I really enjoyed reading about the same scenes from a different perspective. I was impressed by how well OSC pulled it off.
It reminds you every great drama in real life also has dozens of plots and subplots that cross over each other. For every big story you hear about in history there were certainly many others that went on in the background. Fiction doesn't usually capture that, however.
I think I would like to see a few more parallel books attempted by various authors.
As for the other books in the series, they were not as intense as the first one. They ventured further into strangely philisophical land, but I enjoyed them just the same. That sort of thing appeals to me. But yes, those looking for more of the same kind of literary power in Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind that OSC put into Ender's Game will be disappointed. They take a different approach.
Thank you! That document may have contained good information, but the presentation was so ugly I couldn't stand to read very much of it.
Let this be a lesson to all of you: Office products product absolutely nasty HTML because they try to make your document look like it came from a word-processor instead of look like a normal web page. Sometimes trying to preserve the original appearance of something in a new medium is a really bad idea.
Is it really that much fun to sit here and troll/flame/argue with each other over how Linux is dead, GPL is communism, and we should all go back to running MS products. Yes all, the honeymoon is over and Linux sucks. You suck, and you're a moron. In fact you're a hypocritical, unintelligent hippie moron who probably hasn't passed puberty. . .
. . . Is this really so enjoyable that dozens of people spend their time ripping on anyone and everyone? It makes me sad to see so many people enjoy telling other people how stupid they are. Why is there so much destruction?
I've even caught myself slipping into the pit of unbounded criticism. Just a couple of weeks ago someone made me realize that I had accused them of attitudes that I didn't know they had. I just assumed the worst of them and proceeded accordingly, and unjustly. It scared me to see such a change occur in myself on an online forum. Being rude and self-righteous is contagious.
Is this the inevitable source of destruction for any online communication more interesting than Instant Messenger? Put enough people in one place and give them the ability to interact, and *WHAM* perfectly good and normal people distort their opinions and views just so they can rip on some guy.
Is it just me, or does anyone else long for discussion where the object is to share knowledge and not to gain conversational dominance? Maybe it's distorted hindsight, but I remember being able to do that once upon a time.
Sigh. I'll go crawl back into my hole now. You may now offtopic me into oblivion and pour hot grits down my pants while telling me that I'm a hypocritical, uninformed fool. That's what discussion is about these days, I guess.
To my knowledge, "perfect security" means that without the key, you cannot decrypt the message. So far, the only encryption scheme that meets that criterion is the One Time Pad scheme.
Here's a quick description of how it works. (I've changed the implementation to be more computer-friendly. It was originally stated in terms of a pad of random letters used to generate alphabet rotations.) It requires that Alice have a big pool of random (not pseudo-random) bytes. Alice and Bob (the person she is communicating with) have the same sequence of random bytes. Alice XOR's the first byte of her message with the first byte of her random pool. She then XOR's the second byte with the second byte from the random pool. She continues until the message is encrypted. She now sends the ciphertext to Bob who can then XOR the first byte from his random pool (same as Alice's) and recover the first byte. In this manner, Bob can read the entire message.
Eve (the nasty evesdropper) can intercept the ciphertext, but without the key, the ciphertext could mean anything. Every possible message can be encoded as the same ciphertext given the appropriate key.
Of course, few people use this scheme because it is insanely impractical. Distributing huge amounts of truly random data is difficult at best and dangerous at worst. (Eve could just start stealing your keys if you have to ship them all over the place.)
However, the original point of this thread (I think) was to discuss actually hiding the data so that one would not even be sure data was transmitted. Intelligence agencies can get a lot of data from just traffic analysis, so steganography is still an important part of transmitting secret messages, but technically not part of the definition of "cryptographic security."
I can see where you're coming from. I've been the victim of my own rant.:( I assumed motives for your actions that were untrue. It's too bad that distrust and paranoia have to govern our actions these days. I kind of liked being able to trust people.
That's okay. We're all supposed to interpret everyone's actions in the worst possible manner. It's called "being analytical" and is apparently an effective way to be counter-cultural. Yes sir, only conformist drones give anyone the benefit of the doubt.
'K. Enough ranting. Sorry you had to be on the receiving end of someone's paranoia.
I actually wrote a paper for my Senior composition class on that very topic. No Eschelon stuff, though. I argued it from a philisophical and a pragmatic viewpoint (i.e. I took the need for cryptography as a given and argued why cryptographic controls were either bad Karma or pointless). Here's my bibliography:
Denning, Dorothy E. and Miles Smid. "Key Escrowing Today." IEEE Communications Magazine 32.9 (1994): 58-68.
Fotis, James J. "Senate Hearing: Testimony of James J. Fotis, Law Enforcement Alliance of America (on behalf of ACP)." Americans for Computer Privacy. 18 Mar. 1998. <http://www.computerprivacy.org/archive/03171998-5 .shtml> (13 Apr. 1998).
Garfinkel, Simson and Gene Spafford. Practical UNIX and Internet Security. 2nd ed. Cambridge: O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. 1991.
Goodlatte, Bob. "Congressman Bob Goodlatte - GOODLATTE INTRODUCES BILL TO LIMIT LIABILITY." United States House of Representatives. 17 Mar. 1998. <http://www.house.gov/goodlatte/Encrsen.html> (13 Apr. 1998)
Litt, Robert S. "Senate Hearing: Testimony of Bob Litt, US Department of Justice." Americans for Computer Privacy. 18 Mar. 1998. <http://www.computerprivacy.org/archive/03171998-4 .shtml> (13 Apr. 1998).
Nguyen, Thinh. "Cryptography, Export Controls, and the First Amendment in Bernstein v. United States Department of State." Harvard Journal of Law and Technology 10.3 (Summer 1997): 667-82.
Parenty, Thomas. "Senate Hearing: Tom Parenty, SyBase Inc (on Behalf of ACP)." Americans for Computer Privacy. 18 Mar. 1998. <http://www.computerprivacy.org/archive/03171998-6 .shtml> (13 Apr. 1998).
Radlo, Edward J. "Legal Issues in Cryptography." Computer Lawyer 13.5 (May 1996): 1-11.
Reiman, Phillip E. "Cryptography and the First Amendment: The Right to be Unheard." John Marshall Journal of Computer and Information Law 14 (Winter 1996): 325-45.
Schumacher, Ståle. "Frequently Asked Questions About PGPi." PGP International. 28 Apr. 1998. <http://www.pgpi.com/faq/50i.shtml> (7 May 1998).
Stay, Ronald J. "Cryptic Controversy: U.S. Government Restrictions on Cryptography Exports and the Plight of Philip Zimmerman." Georgia State University Law Review 13.2 (1997): 581-604.
Wiedemann, Bill. "Senate Hearing: Testimony of Bill Wiedemann, Red Creek Communications." Americans for Computer Privacy. 17 Mar. 1998. <http://www.computerprivacy.org/archive/03171998-9 .shtml> (13 Apr. 1998)
The software linked to does not allow you to circumvent (as far as I can tell) the censorware itself. It simply lets you look at their encrypted list of blocked sites. It gives you a way to rapidly evaluate just how lame (or not lame) their site categorization system is.
I always wondered why RedHat and friends put the kernel in the/boot partition until I realized it offered a way to get your kernel early enough on your hard disk to be bootable without forcing you to cramp your root partition.
You partition your disk in this manner:
/boot - 15MB
/ - 4GB (or whatever)
/home - whatever looks good
etc...
Now your kernel will be bootable and you don't need a small root partition.
Maybe you already new that, but I thought I would pass along the tip to anyone who didn't.
I was really hoping someone would attack this topic with some teeth, some concrete ideas and solutions. Instead, it looks like we've watched a vigorous gumming of the issue with a silly conclusion.
I honestly believe there was something behind where Katz was going, but it got lost in the melodramatic ending. As a result, the notion of redefining what property is in a virtual world has been thrown to the wolves to rip and shred because, essentially, of poor packaging.
Doh, maybe the next person who takes a crack at it will be more successful.
Slashdot Mirror
Care to give details, or do we have to take your word for it? If you are indeed legit, I, for one, would like more information.
What were the 1st and 2nd stupidest ideas? :)
Actinide is a series on the periodic table (elements 89-103). The word I believe Sig11 is looking for is asinine, meaning stupid or silly.
-- Fred Brooks _The Mythical Man Month_
That's a fairly random comment. What are you talking about?
I think you missed when you were clicking on the reply link. Perhaps you were slightly distracted...
(However, my opinion doesn't count because I also liked _Siddhartha_ by Hermann Hesse. Or at least that's what they tell me.)
It reminds you every great drama in real life also has dozens of plots and subplots that cross over each other. For every big story you hear about in history there were certainly many others that went on in the background. Fiction doesn't usually capture that, however.
I think I would like to see a few more parallel books attempted by various authors.
As for the other books in the series, they were not as intense as the first one. They ventured further into strangely philisophical land, but I enjoyed them just the same. That sort of thing appeals to me. But yes, those looking for more of the same kind of literary power in Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind that OSC put into Ender's Game will be disappointed. They take a different approach.
At least they haven't made it illegal for people to read over your shoulder.
(Go read The Right to Read even if you think RMS is a fruitcake. It brings up some good points on this topic.)
Let this be a lesson to all of you: Office products product absolutely nasty HTML because they try to make your document look like it came from a word-processor instead of look like a normal web page. Sometimes trying to preserve the original appearance of something in a new medium is a really bad idea.
Segmentation fault
Yeah, damn the Man! Damn the Man!
Is this really so enjoyable that dozens of people spend their time ripping on anyone and everyone? It makes me sad to see so many people enjoy telling other people how stupid they are. Why is there so much destruction?
I've even caught myself slipping into the pit of unbounded criticism. Just a couple of weeks ago someone made me realize that I had accused them of attitudes that I didn't know they had. I just assumed the worst of them and proceeded accordingly, and unjustly. It scared me to see such a change occur in myself on an online forum. Being rude and self-righteous is contagious.
Is this the inevitable source of destruction for any online communication more interesting than Instant Messenger? Put enough people in one place and give them the ability to interact, and *WHAM* perfectly good and normal people distort their opinions and views just so they can rip on some guy.
Is it just me, or does anyone else long for discussion where the object is to share knowledge and not to gain conversational dominance? Maybe it's distorted hindsight, but I remember being able to do that once upon a time.
Sigh. I'll go crawl back into my hole now. You may now offtopic me into oblivion and pour hot grits down my pants while telling me that I'm a hypocritical, uninformed fool. That's what discussion is about these days, I guess.
Here's a quick description of how it works. (I've changed the implementation to be more computer-friendly. It was originally stated in terms of a pad of random letters used to generate alphabet rotations.)
It requires that Alice have a big pool of random (not pseudo-random) bytes. Alice and Bob (the person she is communicating with) have the same sequence of random bytes. Alice XOR's the first byte of her message with the first byte of her random pool. She then XOR's the second byte with the second byte from the random pool. She continues until the message is encrypted. She now sends the ciphertext to Bob who can then XOR the first byte from his random pool (same as Alice's) and recover the first byte. In this manner, Bob can read the entire message.
Eve (the nasty evesdropper) can intercept the ciphertext, but without the key, the ciphertext could mean anything. Every possible message can be encoded as the same ciphertext given the appropriate key.
Of course, few people use this scheme because it is insanely impractical. Distributing huge amounts of truly random data is difficult at best and dangerous at worst. (Eve could just start stealing your keys if you have to ship them all over the place.)
However, the original point of this thread (I think) was to discuss actually hiding the data so that one would not even be sure data was transmitted. Intelligence agencies can get a lot of data from just traffic analysis, so steganography is still an important part of transmitting secret messages, but technically not part of the definition of "cryptographic security."
Sigh.
Go with both. They complement each other.
'K. Enough ranting. Sorry you had to be on the receiving end of someone's paranoia.
When you post such insightful and well-thought out comments, are you at all surprised that moderators are not impressed?
The software linked to does not allow you to circumvent (as far as I can tell) the censorware itself. It simply lets you look at their encrypted list of blocked sites. It gives you a way to rapidly evaluate just how lame (or not lame) their site categorization system is.
You partition your disk in this manner:
- /boot - 15MB
- / - 4GB (or whatever)
- /home - whatever looks good
- etc...
Now your kernel will be bootable and you don't need a small root partition.Maybe you already new that, but I thought I would pass along the tip to anyone who didn't.
Does somebody want to mirror the Einstein files? The FBI site appears to have taken them all down.
I honestly believe there was something behind where Katz was going, but it got lost in the melodramatic ending. As a result, the notion of redefining what property is in a virtual world has been thrown to the wolves to rip and shred because, essentially, of poor packaging.
Doh, maybe the next person who takes a crack at it will be more successful.