AES is secure, as is DES, as is almost any other symmetric cryptographic protocol. AES, for instance, is based on Galois Fields (and associated chicanery), whereas DES is based on drop-dead simple permutations that are so elegant and inexpensive that I find it difficult to resist *not* implementing them on an 8-bit PIC (although someone else has of course beaten me to the punch!). Neither one is reducible to anything like factoring.
Many public-key algorithms, and many public-key-based authentication protocols, however, *are* reducible to factoring, even if they don't appear to involve such darkness the first time you read them.AFAIK, for public key algs the deep magic is either factoring or the knapsack problem; however, almost all of the latter kind have been proven insecure. One notable exception of the latter variety is the Diffie-Hellman (sp?) algorithm, which is incidentally also the first public-key alg ever invented, and the underlying muscle behind the NSA's DSA signature scheme (although ElGamal did some strengthening work and got to rename the bugger;). However, don't make the switch to DH just yet -- IIRC, the ciphertext is effectively doubled in length (over RSA). So you can either make a bigger RSA, or you can make a bigger message every time you encrypt -- either way, you email just got longer:)
Shame on SA.
SA completed its transformation from 'Science for Generalists' to '_Popular_Science_ for Grownups' a couple of years back, when they changed the layout of their cover.
I pine for the days of a good ol' fashioned science rag that doesn't attempt to satisfy 'everyone with an interest' but merely those with an interest and a willingness to scratch up whatever bodies of knowledge are prerequisite.
_Science_ is about the best a person can do these days. It's usually heavier-gauge than what I really need, but I can usually piece together enough to know what's going on.
I really, really hate it when an app isn't cross-platform and/or doesn't have a compatible implementation available under other platforms. My job entails switching back/forth between linux and windows many, many times; having patches of stability such as Mozilla, vim and (Win|G)cvs is great.
Knowing bosses, the lack of sleep would prolly be deducted from your health package, as a benefit.
Re:Actually excited about .NET
on
What is .NET?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Um. 'Whilst' is perfectly acceptable modern English, no matter where you live (except possibly in whatever cave you crawled out of, my dear primitive primate).
If you want a language without fun synonyms, use Esperanto, which remains the one true 'Common Language Runtime'.
But you know what? Everyone uses English, Spanish, or what-have-you for international communication, instead. Because we like 'whilst', and words like it --- inefficiency and redundancy and all.
I have a hunch that many developers will feel the same way about all those little bevelled edges on.NET that they do about Esperanto, and Haskell and Scheme and all previous attempts to prune the messy, crazy tree of human creativity: "Gee, this is Formally Correct, but who cares?" (I say this as a big fan of Scheme, believe it or not; I'm just documenting the typical C programmer's reaction to it.)
OTOH, whatever degree of language neutrality they 're planning is certainly a leap in the right direction -- less to change, less to learn. However, quite a few of my fellow coders won't be happy until they have a complete Win32 implementation running atop.Net;)
And as for that whole spin about.Net being the death knell for the x86? Well, lemme share a prediction: ten years from now we'll all be using Pentium Elevens with full 386 backward compatibility and toaster-sized nitrogen-cooled heat sinks.
This has to be the dumbest, most trollerific Ask Slashdot ever. What's next? 'Which operating system is best?' 'What's the best text editor?' 'Is Bill Gates Cooler, As Cool or Less Cool than Linus?'.... They must be having a really slow news day there over at OSDN.
...may provide answers to how animals can survive in a cold, dark, gaseous environment."
And *how*, exactly, are they going to smuggle them into the Senate?
"Lo, I am Miguel the many-coloured!"
To which RMS the grey replied,
"You have been staring into the Lidless API for too long. You tried to wrestle control of the Dot away from Him, but the Dot still points to Redmond."
"To oppose Bill is impossible! If you are not with us, then... Die!"
</rough_paraphrasing>
Well, okay, sure, we've seen MS turn around before.
Once.
The difference is that time isn't on MS' side, this round. Sure, Bill isn't expecting the turnaround to be complete in 2002; but it kind of needs to be.
Another asymmetry is that the Internet Memo(tm) was basically a heads-up saying 'hey, guys, look at that *opportunity* to eat someone else's market share'. This memo is more like 'Fuck, we're going to *lose* market share'. The second is more serious from a business perspective, I believe.
Finally, Microsoft has an effing huge amount of product 'in the pipe' ATM. They really *need* full thrusters to put both XP and.NET into orbit, or Sun will have an opportunity to stop reacting and really make original headway with Java (again). It's like a game of chess. Microsoft has had the rest of the market in continuous check for the past two years or so, and due to a minor pawn-like oversight, the world has been given a breather. It probably won't be enough to break or even seriously slow the monopoly glacier, but it might strengthen a few pockets of resistance, here and there.
Okay, I think this one is going to tank harder than the hindenburg grafted to the side of the titanic grafted to the side of the world trade center, but _only_ in the consumer market.
Think of video houses and TV broadcasting outfits. I don't know about elsewhere, but in Canada all radio stations (and presumably, tv ones) are required to keep a running log of everything they produce, for one month. This must be quite prohibitively expensive for the 'little guys'.
Remember backup, too. I've often wanted to back up onto a nice roomy VHS casette! This could finally spell the end of those proprietary cart drives we've seen so many of these past years.
Also, remember, that this medium is less linear than vanilla VHS (vVHS?). The tape itself hasn't become any longer, so ffwd/rew would occur much more quickly (subjectively speaking).
This could've been an interesting technology had it been introduced five years ago.
Perhaps commercial software just isn't the right model for the rest of the known universe.
It'll take more than hardware DRM to shut down that distribution network, I promise you...
...so why not free software? Emergin' Market nation-states could finance GPLed code development/I18N as a means of pushing their economic interests forward.
They're already used to $5 software, dammit! This market is perfect for us!:)
...is provide a powerful enticement for consumers to purchase their music from "real" pirates. Why buy that copy-protected crap at full price when your Uncle Toby knows this guy that can get you a real CD of anything for a fraction of that?
IMO one of the most important reasons that Napster didn't obliterate the music industry overnight is that CDs are basically Good Enough. CDs provide an entire album in a nice (erm) compact package, with high fidelity to boot. This is *STILL* impressive, folks. Who cares if you can save twenty bucks by spending a couple of hours hunting down the dozen new songs by your favourite artist? Many people are simply too lazy and too rich; they just buy the goddamned CD and get it over with. (Besides, it comes in a pretty box.)
However, if commercial CDs suddenly become a big pain in the arse, you can bet your booty that alternatives will spring up.
Although consumers won't find it convenient to pirate stuff all by themselves, I imagine a full-scale bootleg distribution system will spring up fairly quickly. Although compared to Napster this structure has the disadvantage of reducing the number of actual pirates to prosecutable levels, basic economics tell us that so long as the demand is there, the supply WILL try to meet it. As with the 'war' on drugs, once can therefore expect many police hours (and therefore, tax dollars) to be spent finding and squishing a never-ending procession of infinitely-replaceable suppliers. What a pain! What an expense!
Why, here in Canada, we've not only created a supernova but in fact a whole 'mirror universe'. Although virtually identical to the US in most ways, in this 'twin world' the dollar is almost worthless, the politics are leftish, measurements are conducted in a rather strange "metric" system, the minority language is French rather than Spanish, and people manifest love for their nation by violently asserting a profound lack of patriotism.
As near as I can tell, the real universe split from its when the war of independence failed to happen, although it could also have something to do with the invention of poutine.
Interestingly, since prime-time television programming has apparently not yet been invented in this timeline, this alternate universe is almost completely dependent upon its mate for non-drama, non-Prince-Edward-Island-themed broadcasts. Thus, while the existence of a 'shadow -universe' may come as a shock to all of you in out there in the real one, citizens of this other realm have known about your universe for quite some time. They've been watching you! They don't wear goatees, but they all seem to wear mustaches! Avoid replacement by your evil twin: Destroy Canada today!
First off, the bit about the 90% of the users being almost completely computer illiterate is not a theory, it is an empirically-proven fact. I have the tech support nightmare-stories to prove it.:) Secondly --- and I think this follows pretty much immediately from the definition of 'computer illiterate' --- they do not use many, if any, 'power features'. Good god, teaching them to adjust their margins by any method other than tabbing was a challenge! Feature-wise, they use whatever's really thrown in their face (ie. the ability to cut and paste, the ability to make a memo or a letter with a company template) and very very very little else. These are all highly-intelligent people who, god bless 'em, simply know fuck-all about computers.
Secondly:
See, Gnumeric and AbiWord are actually pretty good at handling basic.xls and.doc files. For anything more difficult, it will be trivial to maintain a W2k box in the corner with some VBA scripts and Distiller to translate incoming Excel, Word into PDF. Besides, these days incompatibility with Word and Excel macros is a feature, not a bug:)
Also -- and I should be clear about this -- *I* *am* the entire IT department for this company. They'll all be using standard software, because I set the standard. Bob from accounting doesn't have an option. If he really really really really needs to use windows for some reason, he'll be using AbiWord to communicate with the rest of the company, point finale.
I'm going to reply to your comment before you have the misfortune of being modded down into oblivion as a troll (and I don't think you are.)
First off, some background: I'm currently working as a network admin (and jr. sw/ engineer) for a small (~10peep) company that has a small quotient of (extremely) technically-proficient people and a lot of very wonderful people whose expertise is in other fields. I mean, *really* *way* other fields. No offense -- these people are all great -- but they have the combined computer know-how of my cat. I mean, some of these people get confused when they accidentally collapse one of the 'folder-branches' in Outlook ("hey! I can't find my inbox!") These people have a hard time using Windows, let alone using linux. However -- and this is the important bit -- they only use about.5% of the features of their operating system. That is, they each have very little investment in learned skills. Each person knows the bare basics of what it takes to accomplish their job -- the sales guys know how to send, receive and sort email; the secretary knows how to work Excel and Dynacom, and so on, and so on. The upshot is this: All a replacement platform needs in order to be 'drop-in' is a precise rendition of the basic features of Word, Outlook and so forth. Due to the recent TCO explosion in the use of MS products (virii, worms, IE holes, subscription fees....), I've been given the green light to migrate everyone to linux. Initially, I was sceptical. although I'm willing to loudly advocate linux at the drop of a hat for (especially Internet-facing) servers, I was afraid of the headaches that would emerge when I had to field complaints. However, as it turns out, using a windows-like WM (for instance, icewm) and Abiword, Gnumeric, and Evolution works great. Although none of these packages is perfect, they're all 'good enough' simply because the skill set of each employee is typcially so narrow. It's actually the power users that put up the most resistance, and they can usually be assauged by giving them a full GNOME desktop (panel applets and Nautilus are like Jesus for winning them over.) Although KDE works great too, and in fact is what I regard as the superior overall desktop, Abiword and Gnumeric and Evolution and Opera win the vote for Gnome; they're (generally speaking) more well-rounded and more user-friendly than their KDE cognates . Especially important is the degree of browser/filemanager compatibility; as much as I love Konq, it frequently butchers IE-philic web sites (little ?-marks instead em-dashes, for instance), and that makes it very confusing for newbies.
Slashdot Mirror
AES is secure, as is DES, as is almost any other symmetric cryptographic protocol. AES, for instance, is based on Galois Fields (and associated chicanery), whereas DES is based on drop-dead simple permutations that are so elegant and inexpensive that I find it difficult to resist *not* implementing them on an 8-bit PIC (although someone else has of course beaten me to the punch!). Neither one is reducible to anything like factoring.
;). However, don't make the switch to DH just yet -- IIRC, the ciphertext is effectively doubled in length (over RSA). So you can either make a bigger RSA, or you can make a bigger message every time you encrypt -- either way, you email just got longer :)
Many public-key algorithms, and many public-key-based authentication protocols, however, *are* reducible to factoring, even if they don't appear to involve such darkness the first time you read them.AFAIK, for public key algs the deep magic is either factoring or the knapsack problem; however, almost all of the latter kind have been proven insecure. One notable exception of the latter variety is the Diffie-Hellman (sp?) algorithm, which is incidentally also the first public-key alg ever invented, and the underlying muscle behind the NSA's DSA signature scheme (although ElGamal did some strengthening work and got to rename the bugger
Deckard was a REPLICANT?
Oh my GOD...
Shame on SA. SA completed its transformation from 'Science for Generalists' to '_Popular_Science_ for Grownups' a couple of years back, when they changed the layout of their cover. I pine for the days of a good ol' fashioned science rag that doesn't attempt to satisfy 'everyone with an interest' but merely those with an interest and a willingness to scratch up whatever bodies of knowledge are prerequisite. _Science_ is about the best a person can do these days. It's usually heavier-gauge than what I really need, but I can usually piece together enough to know what's going on.
You know, they forgot to ship a motherboard along with the monitor and pedestal.
I really, really hate it when an app isn't cross-platform and/or doesn't have a compatible implementation available under other platforms. My job entails switching back/forth between linux and windows many, many times; having patches of stability such as Mozilla, vim and (Win|G)cvs is great.
Knowing bosses, the lack of sleep would prolly be deducted from your health package, as a benefit.
Um. 'Whilst' is perfectly acceptable modern English, no matter where you live (except possibly in whatever cave you crawled out of, my dear primitive primate).
.NET that they do about Esperanto, and Haskell and Scheme and all previous attempts to prune the messy, crazy tree of human creativity: "Gee, this is Formally Correct, but who cares?" (I say this as a big fan of Scheme, believe it or not; I'm just documenting the typical C programmer's reaction to it.)
.Net ;)
.Net being the death knell for the x86? Well, lemme share a prediction: ten years from now we'll all be using Pentium Elevens with full 386 backward compatibility and toaster-sized nitrogen-cooled heat sinks.
If you want a language without fun synonyms, use Esperanto, which remains the one true 'Common Language Runtime'.
But you know what? Everyone uses English, Spanish, or what-have-you for international communication, instead. Because we like 'whilst', and words like it --- inefficiency and redundancy and all.
I have a hunch that many developers will feel the same way about all those little bevelled edges on
OTOH, whatever degree of language neutrality they 're planning is certainly a leap in the right direction -- less to change, less to learn. However, quite a few of my fellow coders won't be happy until they have a complete Win32 implementation running atop
And as for that whole spin about
Just my floor(e) cents.
It was probably to fight terrorism. You know. The terror created by offering the electorate a choice of political parties. All that indecision!
This has to be the dumbest, most trollerific Ask Slashdot ever. What's next? 'Which operating system is best?' 'What's the best text editor?' 'Is Bill Gates Cooler, As Cool or Less Cool than Linus?' .... They must be having a really slow news day there over at OSDN.
...may provide answers to how animals can survive in a cold, dark, gaseous environment."
And *how*, exactly, are they going to smuggle them into the Senate?
Salesguy: "Er, yeah, actually, our customers usually buy, like, a dozen or more. Because they're so good. Er."
Tech: "Really? How many do you think *I* should get?"
Salesguy: "What's your credit card limit like?"
"Lo, I am Miguel the many-coloured!"
To which RMS the grey replied,
"You have been staring into the Lidless API for too long. You tried to wrestle control of the Dot away from Him, but the Dot still points to Redmond."
"To oppose Bill is impossible! If you are not with us, then... Die!"
</rough_paraphrasing>
Well, okay, sure, we've seen MS turn around before.
.NET into orbit, or Sun will have an opportunity to stop reacting and really make original headway with Java (again). It's like a game of chess. Microsoft has had the rest of the market in continuous check for the past two years or so, and due to a minor pawn-like oversight, the world has been given a breather. It probably won't be enough to break or even seriously slow the monopoly glacier, but it might strengthen a few pockets of resistance, here and there.
Once.
The difference is that time isn't on MS' side, this round. Sure, Bill isn't expecting the turnaround to be complete in 2002; but it kind of needs to be.
Another asymmetry is that the Internet Memo(tm) was basically a heads-up saying 'hey, guys, look at that *opportunity* to eat someone else's market share'. This memo is more like 'Fuck, we're going to *lose* market share'. The second is more serious from a business perspective, I believe.
Finally, Microsoft has an effing huge amount of product 'in the pipe' ATM. They really *need* full thrusters to put both XP and
Yeah, the Bush dynasty has been pretty long-lasting. How many governors? Presidents?
It threatens to beat out the Kennedys, for sure.
Okay, I think this one is going to tank harder than the hindenburg grafted to the side of the titanic grafted to the side of the world trade center, but _only_ in the consumer market.
Think of video houses and TV broadcasting outfits. I don't know about elsewhere, but in Canada all radio stations (and presumably, tv ones) are required to keep a running log of everything they produce, for one month. This must be quite prohibitively expensive for the 'little guys'.
Remember backup, too. I've often wanted to back up onto a nice roomy VHS casette! This could finally spell the end of those proprietary cart drives we've seen so many of these past years.
Also, remember, that this medium is less linear than vanilla VHS (vVHS?). The tape itself hasn't become any longer, so ffwd/rew would occur much more quickly (subjectively speaking).
This could've been an interesting technology had it been introduced five years ago.
There are drugs to fix that.
carrying a Microsoft press release, or other bad news ;)
Either that, or the scientists crunched the numbers over a nice Italian meal at some bistro...
Perhaps commercial software just isn't the right model for the rest of the known universe.
:)
It'll take more than hardware DRM to shut down that distribution network, I promise you...
...so why not free software? Emergin' Market nation-states could finance GPLed code development/I18N as a means of pushing their economic interests forward.
They're already used to $5 software, dammit! This market is perfect for us!
...is provide a powerful enticement for consumers to purchase their music from "real" pirates. Why buy that copy-protected crap at full price when your Uncle Toby knows this guy that can get you a real CD of anything for a fraction of that?
IMO one of the most important reasons that Napster didn't obliterate the music industry overnight is that CDs are basically Good Enough. CDs provide an entire album in a nice (erm) compact package, with high fidelity to boot. This is *STILL* impressive, folks. Who cares if you can save twenty bucks by spending a couple of hours hunting down the dozen new songs by your favourite artist? Many people are simply too lazy and too rich; they just buy the goddamned CD and get it over with. (Besides, it comes in a pretty box.)
However, if commercial CDs suddenly become a big pain in the arse, you can bet your booty that alternatives will spring up.
Although consumers won't find it convenient to pirate stuff all by themselves, I imagine a full-scale bootleg distribution system will spring up fairly quickly. Although compared to Napster this structure has the disadvantage of reducing the number of actual pirates to prosecutable levels, basic economics tell us that so long as the demand is there, the supply WILL try to meet it. As with the 'war' on drugs, once can therefore expect many police hours (and therefore, tax dollars) to be spent finding and squishing a never-ending procession of infinitely-replaceable suppliers. What a pain! What an expense!
So when did the proper spelling of the word 'connexion' become a corporate trademark?
Grr.
'Crack ROT-13, Go To Jail, Where ROT-13 is Defined as f(x) = x + 13 mod 26, for a=1, b=2...z=26'?
:P
It's a one-line formula; quite catchy, really....
Why, here in Canada, we've not only created a supernova but in fact a whole 'mirror universe'. Although virtually identical to the US in most ways, in this 'twin world' the dollar is almost worthless, the politics are leftish, measurements are conducted in a rather strange "metric" system, the minority language is French rather than Spanish, and people manifest love for their nation by violently asserting a profound lack of patriotism.
As near as I can tell, the real universe split from its when the war of independence failed to happen, although it could also have something to do with the invention of poutine.
Interestingly, since prime-time television programming has apparently not yet been invented in this timeline, this alternate universe is almost completely dependent upon its mate for non-drama, non-Prince-Edward-Island-themed broadcasts. Thus, while the existence of a 'shadow -universe' may come as a shock to all of you in out there in the real one, citizens of this other realm have known about your universe for quite some time. They've been watching you! They don't wear goatees, but they all seem to wear mustaches! Avoid replacement by your evil twin: Destroy Canada today!
First off, the bit about the 90% of the users being almost completely computer illiterate is not a theory, it is an empirically-proven fact. I have the tech support nightmare-stories to prove it. :) Secondly --- and I think this follows pretty much immediately from the definition of 'computer illiterate' --- they do not use many, if any, 'power features'. Good god, teaching them to adjust their margins by any method other than tabbing was a challenge! Feature-wise, they use whatever's really thrown in their face (ie. the ability to cut and paste, the ability to make a memo or a letter with a company template) and very very very little else. These are all highly-intelligent people who, god bless 'em, simply know fuck-all about computers.
.xls and .doc files. For anything more difficult, it will be trivial to maintain a W2k box in the corner with some VBA scripts and Distiller to translate incoming Excel, Word into PDF. Besides, these days incompatibility with Word and Excel macros is a feature, not a bug :)
Secondly:
See, Gnumeric and AbiWord are actually pretty good at handling basic
Also -- and I should be clear about this -- *I* *am* the entire IT department for this company. They'll all be using standard software, because I set the standard. Bob from accounting doesn't have an option. If he really really really really needs to use windows for some reason, he'll be using AbiWord to communicate with the rest of the company, point finale.
I'm going to reply to your comment before you have the misfortune of being modded down into oblivion as a troll (and I don't think you are.)
.5% of the features of their operating system. That is, they each have very little investment in learned skills. Each person knows the bare basics of what it takes to accomplish their job -- the sales guys know how to send, receive and sort email; the secretary knows how to work Excel and Dynacom, and so on, and so on. The upshot is this: All a replacement platform needs in order to be 'drop-in' is a precise rendition of the basic features of Word, Outlook and so forth. Due to the recent TCO explosion in the use of MS products (virii, worms, IE holes, subscription fees....), I've been given the green light to migrate everyone to linux. Initially, I was sceptical. although I'm willing to loudly advocate linux at the drop of a hat for (especially Internet-facing) servers, I was afraid of the headaches that would emerge when I had to field complaints. However, as it turns out, using a windows-like WM (for instance, icewm) and Abiword, Gnumeric, and Evolution works great. Although none of these packages is perfect, they're all 'good enough' simply because the skill set of each employee is typcially so narrow. It's actually the power users that put up the most resistance, and they can usually be assauged by giving them a full GNOME desktop (panel applets and Nautilus are like Jesus for winning them over.) Although KDE works great too, and in fact is what I regard as the superior overall desktop, Abiword and Gnumeric and Evolution and Opera win the vote for Gnome; they're (generally speaking) more well-rounded and more user-friendly than their KDE cognates . Especially important is the degree of browser/filemanager compatibility; as much as I love Konq, it frequently butchers IE-philic web sites (little ?-marks instead em-dashes, for instance), and that makes it very confusing for newbies.
First off, some background: I'm currently working as a network admin (and jr. sw/ engineer) for a small (~10peep) company that has a small quotient of (extremely) technically-proficient people and a lot of very wonderful people whose expertise is in other fields. I mean, *really* *way* other fields. No offense -- these people are all great -- but they have the combined computer know-how of my cat. I mean, some of these people get confused when they accidentally collapse one of the 'folder-branches' in Outlook ("hey! I can't find my inbox!") These people have a hard time using Windows, let alone using linux. However -- and this is the important bit -- they only use about
Well, I suppose if you want it to work, you should also call newaliases somewhere in there....
:)
Sigh. Maybe I'm increasing my boss' total cost of ownership after all.....