Damn. Got all excited...
on
New Crypto-OS
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· Score: 3
I read the title, "New Crypto-OS" and I thought Wow! An operating system centered on cryptographic principles. That's so cool and temporally relevant!
It could support a PGP encrypted USB and digital video interface for disabling tempest and keystroke attacks. It could be built to only support SSL, SSH or other wise secure TCP/IP protocols, possibly some kind of ISP program through Anonymizer (or anyone, really).
Just think, a system based on the principle that the only place cleartext exists is on the CPU (and other minute pathways between crypchips and rasterizers, logic elements, etc...
But no, it's just another open source project for people to mess with... Sigh.
Is it just me, or was there something wrong with the link? It critiqued the Stowaway just fine, but didn't go anywhee else, no 'next page' link, or anything to do with the GoType.
The jolt is the effect of passing an electrical current through a solonoid within a magnetic field. There are three obvious flaws with trying to use this as any sort of propulsion:
The 'jolt' would only occur when there's an outside magnetic field for it to 'jolt' against, and the strength of the jolt would be directly proportional to the strength of that field. Go to interstellar space and you have little or no jolt.
You have little control over the vector of the jolt. While the orientation of the solonoid makes a difference, it's trying to use it to navigate would be like tacking into the wind on a sailboat.
The biggie: Since the jolt is the result of the EM delta when the solonoid is activated, there is an equal and opposite jolt when the electromagnet is turned off. Basically it's like throwing a brick with a string tied to it out of a spaceship. The spaseship will move, but when it reached the end of the string, it'll stop again.
In this metaphor, to cut the string, you'd have to actually have an infinitely long string, which equates to never shutting off the solonoid, which means you get one 'jolts' worth of accelleration, for as long as you keep the charge in the solonoid.
For the picky, rotating the solonoid 180 degrees while charged wouldn't work either, as it would have exactly the same effect on accelleration as shutting it down and charging it up again with a reversed polarity, so charging, turning, discharging, turning, etc wouldn't work at all. It's like a gyroscope in that capacity.
Oh yes, but there they don't fire you, they just keep you at low pay unless you're a good teacher, in which case they'll fast-track you to administration.
There's a reason they teach these things early in life.
Yes, and that reason is because these are things that aren't implicit in human nature, otherwise they wouldn't have to be taught. A person's right to vote for their chosen candidate shouldn't be limited to how well they learned and retained these lessons in school.
There is exactly and only ONE way that this ballot could be inturpreted. It can not be inturpreted in any other way.
I don't care much for hyperbole, but this is the stupidest thing I've heard all week. There's one and only one way it was intended to be interpreted. To say that there's only one way it could be interpreted is so stupid that I'm not about to go into why. Anyone who actually believes there's only one possible interpretation
of anything couldn't be talked out of a wet paper bag so I won't waste time trying.
I've put together a page illustrating three alternate ways a person could cognitively process the Palm Beach ballot, all of which would give erroneous Gore votes to Buchanan.
It's just a first pass, but it should make my visual perception and cognitive neuroscience teachers happy.
Date: Sun, 5 Nov 2000 22:19:32 -0800 (PST)
From: Kevin Fox
To: frezza@alum.mit.edu
Subject: IPv6 vs the Status Quo
I just finished reading your article at Internet Week and I had two comments:
First, network interface addresses aren't always hardwired, and many NICs allow you to, with the proper utility, change your 48-bit address to
anything you want.
Second, your Ethernet address is heavily used under current networks for a lot of things, and is stored in mailserver logs, correlated to email that you send out, and DHCP keeps records of Ethernet address/IP address mappings, records that could be hacked or subpoenaed to create a relatively solid link between an IP/time to an NIC.
While I agree with many points in your article, I do think the above points were worth mentioning, as omitting them gives the article an aura of "We were safe before, but with IPv6 we're all f***ed." In actuality, we're only kind of safe now, and after IPv6, we're only kind of f***ed.
Got it. But this is exactly the problem. If you actually want to use the number for any purpose more meaningful than striking panic, you need to have both numbers, and not one. Mapping two independent variables onto one dimension has big problems, as the linked chart shows.
For example, an impact that would cause regional damage and has a 98% chance of striking is rated as a 3, while one with a 99% chance of striking is an 8.
Another example: According to the chart, an impact with global consequences and a 1:1000 probability merits a 2 on the Torini scale, but if it has a 1:999 probability, it jumps to a 6 on the scale.
Both of the above examples are where the spatial regions meet at a line. If you look at where they meet at a point, it's possible to nudge an impact between a ranking of 2 and 7 (KE: 10E5MT, P: 10E-2), or from a 3 to a 9 (KE:100MT, P: 0.99).
This is arbitrary and, as mentioned before, useless for anything other than scaremongering and puff-pieces.
The Torino Scale, as presented in the link provided in the story, is useless. It tries to rank objects on a scale of 0 to 10 based on the damage they would inflict if an impact did occur, yet it simultaneously tries to rank based on the likelihood of collision, though these factors aren't necessarily correlated at all.
Basically, an object gets a 0 if it is extremely unlikely to hit the Earth and|or wouldn't inflict any damage if it did. An object gets an 8, 9, or 10 if it's certain to hit the Earth, and|or would inflict continental or global devistation.
The Torino scale doesn't give a way to categorize objects which are certain to strike the Earth but pose no danger, nor does it facilitate ranking objects that could prove catacalysmic, but have only a marginal likelyhood of impact.
Looks like something more suited to a bad asteriod movie than a NASA research site.
c'mon. Of course Christmas is a Christian holiday. Sure, it was imported into the Christian dogma from pagan cultures, which celebrates the winter Solstice as Yule, the day of the rebirth of the Sun God, and even the term Yule is a descendent of Norse Iul, meaning 'wheel' symbolizing the rejuvination of the annular cycle.
The point is that religions, like language, are evolutionary phenomena, and nearly every aspect is derived from preceeding religions. Easter is the transmutation of the Spring Equinox Sabbat, and shares the themes of death and rebirth. Halloween, All Saints Day, and the Mexican Day of the Dead are all direct descendent of Samhain, the day which pagan cultures believed marked the closest passing of the worlds of the living and the dead.
To say that Christmas has 'never had anything to do with Jesus' is stupid, pure and simple. Holidays and observences, like open source projects, evolve and yes, fork. Christmas is a Christian fork of the Winter Solstice project and has a whole lot to do with Jesus.
Am I stupid? Is it that you didn't read my post, or didn't understand it? They noticed when they were being bombarded by the EM signal, but it was a simple sine wave, coming from an identifiable source outside the embassy, and they concluded it was a jamming attempt.
The Soviets used a system similar to this to spy on the US Embassy in Moscow about 20 years ago. They 'gifted' a wall emblem to the embassy, and of course it was checked for bugs, and no emissions were found, but it actually had embedded a long copper loop that acted as an induction coil.
The gist was, the KGB could park a van a block away and emit a very powerful high frequency sine wave at the embassy and the coil in the emblem would turn the EM flux into power to drive an embedded microphone and transmitter (using the same coil).
This went on for several years because the US regularly ran bug sweeps but it wasn't generating or storing any energy most of the time, and when it was being powered from the outside, the US figured it was some sort of attempt at jamming telecommunications within the embassy (which it was doing a very poor job of, being at the wrong frequency) so they basically ignored it.
Anyhow, this is all relevant because these RF tags are powered by inductance, which means any range limitation is purely a factor of the EM field powering it. There's no inheirent limitation in the device itself.
As for privacy, I don't care about tags in my cereal box. If I can walk out of a store and automatically debit my account instead of waiting in line, so much the better. If I can tie it to an anonymous cash card instead of my credit card, better still. If there's anything to worry about, it's the RF-powered listening devices, but since you probably don't run bug sweeps inside your own house on a regular basis, this isn't any more dangerous than an ordinary joe-blow X-10 camera bug in your shower.
It would make an interesting twist to the torture scenario described in the above link if Rubberhose, at the outset, had a way of specifying that this given data file must contain at least 15% (or 5%, or 50%, whatever) noise, and this number could somehow be encrypted into part of the noise in a keyed fashion that even the user wouldn't have access to. This way the torturers would feel even more uneasy because they'd realize that just because there's still 15% of the data left unaccounted for, that 15% could easily be Rubberhose's allocation.
Interesting stuff. Just another example that when you think of a cool software idea, you should check google and see where you can download it.
Someone needs to write a pgp-driven encryption tool that works as follows:
It take a file to be encrypted, encrypts it, appends it to either another encrypted file using a different key, or a noise file encrypted using a random and discarded key, then merges the two and encrypts again using the first file's key.
Use this tool all the time whenever you encrypt anything. It will result in files twice the size of the original, but you can legitimately say you only have the key for one half of the file, and the other half is noise, as demonstrated by examining the open-source encryption program. However, it's entirely possible that the person could choose to merge in another, 'secret' encrypted file instead of the noise file, and this could only be proven if that key is discovered or cracked.
If such a program went into widespread use, the Enzed gov't would either have to prosecute everyone who used the program, despite the fact that they're breaking no laws, or they would lack any means of obtaining keys (which they can't prove even exist) to uncover data they similarly can't prove the existence of.
The only contact I had with DARE was in 4th grade. We had an assembly hosted by a police officer and the main thing I learned and took away from the assembly was that police officers don't prosecute drug users, they prosecute drug pushers and sellers.
As it turned out, I grew into a person who doesn't use drugs and seldom drinks, but after that assembly I wasn't as scared of the legal implications of using drugs as I was before.
On the other side of the coin, DARE might as well be called SCARE by the lack of education on exactly how 'bad' specific drugs are relative to one another. If they were honest, they'd be warning on the dangers of drinking (instead of just drinking and driving) in a louder voice than they cry the dangers of casual marijuana use.
So what? Lawyers will try to protect intellectual property, and reverse-engineering laws will stop them. Sony tried to sue Connectix over their Playstation software emulator, and they lost.
So what you're saying is that/. shouldn't post stories on companies that will try to protect their intellectual property, even when we think they should lose? That's censorship based on third-party ideals, and not news for nerds.
Very, very good point. It's not like they get a tax break if they're a planet but not if they're an asteroid or moon. there only reasons to make a hard distinction are lexical, not functional.
Kevin Fox
Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs
on
X On OSX Now Free
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· Score: 5
Most people's complaint with the cube isn't it's price/performace ration when compared to Intel boxen, but when compared to other Macs. You're paying a premium for a Cube, and what you get is a slower machine than a Mac G4 dual-processor tower, and no expandability. For this you're paying more.
This is why the Cube is the first CPU in Apple's history that hasn't bet initial sales forecasts (this gleaned from their recent earnings conference call).
I love the Cube, but I'm waiting until they come out with the low-cost version in Jan or Feb. They can't cut anything but the price, and I'm pretty sure the 'low price' cube wil be the current cube, and they'll introduce something faster for the premium price. This is what they've been doing with Powerbooks and iMacs for the last three years.
Slashdot Mirror
I read the title, "New Crypto-OS" and I thought Wow! An operating system centered on cryptographic principles. That's so cool and temporally relevant!
It could support a PGP encrypted USB and digital video interface for disabling tempest and keystroke attacks. It could be built to only support SSL, SSH or other wise secure TCP/IP protocols, possibly some kind of ISP program through Anonymizer (or anyone, really).
Just think, a system based on the principle that the only place cleartext exists is on the CPU (and other minute pathways between crypchips and rasterizers, logic elements, etc...
But no, it's just another open source project for people to mess with... Sigh.
Kevin Fox
Is it just me, or was there something wrong with the link? It critiqued the Stowaway just fine, but didn't go anywhee else, no 'next page' link, or anything to do with the GoType.
I'm probably just missing something...
Kevin Fox
In this metaphor, to cut the string, you'd have to actually have an infinitely long string, which equates to never shutting off the solonoid, which means you get one 'jolts' worth of accelleration, for as long as you keep the charge in the solonoid.
For the picky, rotating the solonoid 180 degrees while charged wouldn't work either, as it would have exactly the same effect on accelleration as shutting it down and charging it up again with a reversed polarity, so charging, turning, discharging, turning, etc wouldn't work at all. It's like a gyroscope in that capacity.
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
Kind of reminds me of being a teacher.
Oh yes, but there they don't fire you, they just keep you at low pay unless you're a good teacher, in which case they'll fast-track you to administration.
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
There's a reason they teach these things early in life.
Yes, and that reason is because these are things that aren't implicit in human nature, otherwise they wouldn't have to be taught. A person's right to vote for their chosen candidate shouldn't be limited to how well they learned and retained these lessons in school.
There is exactly and only ONE way that this ballot could be inturpreted. It can not be inturpreted in any other way.
I don't care much for hyperbole, but this is the stupidest thing I've heard all week. There's one and only one way it was intended to be interpreted. To say that there's only one way it could be interpreted is so stupid that I'm not about to go into why. Anyone who actually believes there's only one possible interpretation
of anything couldn't be talked out of a wet paper bag so I won't waste time trying.
Kevin Fox
I've put together a page illustrating three alternate ways a person could cognitively process the Palm Beach ballot, all of which would give erroneous Gore votes to Buchanan.
It's just a first pass, but it should make my visual perception and cognitive neuroscience teachers happy.
Kevin Fox
Do gay minority Wiccan women prefer Bush or Nader? Your post wasn't clear.
Kevin Fox
Hopefully when I wake up the world will realize it made a msitake.
The counting kind, not the voting kind...
Kevin Fox
Sure am. My post was in regard to an article referenced by another /. post, not the one mentioned at the top level. Sorry for the confusion.
Kevin Fox
Date: Sun, 5 Nov 2000 22:19:32 -0800 (PST)
From: Kevin Fox
To: frezza@alum.mit.edu
Subject: IPv6 vs the Status Quo
I just finished reading your article at Internet Week and I had two comments:
First, network interface addresses aren't always hardwired, and many NICs allow you to, with the proper utility, change your 48-bit address to
anything you want.
Second, your Ethernet address is heavily used under current networks for a lot of things, and is stored in mailserver logs, correlated to email that you send out, and DHCP keeps records of Ethernet address/IP address mappings, records that could be hacked or subpoenaed to create a relatively solid link between an IP/time to an NIC.
While I agree with many points in your article, I do think the above points were worth mentioning, as omitting them gives the article an aura of "We were safe before, but with IPv6 we're all f***ed." In actuality, we're only kind of safe now, and after IPv6, we're only kind of f***ed.
Thanks,
Kevin Fox
Got it. But this is exactly the problem. If you actually want to use the number for any purpose more meaningful than striking panic, you need to have both numbers, and not one. Mapping two independent variables onto one dimension has big problems, as the linked chart shows.
For example, an impact that would cause regional damage and has a 98% chance of striking is rated as a 3, while one with a 99% chance of striking is an 8.
Another example: According to the chart, an impact with global consequences and a 1:1000 probability merits a 2 on the Torini scale, but if it has a 1:999 probability, it jumps to a 6 on the scale.
Both of the above examples are where the spatial regions meet at a line. If you look at where they meet at a point, it's possible to nudge an impact between a ranking of 2 and 7 (KE: 10E5MT, P: 10E-2), or from a 3 to a 9 (KE:100MT, P: 0.99).
This is arbitrary and, as mentioned before, useless for anything other than scaremongering and puff-pieces.
Kevin Fox
Heh. The irony is it turned out I got it wrong. It's cataclysmic. After reading your post, I just had to make sure...
Kevin Fox
The Torino Scale, as presented in the link provided in the story, is useless. It tries to rank objects on a scale of 0 to 10 based on the damage they would inflict if an impact did occur, yet it simultaneously tries to rank based on the likelihood of collision, though these factors aren't necessarily correlated at all.
Basically, an object gets a 0 if it is extremely unlikely to hit the Earth and|or wouldn't inflict any damage if it did. An object gets an 8, 9, or 10 if it's certain to hit the Earth, and|or would inflict continental or global devistation.
The Torino scale doesn't give a way to categorize objects which are certain to strike the Earth but pose no danger, nor does it facilitate ranking objects that could prove catacalysmic, but have only a marginal likelyhood of impact.
Looks like something more suited to a bad asteriod movie than a NASA research site.
Kevin Fox
c'mon. Of course Christmas is a Christian holiday. Sure, it was imported into the Christian dogma from pagan cultures, which celebrates the winter Solstice as Yule, the day of the rebirth of the Sun God, and even the term Yule is a descendent of Norse Iul, meaning 'wheel' symbolizing the rejuvination of the annular cycle.
The point is that religions, like language, are evolutionary phenomena, and nearly every aspect is derived from preceeding religions. Easter is the transmutation of the Spring Equinox Sabbat, and shares the themes of death and rebirth. Halloween, All Saints Day, and the Mexican Day of the Dead are all direct descendent of Samhain, the day which pagan cultures believed marked the closest passing of the worlds of the living and the dead.
To say that Christmas has 'never had anything to do with Jesus' is stupid, pure and simple. Holidays and observences, like open source projects, evolve and yes, fork. Christmas is a Christian fork of the Winter Solstice project and has a whole lot to do with Jesus.
Kevin Fox
Am I stupid? Is it that you didn't read my post, or didn't understand it? They noticed when they were being bombarded by the EM signal, but it was a simple sine wave, coming from an identifiable source outside the embassy, and they concluded it was a jamming attempt.
Read before you criticize.
Kevin Fox
The Soviets used a system similar to this to spy on the US Embassy in Moscow about 20 years ago. They 'gifted' a wall emblem to the embassy, and of course it was checked for bugs, and no emissions were found, but it actually had embedded a long copper loop that acted as an induction coil.
The gist was, the KGB could park a van a block away and emit a very powerful high frequency sine wave at the embassy and the coil in the emblem would turn the EM flux into power to drive an embedded microphone and transmitter (using the same coil).
This went on for several years because the US regularly ran bug sweeps but it wasn't generating or storing any energy most of the time, and when it was being powered from the outside, the US figured it was some sort of attempt at jamming telecommunications within the embassy (which it was doing a very poor job of, being at the wrong frequency) so they basically ignored it.
Anyhow, this is all relevant because these RF tags are powered by inductance, which means any range limitation is purely a factor of the EM field powering it. There's no inheirent limitation in the device itself.
As for privacy, I don't care about tags in my cereal box. If I can walk out of a store and automatically debit my account instead of waiting in line, so much the better. If I can tie it to an anonymous cash card instead of my credit card, better still. If there's anything to worry about, it's the RF-powered listening devices, but since you probably don't run bug sweeps inside your own house on a regular basis, this isn't any more dangerous than an ordinary joe-blow X-10 camera bug in your shower.
Kevin Fox
It would make an interesting twist to the torture scenario described in the above link if Rubberhose, at the outset, had a way of specifying that this given data file must contain at least 15% (or 5%, or 50%, whatever) noise, and this number could somehow be encrypted into part of the noise in a keyed fashion that even the user wouldn't have access to. This way the torturers would feel even more uneasy because they'd realize that just because there's still 15% of the data left unaccounted for, that 15% could easily be Rubberhose's allocation.
Interesting stuff. Just another example that when you think of a cool software idea, you should check google and see where you can download it.
Kevin Fox
If noise files are illegal then only criminals will have noise files.
Kevin Fox
Someone needs to write a pgp-driven encryption tool that works as follows:
It take a file to be encrypted, encrypts it, appends it to either another encrypted file using a different key, or a noise file encrypted using a random and discarded key, then merges the two and encrypts again using the first file's key.
Use this tool all the time whenever you encrypt anything. It will result in files twice the size of the original, but you can legitimately say you only have the key for one half of the file, and the other half is noise, as demonstrated by examining the open-source encryption program. However, it's entirely possible that the person could choose to merge in another, 'secret' encrypted file instead of the noise file, and this could only be proven if that key is discovered or cracked.
If such a program went into widespread use, the Enzed gov't would either have to prosecute everyone who used the program, despite the fact that they're breaking no laws, or they would lack any means of obtaining keys (which they can't prove even exist) to uncover data they similarly can't prove the existence of.
Kevin Fox
The only contact I had with DARE was in 4th grade. We had an assembly hosted by a police officer and the main thing I learned and took away from the assembly was that police officers don't prosecute drug users, they prosecute drug pushers and sellers.
As it turned out, I grew into a person who doesn't use drugs and seldom drinks, but after that assembly I wasn't as scared of the legal implications of using drugs as I was before.
On the other side of the coin, DARE might as well be called SCARE by the lack of education on exactly how 'bad' specific drugs are relative to one another. If they were honest, they'd be warning on the dangers of drinking (instead of just drinking and driving) in a louder voice than they cry the dangers of casual marijuana use.
Kevin Fox
So what? Lawyers will try to protect intellectual property, and reverse-engineering laws will stop them. Sony tried to sue Connectix over their Playstation software emulator, and they lost.
/. shouldn't post stories on companies that will try to protect their intellectual property, even when we think they should lose? That's censorship based on third-party ideals, and not news for nerds.
So what you're saying is that
Kevin Fox
Very, very good point. It's not like they get a tax break if they're a planet but not if they're an asteroid or moon. there only reasons to make a hard distinction are lexical, not functional.
Kevin Fox
Most people's complaint with the cube isn't it's price/performace ration when compared to Intel boxen, but when compared to other Macs. You're paying a premium for a Cube, and what you get is a slower machine than a Mac G4 dual-processor tower, and no expandability. For this you're paying more.
This is why the Cube is the first CPU in Apple's history that hasn't bet initial sales forecasts (this gleaned from their recent earnings conference call).
I love the Cube, but I'm waiting until they come out with the low-cost version in Jan or Feb. They can't cut anything but the price, and I'm pretty sure the 'low price' cube wil be the current cube, and they'll introduce something faster for the premium price. This is what they've been doing with Powerbooks and iMacs for the last three years.
Kevin Fox