Oh, and btw, Iceland is making the move to Hydrogen. Don't remember where I read it but the story checked out. Take a look on google.
This is a bit of an overstatement. There is currently a pilot project with hydrogen powered cars (you'll see a few on the street, they're dark green and have the logo of an oil-company on them) a couple of buses I believe, and some trials with fishing boats have started or are about to start.
This is a particularly good idea in Iceland where we have cheap renewable energy in the form of hydroelectric and geothermal power. Also, a very large portion of out oil consumption is by the fishing fleet where there are fewer and much larger engines which should make them more worthwhile to renew.
No, the ISP is not a government body. However, it is required by law to take this action, so the government is definately involved, albeit passively. Basically, the DHCP delegates the power of government to the MPAA et al, so their action under the DMCA should be held to the same standards as any other government action.
Also, you seem to imply that I'm inmature for expressing my contempt for a contemptible "judge"'s actions in a case. Can't you see what is WRONG with that attitude? NOTHING can be above ALL question ina free society!!!! NOTHING!!!
If we as citizens have an ABSOLUTE 1st Amendment right to political speech, which includes bashing or praising Presidents and Congressmen without government reprisal, why does that not ALSO include judges? How can it not? Aren't Federal Judges part of the government, and therefore, subservient to the Constitution?
I'm not particularly interested in the argument about this particular ruling or judge Kaplan, but I can't help but ask one question in response to those two paragraphs:
I just spent about an hour reding through material on their web site and they anwer these points quite well.
(1) Capacity - These personal rail car concepts tend to fail when it comes to extremely dense corridors. As you can imagine, heavy rail can push many more people through a single rail corridor than this sort of technology. Right now you can push about 2K cars/lane/hour, compared to densities of nearly 10K for heavy rail systems. With this technology, you could decrease headways and maybe squeeze another few K through, but:
They claim to get about 20K people per hour over one rail, vs about 2K for a single lane of traffice. This means that you would need about 10 lanes to get the same throughput using the highway system.
(2) Cost - these rail systems still cost on the order of $5M US/km to build, while each highway lane only costs about $200K to build. So, you are still getting less for your tax money with this stuff. Not that I am totally against this, though. Essen (Germany) has a clever system that does this, except the cars are busses that turn into light rail. I can see these applied intelligently for mid-range suburban corridors where other forms of transit are not applicable, but this brings us to the final issue:
Comparing the USD 5M/Km to the USD 0.2M/Km a high-way lane is not quite fair since these systems will carry 10 times the traffic. Of course, the roads are still cheaper than the rail initially, but this system has so many things going for it in terms of the environment it creates in the city and the reduction in pollution, that it might very well be worth it. In fact, almost anything that reduces the reliance on roads is a good thing. And if you can switch from petrolium to electricity in the process, so much the better.
Also, this system would not need to be very dense. That's the beauty of the dual-mode system. You put these rails where there is the heaviest traffic and then use the road systems for the less heavily trafficed routes. So the extra expenditure would only be where there is real need for it.
(3) Consumer Adoption - when you are trying to get customers to change modes and you are asking them to make large capital outlays to do so, you are asking for trouble. This is the main issue with automated highways (like those prototyped at Berkeley). You can build the public infrastructure, but without private investment on a large scale, it does not fly.
The full benefit of this system does not appear without large private expenditure. But! the same rails would be used both for private cars and for the bus-equivalents. Initially it would function essentially as a usual monorail system, except that the "buses" would roll off the end of the rail to reach just a little bit further. Eventually, more of the bus system would be moved onto the rail. This on its own might be enough to make the system worthwhile. Then, once the infrastructure is appearing, people would have some incentive to make their next car RUV-compatible.
So, the adoption should be a lot less painful than what you are implying here. Still, of course, you never know.
A huge benefit of this system over most public transport, is that people can still have their own "car". You still have complete freedom to move about as you wish and can do it in an environment where you feel at home. This is why commuters might adopt this system when they would
never consider taking a train to work.
IBM has been around for an EXTREMELY long time (in computer years, I mean). They've survived longer than many computer companies (Packard Bell, for instance), and outlasted many.com's
Actually, this definately does not do them justice. They are a genuinely old company, at least by American standards:) You can't even compare a company incorporated in 1911 to a.com. They just don't live in the same conceptual space.
I'm sure there are plenty of people who wouldn't want insurance companies and private companies getting hold of their *very private* medical records.
I can understand that people some people might be concerned, but you have to remember that those who receive these records don't know that they are your records. In fact, in the format that they leave the doctors' hands, they are absolutely useless to insurance companies.
I also doubt that you mother has to co-operate with Kári personally:)
If you want to study a very shallow and restricted gene pool you don't go to Tonga or Iceland, you go to Mississippi.
When will they learn?
That's the point. These genepools are fairly uniform, so any genetic deviations (we're talking statistics here, right) are easier to identify and correlating such deviations with particular illnesses becomes much easier.
In fact, her ein Iceland, you are not entered in the database unless your ancesters a couple of generations back were all Icelandic. My great-grandfather was Norwegian, so I might have been rejected.
I don't know how things work in Tonga. In Iceland, no-one is sampled simply because The Company wants a sample. This would be absurd, we're a democratic country.
If, however, a sample has been taken for some reason and stored with your medical records, a copy of this would be sent to Decode along with your other records, but without personally identifying information. I.e. there would be a DNA sample and a medical history. Given a large number of these, you could statisticaly find genes that are likely to be related to particular diseases.
Well, unless the person opts out, in which case those data would not be used for research.
In other words, if I'm a poor Tongan or Icelander, do I get paid for my gene info, or is it taken by the government who has already been paid?
I don't know how things work in Tonga, I don't even know where it is on the map. I do know something about how things work in Iceland (but not all the details) since I am not only an Icelander, but work in computer security for Íslensk Erfðagreining, the Icelandic daughter company of Decode Genetics. Of course, nothing I say is official in any way. In fact I'm probably just making the lot up.
Here, no company has exclusive rights to do genetic research. No company has the right to take samples from an individual without their consent. The government (democratically elected, high voter turnout, no infinitely iterated recounts needed) agreed to the deal. What was sold was not the people's genome, but access to medical health information already collected. You may also opt out of the database, f.ex. by mailing the free-postage form that was sent to every person in the country.
First, any personally identifying information is removed from the data. Second, the data is stored in sealed rooms with camera surveilance and all code which has access to the data is validated by a third party. Third, the code must never return result sets with fewer than a specified number of people. I.e. it is very difficult to use rare traits to get additional information about a person or a small group of people.
The security requirements are incredible. If banks had to adhere to these kinds of standards, I think they'd just decide it wasn't worth the effort and close. We're required to use 10000 bit RSA keys, for example (I wonder if they'd accept 8192 bits keys?) which is just preposterous. But I expect the result will be secure.
I think that, assuming you want to allow large-scale statistical research of this kind at all, it is being done the right way in Iceland. I wouldn't want to guess about Tonga.
I avoid all "desktop environments" since they're too bloated and enforce too much of a system-wide look for me. (A WM, an Emacs, and 20 terminals, and I'm happy...)
This is of course based on a serious mis-understanding. If you look at emacs, this monstrosity could never pass for being an editor. It's huge and bloated, it's got built-in email and web browser support and you besically never have to leave it in a days work. Ergo, emacs is a desktop environment. Why the GNU dudes needed to write *another* desktop environment when they've had emacs for decades is beyond me.
PS The editor component in emacs is great, it's very similar to jed, but ties in better with the rest of the desktop environment and uses the system-wide lisp scripting engine.
Anthony Towns: Supporting this, there's some Apt changes in CVS that'll let people choose a few packages from one distribution and leave the rest from another. Two possibilities come to mind: either running "testing" most of the time, but using a bunch of programs from "unstable" because you're interested in their development; or running mostly from "unstable" except for a few packages you can't afford to have break on that machine. Either way you have a slightly larger buffer between an upload and it making it into "testing".
I've been waiting for something like this to be added, I couldn't believe I was the only one who would want it. Anyway, this will almost certainly bring more testers, since you can run the fairly-safe testing distribution and then test the bleeding-edge stuff you are interested in. Today, it is basically all or nothing. You either run the unstable branch and risk it going to hell completely or you stay away from testing the packages that you are most interested in. It also might make it easier to track down bugs if the parts of the system you are not particularly focusing on are likely to be fairly stable.
the earth used to be a lot warmer, a thousand years ago. That's when the Norse were farming in Greenland, where there is permafrost and desolation today.
The earth has been a lot colder than it is now. Think about the Ice Ages.
The earth was a lot colder than it is now just 500 years ago. Today they call that the mini ice age, and it's what killed off the Norse colonies in Greenland and North America.
Actually, the Norse colonies in Greenland wer very short-lived, decades rather than centuries. I.e. they weren't killed off around 500 years ago, but more like 1000 years ago. There was a very short warm period. This is why Greenland has that completely preposterous name. Iceland (where I live) was named by rather disappointed settelers after a bad winter not many decades earlier. These climate swings were rather short.
And there was no Norse (Icelandic, actually) colony in North-America. Leifur "Heppni" Eiriksson (son of Eirikur who settled in Greenland after being driven from both Norway and then Iceland for killing just a bit too many people) and his people went there for a couple of years and found a land which was "flowing with wine", etc. They seemed to like it, but being used to Icelandic climate, they would! They did, however, have some trouble with the natives:)
I'm sitting in the cellar of my house in Reykjavík, connected via ADSL, ignoring the sunshine outside.
I agree everything Gummi said above, but would add that the scenery here is incredible. This is the most beutiful country on earth. (Yes, I normally live abroad and get homesick, but it is still true!) Reykjavík is the northern-most city of any consequence in the world and you can enjoy constant daylight during the summer (like now) and complain about the (near) constant darkness in the winter. If you are looking for an exciting or interesting place to spend a couple of years, this is it.
The weather is almost certainly responsible for the amount of computer use here. What do you do during the winter? We used to read, but now there are computers. We've had >90% literacy for centuries and now this is turning into almost as much computer literacy.
I greatly admire the Icelandic girls, too, for wearing what Italian girls wear in summer in the middle of an Icelandic winter. I think their physique must be somehow better than ours, because I'm sure that I would die of hypothermia within the hour. But I'm not complaining, of course.
Everyone speaks English. Many of the software companies allready have non-Icelandic employees and in fact, most have a rule that software should be "written in English", i.e. no Icelandic comments and variable names should be English. I expect you can find work without any trouble. I'm only here for 2.5 months myself and I e-mailed the company I most wanted to work for and had the job the next day. Well, they did call me (to Italy) just to confirm that I wasn't a raving lunatic, but it was really no trouble at all.
Also, since the Univerity of Iceland is very small (the population of Iceland is only a wuarter million), many people are forced to go abroad to study. This means that many people, and definately the ones with higher education, are very internationally oriented. They'll very likely have spent a few years living abroad. But everyone comes back. Iceland is a very difficult place to leave.
You write a license with clauses A-G. Clauses A-C give the licensee a number of rights, while the clauses D-F seem to slightly restrict those rights and extract promises from the user to not sue the producer, not to cdriticize the product and not to use any word beginning with a vowel. The use of words starting with 'y' will be determined by the producer on a case-by-case basis.
Clause G then says that if any of those clauses is invalid, that clause shall be void but the rest of the license will still be valid. The producer then goes on to put little flaws in each of the clauses A-F to make them invalid, leaving only the restrictions and no rights.
Of course, this would never actually work if it is true as has been said that a license can only actually grant rights bu not take them away and that the worst that it can threaten is the revokation of those rights, which in this case are none. But now apply this to a proper contract and we have trouble. (or free cash, depending on how evil you are)
Microsoft is already going to lose. All of us are making sure of that. Why let the government set the rules of this game? Whenever they do, the folks who line their pockets get the rules they want. It's just insanity to let government infringe on the industry that has made this country richer than it ever imagined it could be.
The folks who line their pocket are the large corporations who then get the rules they want. You would rather leave it to the corporations directly? Isn't this logic flawed somewhere?
Isn't the point of democracy to first elect responsible leaders and then have them lead? Possibly, though, the democratic process doesn't quite work wherever you live?
The idea that government should not be allowed to interfere with business in any way is absolutely absurd. Business has only its own interests at heart. The government theoretically has the interests of the population at heart. If this is not true, there is somthing wrong with the process by which people come to power and this needs to be fixed, rather than bowing down before the almighty corporations.
But, there is also a bit in the ruling saying that the OS company will have a perpetual, royalty-free license to use and modify and sell, etc. any components which are distributed with the OS, except the browser.
There is then a bit saying how it should be possible for users or even OEM's to remove functionality (although I'm not positively sure this applies to all of those components) and the OEM should even be charged less for the license if they remove the compnent, calculated by how large a fraction of the binaries they are disabling. (Even if they don't get removed!)
The Application company has the right to these things so that they can improve them and sell to Windows users an port them to other platforms. This is the non-Windows company after all:-)
Then there are all the little notes on how they are not allowed to bully anyone to do anything, basically. It's quite a list of things they can no longer do, but which they have previously done to hurt their competitors.
There is a lot of good stuff in that ruling. If it is upheld and enacted and all, the Evil Empire should be unable to do all the things we love them for. If this had happened a few years ago, we would still have OS/2. We might still have DesqView and GEM and DR-DOS and...
(This browser doesn't support cookies, so this may appear to be an anonymous posting. I am not trying to hide.)
Speaking of standard protocols and getting mainstream apps to support free-net (which I'm still thinking about whether I support in general or not), is anyone working on defining URI's for documents on free-net and maybe even adding support for these to Mozilla?
If this really is a more efficient distribution medium people might consider simultaneously releasing a document on the web and on free-net in HTML and link from each to the other.
In fact, you could deliberately copy entire sub-webs from the HTTP-based web to a free-net based equivalent. It would be easy to script this and convert all links. You now have an instant user-base, the system is made much more legitimate and the added number of users and servers makes it more robust, both technically and against themakers, users and abusers of the law.
Hmm... I suppose the most interesting plural would be Coxen, using the Saxon plural? I quote the Jargon File:
On a similarly Anglo-Saxon note, almost anything ending in `x' may form plurals in `-xen' (see VAXen and boxen in the main text). Even words ending in phonetic/k/ alone are sometimes treated this way; e.g., `soxen' for a bunch of socks. Other funny plurals are `frobbotzim' for the plural of `frobbozz' (see frobnitz) and `Unices' and `Twenices' (rather than `Unixes' and `Twenexes'; see Unix, TWENEX in main text). But note that `Unixen' and `Twenexen' are never used; it has been suggested that this is because `-ix' and `-ex' are Latin singular endings that attract a Latinate plural. Finally, it has been suggested to general approval that the plural of `mongoose' ought to be `polygoose'.
The audio file they use to generate the key-file will be converted into a a key-file of about the same size. (They remove the static headers.) As they say, audio files are going to contains noise and be difficult to reproduce exactly. However, an audio file is nowhere near being completely random. If it were completely random it would be impossible to compress, for example. If the best possible lossless audio-compression algorithms could compress the audio-file down to, say, 1/64 size, then obviously it would be enought for the attacker to guess the compressed file, expand it and generate your key.
This is mostly of academic interest, though, since guessing 1/64 of a 128KB audio file is completely out of the question. But it does show that their claims are not completely true.
A better description of the system would be a Pseudo-OTP, using a pseudo-random number generator with a very large initial seed. This could still be a secure system, assuming the PRNG they use were any good.
Looking at the source code (go OSS, go!) it doesn't look particularly effective. It "randomly" picks bytes from the seed file to output. It then xor's it with a "random" byte. These "random" bytes are from the C rand() function. This is done 5000 times, the buffer written to disk and rand() re-seeded from a key-file byte.
I'd say that the GenKeyFile program doesn't do anything useful to the seed file. Here is how I would recover a good portion of the plaintext:
Guess the initial seed for rand().
Completely ignore the bytes from rand() which would be used to pick bytes from the seed file.
Construct the string of 5000 bytes from rand() which were xored into the seed data.
Now output the ciphertext xor the 5000 bytes from step 3.
Since the seed for rand() is small, we can loop through all the possible guesses without any trouble. Step 4 will return bytes of the form C ^ r where C is the cipher-text and r is the bytes we are using from rand(). C will be of the form P ^ S ^ r' where P is the plaintext, S is a byte from the seed-file and r' is a byte from rand() used in the encryption. If we guessed the seed for rand() correctly we'll have output 5000 bytes of the form P ^ S ^ r' ^ r = P ^ S.
In other words, it is easy to completely strip away the pseudo-random mixing. The distribution of bytes in the seed file (assuming it is sound) will be far from uniform. In fact, it will probably contain a lot of 0's, especially if it is your own voice, as they recommend for beginning users. Uncompressed audio tends to be sampled at 16 bits, and for large parts it will have the high byte zero (low volume). In other places it will have either the low byte small (really low volume) or the high byte small (fairly low volume). All in all, a lot of the S values can be expected to be zero. This menas that we can:
See when our guess for the rand() seed was correct, because the distribution of the output from our little routine will suddenly be much closer to the plaintext distribution and
We can actually read a lot of the characters stright from the output stream, since they will simply be the plaintext xored with 0.
This is where you would have to start doing mildly tricky stuff like looking at the actual probability distributions involved, etc.
Short version: Don't use this stuff.
Slightly longer version: This looks OK, if you just use a good seed file. A compressed audio file would be a start, WAV files are completely out of the question. Actually, you should just dump as many bytes as ou need from/dev/random and make that your key-file. Now we just have the usual unsuitability of the OTP to practically anything to contend with.
just let the task force break in to see how its set up
Not so. The article says they are using the Diffie-Hellman key-agreement algorithm, which means that there is no permanent key at all -- no private key to steal. Instead, the two units will negotiate a new key each time you make contact with someone, but makes no effort to ensure that you are talking to the right person. You are simply expected to know their voice or to recognize them in some other way.
They are using 2048-bit Diffie-Hellman which is about as secure as 2048-bit RSA. Diffie-Hellman is based on the discreete-logarithm problem and the best algorithms for solving that, given a large modulus, is pretty much the same algorithm that would be used to factor a large integer. The state of the art in factoring integers still below 512 bits, but is about to reach that mark. What is more, calculating one discreete-log will only give you the session key for a given session and no information about all the previous and subsecuent sessions, so it is even less appealing than trying to break RSA of the same size.
What the attacker can do is to launch a man-in-the-middle attack, so your box will talk to the TLA-agency's box in a secure manner, that box will be sitting next to another box talking to the person you really wanted to talk to. Then they just cross-wire the audio signal and tape everything. This, however, is a much more difficult attack to launch. You need more support from the phone-company and more hardware to pull it off.
It is also possible that the article is oversimplifying slightly and that there is some sort of identification going on in the hardware, but that would be much more difficult to use and people would frequently mess it up. The real problem in cryptography is key management. The rest is easy.
I has lunch with some of the designers of the E2 and LOKI97 ciphers yesterday and of course the AES was discussed.
MARS and RC6 need fast mutipliers to be efficient, which makes them slow on smart-cards, for example.
Prof. Seberry also expected to see an attack against Twofish fairly soon, so there is a good chance it will be discounted.
SERPENT may have been left in only for political reasons. It is written by some very clever cryptoanalysts and it would be a good idea to keep those guys trying to break the other ciphers. The actual cipher isn't particularly likely to go anywhere.
That leaves Rijndael. However, I'm sure that NIST can't pick a European cipher for purely political reasons, as you've all pointed out. The NSA is an advisor to NIST in the contest and I'm sure they'll point out the political aspects of the final choice.
The next cipher I'm going to add implement is going to be Rijndael. I'll probably also have to ad the AES when it is chosen.
Speaking of distributed computing, does anyone know if distributed.net has plans to add a new contest for these encryption schemes?
I doubt there will ever be a contest for any of these ciphers, and if there is, it will run indefinately. The 128-bit key-space is simply too huge to brute-force search it.
Quoting Schneier, if you channel all the energy of the Sun into counting through the key-space, you will be able to count about 2^182 keys per year. This is without doing anything at all to the keys you cycle through, no energy wasted in your system and acess to all the energy of the Sun,collected in a huge sphere built around it.
rather than comming up with yet another semmetrical encryption method, why not come up with something a little better than RSA.. Public key encryption is a wonderful science but when you're talking about a possible man in the middle attack you still have to rely on a trusted signature or a "known" host key
There are two things that make the proposed AES algorithms better than IDEA or Blowfish or triple-DES. No-one has actually broken them, but the art of cipher design has marched onwards.
1) Speed. Each of the algorithms that are left are faster than Blowfish, which is faster than IDEA which is faster than tri-DES.
2) The block-size. All the old, well-known ciphers work on 64-bit blocks. This is becomming too small. You start having problems with block-replay attacks and generally leaking information at a few gigabytes. My reference is at home, so I can't give the exact number. The AES candidates have a 128-bit block-size and this should never become a problem for them.
As for improving public-key cryptography, there are certain limits to what can theoretically be done. You always need some "secret" information, i.e. a private RSA/ElGamal/Schnorr/whatever key or a shared secret key for a symmetric cipher. If you suddenly connect to a box (with ssh) or want to send mail to someone (and are using pgp/gpg) you need something to "grab onto". What we really need is some sort of huge authentication framework. In fact, what we need is the pgp web of trust, but with everyone in it.
Also, IDEA is patented. Are you sure you weren't confusing it with Blowfish?
Slashdot Mirror
This is a bit of an overstatement. There is currently a pilot project with hydrogen powered cars (you'll see a few on the street, they're dark green and have the logo of an oil-company on them) a couple of buses I believe, and some trials with fishing boats have started or are about to start.
This is a particularly good idea in Iceland where we have cheap renewable energy in the form of hydroelectric and geothermal power. Also, a very large portion of out oil consumption is by the fishing fleet where there are fewer and much larger engines which should make them more worthwhile to renew.
No, the ISP is not a government body. However, it is required by law to take this action, so the government is definately involved, albeit passively. Basically, the DHCP delegates the power of government to the MPAA et al, so their action under the DMCA should be held to the same standards as any other government action.
Shouldn't that read work on consumers to make them compliant?.
Is the constitution above question?
(1) Capacity - These personal rail car concepts tend to fail when it comes to extremely dense corridors. As you can imagine, heavy rail can push many more people through a single rail corridor than this sort of technology. Right now you can push about 2K cars/lane/hour, compared to densities of nearly 10K for heavy rail systems. With this technology, you could decrease headways and maybe squeeze another few K through, but:
They claim to get about 20K people per hour over one rail, vs about 2K for a single lane of traffice. This means that you would need about 10 lanes to get the same throughput using the highway system.
(2) Cost - these rail systems still cost on the order of $5M US/km to build, while each highway lane only costs about $200K to build. So, you are still getting less for your tax money with this stuff. Not that I am totally against this, though. Essen (Germany) has a clever system that does this, except the cars are busses that turn into light rail. I can see these applied intelligently for mid-range suburban corridors where other forms of transit are not applicable, but this brings us to the final issue:
Comparing the USD 5M/Km to the USD 0.2M/Km a high-way lane is not quite fair since these systems will carry 10 times the traffic. Of course, the roads are still cheaper than the rail initially, but this system has so many things going for it in terms of the environment it creates in the city and the reduction in pollution, that it might very well be worth it. In fact, almost anything that reduces the reliance on roads is a good thing. And if you can switch from petrolium to electricity in the process, so much the better.
Also, this system would not need to be very dense. That's the beauty of the dual-mode system. You put these rails where there is the heaviest traffic and then use the road systems for the less heavily trafficed routes. So the extra expenditure would only be where there is real need for it.
(3) Consumer Adoption - when you are trying to get customers to change modes and you are asking them to make large capital outlays to do so, you are asking for trouble. This is the main issue with automated highways (like those prototyped at Berkeley). You can build the public infrastructure, but without private investment on a large scale, it does not fly.
The full benefit of this system does not appear without large private expenditure. But! the same rails would be used both for private cars and for the bus-equivalents. Initially it would function essentially as a usual monorail system, except that the "buses" would roll off the end of the rail to reach just a little bit further. Eventually, more of the bus system would be moved onto the rail. This on its own might be enough to make the system worthwhile. Then, once the infrastructure is appearing, people would have some incentive to make their next car RUV-compatible.
So, the adoption should be a lot less painful than what you are implying here. Still, of course, you never know.
A huge benefit of this system over most public transport, is that people can still have their own "car". You still have complete freedom to move about as you wish and can do it in an environment where you feel at home. This is why commuters might adopt this system when they would never consider taking a train to work.
Actually, this definately does not do them justice. They are a genuinely old company, at least by American standards :) You can't even compare a company incorporated in 1911 to a .com. They just don't live in the same conceptual space.
I can understand that people some people might be concerned, but you have to remember that those who receive these records don't know that they are your records. In fact, in the format that they leave the doctors' hands, they are absolutely useless to insurance companies.
I also doubt that you mother has to co-operate with Kári personally :)
That's the point. These genepools are fairly uniform, so any genetic deviations (we're talking statistics here, right) are easier to identify and correlating such deviations with particular illnesses becomes much easier.
In fact, her ein Iceland, you are not entered in the database unless your ancesters a couple of generations back were all Icelandic. My great-grandfather was Norwegian, so I might have been rejected.
If, however, a sample has been taken for some reason and stored with your medical records, a copy of this would be sent to Decode along with your other records, but without personally identifying information. I.e. there would be a DNA sample and a medical history. Given a large number of these, you could statisticaly find genes that are likely to be related to particular diseases.
Well, unless the person opts out, in which case those data would not be used for research.
I don't know how things work in Tonga, I don't even know where it is on the map. I do know something about how things work in Iceland (but not all the details) since I am not only an Icelander, but work in computer security for Íslensk Erfðagreining, the Icelandic daughter company of Decode Genetics. Of course, nothing I say is official in any way. In fact I'm probably just making the lot up.
Here, no company has exclusive rights to do genetic research. No company has the right to take samples from an individual without their consent. The government (democratically elected, high voter turnout, no infinitely iterated recounts needed) agreed to the deal. What was sold was not the people's genome, but access to medical health information already collected. You may also opt out of the database, f.ex. by mailing the free-postage form that was sent to every person in the country.
First, any personally identifying information is removed from the data. Second, the data is stored in sealed rooms with camera surveilance and all code which has access to the data is validated by a third party. Third, the code must never return result sets with fewer than a specified number of people. I.e. it is very difficult to use rare traits to get additional information about a person or a small group of people.
The security requirements are incredible. If banks had to adhere to these kinds of standards, I think they'd just decide it wasn't worth the effort and close. We're required to use 10000 bit RSA keys, for example (I wonder if they'd accept 8192 bits keys?) which is just preposterous. But I expect the result will be secure.
I think that, assuming you want to allow large-scale statistical research of this kind at all, it is being done the right way in Iceland. I wouldn't want to guess about Tonga.
This is of course based on a serious mis-understanding. If you look at emacs, this monstrosity could never pass for being an editor. It's huge and bloated, it's got built-in email and web browser support and you besically never have to leave it in a days work. Ergo, emacs is a desktop environment. Why the GNU dudes needed to write *another* desktop environment when they've had emacs for decades is beyond me.
PS The editor component in emacs is great, it's very similar to jed, but ties in better with the rest of the desktop environment and uses the system-wide lisp scripting engine.
Anthony Towns:
Supporting this, there's some Apt changes in CVS that'll let people choose a few packages from one distribution and leave the rest from another. Two possibilities come to mind: either running "testing" most of the time, but using a bunch of programs from "unstable" because you're interested in their development; or running mostly from "unstable" except for a few packages you can't afford to have break on that machine. Either way you have a slightly larger buffer between an upload and it making it into "testing".
I've been waiting for something like this to be added, I couldn't believe I was the only one who would want it. Anyway, this will almost certainly bring more testers, since you can run the fairly-safe testing distribution and then test the bleeding-edge stuff you are interested in. Today, it is basically all or nothing. You either run the unstable branch and risk it going to hell completely or you stay away from testing the packages that you are most interested in. It also might make it easier to track down bugs if the parts of the system you are not particularly focusing on are likely to be fairly stable.
the earth used to be a lot warmer, a thousand years ago. That's when the Norse were farming in Greenland, where there is permafrost and desolation today.
The earth has been a lot colder than it is now. Think about the Ice Ages.
The earth was a lot colder than it is now just 500 years ago. Today they call that the mini ice age, and it's what killed off the Norse colonies in Greenland and North America.
Actually, the Norse colonies in Greenland wer very short-lived, decades rather than centuries. I.e. they weren't killed off around 500 years ago, but more like 1000 years ago. There was a very short warm period. This is why Greenland has that completely preposterous name. Iceland (where I live) was named by rather disappointed settelers after a bad winter not many decades earlier. These climate swings were rather short.
And there was no Norse (Icelandic, actually) colony in North-America. Leifur "Heppni" Eiriksson (son of Eirikur who settled in Greenland after being driven from both Norway and then Iceland for killing just a bit too many people) and his people went there for a couple of years and found a land which was "flowing with wine", etc. They seemed to like it, but being used to Icelandic climate, they would! They did, however, have some trouble with the natives :)
I'm sitting in the cellar of my house in Reykjavík, connected via ADSL, ignoring the sunshine outside.
I agree everything Gummi said above, but would add that the scenery here is incredible. This is the most beutiful country on earth. (Yes, I normally live abroad and get homesick, but it is still true!) Reykjavík is the northern-most city of any consequence in the world and you can enjoy constant daylight during the summer (like now) and complain about the (near) constant darkness in the winter. If you are looking for an exciting or interesting place to spend a couple of years, this is it.
The weather is almost certainly responsible for the amount of computer use here. What do you do during the winter? We used to read, but now there are computers. We've had >90% literacy for centuries and now this is turning into almost as much computer literacy.
I greatly admire the Icelandic girls, too, for wearing what Italian girls wear in summer in the middle of an Icelandic winter. I think their physique must be somehow better than ours, because I'm sure that I would die of hypothermia within the hour. But I'm not complaining, of course.
Everyone speaks English. Many of the software companies allready have non-Icelandic employees and in fact, most have a rule that software should be "written in English", i.e. no Icelandic comments and variable names should be English. I expect you can find work without any trouble. I'm only here for 2.5 months myself and I e-mailed the company I most wanted to work for and had the job the next day. Well, they did call me (to Italy) just to confirm that I wasn't a raving lunatic, but it was really no trouble at all.
Also, since the Univerity of Iceland is very small (the population of Iceland is only a wuarter million), many people are forced to go abroad to study. This means that many people, and definately the ones with higher education, are very internationally oriented. They'll very likely have spent a few years living abroad. But everyone comes back. Iceland is a very difficult place to leave.
You write a license with clauses A-G. Clauses A-C give the licensee a number of rights, while the clauses D-F seem to slightly restrict those rights and extract promises from the user to not sue the producer, not to cdriticize the product and not to use any word beginning with a vowel. The use of words starting with 'y' will be determined by the producer on a case-by-case basis.
Clause G then says that if any of those clauses is invalid, that clause shall be void but the rest of the license will still be valid. The producer then goes on to put little flaws in each of the clauses A-F to make them invalid, leaving only the restrictions and no rights.
Of course, this would never actually work if it is true as has been said that a license can only actually grant rights bu not take them away and that the worst that it can threaten is the revokation of those rights, which in this case are none. But now apply this to a proper contract and we have trouble. (or free cash, depending on how evil you are)
Isn't the point of democracy to first elect responsible leaders and then have them lead? Possibly, though, the democratic process doesn't quite work wherever you live?
The idea that government should not be allowed to interfere with business in any way is absolutely absurd. Business has only its own interests at heart. The government theoretically has the interests of the population at heart. If this is not true, there is somthing wrong with the process by which people come to power and this needs to be fixed, rather than bowing down before the almighty corporations.
There is then a bit saying how it should be possible for users or even OEM's to remove functionality (although I'm not positively sure this applies to all of those components) and the OEM should even be charged less for the license if they remove the compnent, calculated by how large a fraction of the binaries they are disabling. (Even if they don't get removed!)
The Application company has the right to these things so that they can improve them and sell to Windows users an port them to other platforms. This is the non-Windows company after all :-)
Then there are all the little notes on how they are not allowed to bully anyone to do anything, basically. It's quite a list of things they can no longer do, but which they have previously done to hurt their competitors.
There is a lot of good stuff in that ruling. If it is upheld and enacted and all, the Evil Empire should be unable to do all the things we love them for. If this had happened a few years ago, we would still have OS/2. We might still have DesqView and GEM and DR-DOS and...
Speaking of standard protocols and getting mainstream apps to support free-net (which I'm still thinking about whether I support in general or not), is anyone working on defining URI's for documents on free-net and maybe even adding support for these to Mozilla?
If this really is a more efficient distribution medium people might consider simultaneously releasing a document on the web and on free-net in HTML and link from each to the other.
In fact, you could deliberately copy entire sub-webs from the HTTP-based web to a free-net based equivalent. It would be easy to script this and convert all links. You now have an instant user-base, the system is made much more legitimate and the added number of users and servers makes it more robust, both technically and against themakers, users and abusers of the law.
Hmm... I suppose the most interesting plural would be Coxen, using the Saxon plural? I quote the Jargon File:
The audio file they use to generate the key-file will be converted into a a key-file of about the same size. (They remove the static headers.) As they say, audio files are going to contains noise and be difficult to reproduce exactly. However, an audio file is nowhere near being completely random. If it were completely random it would be impossible to compress, for example. If the best possible lossless audio-compression algorithms could compress the audio-file down to, say, 1/64 size, then obviously it would be enought for the attacker to guess the compressed file, expand it and generate your key.
This is mostly of academic interest, though, since guessing 1/64 of a 128KB audio file is completely out of the question. But it does show that their claims are not completely true.
A better description of the system would be a Pseudo-OTP, using a pseudo-random number generator with a very large initial seed. This could still be a secure system, assuming the PRNG they use were any good.
Looking at the source code (go OSS, go!) it doesn't look particularly effective. It "randomly" picks bytes from the seed file to output. It then xor's it with a "random" byte. These "random" bytes are from the C rand() function. This is done 5000 times, the buffer written to disk and rand() re-seeded from a key-file byte.
I'd say that the GenKeyFile program doesn't do anything useful to the seed file. Here is how I would recover a good portion of the plaintext:
Since the seed for rand() is small, we can loop through all the possible guesses without any trouble. Step 4 will return bytes of the form C ^ r where C is the cipher-text and r is the bytes we are using from rand(). C will be of the form P ^ S ^ r' where P is the plaintext, S is a byte from the seed-file and r' is a byte from rand() used in the encryption. If we guessed the seed for rand() correctly we'll have output 5000 bytes of the form P ^ S ^ r' ^ r = P ^ S.
In other words, it is easy to completely strip away the pseudo-random mixing. The distribution of bytes in the seed file (assuming it is sound) will be far from uniform. In fact, it will probably contain a lot of 0's, especially if it is your own voice, as they recommend for beginning users. Uncompressed audio tends to be sampled at 16 bits, and for large parts it will have the high byte zero (low volume). In other places it will have either the low byte small (really low volume) or the high byte small (fairly low volume). All in all, a lot of the S values can be expected to be zero. This menas that we can:
This is where you would have to start doing mildly tricky stuff like looking at the actual probability distributions involved, etc.
Short version: Don't use this stuff.
Slightly longer version: This looks OK, if you just use a good seed file. A compressed audio file would be a start, WAV files are completely out of the question. Actually, you should just dump as many bytes as ou need from /dev/random and make that your key-file. Now we just have the usual unsuitability of the OTP to practically anything to contend with.
Not so. The article says they are using the Diffie-Hellman key-agreement algorithm, which means that there is no permanent key at all -- no private key to steal. Instead, the two units will negotiate a new key each time you make contact with someone, but makes no effort to ensure that you are talking to the right person. You are simply expected to know their voice or to recognize them in some other way.
They are using 2048-bit Diffie-Hellman which is about as secure as 2048-bit RSA. Diffie-Hellman is based on the discreete-logarithm problem and the best algorithms for solving that, given a large modulus, is pretty much the same algorithm that would be used to factor a large integer. The state of the art in factoring integers still below 512 bits, but is about to reach that mark. What is more, calculating one discreete-log will only give you the session key for a given session and no information about all the previous and subsecuent sessions, so it is even less appealing than trying to break RSA of the same size.
What the attacker can do is to launch a man-in-the-middle attack, so your box will talk to the TLA-agency's box in a secure manner, that box will be sitting next to another box talking to the person you really wanted to talk to. Then they just cross-wire the audio signal and tape everything. This, however, is a much more difficult attack to launch. You need more support from the phone-company and more hardware to pull it off.
It is also possible that the article is oversimplifying slightly and that there is some sort of identification going on in the hardware, but that would be much more difficult to use and people would frequently mess it up. The real problem in cryptography is key management. The rest is easy.
MARS and RC6 need fast mutipliers to be efficient, which makes them slow on smart-cards, for example.
Prof. Seberry also expected to see an attack against Twofish fairly soon, so there is a good chance it will be discounted.
SERPENT may have been left in only for political reasons. It is written by some very clever cryptoanalysts and it would be a good idea to keep those guys trying to break the other ciphers. The actual cipher isn't particularly likely to go anywhere.
That leaves Rijndael. However, I'm sure that NIST can't pick a European cipher for purely political reasons, as you've all pointed out. The NSA is an advisor to NIST in the contest and I'm sure they'll point out the political aspects of the final choice.
The next cipher I'm going to add implement is going to be Rijndael. I'll probably also have to ad the AES when it is chosen.
I doubt there will ever be a contest for any of these ciphers, and if there is, it will run indefinately. The 128-bit key-space is simply too huge to brute-force search it.
Quoting Schneier, if you channel all the energy of the Sun into counting through the key-space, you will be able to count about 2^182 keys per year. This is without doing anything at all to the keys you cycle through, no energy wasted in your system and acess to all the energy of the Sun,collected in a huge sphere built around it.
rather than comming up with yet another semmetrical encryption method, why not
come up with something a little better than RSA.. Public key encryption is a wonderful science but when you're talking about a possible
man in the middle attack you still have to rely on a trusted signature or a "known" host key
There are two things that make the proposed AES algorithms better than IDEA or Blowfish or triple-DES. No-one has actually broken them, but the art of cipher design has marched onwards.
1) Speed. Each of the algorithms that are left are faster than Blowfish, which is faster than IDEA which is faster than tri-DES.
2) The block-size. All the old, well-known ciphers work on 64-bit blocks. This is becomming too small. You start having problems with block-replay attacks and generally leaking information at a few gigabytes. My reference is at home, so I can't give the exact number. The AES candidates have a 128-bit block-size and this should never become a problem for them.
As for improving public-key cryptography, there are certain limits to what can theoretically be done. You always need some "secret" information, i.e. a private RSA/ElGamal/Schnorr/whatever key or a shared secret key for a symmetric cipher. If you suddenly connect to a box (with ssh) or want to send mail to someone (and are using pgp/gpg) you need something to "grab onto". What we really need is some sort of huge authentication framework. In fact, what we need is the pgp web of trust, but with everyone in it.
Also, IDEA is patented. Are you sure you weren't confusing it with Blowfish?