to make guns inaccessible to killers. What's needed is to make them accessible to rational, law-abiding people so that killers have no chance to succeed.
obtaining an automatic firearm is not as easy as many people would like to believe. It's involves a substantial background check, getting permission from your local law enforcment, and several other obnoxious hoops. The process is time consuming, somewhat complicated and quite expensive.
The process isn't that hard, and it's not expensive at all. $200. The process is identical to that required to get many other NFA items, such as suppressors, and lots of people have those.
The laws affecting automatic weapons have made them an exceptionally pricey hobby.
Yes, but not because of the hoops you have to jump through. The reason they're crazy expensive is because they were banned in 1987. Automatic weapons in civilian hands at that time were grandfathered in, but no new weapons are allowed to enter the market, so the supply is fixed. Fixed supply and growing demand means ever-rising prices.
As a result, you have a tough time finding ANY legally purchasable machine gun for under $10,000, and many of the more desirable ones go for in excess of $30,000.
But a stream cipher, being pseudo-random, is by definition not an OTP. The fact that the keystreams are generally used the same way does not make a non-OTP a kind of OTP.
Sorry if this seems like nitpicking, but it's not. From an information theoretic perspective, the difference between a strong PRNG and an OTP is enormous. In particular, it's large enough that the PRNG does not have an OTP's perfect security.
More like no attacks are feasible. If you have an N-bit document, an N-bit quantum computer can attack it. Since the largest quantum computer know is like 3 bits, you should be safe for awhile.
There is no known quantum computer algorithm for attacking any of these hash functions. Shor's algorithm would allow a quantum computer to attack n-bit RSA with an n-bit quantum computer, but I've never heard of any counterpart for any of these hash algorithms, and it would be algorithm-specific.
Also, there may indeed be feasible attacks on the hash algorithms I mentioned. It's just no one knows of any, yet, and lots of very smart people have looked.
One Time Pad has no technical flaws, but still has to be used correctly. I remember hearing that 's how the US broke a rusian nuclear spy ring - the russians got lazy with the one time pad, and the US spies had enough info to see what was happening.
You're talking about the Venona project. A very impressive bit of cryptanalytic work.
Enigma was an approximation to a one-time pad (mostly because you could reconnect the plug boards as you liked and re-order the wheels as you liked), but was likewise cracked because of carelessness of use.
Enigma was a stream cipher, not an approximation to a one-time pad. The configuration of plug boards, wheel order and initial wheel positions made up the key.
If you're thinking that "no known attacks" isn't good enough, keep in mind that's as good as it every gets in cryptography
I think my math teacher would call that a "necessary but not sufficient" condition, I mean anything can be without known attacks by virtue of never having been reviewed. Minimums should include:
1. Published algorithm, no "secret sauce" security by obscurity
2. Solid peer reviews by other cryptographers, definitely not just the vendor or their hirelings
3. Strong links to well-researched hard mathematical problems
Absolutely correct, with the partial exception of #3. It would be nice, perhaps, if #3 applied, but most symmetric ciphers and secure hash algorithms rely on complexity rather than hard problems.
Is there any hash function that actually is secure?
There are some for which no known attacks exist. SHA-256 and SHA-512, Whirlpool and Tiger are all pretty thoroughly-reviewed with no weaknesses uncovered. The NIST hash function competition is causing a great deal of new hash function research and we'll almost certainly get a bunch of great new hash functions out of it -- many of them not only secure, but significantly faster than SHA-1.
If you're thinking that "no known attacks" isn't good enough, keep in mind that's as good as it every gets in cryptography, with the sole exception of the One Time Pad
I really hope they don't let the kids get on youtube with these, and think that's all computers are for.
I have an XO (got it because I volunteered to write 4th grade math ed software for it) and I'll tell you that youtube does not work very well on these things. They do have a flash player, but when I go to youtube, the video never plays.
I think that's a good thing, personally.
BTW, the XO is the coolest little machine I've ever seen. It looks and feels like a toy (a solid, sturdy, well-built toy), but the damned thing is quite a powerful little computer, and the Sugar interface rocks. It's different enough that I had a hard time with it, but my kids picked it up unbelievably quickly. My fifth-grade son is learning Python specifically so he can hack on it -- because the local program coordinator told him that if he helped, he'd get an XO of his own.
Select fire is not really practical or useful in our situation. For one, it consumes an enormous amount of ammunition in a short period of time. Two, it is typically used as suppressive fire. We are not likely to have enough supplies or men to fully utilize a suppression tactic, we would be far more effective in using sniper or target of opportunity tactics.
It depends on the details of the scenario. With select fire, you have the option, depending on the tactical situation and ammunition supplies. I agree that there are many scenarios in which a.308 would be superior to a 5.56 mm but the superiority comes from better ballistics, not the lack of select fire options.
Though I suppose undisciplined shooters would be better off if they didn't have the option of rock 'n roll, or even burst fire.
Music in 2010 will be rare and pretty rough, sort of what you expect on the first couple of episodes of American Idol.
It'll take longer than 2010, but music will be high quality, diverse, more plentiful than it has ever been, and completely free. Rather than a few hundred (at the outside) millionaire musicians, we'll have tens of thousands of musicians making a good white collar-level living performing live shows while distributing their recordings for free as advertising. Very few of them will get rich, but many, many more people who would love to make a living with their musical talents will be able to do so, and as a result the musical landscape will be dramatically richer than it has ever been.
But doesn't it still at least have to be ratified?
Yes, by the Senate, which is why treaties are on equal footing with federal law (subject to the Constitution).
The problem I see is that a treaty by any other name might not be treated as such, like what happened with the Status Of Forces Agreement with Iraq, which sounds like it should be considered a treaty and require ratification, but no one really made a fuss about it.
Well, SOFAs shouldn't commit the US to anything that is not already within the purview of US military commanders, so they shouldn't need to be treated like treaties. SHOULDN'T.
I've often pondered the idea that we should gut our military down to a smaller level and rely on the 'rifle behind every blade of grass' concept to deter invasions of the homeland.
I wouldn't underestimate the ability of a population to make an invaders life a living nightmare just with civilian style firearms.
Absolutely. Better weaponry will make it easier to throw them out, but hunting rifles are nearly ideal for harassing. It's no accident that the most popular military sniper caliber, the.308, is also popular for game.
Make sure you tell your elected representatives that. Taking away the "military-style" rifles seems to be objective #1 of the gun control crowd.
Indeed I do, frequently. Self-defense and hunting are well and good, but military small arms are the reason for the second amendment.
But a store that would take a book, then reprint it and sell a bunch of copies would be evil. THAT WAS HOW THINGS WERE before copyright laws.
Indeed it was. I don't agree that it was evil, though. Copyright is good because it brings very real benefit to society, but I fundamentally disagree that creators have a moral right to control their work after they've decided to publish it.
Just to be clear, I am a fan of copyright. I think it's a very good idea. However, it needs to be implemented properly, and on days when I'm feeling particularly uncharitable toward the status quo I can be convinced that what we have is worse than nothing at all.
He'd freak out in under 20 seconds with actual waterboarding.
No way he'd last that long. According to testimony given in Congress, trained CIA agents freak in 14 seconds. Holding your breath for a few seconds is no problem, but when water starts forcing its way down your windpipe and into your lungs, people lose it fast. That's WHY interrogators want to use it.
I agree that fredclown is a clown, and not worth the attention. The fact that so many people ARE okay with it just really pisses me off.
people won't worry about ruining them at the beach
e-Books are much better for reading at the beach than paper books, at least in terms of resistance to salt, sand, water, etc. Just put your e-book in a big ziploc baggy. It doesn't interfere with reading, and protects it so well you can throw the book in the waves if you like. Don't do that with a paper book (unless it's in a baggy, but you have to take it out to read it).
The only downside to an e-book reader on a public beach is that someone might steal it while you're swimming.
As for dropping them... I've been reading primarily on e-Book readers for almost 10 years now (starting with a Rocketbook) and it's really never been a problem. I don't drop them much, and in the rare case it happens, they've survived fine. They're built to take a little abuse, like a cellphone.
We're not as well-prepared as we were 70 years ago, not in terms of weapons, at least.
Yes, the last few months we've had massive increases in sales of guns and ammunition, but there are far fewer guns per capita than there were 70 years ago. Also, even fewer of those guns are rifles (massive increases in handgun ownership of late -- not that that's a bad thing, but they're not militarily very useful) and hardly any of them are high-capacity semi-automatics and virtually none select fire. So our weapons are further from being militarily useful than they were.
Your comment about paintball is interesting though, and the transportation issue is important -- though it also helps the invader. And the total numbers of people and weapons is much, much larger than what we could field 70 years ago.
Overall, we wouldn't be an easy target for invasion. I'd feel better if we had more military-style rifles, though.
I've stated that I'd rather me, or my own mother, daughter/son, or wife (or even all of us), die in another 9/11 should it come to that, than surrender our ideals, which is what we did when we started torturing folks and doing wiretaps without authorization.
You, sir, are a true patriot.
Were that there were more like us.
I hate the self-aggrandizing way that sounds, but you're absolutely right.
I ended up unable to vote Obama either, after he voted for the telecom immunity bill.
That was just one of many, many reasons I couldn't vote for Obama. Not that there's much difference between the Republicrats and Democans, from where I sit. They both want to spend our grandchildren into the poorhouse, neither of them care about our liberties or the Constitution that was intended to protect them, except when it's convenient. Both are perfectly happy to continue providing bread and circuses; the Democrats like to focus more on bread, and the Republicans more on circuses, but it's a matter of degree in both cases.
I've decided that the only thing to do is to pick a party and get involved at the local level, to try to change their platforms, because there's no getting around them, and just picking between them is pointless.
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For instance tightening the restrictions on how registered guns are stored (the gun in this shooting was registered by the father but was not locked away -- had it been, this particular shooting certainly would have been much more difficult).
Had there been some armed teachers at the school, it never would have happened at all. Shooters like this choose places where no guns are allowed for a reason. And, if he'd chosen to do it anyway, his rampage would have been very brief.
It's impossible to make guns inaccessible to killers. What's needed is to make them accessible to rational, law-abiding people so that killers have no chance to succeed.
obtaining an automatic firearm is not as easy as many people would like to believe. It's involves a substantial background check, getting permission from your local law enforcment, and several other obnoxious hoops. The process is time consuming, somewhat complicated and quite expensive.
The process isn't that hard, and it's not expensive at all. $200. The process is identical to that required to get many other NFA items, such as suppressors, and lots of people have those.
The laws affecting automatic weapons have made them an exceptionally pricey hobby.
Yes, but not because of the hoops you have to jump through. The reason they're crazy expensive is because they were banned in 1987. Automatic weapons in civilian hands at that time were grandfathered in, but no new weapons are allowed to enter the market, so the supply is fixed. Fixed supply and growing demand means ever-rising prices.
As a result, you have a tough time finding ANY legally purchasable machine gun for under $10,000, and many of the more desirable ones go for in excess of $30,000.
But a stream cipher, being pseudo-random, is by definition not an OTP. The fact that the keystreams are generally used the same way does not make a non-OTP a kind of OTP.
Sorry if this seems like nitpicking, but it's not. From an information theoretic perspective, the difference between a strong PRNG and an OTP is enormous. In particular, it's large enough that the PRNG does not have an OTP's perfect security.
More like no attacks are feasible. If you have an N-bit document, an N-bit quantum computer can attack it. Since the largest quantum computer know is like 3 bits, you should be safe for awhile.
There is no known quantum computer algorithm for attacking any of these hash functions. Shor's algorithm would allow a quantum computer to attack n-bit RSA with an n-bit quantum computer, but I've never heard of any counterpart for any of these hash algorithms, and it would be algorithm-specific.
Also, there may indeed be feasible attacks on the hash algorithms I mentioned. It's just no one knows of any, yet, and lots of very smart people have looked.
One Time Pad has no technical flaws, but still has to be used correctly. I remember hearing that 's how the US broke a rusian nuclear spy ring - the russians got lazy with the one time pad, and the US spies had enough info to see what was happening.
You're talking about the Venona project. A very impressive bit of cryptanalytic work.
Enigma was an approximation to a one-time pad (mostly because you could reconnect the plug boards as you liked and re-order the wheels as you liked), but was likewise cracked because of carelessness of use.
Enigma was a stream cipher, not an approximation to a one-time pad. The configuration of plug boards, wheel order and initial wheel positions made up the key.
If you're thinking that "no known attacks" isn't good enough, keep in mind that's as good as it every gets in cryptography
I think my math teacher would call that a "necessary but not sufficient" condition, I mean anything can be without known attacks by virtue of never having been reviewed. Minimums should include:
1. Published algorithm, no "secret sauce" security by obscurity 2. Solid peer reviews by other cryptographers, definitely not just the vendor or their hirelings 3. Strong links to well-researched hard mathematical problems
Absolutely correct, with the partial exception of #3. It would be nice, perhaps, if #3 applied, but most symmetric ciphers and secure hash algorithms rely on complexity rather than hard problems.
Is there any hash function that actually is secure?
There are some for which no known attacks exist. SHA-256 and SHA-512, Whirlpool and Tiger are all pretty thoroughly-reviewed with no weaknesses uncovered. The NIST hash function competition is causing a great deal of new hash function research and we'll almost certainly get a bunch of great new hash functions out of it -- many of them not only secure, but significantly faster than SHA-1.
If you're thinking that "no known attacks" isn't good enough, keep in mind that's as good as it every gets in cryptography, with the sole exception of the One Time Pad
I'm trying to figure out if that was a insightful speculation or a bunch of words thrown together randomly.
Any sufficiently insightful comment is indistinguishable from gibberish?
I really hope they don't let the kids get on youtube with these, and think that's all computers are for.
I have an XO (got it because I volunteered to write 4th grade math ed software for it) and I'll tell you that youtube does not work very well on these things. They do have a flash player, but when I go to youtube, the video never plays.
I think that's a good thing, personally.
BTW, the XO is the coolest little machine I've ever seen. It looks and feels like a toy (a solid, sturdy, well-built toy), but the damned thing is quite a powerful little computer, and the Sugar interface rocks. It's different enough that I had a hard time with it, but my kids picked it up unbelievably quickly. My fifth-grade son is learning Python specifically so he can hack on it -- because the local program coordinator told him that if he helped, he'd get an XO of his own.
Well, that's two of us. Now we just need to convince the rest of the country :-)
Agreed. We should be better than that.
Select fire is not really practical or useful in our situation. For one, it consumes an enormous amount of ammunition in a short period of time. Two, it is typically used as suppressive fire. We are not likely to have enough supplies or men to fully utilize a suppression tactic, we would be far more effective in using sniper or target of opportunity tactics.
It depends on the details of the scenario. With select fire, you have the option, depending on the tactical situation and ammunition supplies. I agree that there are many scenarios in which a .308 would be superior to a 5.56 mm but the superiority comes from better ballistics, not the lack of select fire options.
Though I suppose undisciplined shooters would be better off if they didn't have the option of rock 'n roll, or even burst fire.
Music in 2010 will be rare and pretty rough, sort of what you expect on the first couple of episodes of American Idol.
It'll take longer than 2010, but music will be high quality, diverse, more plentiful than it has ever been, and completely free. Rather than a few hundred (at the outside) millionaire musicians, we'll have tens of thousands of musicians making a good white collar-level living performing live shows while distributing their recordings for free as advertising. Very few of them will get rich, but many, many more people who would love to make a living with their musical talents will be able to do so, and as a result the musical landscape will be dramatically richer than it has ever been.
But doesn't it still at least have to be ratified?
Yes, by the Senate, which is why treaties are on equal footing with federal law (subject to the Constitution).
The problem I see is that a treaty by any other name might not be treated as such, like what happened with the Status Of Forces Agreement with Iraq, which sounds like it should be considered a treaty and require ratification, but no one really made a fuss about it.
Well, SOFAs shouldn't commit the US to anything that is not already within the purview of US military commanders, so they shouldn't need to be treated like treaties. SHOULDN'T.
They express different positions on many matters, but the results are the same no matter which party is in power.
I've often pondered the idea that we should gut our military down to a smaller level and rely on the 'rifle behind every blade of grass' concept to deter invasions of the homeland.
I think that's a marvellous idea (third paragraph).
I wouldn't underestimate the ability of a population to make an invaders life a living nightmare just with civilian style firearms.
Absolutely. Better weaponry will make it easier to throw them out, but hunting rifles are nearly ideal for harassing. It's no accident that the most popular military sniper caliber, the .308, is also popular for game.
Make sure you tell your elected representatives that. Taking away the "military-style" rifles seems to be objective #1 of the gun control crowd.
Indeed I do, frequently. Self-defense and hunting are well and good, but military small arms are the reason for the second amendment.
But a store that would take a book, then reprint it and sell a bunch of copies would be evil. THAT WAS HOW THINGS WERE before copyright laws.
Indeed it was. I don't agree that it was evil, though. Copyright is good because it brings very real benefit to society, but I fundamentally disagree that creators have a moral right to control their work after they've decided to publish it.
Just to be clear, I am a fan of copyright. I think it's a very good idea. However, it needs to be implemented properly, and on days when I'm feeling particularly uncharitable toward the status quo I can be convinced that what we have is worse than nothing at all.
He'd freak out in under 20 seconds with actual waterboarding.
No way he'd last that long. According to testimony given in Congress, trained CIA agents freak in 14 seconds. Holding your breath for a few seconds is no problem, but when water starts forcing its way down your windpipe and into your lungs, people lose it fast. That's WHY interrogators want to use it.
I agree that fredclown is a clown, and not worth the attention. The fact that so many people ARE okay with it just really pisses me off.
The problem with the iron spike idea is that most people don't know that the iron spike is going to do them any harm in a crash.
Put a nice razor-sharp point on it and I think they'll get the idea.
people won't worry about ruining them at the beach
e-Books are much better for reading at the beach than paper books, at least in terms of resistance to salt, sand, water, etc. Just put your e-book in a big ziploc baggy. It doesn't interfere with reading, and protects it so well you can throw the book in the waves if you like. Don't do that with a paper book (unless it's in a baggy, but you have to take it out to read it).
The only downside to an e-book reader on a public beach is that someone might steal it while you're swimming.
As for dropping them... I've been reading primarily on e-Book readers for almost 10 years now (starting with a Rocketbook) and it's really never been a problem. I don't drop them much, and in the rare case it happens, they've survived fine. They're built to take a little abuse, like a cellphone.
Engineers, hold on to your text books. I know that $20 for beer looks good now but you'll want that book later much more than you want the beer now.
We burn heretics around here. That's the 4th law of thermdynamics.
Indeed we do. Book-selling heretics shall all go up in flames!
We're not as well-prepared as we were 70 years ago, not in terms of weapons, at least.
Yes, the last few months we've had massive increases in sales of guns and ammunition, but there are far fewer guns per capita than there were 70 years ago. Also, even fewer of those guns are rifles (massive increases in handgun ownership of late -- not that that's a bad thing, but they're not militarily very useful) and hardly any of them are high-capacity semi-automatics and virtually none select fire. So our weapons are further from being militarily useful than they were.
Your comment about paintball is interesting though, and the transportation issue is important -- though it also helps the invader. And the total numbers of people and weapons is much, much larger than what we could field 70 years ago.
Overall, we wouldn't be an easy target for invasion. I'd feel better if we had more military-style rifles, though.
I've stated that I'd rather me, or my own mother, daughter/son, or wife (or even all of us), die in another 9/11 should it come to that, than surrender our ideals, which is what we did when we started torturing folks and doing wiretaps without authorization.
You, sir, are a true patriot.
Were that there were more like us.
I hate the self-aggrandizing way that sounds, but you're absolutely right.
I ended up unable to vote Obama either, after he voted for the telecom immunity bill.
That was just one of many, many reasons I couldn't vote for Obama. Not that there's much difference between the Republicrats and Democans, from where I sit. They both want to spend our grandchildren into the poorhouse, neither of them care about our liberties or the Constitution that was intended to protect them, except when it's convenient. Both are perfectly happy to continue providing bread and circuses; the Democrats like to focus more on bread, and the Republicans more on circuses, but it's a matter of degree in both cases.
I've decided that the only thing to do is to pick a party and get involved at the local level, to try to change their platforms, because there's no getting around them, and just picking between them is pointless.