>I don't think what the ATM makers did (non-encryption) is 'far far worse'.
Thief: steals from dozens or hundreds and extracts tens of thousands of dollars. ATM system designers: endanger millions of people and billions of dollars. Thief: subject to all the machinery of the criminal justice system. ATM system designers: legally protected. Thief: expected to be a thief. We have a chance to take precautions. ATM system designers: trusted by default. Very few of us have checked the encryption on ATMs before using them.
If you're going to use a meatspace analogy, compare it to people making buildings out of sugar. We all know that rain happens, so the builders have to pay for all the damage that results and maybe go to prison.
Car analogies are like Yugos: they don't work well, nobody wants them, and they're old news.
If you're African-American on a lonely road with N Caucasian police officers around you from a jurisdiction known for unprofessionalism, standing on your rights might be unwise.
Also be civil to the officer and don't make his/her job any harder than it already is. Remember that if the officer swears in court that you were throwing bags of white powder out the window and you swear that you weren't, the judge will believe the officer and uphold the search. *The officer knows this*. This happens in real life: I knew a criminal lawyer who'd seen a case like that. Many police officers are too honest to pull something like that, some will do it but only to nail down known criminals, some will rationalize it against anyone who acts like a jerk.
What would you think of a friend who treated you to this example argument from law school?
"In the first place, I never borrowed your car". "In the second place, the front end was crumpled when I borrowed it". "And in the third place, I returned it to you in showroom condition".
"Scum" would be one of the milder words you might use.
Look at NOD32 as well. In the underpublicized lab tests of detection rates, it was one of a very few to detect all viruses in the sample. Somewhat awkward user interface.
I'd quibble with point 10: something like Zone Alarm is theoretically unsound but nonetheless useful. Use at least a cheap DNetLinkGearSys NAT router regardless.
Point 9 is good but inadequate. No spyware scanner has a really high detection rate. Use two.
#6 is the most important in the 2006 threat landscape.
>If these bots have control over 'the most secure Windows yet', then that is worthy of note.
It's a program. The user downloads it and runs it. It opens ports and talks over them, a user-level activity.
Even OpenBSD would allow this to happen. It wouldn't happen in reality because the kind of people who run OpenBSD aren't going to run Trojans and may even have systrace policies.
Nothing short of capability-based OSes or Trusted Computing lockdown to approved software is going to stop this kind of thing. It's exploiting humans, and trying to protect the computer from its owner is an area where angels fear to tread.
One problem with campaign finance reform is that it can have the unwanted effect of protecting incumbents.
Your existing Congressperson can get on TV for free in zillions of ways. Name recognition follows. Votes follow, because the natives of this planet confuse familiarity with trust. Challengers can't match that without spending money.
This will be less of a problem if more people quit watching TV and spend their time on the net instead.
Actually, for a long time USians had widespread basic trust in government. It's only since Vietnam that a majority has distrusted the government. It fluctuates over a wide range: Chart of trust in government over time.
It's just common sense, when looking at someone who commands armies and police, never to turn your back on him.
A few dozen independent mechanisms that run a checksum and which work at different points in the process to prevent reproduction, sabotage reproduction, make the mutants non-viable, make the second generation sterile, etc.
The problem is you'll probably find out that in order to keep up with rapidly mutating and adapting cancer cells, the nanites will *need* to mutate.
Progress has to be an improvement over what came before. Mesothelioma, the result of one of our previous experiments with using materials, was not progress.
New stuff needs to be tested. That's simply good engineering.
8 kbps for a typical non-Skype VOIP codec, add packet overhead and you're in the approximate range 10-20 kbps. Skype is more demanding, with one source claiming 3-16 kBps (notice the capital B). So, somewhere in the modem range, maybe up to ISDN speeds.
The hazards are 1. Size. Big organizations can't be efficient in human experience, except maybe at one single specialized activity, and that only with great effort and sacrifice. 2. Misaligned incentives. Corporate managers get pay and perks for making their deparments larger and more expensive. Owners lose. Which brings us to the next point, 3. Lack of oversight. If shareholders don't demand an active board of directors, they're making the same mistake as voters who don't demand representatives who will hold hearings and issue subpoenas.
The link says the test's reliability is.88. At least they give a definition: that's the correlation between results on multiple administrations of the test. So a critical reader will ask what in the name of the Flying Spaghetti Monster that has to do with anything normal people call "reliability".
Then you have to ask, if college students can't judge the objectivity and authority of a web site, how can the test administrators do it?
For that matter, I could have some recursive fun with the parent post. If realmolo will promise to take it as a joke and not an attack: o How is "terrible" defined? Is it a relative or absolute measurement and how is it assessed? o How many is "most"? "Most" out of what sample? How were their numbers counted or estimated? o What's the chain of transmission between measurements of critical reading and the parent post? Did the parent refer to primary sources?
And that's what you can do to a statement that your own experience confirms (mine sure does).
Reading everything critically can leave you feeling like you were dropped on this planet by mistake and don't belong here.
>The Moon is too far away and has too deep a gravity well
The "too far away" part is irrelevant. Distance affects travel time, but the real cost of doing anything in space is the amount of velocity change you need. Travel time isn't a worry from Lunar orbit: remmeber that bulk materials travel across oceans at a few miles per hour and nobody particularly minds waiting a few weeks for them.
Re:thawte offers free x.509 certificates . . .
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PGP Is 15 Years Old
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· Score: 1
Not to mention (Bruce Schneier may have been the first to publish about this):
What guarantees the integrity of IE's list of trusted root certificate authorities? In other words, what stops a piece of malware from installing its own public key as an ultimately trusted one?
The demand for theoretically solid security
on
PGP Is 15 Years Old
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· Score: 1
This point isn't original with me. Ian Griggs, and probably others, have been making it for years. (I'm not even sure I agree).
The use case you want is prevented by existing public key systems. They consider it insecure because there wouldn't be any proof that you were really encrypting to your friend's public key, as opposed to a public key belonging to whoever is wiretapping you. Hence the whole need for directory systems, trust systems, signers and "CA"s (signers you don't know but who are supposed to do a good job).
Mr. Griggs and company raise the question: is the problem of phony keys worth solving, at the cost of a staggering loss of usability?
Their idea is to encrypt without trying to build a theoretically sound PKI. The result would be vulnerable to deliberate attack but still, they argue, incomparably better than sending everything in plaintext.
The counterargument is that crypto without PKI could be worse than plaintext because of the risk of giving people a false sense of security.
Aside from the issue of what threat model to address, the UI problems are ghastly, and only partly because public key crypto is such a hard concept to communicate. I have never come up with a meatspace metaphor that captures all the important properties despite years of thinking about wax seals, drop boxes, and matching halves of torn pieces of paper.
What's been the problem with encrypted voice?
on
PGP Is 15 Years Old
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· Score: 1
Starium fizzled, SpeakFreely was abandoned, STU-III prohibitively overpriced, GSM crypto pathetic, Skype has secret crypto which means nobody savvy will trust it for serious work, and SIP/SRTP: well, a typical comment about that is "Are there any SIP implementations currently supporting SRTP?".
There's a school of thought which holds that unless you have at least two backups of your data, one of them off site, then you don't really have the data.
On this planet, a rapidly rising column of hot moist air creates a dangerous storm. Mars has a thinner atmosphere, but this would create a larger temperature difference to drive the process.
Slashdot Mirror
For example, on a shared server at a colo site?
>I don't think what the ATM makers did (non-encryption) is 'far far worse'.
Thief: steals from dozens or hundreds and extracts tens of thousands of dollars.
ATM system designers: endanger millions of people and billions of dollars.
Thief: subject to all the machinery of the criminal justice system.
ATM system designers: legally protected.
Thief: expected to be a thief. We have a chance to take precautions.
ATM system designers: trusted by default. Very few of us have checked the encryption on ATMs before using them.
If you're going to use a meatspace analogy, compare it to people making buildings out of sugar. We all know that rain happens, so the builders have to pay for all the damage that results and maybe go to prison.
Car analogies are like Yugos: they don't work well, nobody wants them, and they're old news.
If you're African-American on a lonely road with N Caucasian police officers around you from a jurisdiction known for unprofessionalism, standing on your rights might be unwise.
Also be civil to the officer and don't make his/her job any harder than it already is. Remember that if the officer swears in court that you were throwing bags of white powder out the window and you swear that you weren't, the judge will believe the officer and uphold the search. *The officer knows this*. This happens in real life: I knew a criminal lawyer who'd seen a case like that. Many police officers are too honest to pull something like that, some will do it but only to nail down known criminals, some will rationalize it against anyone who acts like a jerk.
What would you think of a friend who treated you to this example argument from law school?
"In the first place, I never borrowed your car".
"In the second place, the front end was crumpled when I borrowed it".
"And in the third place, I returned it to you in showroom condition".
"Scum" would be one of the milder words you might use.
Look at NOD32 as well. In the underpublicized lab tests of detection rates, it was one of a very few to detect all viruses in the sample. Somewhat awkward user interface.
I'd quibble with point 10: something like Zone Alarm is theoretically unsound but nonetheless useful. Use at least a cheap DNetLinkGearSys NAT router regardless.
Point 9 is good but inadequate. No spyware scanner has a really high detection rate. Use two.
#6 is the most important in the 2006 threat landscape.
>If these bots have control over 'the most secure Windows yet', then that is worthy of note.
It's a program. The user downloads it and runs it. It opens ports and talks over them, a user-level activity.
Even OpenBSD would allow this to happen. It wouldn't happen in reality because the kind of people who run OpenBSD aren't going to run Trojans and may even have systrace policies.
Nothing short of capability-based OSes or Trusted Computing lockdown to approved software is going to stop this kind of thing. It's exploiting humans, and trying to protect the computer from its owner is an area where angels fear to tread.
Fast forward a few years. Black market arms dealers offer bug-sized devices that can kill any individual who's outdoors or in unfiltered air.
Who gets the most power out of this technology, big governments or assassins?
One problem with campaign finance reform is that it can have the unwanted effect of protecting incumbents.
Your existing Congressperson can get on TV for free in zillions of ways. Name recognition follows. Votes follow, because the natives of this planet confuse familiarity with trust. Challengers can't match that without spending money.
This will be less of a problem if more people quit watching TV and spend their time on the net instead.
Actually, for a long time USians had widespread basic trust in government. It's only since Vietnam that a majority has distrusted the government. It fluctuates over a wide range: Chart of trust in government over time.
It's just common sense, when looking at someone who commands armies and police, never to turn your back on him.
A few dozen independent mechanisms that run a checksum and which work at different points in the process to prevent reproduction, sabotage reproduction, make the mutants non-viable, make the second generation sterile, etc.
The problem is you'll probably find out that in order to keep up with rapidly mutating and adapting cancer cells, the nanites will *need* to mutate.
Calculated risk, or blind risk?
Progress has to be an improvement over what came before. Mesothelioma, the result of one of our previous experiments with using materials, was not progress.
New stuff needs to be tested. That's simply good engineering.
8 kbps for a typical non-Skype VOIP codec, add packet overhead and you're in the approximate range 10-20 kbps. Skype is more demanding, with one source claiming 3-16 kBps (notice the capital B). So, somewhere in the modem range, maybe up to ISDN speeds.
"the Boost Loopt service could alert users whenever their friends are within a half-mile to 25 miles."
The phone company has to know where you are so they can route the call to the correct tower. Phone companies log everything.
This service simply exposes the information to other cellphone users.
The only way to avoid having location information recorded is to keep the phone turned off and have incoming calls go to a pager.
>"We're the largest Citrix deployment in the world," Deal said.
Alarm bells should have gone off.
>"We're using it in a way that's quite different from the way most organizations are using it"
When you make a pair of statements like that, you're really saying "We've just taken on more technical risk that we understand".
The hazards are
1. Size. Big organizations can't be efficient in human experience, except maybe at one single specialized activity, and that only with great effort and sacrifice.
2. Misaligned incentives. Corporate managers get pay and perks for making their deparments larger and more expensive. Owners lose. Which brings us to the next point,
3. Lack of oversight. If shareholders don't demand an active board of directors, they're making the same mistake as voters who don't demand representatives who will hold hearings and issue subpoenas.
The link says the test's reliability is .88. At least they give a definition: that's the correlation between results on multiple administrations of the test. So a critical reader will ask what in the name of the Flying Spaghetti Monster that has to do with anything normal people call "reliability".
Then you have to ask, if college students can't judge the objectivity and authority of a web site, how can the test administrators do it?
For that matter, I could have some recursive fun with the parent post. If realmolo will promise to take it as a joke and not an attack:
o How is "terrible" defined? Is it a relative or absolute measurement and how is it assessed?
o How many is "most"? "Most" out of what sample? How were their numbers counted or estimated?
o What's the chain of transmission between measurements of critical reading and the parent post? Did the parent refer to primary sources?
And that's what you can do to a statement that your own experience confirms (mine sure does).
Reading everything critically can leave you feeling like you were dropped on this planet by mistake and don't belong here.
"Ours is a high and lonely destiny".
>The Moon is too far away and has too deep a gravity well
The "too far away" part is irrelevant. Distance affects travel time, but the real cost of doing anything in space is the amount of velocity change you need. Travel time isn't a worry from Lunar orbit: remmeber that bulk materials travel across oceans at a few miles per hour and nobody particularly minds waiting a few weeks for them.
Not to mention (Bruce Schneier may have been the first to publish about this):
What guarantees the integrity of IE's list of trusted root certificate authorities? In other words, what stops a piece of malware from installing its own public key as an ultimately trusted one?
Hint: they're stored in the registry.
I don't know enough to say who's right, but here's Phil Zimmermann's acount of PGP history. Also check out Adam Back's PGP timeline, which he warns is probably inaccurate. Microtimes columnist's recollections of PGP history.
This point isn't original with me. Ian Griggs, and probably others, have been making it for years. (I'm not even sure I agree).
The use case you want is prevented by existing public key systems. They consider it insecure because there wouldn't be any proof that you were really encrypting to your friend's public key, as opposed to a public key belonging to whoever is wiretapping you. Hence the whole need for directory systems, trust systems, signers and "CA"s (signers you don't know but who are supposed to do a good job).
Mr. Griggs and company raise the question: is the problem of phony keys worth solving, at the cost of a staggering loss of usability?
Their idea is to encrypt without trying to build a theoretically sound PKI. The result would be vulnerable to deliberate attack but still, they argue, incomparably better than sending everything in plaintext.
The counterargument is that crypto without PKI could be worse than plaintext because of the risk of giving people a false sense of security.
Aside from the issue of what threat model to address, the UI problems are ghastly, and only partly because public key crypto is such a hard concept to communicate. I have never come up with a meatspace metaphor that captures all the important properties despite years of thinking about wax seals, drop boxes, and matching halves of torn pieces of paper.
Starium fizzled, SpeakFreely was abandoned, STU-III prohibitively overpriced, GSM crypto pathetic, Skype has secret crypto which means nobody savvy will trust it for serious work, and SIP/SRTP: well, a typical comment about that is "Are there any SIP implementations currently supporting SRTP?".
There's a school of thought which holds that unless you have at least two backups of your data, one of them off site, then you don't really have the data.
Not to mention the millenia of turning dry places into cropland with irrigation.
On this planet, a rapidly rising column of hot moist air creates a dangerous storm. Mars has a thinner atmosphere, but this would create a larger temperature difference to drive the process.