As if that's the only problem with his numbers. He is comparing a large luxury sedan to an entry level, small car.
I know two people who own Teslas, and neither of them got it to save money. Teslas are quite comfortable, halfway good looking, and offer good performance. They are also a statement that goes beyond 'I can afford this.'
I have a heavily modded 460hp S60-R Volvo, and a very clean 26 year old Toyota Supra. A Tesla pretty much covers all the strengths of my two cars: performance, turning heads, comfort on long trips, maturity... in one car.
If I wanted a Tesla, I'd buy one. Saving money on gas would not be amongst my reasons... but unless something drastic happens to my cars, I'm happy with what I have. I cannot imagine what would make me buy a new Civic. Losing my job, having my savings wiped out and becoming unemployable wouldn't. I'd buy an old car I could fix and maintain myself.
Well, now that I posted, I am thinking about exceptions. For example, in Russian, you have to know where the accent falls, or you may mispronounce the letter 'o'. There are a few tricky things about Hungarian, as well. But in general, English is much harder to get right than any language I know. Hell, I've been told that I can read a Japanese paragraph and sound perfectly understandable, and I have never studied Japanese, I just picked up the phonetic alphabet because I ran out of reading materials on a long flight.
As for Esperanto, I have found it an insanely easy language to understand, and I think it would be the case for every well-traveled European. But the rverse is not true - I would have no hope of speaking it correctly, because I have no idea how they decided which language to borrow from for specific words.
This is more of the rule than the exception in most languages that I know.
English is my fourth language, and when I started getting serious about speaking it properly, I realized two things: - I had been pronouncing many words incorrectly, and to this day, 25 years later, I sometimes realize that I had the wrong pronunciation all along. Sometimes it is because I am familiar with the word in the original language, but it is pronounced differently in English, and sometimes it is because the pronunciation disobeys English rules. - Many native speakers have no idea how to pronounce words that they have never heard.
But in Bulgarian, Russian, French, Spanish, Hungarian, Polish, German, there are very, very few words that you would mispronounce if you see them written down, as long as you know the applicable rules. Some of the languages above (not all) are also very easy to spell, because as long as you know the correct pronunciation, there is only one possible spelling.
Heh. A 2000 Toyota running strong is not an exception, it's the rule.
My daily driver is a 1990 Supra with 7000 miles on its rebuilt engine. It had 310,000 miles when I decided that I was getting too little compression. I have replaced a lot of things on that car (every hose, for starters) but I can do everything but truly major work myself.
On the other hand, I just paid $5,800 to have the clutch, angle gear, etc... of my S60-R Volvo replaced. I could not have began to do the work myself. My regular mechanic was unwilling to work on it, and he has been fixing my cars for two decades. I still like that car a lot, it's a 460 sleeper with a hydraulic suspension that's my choice for long trips... but every repair is a major expense.
If I really want to feel that I own a car, it has to be something that at least a dozen of years old. Anything more recent is either really cheap crap, or is beyond my skills to really fully understand, let alone tinker with. Sure, I'm an CS guy, not a gearhead, but I do have an MEng, and I like cars. When I was thirty, I felt that I could at least talk with my mechanic. Nowadays... Oh, will you kids get off my lawn?
Well, I think that ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE agrees that our taxes are spent on the wrong things. The young think too much is spent on the elderly, the healthy think too much is spent on the sick, the pedestrians think too much is spent on roads, the childless think too much is spent on education, etc... And I bet there are people who think that homeland security, the police and the military are getting way too much.
But until someone comes with a better way to decide where the money gets spent we are stuck with the time honored one: wherever it will bring the politicians more power, which in the US means votes and campaign contributions.
And a lot of noise will be made as to where expenses will be cut... usually, whatever programs do not have powerful, organized groups benefiting from them. You can't cut grandpa's check without losing his vote, but you can cut school lunches or fail to fund infrastructure maintenance.
There are no easy solutions. And speaking for myself, I can a lot more benefit, for myself, by working harder, than trying to influence how much I pay in taxes, and where it gets spent.
I have a choice where I live and work. I chose the US in the 90s, and I do not regret that choice, not even when I have to deal with our healthcare (which is the only thing I think is done better elsewhere). Pre- or post- Obamacare, with my experience of other healthcare systems, the changes are not worth commenting on. It was terrible, it is terrible, but as long as I have a good income, it's survivable.
We get more from taxes. A poor person may get a pittance for food and lodging, but we, and by that I mean middle class professionals, get roads on which to drive our nice cars, police protection for our belongings, safe streets around where we live... and basically a nice life. And yes, we get it from the society that is made possible by taxes.
If you are one of the brainless retards who think that their guns and mad macho skillz will keep them on top if there is a breakdown in law and order, I won't even bother arguing with you. I'll just say that I lived through Bulgaria's transition from a police state to a society run by organized not-quite-criminals, and saw how happy people were to see an end of the truly lawless times.
Without taxes, there is no law enforcement. Without law enforcement, there is no security. No one is tough enough to guarantee their own security without organizing with like minded and skilled people. Once they have organized, they decide that they don't be keeping themselves secure, they are protecting others as well, and... start collecting taxes.
No, it is not funny. It is actually quite amazing how carefully you have to read the article to understand that the incident was in international airspace, and how little "nearly collided" means.
It reminds me of the CNN report about the Russian missile inscribed "To be delivered personally in Omaba's hands" . You know, the one that our ex-ambassador twitted about, the one that showed how Putin is threatening the United States, the one pundits were discussing, as in "can it reach the United States."
CNN even went as far as to intersperse pictures of the missile into footage from the main Feb 23rd parade on the Red Square. The catch? It was a papier-mache prop carried by two member of a fringe party (Stalinist Youth!) that was marching on a back street. Of course, the picture was cropped by CNN as not to make that immediately obvious.
Frankly, the report worried me. Then, in 10 seconds, I stopped worrying, because I found the original picture, and had a laugh. I was scared again, a few days later, when I could not find the CNN clip, or the MSN article, or pretty much anything about the epic fail on English language sites. Good cleanup.
I think that SJW is a quite appropriate subject to bring when talking about this article.
Let me list a few ways in which just the summary is wrong, deliberately twisting the truth so that SJW can get their righteous anger on.
o Cecilia Payne-Gaposhkin is not someone I have not heard of. She was a professor at Harvard, a department chair, and hers is a name that you are very likely to hear even if you have just taken classes there. o Her credit was not stolen. The man who dissuaded her from publishing part of her theory thought that the claim, unsupported, would expose her to ridicule. He did not do it to steal the credit - once he actually proved the claim, he gave her credit in the paper, and actually admitted there, without having to, that he was originally wrong.
And seriously, do we have to twist the facts to make things more interesting? There are enough wrongs to get angry about, and every time lies that are meant to inflame are discovered, assholes get to cast doubt on other, true injustices.
Why is it okay for Charlie Hebdo to insult Muslims, but illegal for them to insult Jews?
Say what? They are insulting Christians more than Jews, and Jews more than Muslims. Of course, they are mostly insulting French right wingers.
Fuck, one of the last things published before they got massacred was a defense of Islam against someone they considered a crazy right wing fear-monger. There was quite a bit of schadenfreude over that is some circles.
I do not know about New York, but if you take an Uber car In California, and get into an accident, do not count on the driver's insurance. It was invalidated the second you got in the car, having promised to pay him.
I do not know about New York, but if you take an Uber car and get into an accident, do not count on the driver's insurance. It was invalidated the second you got in the car, having promised to pay him.
It already isn't. One of my friends is a pro-player, and he says that it was never allowed anywhere close to tournaments - not because of being singled out, but because it is banned by at least two different, preexisting rules.
Poker is far from the only gambling activity that could be helped a lot by a computing device. Hell, there are rules against doing math in your head, let alone an app.
I still have my original Nook Color. Two years ago, my wife got her own tablet. The Nook at least has been jailbroken and reconfigured so that it does everything I want to do off my gaming and coding PCs.
I upgrade my gaming PC when we get a bigger monitor, my programing PC when I need to, my wife upgrades her phone when she doesn't want to appear out of date... But the tablets? They are only dropped on the bed, never get scratched, and don't do anything that taxes their modest capabilities. I cannot see myself upgrading them unless one gives up the ghost, and considering that my first American PC (1993 IBM PS2) is still managing CNCs on a machine tool floor, I'm not holding my breath.
Too late. The second infected nurse flew from Ohio to Texas, while symptomatic. Which means that the infection could, theoretically, have been spread in both Ohio, and wherever her co-passengers went.
Forget quarantining areas. I think efforts should be focused on - educating citizens on measures to reduce chances of exposure (hygiene) - training medical personnel (the infected nurses are a disgrace to their hospital's procedures) - purchasing equipment to deal with Ebola (better suits, gloves, etc...)
But hey, I'm just an engineer. I do not have constituents to please so that I keep my cushy job where I can trade the common good for personal perks. So if any of the above gets implemented, it will be later, as opposed two weeks ago.
As for panicking? There's never a time to panic. There is a time to punish the guilty, after the emergency has been dealt with. They can panic them, if they wish.
Come on guys, the OP clearly has broader knowledge than the incoherence of his rant would imply. Whether the first post was a classic troll, or an example of Poe's law, half of these posts are just an attempt to rile up the audience.
I'm not in academia, but my wife and half of our friends are. To hear them talk, a blown talk or even a bad poster can absolutely affect your tenure chances. A few years ago, they were trembling over their own reputation, now they are gossiping/deciding the newbies' fate. And even if no one hold your equipment problems against you, you will still have missed a great opportunity to enhance your reputation.
As for having a local copy... you'd be surprised how many young people do not share our mindset. Too many people nowadays take connectivity for granted, and do not even know where their stuff is, physically. I'm not even talking about those who put important (or private) stuff 'on the Cloud'. I've seen students in my wife's lab who cannot even comprehend that it matters where the experimental data is stored, when you are dealing with datasets measured in gigabytes. I am not sure my wife would know as much about her lab's infrastructure, were I not sneaking away to drink beer with the IT people every time she tries to take me to her department's 'functions'.
IT professionals think about this - after all, we're paid to. Most other people are used to thing 'working', and if they are being jammed in Florida when their IT guy's kayaking off California, they will pony up a thousand bucks of their lab's fund in a second.
They were jamming for two years in a convention center where thousands of people meet every weekend, and they were charging exorbitant fees, in some cases $1000 per device. If this looks too high to you, imagine you are giving a talk about the last 18 months of your research, and a prearranged setup stops working. Your tenure, your reputation, your tenure may depend on that talk. And that's just for researchers. A company that has gathered a thousand POS managers for a discussion of a new system will have millions on the line.
Captive customer base indeed.
Fines seldom come close to wiping out the profits from the con, when big businesses with lobbyists are involved. I have personally participated in a cleanup effort (mostly through volunteers) which used about $30,000 on top of our donated time and equipment. While we were working, the assholes released more detectable crap, and were fined $2,500. But hey, they are golfing with the local high scum.
How often do you see a Viper, a Ferrari or a Lamborghini being driven the way it is meant to? One of my neighbors has a freaking Maserati, and I hate being stuck behind him on the on-ramp to the 57. He slows down to 15 miles to make the right turn into the ramp, and enters the highway at 45 miles per hour.
The results are exactly what I would have expected, except for the few cars I can't say I've ever heard of. What the hell is a Mercury Topaz?
id think in even a few hundred years our best encryption would be trivial to break.
Not without huge advances in theoretical mathematics, no. We have encryption that would take longer to crack than the heat death of the Universe, even if every atom in it were a modern computer.
On the other hand, advances in the factoring of large numbers, could, for example, make some modern encryption method a lot more vulnerable. But I am told, by people who do research on that topic at MIT and Caltech, that momentous breakthroughs in that area are unlikely - modest improvements, certainly, earth-shattering advancements, no.
If you damage your iDevice and forget your password, can they recover your data?
If the answer is yes, they are lying if they say they cannot assist law enforcement. And between lying to their consumers and lying to the government... I am pretty sure I know which way they will lean.
the worst is its reliance on criminals to be loyal and diligent, any one of whom could compromise your entire organization's communication.
No argument there.
And then you want them doing steganography, and by hand? They'll be raising every red flag there is
How exactly is the e-mail with a picture going to raise any red flags? Sure, it they are already tailed everywhere they go, and someone is monitoring how long they spend composing their e-mails, they will be in trouble. But just from the sent e-mail, when neither the sender or the receiver are monitored? Unlikely.
Each person has their own set of keys, and the key itself is encrypted with a decent password.
Sure. And their e-mails contain obviously encrypted content, which makes them a person of interest, and they own the key for the next e-mail, and the program to decrypt it, so that it can be taken from them, and used by the adversary. Are you sure your way is better?
What you're describing is a random number generator with a key to initialize it. Some of the good ones might be good enough (or might not). Anything you can keep in your head is going to be crap and fairly easily breakable.
Hell no. Using a not-all-that random-book page, and obfuscating its structure by applying a simple algorithm on will still give you an one time pad that is suboptimal, but nowhere all that breakable, especially if you do not know the simple algorithm, and that it is being applied on book pages.
Lets assume that you have somehow completely broken through some of the steps (In the real world, you could not break through the whole thing step by step)
1) So, through some magic you have managed to extract the exact bits from the picture that have been modified. (Which is far from easy, if you have ran out of magic)
2) Lets even assume that you somehow know that the one time pad is generated from book pages, through some keep-it-in-your-head method. (Through the same magic as before)
So now you have the encrypted message. What do you do? How do you use your knowledge of the weakness of the one time pad?
All you will get is the ability, once you have come up with every possible message, to assign a probability of the sort "This message is more likely to have been the original, if the one time pad was crappy in the way we assume it was".
You didn't say so, but I'm assuming you're encrypting your message using the book page as a one time pad,
Yes, I missed describing part of the mechanism. You use the page to generate the one time pad, once again via simple rules that you only keep in your head. You certainly do not use the ASCII code of each letter/space/punctuation sign as one byte in the pad. This will not make it anywhere close to random - it will be way worse than counting decay particles, but I think that it will be good enough. I am not trying to improve on something that we know works, here. I am trying to avoid incriminating keys that the characters have to keep secure, and that can be seized to compromise the communications.
Steganography isn't much protection when someone knows there might be hidden messages.
Once again, I am going for good enough. Sure, the attacker may know that a few bites in the picture 'may' have been changed. (The characters won't be dumb enough to exchange pictures only when they want to exchange a message.) If the message is short enough, and the picture large enough, it will be very hard to tell there's something amiss, and much much harder to prove it in a court of law... Not that it really matters.
Remember, by picking other bites, and picking a different one-time pad, you would get different messages, just as meaningful.
One time pads are not worthless in practice, at all.
Whether you are a criminal, or a government agent, at some point you will be in a secure location, and you will be able to exchange the pads. The USB stick in my pocket can hold more data than I expect to exchange with any of my friends in the course my lifetime. How long to you think encrypted messages need to be?
But even that is less secure than what you could do.
Hell, if I was writing a novel about smart criminals, and wanted them to be capable of secure communication, this is what I have them do:
They would meet in the big boss's hacienda, and they would agree to use one of the 50000 books available on project Gutenberg. The page to use as an one time pad would be selected via a function of the day the message is sent. The function would be simple enough to memorize.
When one of the party wants to send a message, they would take a picture they have a plausible reason to send, and would use a hex editor, on a PC physically disconnected from the Internet, to manually change a subset of low-significance color bits. Again, the subset will be determined by a rule that is easily memorized.
Yes, the process is laborious, and I would have them do it twice, and then compare the two resulting pictures. If they do not match, they will have to do it again. Once the pictures match, wipe (properly) the originals (from everywhere: camera, usb, secure computer) and send the modified picture, accompanied with an innocuous and appropriate message.
Obviously, the encrypted messages would need to be short, but this process will not attract any attention, and will rely on memorized rules, publicly available data, and programs that would not draw anyone's attention.
What is the NSA doing to do? Suspect anyone sending pictures to his friends? Try, as a one time pad, every page on every book available on Gutenberg, or the myriads of pirated book libraries in China, Russia, Ukraine, etc?
I cannot think of any weakness of this system. Can you? And even if it is completely stupid, I bet you two things: there are plenty of people who can come up with a better one, and plenty of people who are getting away with using a worse one.
Slashdot Mirror
As if that's the only problem with his numbers. He is comparing a large luxury sedan to an entry level, small car.
I know two people who own Teslas, and neither of them got it to save money. Teslas are quite comfortable, halfway good looking, and offer good performance. They are also a statement that goes beyond 'I can afford this.'
I have a heavily modded 460hp S60-R Volvo, and a very clean 26 year old Toyota Supra. A Tesla pretty much covers all the strengths of my two cars: performance, turning heads, comfort on long trips, maturity... in one car.
If I wanted a Tesla, I'd buy one. Saving money on gas would not be amongst my reasons... but unless something drastic happens to my cars, I'm happy with what I have. I cannot imagine what would make me buy a new Civic. Losing my job, having my savings wiped out and becoming unemployable wouldn't. I'd buy an old car I could fix and maintain myself.
Well, now that I posted, I am thinking about exceptions. For example, in Russian, you have to know where the accent falls, or you may mispronounce the letter 'o'. There are a few tricky things about Hungarian, as well. But in general, English is much harder to get right than any language I know. Hell, I've been told that I can read a Japanese paragraph and sound perfectly understandable, and I have never studied Japanese, I just picked up the phonetic alphabet because I ran out of reading materials on a long flight.
As for Esperanto, I have found it an insanely easy language to understand, and I think it would be the case for every well-traveled European. But the rverse is not true - I would have no hope of speaking it correctly, because I have no idea how they decided which language to borrow from for specific words.
This is more of the rule than the exception in most languages that I know.
English is my fourth language, and when I started getting serious about speaking it properly, I realized two things:
- I had been pronouncing many words incorrectly, and to this day, 25 years later, I sometimes realize that I had the wrong pronunciation all along. Sometimes it is because I am familiar with the word in the original language, but it is pronounced differently in English, and sometimes it is because the pronunciation disobeys English rules.
- Many native speakers have no idea how to pronounce words that they have never heard.
But in Bulgarian, Russian, French, Spanish, Hungarian, Polish, German, there are very, very few words that you would mispronounce if you see them written down, as long as you know the applicable rules. Some of the languages above (not all) are also very easy to spell, because as long as you know the correct pronunciation, there is only one possible spelling.
Heh. A 2000 Toyota running strong is not an exception, it's the rule.
My daily driver is a 1990 Supra with 7000 miles on its rebuilt engine. It had 310,000 miles when I decided that I was getting too little compression. I have replaced a lot of things on that car (every hose, for starters) but I can do everything but truly major work myself.
On the other hand, I just paid $5,800 to have the clutch, angle gear, etc... of my S60-R Volvo replaced. I could not have began to do the work myself. My regular mechanic was unwilling to work on it, and he has been fixing my cars for two decades. I still like that car a lot, it's a 460 sleeper with a hydraulic suspension that's my choice for long trips... but every repair is a major expense.
If I really want to feel that I own a car, it has to be something that at least a dozen of years old. Anything more recent is either really cheap crap, or is beyond my skills to really fully understand, let alone tinker with. Sure, I'm an CS guy, not a gearhead, but I do have an MEng, and I like cars. When I was thirty, I felt that I could at least talk with my mechanic. Nowadays... Oh, will you kids get off my lawn?
Well, I think that ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE agrees that our taxes are spent on the wrong things. The young think too much is spent on the elderly, the healthy think too much is spent on the sick, the pedestrians think too much is spent on roads, the childless think too much is spent on education, etc... And I bet there are people who think that homeland security, the police and the military are getting way too much.
But until someone comes with a better way to decide where the money gets spent we are stuck with the time honored one: wherever it will bring the politicians more power, which in the US means votes and campaign contributions.
And a lot of noise will be made as to where expenses will be cut... usually, whatever programs do not have powerful, organized groups benefiting from them. You can't cut grandpa's check without losing his vote, but you can cut school lunches or fail to fund infrastructure maintenance.
There are no easy solutions. And speaking for myself, I can a lot more benefit, for myself, by working harder, than trying to influence how much I pay in taxes, and where it gets spent.
I have a choice where I live and work. I chose the US in the 90s, and I do not regret that choice, not even when I have to deal with our healthcare (which is the only thing I think is done better elsewhere). Pre- or post- Obamacare, with my experience of other healthcare systems, the changes are not worth commenting on. It was terrible, it is terrible, but as long as I have a good income, it's survivable.
We get more from taxes. A poor person may get a pittance for food and lodging, but we, and by that I mean middle class professionals, get roads on which to drive our nice cars, police protection for our belongings, safe streets around where we live... and basically a nice life. And yes, we get it from the society that is made possible by taxes.
If you are one of the brainless retards who think that their guns and mad macho skillz will keep them on top if there is a breakdown in law and order, I won't even bother arguing with you. I'll just say that I lived through Bulgaria's transition from a police state to a society run by organized not-quite-criminals, and saw how happy people were to see an end of the truly lawless times.
Without taxes, there is no law enforcement. Without law enforcement, there is no security. No one is tough enough to guarantee their own security without organizing with like minded and skilled people. Once they have organized, they decide that they don't be keeping themselves secure, they are protecting others as well, and... start collecting taxes.
No, it is not funny. It is actually quite amazing how carefully you have to read the article to understand that the incident was in international airspace, and how little "nearly collided" means.
It reminds me of the CNN report about the Russian missile inscribed "To be delivered personally in Omaba's hands" . You know, the one that our ex-ambassador twitted about, the one that showed how Putin is threatening the United States, the one pundits were discussing, as in "can it reach the United States."
CNN even went as far as to intersperse pictures of the missile into footage from the main Feb 23rd parade on the Red Square. The catch? It was a papier-mache prop carried by two member of a fringe party (Stalinist Youth!) that was marching on a back street. Of course, the picture was cropped by CNN as not to make that immediately obvious.
Frankly, the report worried me. Then, in 10 seconds, I stopped worrying, because I found the original picture, and had a laugh. I was scared again, a few days later, when I could not find the CNN clip, or the MSN article, or pretty much anything about the epic fail on English language sites. Good cleanup.
I think that SJW is a quite appropriate subject to bring when talking about this article.
Let me list a few ways in which just the summary is wrong, deliberately twisting the truth so that SJW can get their righteous anger on.
o Cecilia Payne-Gaposhkin is not someone I have not heard of. She was a professor at Harvard, a department chair, and hers is a name that you are very likely to hear even if you have just taken classes there.
o Her credit was not stolen. The man who dissuaded her from publishing part of her theory thought that the claim, unsupported, would expose her to ridicule. He did not do it to steal the credit - once he actually proved the claim, he gave her credit in the paper, and actually admitted there, without having to, that he was originally wrong.
And seriously, do we have to twist the facts to make things more interesting? There are enough wrongs to get angry about, and every time lies that are meant to inflame are discovered, assholes get to cast doubt on other, true injustices.
Why is it okay for Charlie Hebdo to insult Muslims, but illegal for them to insult Jews?
Say what? They are insulting Christians more than Jews, and Jews more than Muslims. Of course, they are mostly insulting French right wingers.
Fuck, one of the last things published before they got massacred was a defense of Islam against someone they considered a crazy right wing fear-monger. There was quite a bit of schadenfreude over that is some circles.
I do not know about New York, but if you take an Uber car In California, and get into an accident, do not count on the driver's insurance. It was invalidated the second you got in the car, having promised to pay him.
I do not know about New York, but if you take an Uber car and get into an accident, do not count on the driver's insurance. It was invalidated the second you got in the car, having promised to pay him.
It already isn't. One of my friends is a pro-player, and he says that it was never allowed anywhere close to tournaments - not because of being singled out, but because it is banned by at least two different, preexisting rules.
Poker is far from the only gambling activity that could be helped a lot by a computing device. Hell, there are rules against doing math in your head, let alone an app.
I still have my original Nook Color. Two years ago, my wife got her own tablet. The Nook at least has been jailbroken and reconfigured so that it does everything I want to do off my gaming and coding PCs.
I upgrade my gaming PC when we get a bigger monitor, my programing PC when I need to, my wife upgrades her phone when she doesn't want to appear out of date... But the tablets? They are only dropped on the bed, never get scratched, and don't do anything that taxes their modest capabilities. I cannot see myself upgrading them unless one gives up the ghost, and considering that my first American PC (1993 IBM PS2) is still managing CNCs on a machine tool floor, I'm not holding my breath.
Too late. The second infected nurse flew from Ohio to Texas, while symptomatic. Which means that the infection could, theoretically, have been spread in both Ohio, and wherever her co-passengers went.
Forget quarantining areas. I think efforts should be focused on
- educating citizens on measures to reduce chances of exposure (hygiene)
- training medical personnel (the infected nurses are a disgrace to their hospital's procedures)
- purchasing equipment to deal with Ebola (better suits, gloves, etc...)
But hey, I'm just an engineer. I do not have constituents to please so that I keep my cushy job where I can trade the common good for personal perks. So if any of the above gets implemented, it will be later, as opposed two weeks ago.
As for panicking? There's never a time to panic. There is a time to punish the guilty, after the emergency has been dealt with. They can panic them, if they wish.
The trolls eat well today.
Come on guys, the OP clearly has broader knowledge than the incoherence of his rant would imply. Whether the first post was a classic troll, or an example of Poe's law, half of these posts are just an attempt to rile up the audience.
I'm not in academia, but my wife and half of our friends are. To hear them talk, a blown talk or even a bad poster can absolutely affect your tenure chances. A few years ago, they were trembling over their own reputation, now they are gossiping/deciding the newbies' fate. And even if no one hold your equipment problems against you, you will still have missed a great opportunity to enhance your reputation.
As for having a local copy... you'd be surprised how many young people do not share our mindset. Too many people nowadays take connectivity for granted, and do not even know where their stuff is, physically. I'm not even talking about those who put important (or private) stuff 'on the Cloud'. I've seen students in my wife's lab who cannot even comprehend that it matters where the experimental data is stored, when you are dealing with datasets measured in gigabytes. I am not sure my wife would know as much about her lab's infrastructure, were I not sneaking away to drink beer with the IT people every time she tries to take me to her department's 'functions'.
IT professionals think about this - after all, we're paid to. Most other people are used to thing 'working', and if they are being jammed in Florida when their IT guy's kayaking off California, they will pony up a thousand bucks of their lab's fund in a second.
Are you kidding?
They were jamming for two years in a convention center where thousands of people meet every weekend, and they were charging exorbitant fees, in some cases $1000 per device. If this looks too high to you, imagine you are giving a talk about the last 18 months of your research, and a prearranged setup stops working. Your tenure, your reputation, your tenure may depend on that talk. And that's just for researchers. A company that has gathered a thousand POS managers for a discussion of a new system will have millions on the line.
Captive customer base indeed.
Fines seldom come close to wiping out the profits from the con, when big businesses with lobbyists are involved. I have personally participated in a cleanup effort (mostly through volunteers) which used about $30,000 on top of our donated time and equipment. While we were working, the assholes released more detectable crap, and were fined $2,500. But hey, they are golfing with the local high scum.
> Enough of that. Here's a little musical relief.
I see your Doctor Spin and raise you Pig With The Face Of A Boy.
If the movie is half as good as the video in my link, I'll go see it.
How often do you see a Viper, a Ferrari or a Lamborghini being driven the way it is meant to? One of my neighbors has a freaking Maserati, and I hate being stuck behind him on the on-ramp to the 57. He slows down to 15 miles to make the right turn into the ramp, and enters the highway at 45 miles per hour.
The results are exactly what I would have expected, except for the few cars I can't say I've ever heard of. What the hell is a Mercury Topaz?
id think in even a few hundred years our best encryption would be trivial to break.
Not without huge advances in theoretical mathematics, no. We have encryption that would take longer to crack than the heat death of the Universe, even if every atom in it were a modern computer.
On the other hand, advances in the factoring of large numbers, could, for example, make some modern encryption method a lot more vulnerable. But I am told, by people who do research on that topic at MIT and Caltech, that momentous breakthroughs in that area are unlikely - modest improvements, certainly, earth-shattering advancements, no.
I have one question:
If you damage your iDevice and forget your password, can they recover your data?
If the answer is yes, they are lying if they say they cannot assist law enforcement. And between lying to their consumers and lying to the government... I am pretty sure I know which way they will lean.
the worst is its reliance on criminals to be loyal and diligent, any one of whom could compromise your entire organization's communication.
No argument there.
And then you want them doing steganography, and by hand? They'll be raising every red flag there is
How exactly is the e-mail with a picture going to raise any red flags? Sure, it they are already tailed everywhere they go, and someone is monitoring how long they spend composing their e-mails, they will be in trouble. But just from the sent e-mail, when neither the sender or the receiver are monitored? Unlikely.
Each person has their own set of keys, and the key itself is encrypted with a decent password.
Sure. And their e-mails contain obviously encrypted content, which makes them a person of interest, and they own the key for the next e-mail, and the program to decrypt it, so that it can be taken from them, and used by the adversary. Are you sure your way is better?
What you're describing is a random number generator with a key to initialize it. Some of the good ones might be good enough (or might not). Anything you can keep in your head is going to be crap and fairly easily breakable.
Hell no. Using a not-all-that random-book page, and obfuscating its structure by applying a simple algorithm on will still give you an one time pad that is suboptimal, but nowhere all that breakable, especially if you do not know the simple algorithm, and that it is being applied on book pages.
Lets assume that you have somehow completely broken through some of the steps (In the real world, you could not break through the whole thing step by step)
1) So, through some magic you have managed to extract the exact bits from the picture that have been modified. (Which is far from easy, if you have ran out of magic)
2) Lets even assume that you somehow know that the one time pad is generated from book pages, through some keep-it-in-your-head method. (Through the same magic as before)
So now you have the encrypted message. What do you do? How do you use your knowledge of the weakness of the one time pad?
All you will get is the ability, once you have come up with every possible message, to assign a probability of the sort "This message is more likely to have been the original, if the one time pad was crappy in the way we assume it was".
You didn't say so, but I'm assuming you're encrypting your message using the book page as a one time pad,
Yes, I missed describing part of the mechanism. You use the page to generate the one time pad, once again via simple rules that you only keep in your head. You certainly do not use the ASCII code of each letter/space/punctuation sign as one byte in the pad. This will not make it anywhere close to random - it will be way worse than counting decay particles, but I think that it will be good enough. I am not trying to improve on something that we know works, here. I am trying to avoid incriminating keys that the characters have to keep secure, and that can be seized to compromise the communications.
Steganography isn't much protection when someone knows there might be hidden messages.
Once again, I am going for good enough. Sure, the attacker may know that a few bites in the picture 'may' have been changed. (The characters won't be dumb enough to exchange pictures only when they want to exchange a message.) If the message is short enough, and the picture large enough, it will be very hard to tell there's something amiss, and much much harder to prove it in a court of law... Not that it really matters.
Remember, by picking other bites, and picking a different one-time pad, you would get different messages, just as meaningful.
One time pads are not worthless in practice, at all.
Whether you are a criminal, or a government agent, at some point you will be in a secure location, and you will be able to exchange the pads. The USB stick in my pocket can hold more data than I expect to exchange with any of my friends in the course my lifetime. How long to you think encrypted messages need to be?
But even that is less secure than what you could do.
Hell, if I was writing a novel about smart criminals, and wanted them to be capable of secure communication, this is what I have them do:
They would meet in the big boss's hacienda, and they would agree to use one of the 50000 books available on project Gutenberg. The page to use as an one time pad would be selected via a function of the day the message is sent. The function would be simple enough to memorize.
When one of the party wants to send a message, they would take a picture they have a plausible reason to send, and would use a hex editor, on a PC physically disconnected from the Internet, to manually change a subset of low-significance color bits. Again, the subset will be determined by a rule that is easily memorized.
Yes, the process is laborious, and I would have them do it twice, and then compare the two resulting pictures. If they do not match, they will have to do it again. Once the pictures match, wipe (properly) the originals (from everywhere: camera, usb, secure computer) and send the modified picture, accompanied with an innocuous and appropriate message.
Obviously, the encrypted messages would need to be short, but this process will not attract any attention, and will rely on memorized rules, publicly available data, and programs that would not draw anyone's attention.
What is the NSA doing to do? Suspect anyone sending pictures to his friends? Try, as a one time pad, every page on every book available on Gutenberg, or the myriads of pirated book libraries in China, Russia, Ukraine, etc?
I cannot think of any weakness of this system. Can you? And even if it is completely stupid, I bet you two things: there are plenty of people who can come up with a better one, and plenty of people who are getting away with using a worse one.