From what? What attacks? What value does it have to the attacker? What value does the secret hold to you? Who are the attackers?
For example if the value of the secret is low to you, then spending money on protecting it is a waste. Encryption costs to buy, costs to run, costs to manage keys, costs in convenience. eg. (Most secrets aren't worth a trip across town because you forgot your keys once)
If the attackers are internal, (they usually are), then encryption buys you nothing.
If the value of the secret is large and the attackers have physical access, then encryption is the strongest link in a very weak chain.
If many people have access to the secret, then social engineering will weasel it out no matter what your encryption.
If the attackers are evil and powerful, then encryption is a red flag to very Bad Bulls. You better off with more primitive methods that require real humans to eye ball it.
Get these questions lined up and answered before you start.
The problem with voting is that it only takes something like 16% of the population to be motivated morons to outvote the 15% of people on the other side.
Valid issues of concern to minority groups have received more attention in the last few years of MMP than in decades before.
I remember once years ago freaking my colleagues out with a largish app written in R... with nary a loop anywhere.
Actually that wasn't why I used R, just a fun addendum. The reason to use R is the huge body of statistics, data mining and graphics facilities. Superb.
Of course, the problem with any statistical library is you have to turn your brain on first. Nothing produces "Garbage in Garbage out" quite like statistical analysis.
With R you tend to need to spend far more time thinking about why you are doing something, and what the answer means than in say vanilla C/Ruby programming.
Which is actually not a Bad Thing at all.
The worse thing about R programming is its name. Googling for "R" turns up way to much noise and way too little signal.
The Green's are quite correct in that what little is left of our natural ecology is in urgent need of conservation.
My guess from what I have seen is Labour and the Nats watered down the law so you weren't adequately compensated. (That would cost them real money! Schlock Horror!)
Yes, it is an entirely accepted point of common law for eons that the government for the greater good of the people _can_ decide when / whom / why you sell your property. The matching flip side is you should be adequately compensated.
Environment - they may mean well, but their lack of scientific knowledge about the environment leads them to support all kinds of ideas that sound good on the surface, but would in fact be detrimental to the environment. e.g. their endorsement of biofuels.
Still gullibly eating MSM sound bites?
This tragic little Energy (Fuels, Levies, and References) Biofuel Obligation Repeal Bill, rushed through all its stages under urgency by a Minister of Energy and Resources who is ignorant of most aspects of his portfolio--apart from perhaps sexy coal--will do exactly the opposite of what the Minister says it will do. It will replace the potentially sustainable local industry--stable, secure and well known--with intermittent imports of biofuels from unknown sources, which are likely to include palm oil from South-east Asia grown where the tropical forests, the last refuge of the orang-utan, used to grow, and corn ethanol with a higher carbon footprint than petroleum, subsidised by the US Government. That is what this bill will do
Looks like she's done her homework to me.
Freedom - Uhhhhh.... do you know anything about the greens at all?
Green MP Keith Locke is calling for an inquiry into the Police Special Investigation Group following evidence it is planting paid informants in legitimate protest groups.
This morning the Sunday Star-Times carried details of activities of a Police informer who infiltrated and spied upon Greenpeace and groups active on animal rights, climate change and peace issues. The informer was operating under the instructions of the Police Special Investigation Group.
"Such Stasi tactics are unacceptable in New Zealand," said Mr Locke, the party's Police spokesperson.
"Peace and environmental protesters are the conscience of society, not enemies of the state.
I know it is very hard for you to digest more than a sound bite, but try
actually read the whole of Gordon Campbell's analysis of the Zaoui case. Oh yes, Campbell is the Green's media rep. Oh yes, What is the difference between myself and Zaoui? I have a letter of recommendation from a police force that murdered thousands and Zaoui is a democratically elected representative. Guess who the Labour (and certainly the National) parties imprisoned?
NZ has one of the highest prison populations on the planet (tiny compared to Gulag America I know), but which parties want to build more prisons?
Opposing better education for a small elite, yes they oppose that bitterly.
Good. They support better education for all, personally this policy will help my kids quite a bit.
Let's face it, there is only one party left in NZ with any conscience. That's the Greens.
Most (non-troll) slashdotters would be quite in agreement with all the Greens 'net policies and get a comfortable feeling that these guys actually understand and like the 'net.
The Main Stream Media tries damn hard to portray the Greens as dope smoking hippy nutters, but thats because they're the only party in parliament not deep in the pockets of big business.
If you actually look closely, the Greens are the only ones that give a shit about the environment, freedom, the poor and little guy. The rest of them only care about campaign funds, and a recursive frenzy between the media irrelavent sensationalized "human interest" stories and the politicians saying whatever ill-thought out thing that will make them look good on TV. Law and Order is a favourite.
climbing Everest is still #1 on my list of things to do before I die.
Silly sods know they have one chance, and probably realise at about the 60% mark they should give up and turn around, but know if they do they will die without having achieved #1. So they push on, already behind, already over exerting, hit the top too late, and yes, it was the #1 and #omega thing they did before they died.
I talking about style and preferences and domain of operation, not ability.
Have you ever watched good mathematicians and physicists at work? I have and they clearly go about life in different ways.
My best guess as to what the difference is physicists operate in a highly constrained subset of mathematics.
Namely one where conservation laws and deep symmetries and occam's razor rules. Analytic solubility and rigor is merely a "nice to have". If they can't solve it, thats OK, numerically solving to check against experiment is perfectly acceptable.
Half of a mathematicians work is inventing a problem space with a rich array of interesting and non-obvious but analytically soluble properties. Applicability to any physical realm is usually an idle afterthought, and numerical solutions usually have very little value.
Excellent physicists seem to have a powerful intuition about how the maths work that enables them to leap frog over many steps in the derivation.
Well, perhaps I misphrased that... they have a powerful intuition guided by a deep understanding of how physical laws, symmetry and conservation laws constrain the mathematics.
A mathematician's intuition can only rely on symmetry, and hence the urge to fill in the gaps.
But the bottom line is Feynman's books are horrible for those who aren't near Feynman in ability and familiarity with the physical and conservation laws.
The trouble with 99% of the physics text out there, is you give them a mathematician and he reads the first two pages.
The mathematician goes off for three weeks filling in all the gaps and "leaps of faith".
He comes back to the book, and reads page three.
Mathematician flings book against the wall, and goes off and finds something more rigorous to read.
As I remember them, the Feynman lecture series were finely crafted instruments of torture for those who delight in rigor. Personally I think he entitled the wrong book "You must be Joking!"
Perhaps all this a nonny mouse anger arises from the mile long EULAs that we are supposed to read (but don't) ((because we'd start rioting if we were forced to)).
At the end of these sublimely irritating EULA's is an "I Accept" button.
However, nobody, but nobody, clicks on an "I Accept" button thinking "I truly accept, understand and welcome these words of wisdom which in exchange for a paltry sum of money, have made my life much better".
Universally, on clicking on "I Accept" around the 'net the one silent, but LOUD thought occurs, which is, as the parent so aptly expressed, "FUCK YOU!"
...the trouble with any encryption is it sends a strong signal to the spooks... This guy is hiding something, put him through the works and see if anything leaks out.
But I dare say you may be safe... after all, TrueCrypt has probably received a visit from No Such Agency.
Moore's law has gifted me with 2**20 increase in compute power since I started programming.
But me old dinosaur brain hasn't been upgraded at all at all.
Me (and my cow-orkers) were crappy at creating defect free concurrency when we started, and I'm afraid this new bunch of cow-orkers aren't much better either.
...not only is a signal handler another thread context, it's a dodgy thread context in which you may not do "real" work where the definition of "real" is some dodgy illspecified period of time. And then people wonder why systems aren't robust. Sigh!
You can avoid threads all you like... but several libraries / toolkits automagically spin threads for you. eg. If you using java graphical stuff odds on it has it's own thread whirring away doing stuff.
Threads have subtle and noxious interactions with processes. Say "man pthread_atfork" sometime to see what I mean.
ISRs/Timer/alarm/signal callbacks are effectively another thread context. ie. Most largish systems that claim to be "single threaded" aren't.
....it's the nature of hierarchical systems like corporates that the _WORST_ companies, employing the WORST methods employ the most people because they are so inefficient that they need to get the job done.
And, depending on multiple factors like... how complete their monopoly is, how rich their niche is, how fat their investors pockets are, how crooked their pocket politicians are... they last a widely varying length of time. As they say, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
Alas, since they set the methods for, the processes used by so many people, they get to all the conferences, write the papers, fill the text books.... with crap!
So which are the right methods? Which are the best tools?
Nobody actually has the foggiest.
Now. Let me really pour the flaming oil on...
And, no matter what Fred Brook's sacred book says, there really is a magic bullet for software development.
It's called doing software properly. From the top to the bottom. It's called relentless simplicity. It's called sound design. It's called proper UI design. It's called Quality beats Schedule.
Compared to the rest of the dump shoddy pack, yes, two orders of magnitude improvement are available.
Alas... nobody knows what it is.
Nobody even knows what "improve" is. The field is obscured by vapour, hype and gas created by the "biggest" and "BEST" companies.
Slashdot Mirror
What are you trying to protect?
From what? What attacks? What value does it have to the attacker? What value does the secret hold to you? Who are the attackers?
For example if the value of the secret is low to you, then spending money on protecting it is a waste. Encryption costs to buy, costs to run, costs to manage keys, costs in convenience. eg. (Most secrets aren't worth a trip across town because you forgot your keys once)
If the attackers are internal, (they usually are), then encryption buys you nothing.
If the value of the secret is large and the attackers have physical access, then encryption is the strongest link in a very weak chain.
If many people have access to the secret, then social engineering will weasel it out no matter what your encryption.
If the attackers are evil and powerful, then encryption is a red flag to very Bad Bulls. You better off with more primitive methods that require real humans to eye ball it.
Get these questions lined up and answered before you start.
Valid issues of concern to minority groups have received more attention in the last few years of MMP than in decades before.
I retract my sole criticism of R.
Actually that wasn't why I used R, just a fun addendum. The reason to use R is the huge body of statistics, data mining and graphics facilities. Superb.
Of course, the problem with any statistical library is you have to turn your brain on first. Nothing produces "Garbage in Garbage out" quite like statistical analysis.
With R you tend to need to spend far more time thinking about why you are doing something, and what the answer means than in say vanilla C/Ruby programming.
Which is actually not a Bad Thing at all.
The worse thing about R programming is its name. Googling for "R" turns up way to much noise and way too little signal.
I suspect the arrow of causation goes both ways.
My recreational psycho-active pharmaceutical of choice is Coffee.
This is point that is simply not seen by the casual tourist or life long Kiwi.
My guess from what I have seen is Labour and the Nats watered down the law so you weren't adequately compensated. (That would cost them real money! Schlock Horror!)
Yes, it is an entirely accepted point of common law for eons that the government for the greater good of the people _can_ decide when / whom / why you sell your property. The matching flip side is you should be adequately compensated.
Environment - they may mean well, but their lack of scientific knowledge about the environment leads them to support all kinds of ideas that sound good on the surface, but would in fact be detrimental to the environment. e.g. their endorsement of biofuels.
Still gullibly eating MSM sound bites?
Looks like she's done her homework to me.
Freedom - Uhhhhh.... do you know anything about the greens at all?
I know it is very hard for you to digest more than a sound bite, but try actually read the whole of Gordon Campbell's analysis of the Zaoui case. Oh yes, Campbell is the Green's media rep. Oh yes, What is the difference between myself and Zaoui? I have a letter of recommendation from a police force that murdered thousands and Zaoui is a democratically elected representative. Guess who the Labour (and certainly the National) parties imprisoned?
NZ has one of the highest prison populations on the planet (tiny compared to Gulag America I know), but which parties want to build more prisons?
Opposing better education for a small elite, yes they oppose that bitterly.
Good. They support better education for all, personally this policy will help my kids quite a bit.
Most (non-troll) slashdotters would be quite in agreement with all the Greens 'net policies and get a comfortable feeling that these guys actually understand and like the 'net.
The Main Stream Media tries damn hard to portray the Greens as dope smoking hippy nutters, but thats because they're the only party in parliament not deep in the pockets of big business.
If you actually look closely, the Greens are the only ones that give a shit about the environment, freedom, the poor and little guy. The rest of them only care about campaign funds, and a recursive frenzy between the media irrelavent sensationalized "human interest" stories and the politicians saying whatever ill-thought out thing that will make them look good on TV. Law and Order is a favourite.
Silly sods know they have one chance, and probably realise at about the 60% mark they should give up and turn around, but know if they do they will die without having achieved #1. So they push on, already behind, already over exerting, hit the top too late, and yes, it was the #1 and #omega thing they did before they died.
So why is anybody surprised by these results?
Have you ever watched good mathematicians and physicists at work? I have and they clearly go about life in different ways.
My best guess as to what the difference is physicists operate in a highly constrained subset of mathematics.
Namely one where conservation laws and deep symmetries and occam's razor rules. Analytic solubility and rigor is merely a "nice to have". If they can't solve it, thats OK, numerically solving to check against experiment is perfectly acceptable.
Half of a mathematicians work is inventing a problem space with a rich array of interesting and non-obvious but analytically soluble properties. Applicability to any physical realm is usually an idle afterthought, and numerical solutions usually have very little value.
Well, perhaps I misphrased that... they have a powerful intuition guided by a deep understanding of how physical laws, symmetry and conservation laws constrain the mathematics.
A mathematician's intuition can only rely on symmetry, and hence the urge to fill in the gaps.
But the bottom line is Feynman's books are horrible for those who aren't near Feynman in ability and familiarity with the physical and conservation laws.
The mathematician goes off for three weeks filling in all the gaps and "leaps of faith".
He comes back to the book, and reads page three.
Mathematician flings book against the wall, and goes off and finds something more rigorous to read.
As I remember them, the Feynman lecture series were finely crafted instruments of torture for those who delight in rigor. Personally I think he entitled the wrong book "You must be Joking!"
In which case, a few pennies may drop.
Perhaps all this a nonny mouse anger arises from the mile long EULAs that we are supposed to read (but don't) ((because we'd start rioting if we were forced to)).
At the end of these sublimely irritating EULA's is an "I Accept" button.
However, nobody, but nobody, clicks on an "I Accept" button thinking "I truly accept, understand and welcome these words of wisdom which in exchange for a paltry sum of money, have made my life much better".
Universally, on clicking on "I Accept" around the 'net the one silent, but LOUD thought occurs, which is, as the parent so aptly expressed, "FUCK YOU!"
I'd "click" on "buy" right now.
But I dare say you may be safe... after all, TrueCrypt has probably received a visit from No Such Agency.
Google for crypto nsa backdoor
But me old dinosaur brain hasn't been upgraded at all at all.
Me (and my cow-orkers) were crappy at creating defect free concurrency when we started, and I'm afraid this new bunch of cow-orkers aren't much better either.
...not only is a signal handler another thread context, it's a dodgy thread context in which you may not do "real" work where the definition of "real" is some dodgy illspecified period of time. And then people wonder why systems aren't robust. Sigh!
When I spotted a bug in the output I typed...
list 1000-4000
and my program responded...
Really? Why?
Totally derailed my train of thought.
...was very similar. "None of your errors have been found."
Or is someone linking to The Onion again?
Thanks Yanks, we'll take Good care of it.
And, depending on multiple factors like... how complete their monopoly is, how rich their niche is, how fat their investors pockets are, how crooked their pocket politicians are... they last a widely varying length of time. As they say, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
Alas, since they set the methods for, the processes used by so many people, they get to all the conferences, write the papers, fill the text books.... with crap!
So which are the right methods? Which are the best tools?
Nobody actually has the foggiest.
Now. Let me really pour the flaming oil on...
And, no matter what Fred Brook's sacred book says, there really is a magic bullet for software development.
It's called doing software properly. From the top to the bottom. It's called relentless simplicity. It's called sound design. It's called proper UI design. It's called Quality beats Schedule.
Compared to the rest of the dump shoddy pack, yes, two orders of magnitude improvement are available.
Alas... nobody knows what it is.
Nobody even knows what "improve" is. The field is obscured by vapour, hype and gas created by the "biggest" and "BEST" companies.
Now let the trolls ROCK!