in the united states, it's legal to sell armour-piercing ammunition... this activity is all fine and legal.
As soon as we see a cop get killed by armor-piercing ammunition, there will certainly be a lawsuit.
In more than 25 years of the KTW round (the armor-piercing round in question) being available on the gray market, not once has it been used in any crime. That track record strongly suggests the KTW is not in need of legislation.
Also, it's now illegal to manufacture armor-piercing ammunition for the civilian market. It's legal to sell existing armor-piercing ammunition on the civilian market, but it's not legal to create new AP ammo for the civilian market or to allow law-enforcement AP ammo to enter the civilian market.
I saw my first steer get slaughtered when I was about seven. We didn't believe in using sledgehammers, as meatpacking plants do. We thought a twelve-gauge deer slug between the eyes was more humane. I was shooting a.22 rifle by the time I was eight, albeit with close adult supervision. On weekends my brother and I would take air rifles into our barns and hoghouses and do search-and-destroy for sparrows and rats. Part of this was necessity, in that you don't want pests infesting your grain and hay and feed. Part of it was that it was fun.
Today I'm thirty years old. I shoot skeet and.45 ACP nowadays, not air rifles and.22 rimfires. I've never been arrested; never been accused of any crime more serious than a minor moving violation. I pay my taxes, I vote in almost every possible election (including school board elections), and while I've fallen away from organized religion I drop in on my old padre once every two weeks to have lunch and talk faith.
You think the problem today is the graphics? I had photorealistic violence. I had the real deal. I stood there with a twelve-gauge and put a steer's brains out through the back of its head. It rattled me at first, doesn't anymore. I patrolled a farm on rat and sparrow detail and did a pretty good job of it. That didn't rattle me.
Anyone who says exposure to photorealistic violence is causing kids to go crazy knows nothing about the everyday violence of rural America, or how normal we turn out.
P.S.: Yes, it's rare that animals get slaughtered on farms nowadays; usually that happens at meatpacking plants. However, from time to time it does happen. We had a small meat plant which bought cattle from us, and they didn't care much whether it was alive or dead when they hauled it away. Rather than have our cattle be condemned to a sledgehammer, we decided to grant them the mercy of a gunshot. The small meatpacker wouldn't do this themselves, on account of ammunition costs money and sledgehammers are cheap.
I think it says something that of all the professional soldiers I know, none of them share your view. None. Zero. Their attitude is simple: violence is wrong. It is never morally right to engage in war. The only question is whether not engaging in war is an even worse moral choice.
"War is hell," as Sherman put it. A USMC gunnery sergeant described his job as "legally sanctioned murder". Col. Jeff Cooper, USMC (Ret.), one of the finest living riflemen today and founder of some terrific shooting schools, has said he'd far rather be a cop than a soldier: when a cop shoots someone, it's usually somebody who's made some really bad choices and is endangering lives, but when a soldier shoots someone, it's usually for no other reason than the other guy is wearing the wrong color of uniform. Cooper's said in the past that he thinks most of the people he killed in war, he would've really liked if he'd ever had the chance to sit down and have a beer with them.
Ask General Hal Moore, USAR (Ret.), or Sgt. Major Basil Plumley, USAR (Ret.), if they think what they did in the Ia Drang was "right". They'll be quite adamant: it was not right, it was a horror, a nightmare, and something no human being should ever inflict on another. What would've been worse is doing nothing.
I am not a pacifist. I've actually had to pull a twelve-gauge on someone before, and give a mugger a choice: he could keep on beating an unconscious victim with a tire iron, or he could go away. (He elected to go away, for which I am immensely grateful. I did not need that stain on my soul.) His victim survived, albeit with a lengthy stay in the intensive care unit.
After it was all over I spent the next half-hour puking my guts out. I am glad I spent the next half-hour puking my guts out. That tells me that I'm still human. That tells me that I recognize other people are human beings and deserve to exist. That tells me that I'm not a bully. That tells me that I'm not evil.
People like you scare the living shit out of me, because the instant someone like you gets a weapon, you start to rationalize its use. I'm not worried about lunatics with tire irons who are beating the living shit out of unconscious people; in all my years I've only met one of those, so they're pretty uncommon.
But I know tons of people like you. People who talk about how the instant someone breaks into their home, they'd better have an ambulance handy. People who have their explanations and justifications prerationalized. People like you scare the living shit out of me.
I'm a firearms owner. Quite proud to be one. I'm a big fan of the Second Amendment. But I'm just as big a fan of moral responsibility, which, I hate to say, is becoming harder and harder to find nowadays.
I usually don't respond to ACs, but I'm going to assume your question is sincere.
Of the 200,000 people who died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, most historians estimate about 180,000 of them were part of the Imperial Japanese Army's war machine. IJA conscripted the population into being part of the war machine, to the point where schools stopped teaching math and literature and history and started teaching how to stick American GIs with bamboo spears--some of the classes being taught with American POWs.
Women were forced to work in factories building war materiel, as were men unfit for military duty. Of the population of Japan, only a small fraction--ten percent or so--could truly be considered noncombatants.
It's true that most of the 180,000 military personnel killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unwilling personnel, but that doesn't make them any different from IJA troops who were drafted and sent against American GIs.
So, are a couple of nukes worth more than a couple of hundred thousand innocent civilians? Of course not. Are they worth more than several factories building war materials and 180,000 people working in the furtherance of IJA goals? Absolutely.
The first absurdist conclusion I saw, which was impeccably backed up, I found in high school. I no longer remember the source, unfortunately. In the aftermath of a strategic nuclear exchange between the US and the Soviet Union, the per-capita cancer rates would actually go down because the same nukes which would take out the CIA headquarters in Virginia would also take out essential infrastructure for the tobacco industry. Whatever upswing in cancer rates due to fallout would quickly be overtaken by the downswing of the entire nation quitting smoking.
Stuart Slade, a veteran of The Business who's now a defense industry analyst, wrote a good (unclassified) view from The Business of nuclear warfare. It's written up in three parts: here, here and here.
Slade mentions wealth creation by nuclear annihilation, but it's also covered other places. That and the cancer rate downturn are the two most widely-known absurdisms from The Business.
So call me crazy but I figure a MIRV would effectively destroy a metropolis.
The science industry which models nuclear weapon damage--a complex blend of physics, economics, engineering and political science--is called The Business by people who are in The Business. They're really interesting people to know; the vast majority of them have the hacker spirit. They specialize in asking hard questions, looking at the empirical data, and following it through to its most absurdist conclusions.
For instance, a 300 Kt strategic nuclear weapon needs to be placed within about 800m of its target, otherwise don't even bother with it. (Seriously. Most strategic targets are incredibly resistant to damage. The firebombing of Dresden was done to destroy the rail lines, but three days later the rails were going at full capacity.) Drop a strategic nuclear weapon more than 800m from a submarine pen, a railyard, a C3 bunker, and you're better off not dropping it at all and saving it for later.
Then, a few years ago, The Business looked into the effects of a 1 Mt citykiller dropped on London. It turns out you'd kill 20% of the population, but only destroy 5% of the economic value of London... meaning that immediately following a nuclear strike, the survivors would find themselves 18% wealthier. (They'd need it, too, thanks to the rampant inflation which would soon hit.)
Moral of the story: nuclear weapons do not have the effects people believe. Most people wildly exaggerate their destructive powers. I've read reports from The Business about what's likely to happen in the aftermath of a nuclear war, and let me tell you, it churned my stomach. The things I was expecting to happen never happened. The things I never imagined could happen would happen, and would have consequences far beyond what I could foresee.
Do you really think the US has the high road by comparing the slaughter of 2400 volunteer servicemen to the murder of nearly a quarter of a million women, children and old men in Nagasaki and Hiroshima?
There is no moral high road in war. However, it's pretty clear that even under today's definition of war crimes, neither Hiroshima or Nagasaki rise to that level.
Both sides, pro and con, agree that Japan had committed itself to what's called "total war"--the complete, one hundred percent mobilization of the population towards actions materially significant to the war's outcome. Twelve-year-olds went to school not to learn math and literature and history, but to learn how to use bamboo spears to defend the homeland. Men unfit for military duty and women were forcibly conscripted into working at war-materiel factories. By some estimates, more than 90% of the Japanese population over age twelve was involved with the war effort.
If a government is going to turn essentially its entire population into military targets, the government has absolutely no right to complain when the population is targeted militarily.
I sympathize with your view that people are people. I agree with it wholeheartedly. I agree that you cannot equate 2400 lives at Pearl Harbor with 200,000 at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But your own argument undercuts your position. You seem to be saying the 200,000 dead by atomic fire are somehow worse than the 2400 dead by sneak attack.
But as you just said, no equivalency can be drawn.
I do not mean to insult you here, but what I've seen in your responses so far leads me to suspect that in your mind there is a clear answer to whether The Bomb was right or wrong, and that Truman bears the brunt of the responsibility for The Bomb being dropped. I would respectfully submit to you that neither is true, and that the militaristic, atrocity-prone Imperial government holds a great deal of responsibility for the outcome.
This is a tremendous area of gray moral muck, and it behooves us to judge with charity to the deciders and compassion to the victims.
Someday we may have to make our own difficult moral choice in a field of gray muck, and we would like to be judged charitably. Someday we may be the victims of horrific violence, and we would like to be remembered with compassion.
The difference is we didn't have total mobilization. We still had schools which educated children in math and literature, not spear drills. We still had hospitals servicing civilian needs, not off-limits to everyone but the military. We still had plumbers and electricians and carpenters building civilian housing, not forcibly conscripted into working exclusively on military projects.
If you're asking me if the defense plants were valid targets, sure. If the Japanese had somehow been able to bomb Rosie the Riveter, that would've been entirely appropriate within the laws and customs of war. The instant a civilian starts working for a military purpose, they stop being a civilian. In wartime Japan, more than ninety percent of the population over age twelve was working for the war effort. Hence, there were very few civilians in Japan.
He wanted to light a fire under the ass of the (factionalized, fragmented, disharmonious) peace faction in the Imperial Cabinet. For months they'd been saying they'd surrender, but they could never agree--even amidst themselves--on under what terms they'd surrender. Congratulations: Hiroshima's gone. Here are our surrender terms. Feel free to come back with your own. You've got three days.
The United States believed--rightly or wrongly--that if it took the peace faction more than three days to get a surrender proposal put together, one which the entire peace faction could agree upon, that no surrender proposal would be forthcoming. At that point, you hammer the Japanese again and tell them "you've got another three days".
And then you hope and you pray that they give you a response by the end of that next three-day period, because you don't have any more nukes and it'll take some while to get more in theater.
There were hardly any civilians in Japan during World War Two.
Seriously. Read up on the war. The Japanese imperial government forced elementary-school children to drill with bamboo spears and take on military rank as preparations to 'defend the homefront'. Men unfit for military duty, as well as most women, were forced to work in factories making war materiel. The entire civilian population had been forcibly mobilized by the government into joining a military war effort. The entire population of Japan over age twelve were essentially military draftees. This is called "total war". Today, total war is considered by political thinkers to be a crime against one's own populace, because it makes the entire population a legitimate military target.
I agree that following orders specifically intended to result in civilian deaths is a war crime. I agree that giving orders specifically intended to result in civilian deaths is a war crime.
I just don't see there were very many civilians in Japan.
Funny thing, they got to have their conditions in the end anyway.
You've got an incorrect understanding here. The U.S. demanded Hirohito renounce his godhood as a condition of surrender, and that the imperial family be removed as head of government.
The U.S. never demanded Japan remove their royal family as head of state.
Most Americans (I'm one myself) don't understand the difference between head of government and head of state. In America, the President serves both roles. In constitutional monarchies, the monarch is the head of state (the public face put on the government) and some other official is the head of government (the person really making the decisions).
First, thank you for a reasoned and thoughtful response.
Secondly, I believe you're wrong.
What I often see from those who condemn The Bomb's use at Hiroshima and Nagasaki is revisionist morality. We know today, thanks to the experiences at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, how terrible are the consequences of nuclear warfare. We didn't know then; we'd had precisely one successful nuclear test. Our knowledge was--as it still is today--sadly limited.
Likewise, if our knowledge of the political situation of WW2 Japan today is so sketchy, how can we expect people of the day to have had any better knowledge? Yes, it's true we insisted on unconditional surrender. Yes, it's true the Japanese were making noises about less-than-unconditional surrender, but the peace factions of the Japanese Cabinet were never able to decide what "less-than-unconditional" meant. And even after the two Bombs were dropped, the war-at-any-price faction of the Cabinet tried to stage a military coup in order to prevent the Emperor from being able to surrender at all. What I read from history is the Japanese government was disintegrating and the militarists were still running things: the peace faction had no unity, but the militarists were quite united in their desire to see the nation burn to a cinder before any surrender would take place.
Regarding a "plan to nuke all the defenses on Kyushu before sending servicemen in", you should know as well as anybody else that's what militaries do: they plan. Right now, the United States Government has SIOPs--nuclear warfare plans--which cover every conceivable contingency: limited exchange, strategic exchange, population attacks, strategic resource attacks, infrastructure attacks... militaries make far, far more plans than they will ever use. Militaries make these plans so that, in the event the world takes a direction they weren't expecting, they can have a game plan. If we had a plan to nuke all the defenses on Kyushu, that by itself is no evidence at all unless you also have General MacArthur--himself an opponent of nuclear warfare--advocating the use of that plan.
What I see from history is this. We didn't know what was going on inside the Japanese political machine. (We still don't know today.) We didn't know how the Japanese political machine would react to The Bomb. We didn't know how the Japanese political machinery would react if we didn't drop The Bomb. We. Didn't. Know.
What we did know is we were against a foe which practiced total war, one in which even schoolchildren were forcibly conscripted into helping the war effort. We were against a foe which had commited countless atrocities in China and in the Pacific. We knew from the Battle of Okinawa that they would fight to the last man. All right, so we drop The Bomb and we pray history will be forgiving. It'd be nice to do a demonstration, but... we only have two of these things, and future devices will not be immediately forthcoming.
(Do you know what the Soviet response time was to a nuclear strike in the 1950s and 1960s? Six weeks. Know what our response time was like? Four weeks. Prior to modern nuke design and ICBMs, these things were extraordinarily difficult to maintain. They couldn't be built and put into storage for later use; they had to be built when they were needed. If in the 1950s our nuclear response time was 30 days, what was it like in 1945?)
So if we only have two of these devices, and they must be used within days of final assembly or else the bombs are useless, and we're not going to get more bombs anytime soon... can we really afford to not go after strategic targets?
Hiroshima. Gone.
It wasn't the right choice to make. When dealing in war, atomic or conventional, the only right choice is not to start. But Hiroshima was the least-wrong of a whole passel of bad options. In hindsight, should we have conducted things differently? Of course. But we can't judge Truman based on what we know in hindsight. We can only judge him based on what he knew when he gave the order.
Because the LSW was magazine-fed, while the Minimi is belt-fed.
In addition to ongoing problems with the Enfield which, while they were able to rectify with the L85A2s, they were not able to rectify with the LSW.
This gallery shows French SF in Congo with both FAMAS and M-4
My memory was in error; it was French SF I was thinking of.
I stand by my original statement: the bullpup design is not the revolution which its proponents claim, and it's quite premature to claim the death of the conventional rifle layout.
Re: my source for British Paras with M4s, as I said earlier, I've seen them on CNN. I can't give a link, obviously, but I've seen them on the nightly news. Friends in service with American Ranger battalions have confirmed that they've seen British paras and SAS in-theater in the Mideast with M4s.
Exactly my point... don't condemn all bullpups because one exotic weapon wasn't refined to the point where it outperformed conventional rifles.
I'm not condemning all bullpups because of any one failed system. I'm saying that the track record of bullpups is not all that great. The British Army is looking at replacing their L85A2s with G36s; they've already replaced their bullpupped SAW, the LSW, with the FN Minimi; the Bundeswehr replaced their early-adoption G11s with G36s; the Brits have already moved their Paras and SAS to the M4; the Foreign Legion has moved to the M4; the Australian SAS has abandoned the (bullpupped) Steyr AUG for the M4; Indonesia's Detachment 91 has moved to the M4; etcetera.
Wherever I look, the world's special operations troops--even in heavily Kalashnikov-dominated nations like India, Pakistan and Indonesia--are moving to M4s. The only country I can think of that's moving the other way is China, which is introducing a bullpupped 4.85mm assault rifle (the Type 85?) for its troops.
Anyone who says the future is bullpupped is not paying attention to the present.
I don't know about this, but the MP5 is a submachine gun, not an assault rifle like the M4. They aren't in the same class.
It went to disprove the original comment of "This is why the US military is dumping these crappy weapons and moving to German-made HK assault rifles and submachine guns." The US military is not abandoning the M4; they're abandoning the submachinegun instead.
Insofar as the reliability of the M4 is concerned, I'd suggest you read references other than world.guns.ru. Try Jane's, for starters. Or go to a nearby military base and find someone there who's accumulated lots of range hours with the M4; see what they say.
The overheating problem is real, but a strong argument can be made that if you're finding yourself with an overheating M4, you need to worry more about your fire discipline than anything else. The M4 isn't a SAW and isn't meant for sustained volumes of fire.
the XM8 was getting positive feedback as of mid-2004
The Army has recently issued to contractors requests for more weapon prototypes which fit the exact same tactical niche as the XM8. Some commentators are viewing this as "the Army has really been sold on the XM8 and they want to see what other people can do". Others are viewing this as "the Army likes the idea of the XM8, but the HK system is inadequate and they want to see if anyone else can do better".
The idea of a compact assault rifle is definitely one whose time has come. It's an entirely unresolved question whether the XM8 will be the next issue weapon.
never got very far past the prototype stage into actual use
I've seen German regular-Army troops outfitted with them in the early '90s. Field reports were less than glowing--the G11 had a pretty substantial problem with round cookoff--and the expense of German reunification diminished the German government's willingness to subsidize further revolutionary weapons design. For the money it would take to fix the G11, they felt it would be better to go with a conventional weapon with a conventional layout.
Where'd you read this?
Jane's for starters. Then I saw British paras toting around Diemaco rifles on CNN. As memory serves, the Foreign Legionnaires equipped with M4s came from Reuters News Service in the form of a photograph of a Foreign Legionnaire doing his job.
The problem with the SA80 is that it's flimsy
The problem is also that it's entirely unsuitable for left-handed shooters, due to the rifle's unhealthy habit of discharging brass straight down their necks. (How does the British Army get around this problem? By teaching left-handed shooters to fire from the right shoulder. This is the sort of thing that only works at the range, since as soon as you're getting shot at you're going to fire the weapon from the most natural-feeling stance...)
The M16A2 doesn't have this problem, since the weapon action isn't right next to the shooter's face. Additionally, the bullpup design leads to such a butt-heavy weapon that Royal Ordnance decided to graft a dead weight on to the muzzle to balance it, despite the fact the rifle was already heavier than the M16A2. Now try telling a paratroop or a mountain trooper that they have to slog around for tens of miles each day carrying a huge, heavy pack and an extra pound of dead weight on their rifle.
The flimsiness of the SA80 was quite real. I had the chance to get my hands on one about ten years ago. Squeezing the front furniture would cause it to separate from the barrel, and just by squeezing on the action you could keep the weapon from cycling.
First, the AK has a larger calibre, so it's more effective against armor and vehicles.
False. The penetration of a bullet is closely related to its sectional density. A small round traveling at high velocity, such as the 5.56mm round, will have superior penetration over a large round traveling at a slow velocity, such as the 7.62mm Soviet.
In fact, after the 1993 Mogadishu debacle, one of the things learned was the 5.56mm round overpenetrates human targets significantly. Somali insurgents were shot several times at close range with little effect, since the rounds were traveling clean through with little tissue damage.
The M16 has much more precise machining, but it must be cleaned religiously so that it operates correctly. That's fine for a high-accuracy rifle you use at a firing range or maybe for hunting, but in a muddy battlefield this is the last thing you want in a weapon.
False. The M16 needs daily cleaning in hostile environments, but as long as it receives that cleaning it's a quite reliable weapon. The original Vietnam unreliability was the product of the Army not sending cleaning kits to troops in the field, and substituting inferior ammunition for the stuff the factory specified. American troops are the best-trained, best-equipped in the world, and part of their training has always been religious attention to weapons care.
Of course, the side effect is that the M16 is more accurate, but again, this isn't very important on a battlefield.
False. The Soviets knew that the M16 had about 250m of effective range on the AK-47 and AKMs (550m versus 300m), and so every Soviet army fireteam was equipped with an SVD Dragunov designated marksman's rifle. (Contrary to popular belief, the Dragunov is not a sniper rifle; it was equipped to regular line troops, not snipers.) The Soviets would not have done this unless they were scared shitless of the 250m range advantage the M16 offered.
Even worse, the M4, being just a short-barrel version of the M16, has much worse accuracy
It loses about 200m of effective range, still managing to have a marginally greater effective range than the AK-47/AKM family. But it's still too long for use in situations where you're sitting in a Humvee and have to jump out and shoot at someone. False. The M4 has received a fabulous reception from line users because of its compact nature. It, along with the Canadian-made Diemaco clones, is the close-quarters weapon of choice for Western armies. The biggest complaint about the M4 is the 5.56mm round has anemic penetration when fired from the short barrel of the M4; it penetrates less than a 9mm. Perversely, this complaint is actually a virtue for close-quarters fighting, where overpenetration is a major concern.
This is why the US military is dumping these crappy weapons and moving to German-made HK assault rifles and submachine guns.
The USMC has abandoned the HK MP5N in favor of the M4 SOPMOD system. The XM8 is currently a hotly-contested weapon, and several educated observers don't think the XM8 has much chance of acceptance.
A more modern assault rifle with a "bullpup" configuration will provide good accuracy and very short length.
Modern weapons design is moving away from bullpup configurations. Field experience has shown that it takes significantly longer to reload a bullpup than it does a weapon of conventional layout. The German army abandoned the (bullpup) G11 weapons system for the (conventional) G36 weapons system. The British have re-equipped their paratroops away from the (bullpupped) SA80 and towards the Diemaco clone of the M4. French Foreign Legionnaires are abandoning the (bullpupped) FAMAS for the M4.
/dev/random only has a finite number of bits. It harvests believed-random data from events on the PC. When you exhaust/dev/random, you're out of random data until you get more system events. This is potentially a Really Bad Idea if there are other apps on your machine which also need extremely high-quality believed-random numbers.
Radioisotope decay isn't the gold standard of randomness; it's possible to find determinism in it. As it turns out this isn't because of any inherent determinism in whether an atom decays or not, but because of the determinism in the hardware used to measure it. When a Geiger counter trips, it has a certain (finite) refresh time before it will measure another decay event. That means during the refresh time, it will register 0 regardless of whether decay events occur during that time or not.
A perfect Geiger counter plus a radioisotope equals a perfect random number generator. Unfortunately, perfect Geiger counters don't exist. We can get extremely good randomness from radioisotope-based RNGs, but there are limits even to them.
IAAGSSTS (I Am A Grad Student Studying This Shit).
There are two different concerns going on here; the first is the strength of the key and the second is its lifetime. If you really desperately need a truly random 128-bit session key, then take out a quarter and start flipping; it takes about five minutes and you're done. But if you're in a situation where your applications will be changing keys every second, then you don't want rekeying to take five minutes.
Honestly, the best advice is to look long and hard at your reasoning for trying to roll your own generator. If you can point out precise reasons why you need truly random numbers and back your reasons up with references to the literature, then great, break out a quarter. If you can point out precise reasons why existing PRNGs are all insufficient for your task, then great, try to roll your own.
Otherwise, find a good pseudorandom number generator--and by "good", I mean "well-understood with good analysis and well-known behavior", such as the ANSI X9.17 pseudorandom number generator. Read up on its weaknesses and where it fails and how it fails. Avoid those failure modes.
Creating good PRNGs is extraordinarily hard. Trying to roll your own generator is fraught with risk; even when experienced professionals do it, they fail more often than they succeed. If you just want to learn about PRNGs and RNGs, then sure, go for it; I'm all for that. However, be very, very careful before you put your handrolled system into production code.
The trial judge did not accept it as evidence of guilt. In the American system of jurisprudence, judges never make any determination as to whether evidence is implicating or exonerating. They only decide whether evidence is relevant. All other decisions--like how much credibility to put in the evidence, whether the evidence implicates or exonerates, all other decisions--lie in the hands of the jury. The framers of the Constitution didn't trust the government to judge evidence; all fact-finding was delegated to the jury.
In this case, the judge decided the presence of PGP may have had evidentiary value and thus it deserved being presented to a jury. Twelve people from the community then looked over the entirety of evidence, of which the presence of PGP was a really minor part, and decided that the balance of the evidence indicated his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. And an appellate court has said that the trial judge wasn't unreasonable in finding that the question of PGP was best left to the jury.
Wow. Amazing. How dare courts do that in America? It's positively unamerican.
Speaking as a grad student in cryptography, I don't make the same implicit assumption that you do; nor does my advisor. Whether we like it or not, people use the term "RSA" or "IDEA" or whatever to cover both the algorithm, the protocol, and the implementation of both.
The RSA algorithm is vulnerable to many attacks.
The RSA protocol (what I'd prefer people called PKCS-1) is designed to minimize these vulnerabilities.
And RSA implementations run the gamut from good to lousy.
It would be a nice world if we could always understand precisely what people meant by "RSA", or insert-your-cipher here. We don't, and for that reason it pays to be very careful with language.
That depends on what you mean by RSA and IDEA. The security of cryptosystems is highly dependent on implementation details; for instance, without use of OAEP, RSA is vulnerable to all manner of different attacks.
Any cipher run in ECB mode is vulnerable to a degenerate known-plaintext attack. If you know what a certain block of text is, and you see how that's been encrypted by a cipher in ECB mode, then you can be guaranteed that later on when you see that same pattern it'll decrypt to the same value. This is why ECB mode is held in such disrepute nowadays.
Etcetera. Basically, there are all kinds of different qualifiers which need to be put on any crypto answer. I don't think the original poster was correct, but I think it gives a false sense of security to say "neither RSA nor IDEA is vulnerable to a known-plaintext attack" without giving a lot of qualifiers on precisely how those algorithms are being implemented.
Reread what I said. Nowhere did I ever mention anonymity; I only mentioned accountability. Anyone who reads my posts to be an attack against anonymity is reading stuff that clearly isn't there.
You're also mistaken about "essential freedom isn't more important than the inconvenience of spam". You're subscribing to a zero-sum, guns-or-butter mentality. I reject that mentality altogether. I insist on essential freedom, and I'm going to continue to push for a solution to spam which still respects our essential freedoms. I don't believe in zero-sum liberty. I believe in growing liberties: increasing my freedom from unwanted intrusion, in the form of spam, while at the same time increasing other people's freedom to be anonymous.
It's an extraordinarily hard thing to do, but it's important for the future that we make an attempt for it.
The parent poster was justifying Tor's existence by making a claim that the freedom of, e.g., Chinese dissidents was worth us in the West giving up some of our freedoms to effectively communicate.
If it were truly a zero-sum game, I might be tempted to agree with the parent. But it's not a zero-sum game. We don't know that it's impossible to increase freedoms for everyone--to give, e.g., Chinese dissidents the freedom to criticize their government, while at the same time giving us in the West freedom from those who abuse anonymity.
The only time a compromise of freedom can be justified is when every reasonable method at increasing everyone's freedom has failed. What so offended me was the parent poster's glib assumption that it was necessary for us in the West to lose an essential freedom (the right to have our public forums be free from those who abuse anonymity) so that other people elsewhere might gain an essential freedom.
So locking up kidnappers is immoral? Criminals in general? Terrorists?
Yes. However, in the cases described, it is more immoral to let them go free to continue to commit crimes. The net freedom of the nation is more impaired by not imprisoning people who harm others' freedom than by imprisoning them.
That's not to say I give the state a free ride when it comes to the penal system. The recidivist rates are nothing short of appalling. But in principle, at least, yes, you're entirely right. Locking up criminals is immoral. The only instance in which it can be justified is as a last-ditch measure to limit the amount by which the world's freedoms are being diminished.
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In more than 25 years of the KTW round (the armor-piercing round in question) being available on the gray market, not once has it been used in any crime. That track record strongly suggests the KTW is not in need of legislation.
Also, it's now illegal to manufacture armor-piercing ammunition for the civilian market. It's legal to sell existing armor-piercing ammunition on the civilian market, but it's not legal to create new AP ammo for the civilian market or to allow law-enforcement AP ammo to enter the civilian market.
I grew up on a farm.
.22 rifle by the time I was eight, albeit with close adult supervision. On weekends my brother and I would take air rifles into our barns and hoghouses and do search-and-destroy for sparrows and rats. Part of this was necessity, in that you don't want pests infesting your grain and hay and feed. Part of it was that it was fun.
.45 ACP nowadays, not air rifles and .22 rimfires. I've never been arrested; never been accused of any crime more serious than a minor moving violation. I pay my taxes, I vote in almost every possible election (including school board elections), and while I've fallen away from organized religion I drop in on my old padre once every two weeks to have lunch and talk faith.
I saw my first steer get slaughtered when I was about seven. We didn't believe in using sledgehammers, as meatpacking plants do. We thought a twelve-gauge deer slug between the eyes was more humane. I was shooting a
Today I'm thirty years old. I shoot skeet and
You think the problem today is the graphics? I had photorealistic violence. I had the real deal. I stood there with a twelve-gauge and put a steer's brains out through the back of its head. It rattled me at first, doesn't anymore. I patrolled a farm on rat and sparrow detail and did a pretty good job of it. That didn't rattle me.
Anyone who says exposure to photorealistic violence is causing kids to go crazy knows nothing about the everyday violence of rural America, or how normal we turn out.
P.S.: Yes, it's rare that animals get slaughtered on farms nowadays; usually that happens at meatpacking plants. However, from time to time it does happen. We had a small meat plant which bought cattle from us, and they didn't care much whether it was alive or dead when they hauled it away. Rather than have our cattle be condemned to a sledgehammer, we decided to grant them the mercy of a gunshot. The small meatpacker wouldn't do this themselves, on account of ammunition costs money and sledgehammers are cheap.
I think it says something that of all the professional soldiers I know, none of them share your view. None. Zero. Their attitude is simple: violence is wrong. It is never morally right to engage in war. The only question is whether not engaging in war is an even worse moral choice.
"War is hell," as Sherman put it. A USMC gunnery sergeant described his job as "legally sanctioned murder". Col. Jeff Cooper, USMC (Ret.), one of the finest living riflemen today and founder of some terrific shooting schools, has said he'd far rather be a cop than a soldier: when a cop shoots someone, it's usually somebody who's made some really bad choices and is endangering lives, but when a soldier shoots someone, it's usually for no other reason than the other guy is wearing the wrong color of uniform. Cooper's said in the past that he thinks most of the people he killed in war, he would've really liked if he'd ever had the chance to sit down and have a beer with them.
Ask General Hal Moore, USAR (Ret.), or Sgt. Major Basil Plumley, USAR (Ret.), if they think what they did in the Ia Drang was "right". They'll be quite adamant: it was not right, it was a horror, a nightmare, and something no human being should ever inflict on another. What would've been worse is doing nothing.
I am not a pacifist. I've actually had to pull a twelve-gauge on someone before, and give a mugger a choice: he could keep on beating an unconscious victim with a tire iron, or he could go away. (He elected to go away, for which I am immensely grateful. I did not need that stain on my soul.) His victim survived, albeit with a lengthy stay in the intensive care unit.
After it was all over I spent the next half-hour puking my guts out. I am glad I spent the next half-hour puking my guts out. That tells me that I'm still human. That tells me that I recognize other people are human beings and deserve to exist. That tells me that I'm not a bully. That tells me that I'm not evil.
People like you scare the living shit out of me, because the instant someone like you gets a weapon, you start to rationalize its use. I'm not worried about lunatics with tire irons who are beating the living shit out of unconscious people; in all my years I've only met one of those, so they're pretty uncommon.
But I know tons of people like you. People who talk about how the instant someone breaks into their home, they'd better have an ambulance handy. People who have their explanations and justifications prerationalized. People like you scare the living shit out of me.
I'm a firearms owner. Quite proud to be one. I'm a big fan of the Second Amendment. But I'm just as big a fan of moral responsibility, which, I hate to say, is becoming harder and harder to find nowadays.
I usually don't respond to ACs, but I'm going to assume your question is sincere.
Of the 200,000 people who died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, most historians estimate about 180,000 of them were part of the Imperial Japanese Army's war machine. IJA conscripted the population into being part of the war machine, to the point where schools stopped teaching math and literature and history and started teaching how to stick American GIs with bamboo spears--some of the classes being taught with American POWs.
Women were forced to work in factories building war materiel, as were men unfit for military duty. Of the population of Japan, only a small fraction--ten percent or so--could truly be considered noncombatants.
It's true that most of the 180,000 military personnel killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unwilling personnel, but that doesn't make them any different from IJA troops who were drafted and sent against American GIs.
So, are a couple of nukes worth more than a couple of hundred thousand innocent civilians? Of course not. Are they worth more than several factories building war materials and 180,000 people working in the furtherance of IJA goals? Absolutely.
The first absurdist conclusion I saw, which was impeccably backed up, I found in high school. I no longer remember the source, unfortunately. In the aftermath of a strategic nuclear exchange between the US and the Soviet Union, the per-capita cancer rates would actually go down because the same nukes which would take out the CIA headquarters in Virginia would also take out essential infrastructure for the tobacco industry. Whatever upswing in cancer rates due to fallout would quickly be overtaken by the downswing of the entire nation quitting smoking.
Stuart Slade, a veteran of The Business who's now a defense industry analyst, wrote a good (unclassified) view from The Business of nuclear warfare. It's written up in three parts: here, here and here.
Slade mentions wealth creation by nuclear annihilation, but it's also covered other places. That and the cancer rate downturn are the two most widely-known absurdisms from The Business.
For instance, a 300 Kt strategic nuclear weapon needs to be placed within about 800m of its target, otherwise don't even bother with it. (Seriously. Most strategic targets are incredibly resistant to damage. The firebombing of Dresden was done to destroy the rail lines, but three days later the rails were going at full capacity.) Drop a strategic nuclear weapon more than 800m from a submarine pen, a railyard, a C3 bunker, and you're better off not dropping it at all and saving it for later.
Then, a few years ago, The Business looked into the effects of a 1 Mt citykiller dropped on London. It turns out you'd kill 20% of the population, but only destroy 5% of the economic value of London... meaning that immediately following a nuclear strike, the survivors would find themselves 18% wealthier. (They'd need it, too, thanks to the rampant inflation which would soon hit.)
Moral of the story: nuclear weapons do not have the effects people believe. Most people wildly exaggerate their destructive powers. I've read reports from The Business about what's likely to happen in the aftermath of a nuclear war, and let me tell you, it churned my stomach. The things I was expecting to happen never happened. The things I never imagined could happen would happen, and would have consequences far beyond what I could foresee.
Both sides, pro and con, agree that Japan had committed itself to what's called "total war"--the complete, one hundred percent mobilization of the population towards actions materially significant to the war's outcome. Twelve-year-olds went to school not to learn math and literature and history, but to learn how to use bamboo spears to defend the homeland. Men unfit for military duty and women were forcibly conscripted into working at war-materiel factories. By some estimates, more than 90% of the Japanese population over age twelve was involved with the war effort.
If a government is going to turn essentially its entire population into military targets, the government has absolutely no right to complain when the population is targeted militarily.
I sympathize with your view that people are people. I agree with it wholeheartedly. I agree that you cannot equate 2400 lives at Pearl Harbor with 200,000 at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But your own argument undercuts your position. You seem to be saying the 200,000 dead by atomic fire are somehow worse than the 2400 dead by sneak attack.
But as you just said, no equivalency can be drawn.
I do not mean to insult you here, but what I've seen in your responses so far leads me to suspect that in your mind there is a clear answer to whether The Bomb was right or wrong, and that Truman bears the brunt of the responsibility for The Bomb being dropped. I would respectfully submit to you that neither is true, and that the militaristic, atrocity-prone Imperial government holds a great deal of responsibility for the outcome.
This is a tremendous area of gray moral muck, and it behooves us to judge with charity to the deciders and compassion to the victims.
Someday we may have to make our own difficult moral choice in a field of gray muck, and we would like to be judged charitably. Someday we may be the victims of horrific violence, and we would like to be remembered with compassion.
The difference is we didn't have total mobilization. We still had schools which educated children in math and literature, not spear drills. We still had hospitals servicing civilian needs, not off-limits to everyone but the military. We still had plumbers and electricians and carpenters building civilian housing, not forcibly conscripted into working exclusively on military projects.
If you're asking me if the defense plants were valid targets, sure. If the Japanese had somehow been able to bomb Rosie the Riveter, that would've been entirely appropriate within the laws and customs of war. The instant a civilian starts working for a military purpose, they stop being a civilian. In wartime Japan, more than ninety percent of the population over age twelve was working for the war effort. Hence, there were very few civilians in Japan.
He wanted to light a fire under the ass of the (factionalized, fragmented, disharmonious) peace faction in the Imperial Cabinet. For months they'd been saying they'd surrender, but they could never agree--even amidst themselves--on under what terms they'd surrender. Congratulations: Hiroshima's gone. Here are our surrender terms. Feel free to come back with your own. You've got three days.
The United States believed--rightly or wrongly--that if it took the peace faction more than three days to get a surrender proposal put together, one which the entire peace faction could agree upon, that no surrender proposal would be forthcoming. At that point, you hammer the Japanese again and tell them "you've got another three days".
And then you hope and you pray that they give you a response by the end of that next three-day period, because you don't have any more nukes and it'll take some while to get more in theater.
There were hardly any civilians in Japan during World War Two.
Seriously. Read up on the war. The Japanese imperial government forced elementary-school children to drill with bamboo spears and take on military rank as preparations to 'defend the homefront'. Men unfit for military duty, as well as most women, were forced to work in factories making war materiel. The entire civilian population had been forcibly mobilized by the government into joining a military war effort. The entire population of Japan over age twelve were essentially military draftees. This is called "total war". Today, total war is considered by political thinkers to be a crime against one's own populace, because it makes the entire population a legitimate military target.
I agree that following orders specifically intended to result in civilian deaths is a war crime. I agree that giving orders specifically intended to result in civilian deaths is a war crime.
I just don't see there were very many civilians in Japan.
The U.S. never demanded Japan remove their royal family as head of state.
Most Americans (I'm one myself) don't understand the difference between head of government and head of state. In America, the President serves both roles. In constitutional monarchies, the monarch is the head of state (the public face put on the government) and some other official is the head of government (the person really making the decisions).
First, thank you for a reasoned and thoughtful response.
Secondly, I believe you're wrong.
What I often see from those who condemn The Bomb's use at Hiroshima and Nagasaki is revisionist morality. We know today, thanks to the experiences at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, how terrible are the consequences of nuclear warfare. We didn't know then; we'd had precisely one successful nuclear test. Our knowledge was--as it still is today--sadly limited.
Likewise, if our knowledge of the political situation of WW2 Japan today is so sketchy, how can we expect people of the day to have had any better knowledge? Yes, it's true we insisted on unconditional surrender. Yes, it's true the Japanese were making noises about less-than-unconditional surrender, but the peace factions of the Japanese Cabinet were never able to decide what "less-than-unconditional" meant. And even after the two Bombs were dropped, the war-at-any-price faction of the Cabinet tried to stage a military coup in order to prevent the Emperor from being able to surrender at all. What I read from history is the Japanese government was disintegrating and the militarists were still running things: the peace faction had no unity, but the militarists were quite united in their desire to see the nation burn to a cinder before any surrender would take place.
Regarding a "plan to nuke all the defenses on Kyushu before sending servicemen in", you should know as well as anybody else that's what militaries do: they plan. Right now, the United States Government has SIOPs--nuclear warfare plans--which cover every conceivable contingency: limited exchange, strategic exchange, population attacks, strategic resource attacks, infrastructure attacks... militaries make far, far more plans than they will ever use. Militaries make these plans so that, in the event the world takes a direction they weren't expecting, they can have a game plan. If we had a plan to nuke all the defenses on Kyushu, that by itself is no evidence at all unless you also have General MacArthur--himself an opponent of nuclear warfare--advocating the use of that plan.
What I see from history is this. We didn't know what was going on inside the Japanese political machine. (We still don't know today.) We didn't know how the Japanese political machine would react to The Bomb. We didn't know how the Japanese political machinery would react if we didn't drop The Bomb. We. Didn't. Know.
What we did know is we were against a foe which practiced total war, one in which even schoolchildren were forcibly conscripted into helping the war effort. We were against a foe which had commited countless atrocities in China and in the Pacific. We knew from the Battle of Okinawa that they would fight to the last man. All right, so we drop The Bomb and we pray history will be forgiving. It'd be nice to do a demonstration, but... we only have two of these things, and future devices will not be immediately forthcoming.
(Do you know what the Soviet response time was to a nuclear strike in the 1950s and 1960s? Six weeks. Know what our response time was like? Four weeks. Prior to modern nuke design and ICBMs, these things were extraordinarily difficult to maintain. They couldn't be built and put into storage for later use; they had to be built when they were needed. If in the 1950s our nuclear response time was 30 days, what was it like in 1945?)
So if we only have two of these devices, and they must be used within days of final assembly or else the bombs are useless, and we're not going to get more bombs anytime soon... can we really afford to not go after strategic targets?
Hiroshima. Gone.
It wasn't the right choice to make. When dealing in war, atomic or conventional, the only right choice is not to start. But Hiroshima was the least-wrong of a whole passel of bad options. In hindsight, should we have conducted things differently? Of course. But we can't judge Truman based on what we know in hindsight. We can only judge him based on what he knew when he gave the order.
I stand by my original statement: the bullpup design is not the revolution which its proponents claim, and it's quite premature to claim the death of the conventional rifle layout.
Re: my source for British Paras with M4s, as I said earlier, I've seen them on CNN. I can't give a link, obviously, but I've seen them on the nightly news. Friends in service with American Ranger battalions have confirmed that they've seen British paras and SAS in-theater in the Mideast with M4s.
Wherever I look, the world's special operations troops--even in heavily Kalashnikov-dominated nations like India, Pakistan and Indonesia--are moving to M4s. The only country I can think of that's moving the other way is China, which is introducing a bullpupped 4.85mm assault rifle (the Type 85?) for its troops.
Anyone who says the future is bullpupped is not paying attention to the present.
Insofar as the reliability of the M4 is concerned, I'd suggest you read references other than world.guns.ru. Try Jane's, for starters. Or go to a nearby military base and find someone there who's accumulated lots of range hours with the M4; see what they say.
The overheating problem is real, but a strong argument can be made that if you're finding yourself with an overheating M4, you need to worry more about your fire discipline than anything else. The M4 isn't a SAW and isn't meant for sustained volumes of fire.The Army has recently issued to contractors requests for more weapon prototypes which fit the exact same tactical niche as the XM8. Some commentators are viewing this as "the Army has really been sold on the XM8 and they want to see what other people can do". Others are viewing this as "the Army likes the idea of the XM8, but the HK system is inadequate and they want to see if anyone else can do better".
The idea of a compact assault rifle is definitely one whose time has come. It's an entirely unresolved question whether the XM8 will be the next issue weapon.I've seen German regular-Army troops outfitted with them in the early '90s. Field reports were less than glowing--the G11 had a pretty substantial problem with round cookoff--and the expense of German reunification diminished the German government's willingness to subsidize further revolutionary weapons design. For the money it would take to fix the G11, they felt it would be better to go with a conventional weapon with a conventional layout. Jane's for starters. Then I saw British paras toting around Diemaco rifles on CNN. As memory serves, the Foreign Legionnaires equipped with M4s came from Reuters News Service in the form of a photograph of a Foreign Legionnaire doing his job.The problem is also that it's entirely unsuitable for left-handed shooters, due to the rifle's unhealthy habit of discharging brass straight down their necks. (How does the British Army get around this problem? By teaching left-handed shooters to fire from the right shoulder. This is the sort of thing that only works at the range, since as soon as you're getting shot at you're going to fire the weapon from the most natural-feeling stance...)
The M16A2 doesn't have this problem, since the weapon action isn't right next to the shooter's face. Additionally, the bullpup design leads to such a butt-heavy weapon that Royal Ordnance decided to graft a dead weight on to the muzzle to balance it, despite the fact the rifle was already heavier than the M16A2. Now try telling a paratroop or a mountain trooper that they have to slog around for tens of miles each day carrying a huge, heavy pack and an extra pound of dead weight on their rifle.
The flimsiness of the SA80 was quite real. I had the chance to get my hands on one about ten years ago. Squeezing the front furniture would cause it to separate from the barrel, and just by squeezing on the action you could keep the weapon from cycling.
In fact, after the 1993 Mogadishu debacle, one of the things learned was the 5.56mm round overpenetrates human targets significantly. Somali insurgents were shot several times at close range with little effect, since the rounds were traveling clean through with little tissue damage.False. The M16 needs daily cleaning in hostile environments, but as long as it receives that cleaning it's a quite reliable weapon. The original Vietnam unreliability was the product of the Army not sending cleaning kits to troops in the field, and substituting inferior ammunition for the stuff the factory specified. American troops are the best-trained, best-equipped in the world, and part of their training has always been religious attention to weapons care.False. The Soviets knew that the M16 had about 250m of effective range on the AK-47 and AKMs (550m versus 300m), and so every Soviet army fireteam was equipped with an SVD Dragunov designated marksman's rifle. (Contrary to popular belief, the Dragunov is not a sniper rifle; it was equipped to regular line troops, not snipers.) The Soviets would not have done this unless they were scared shitless of the 250m range advantage the M16 offered.It loses about 200m of effective range, still managing to have a marginally greater effective range than the AK-47/AKM family. But it's still too long for use in situations where you're sitting in a Humvee and have to jump out and shoot at someone. False. The M4 has received a fabulous reception from line users because of its compact nature. It, along with the Canadian-made Diemaco clones, is the close-quarters weapon of choice for Western armies. The biggest complaint about the M4 is the 5.56mm round has anemic penetration when fired from the short barrel of the M4; it penetrates less than a 9mm. Perversely, this complaint is actually a virtue for close-quarters fighting, where overpenetration is a major concern.The USMC has abandoned the HK MP5N in favor of the M4 SOPMOD system. The XM8 is currently a hotly-contested weapon, and several educated observers don't think the XM8 has much chance of acceptance.Modern weapons design is moving away from bullpup configurations. Field experience has shown that it takes significantly longer to reload a bullpup than it does a weapon of conventional layout. The German army abandoned the (bullpup) G11 weapons system for the (conventional) G36 weapons system. The British have re-equipped their paratroops away from the (bullpupped) SA80 and towards the Diemaco clone of the M4. French Foreign Legionnaires are abandoning the (bullpupped) FAMAS for the M4.
/dev/random only has a finite number of bits. It harvests believed-random data from events on the PC. When you exhaust /dev/random, you're out of random data until you get more system events. This is potentially a Really Bad Idea if there are other apps on your machine which also need extremely high-quality believed-random numbers.
Radioisotope decay isn't the gold standard of randomness; it's possible to find determinism in it. As it turns out this isn't because of any inherent determinism in whether an atom decays or not, but because of the determinism in the hardware used to measure it. When a Geiger counter trips, it has a certain (finite) refresh time before it will measure another decay event. That means during the refresh time, it will register 0 regardless of whether decay events occur during that time or not.
A perfect Geiger counter plus a radioisotope equals a perfect random number generator. Unfortunately, perfect Geiger counters don't exist. We can get extremely good randomness from radioisotope-based RNGs, but there are limits even to them.
IAAGSSTS (I Am A Grad Student Studying This Shit).
There are two different concerns going on here; the first is the strength of the key and the second is its lifetime. If you really desperately need a truly random 128-bit session key, then take out a quarter and start flipping; it takes about five minutes and you're done. But if you're in a situation where your applications will be changing keys every second, then you don't want rekeying to take five minutes.
Honestly, the best advice is to look long and hard at your reasoning for trying to roll your own generator. If you can point out precise reasons why you need truly random numbers and back your reasons up with references to the literature, then great, break out a quarter. If you can point out precise reasons why existing PRNGs are all insufficient for your task, then great, try to roll your own.
Otherwise, find a good pseudorandom number generator--and by "good", I mean "well-understood with good analysis and well-known behavior", such as the ANSI X9.17 pseudorandom number generator. Read up on its weaknesses and where it fails and how it fails. Avoid those failure modes.
Creating good PRNGs is extraordinarily hard. Trying to roll your own generator is fraught with risk; even when experienced professionals do it, they fail more often than they succeed. If you just want to learn about PRNGs and RNGs, then sure, go for it; I'm all for that. However, be very, very careful before you put your handrolled system into production code.
The trial judge did not accept it as evidence of guilt. In the American system of jurisprudence, judges never make any determination as to whether evidence is implicating or exonerating. They only decide whether evidence is relevant. All other decisions--like how much credibility to put in the evidence, whether the evidence implicates or exonerates, all other decisions--lie in the hands of the jury. The framers of the Constitution didn't trust the government to judge evidence; all fact-finding was delegated to the jury.
In this case, the judge decided the presence of PGP may have had evidentiary value and thus it deserved being presented to a jury. Twelve people from the community then looked over the entirety of evidence, of which the presence of PGP was a really minor part, and decided that the balance of the evidence indicated his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. And an appellate court has said that the trial judge wasn't unreasonable in finding that the question of PGP was best left to the jury.
Wow. Amazing. How dare courts do that in America? It's positively unamerican.
Speaking as a grad student in cryptography, I don't make the same implicit assumption that you do; nor does my advisor. Whether we like it or not, people use the term "RSA" or "IDEA" or whatever to cover both the algorithm, the protocol, and the implementation of both.
The RSA algorithm is vulnerable to many attacks.
The RSA protocol (what I'd prefer people called PKCS-1) is designed to minimize these vulnerabilities.
And RSA implementations run the gamut from good to lousy.
It would be a nice world if we could always understand precisely what people meant by "RSA", or insert-your-cipher here. We don't, and for that reason it pays to be very careful with language.
That depends on what you mean by RSA and IDEA. The security of cryptosystems is highly dependent on implementation details; for instance, without use of OAEP, RSA is vulnerable to all manner of different attacks.
Any cipher run in ECB mode is vulnerable to a degenerate known-plaintext attack. If you know what a certain block of text is, and you see how that's been encrypted by a cipher in ECB mode, then you can be guaranteed that later on when you see that same pattern it'll decrypt to the same value. This is why ECB mode is held in such disrepute nowadays.
Etcetera. Basically, there are all kinds of different qualifiers which need to be put on any crypto answer. I don't think the original poster was correct, but I think it gives a false sense of security to say "neither RSA nor IDEA is vulnerable to a known-plaintext attack" without giving a lot of qualifiers on precisely how those algorithms are being implemented.
Reread what I said. Nowhere did I ever mention anonymity; I only mentioned accountability. Anyone who reads my posts to be an attack against anonymity is reading stuff that clearly isn't there.
You're also mistaken about "essential freedom isn't more important than the inconvenience of spam". You're subscribing to a zero-sum, guns-or-butter mentality. I reject that mentality altogether. I insist on essential freedom, and I'm going to continue to push for a solution to spam which still respects our essential freedoms. I don't believe in zero-sum liberty. I believe in growing liberties: increasing my freedom from unwanted intrusion, in the form of spam, while at the same time increasing other people's freedom to be anonymous.
It's an extraordinarily hard thing to do, but it's important for the future that we make an attempt for it.
The parent poster was justifying Tor's existence by making a claim that the freedom of, e.g., Chinese dissidents was worth us in the West giving up some of our freedoms to effectively communicate.
If it were truly a zero-sum game, I might be tempted to agree with the parent. But it's not a zero-sum game. We don't know that it's impossible to increase freedoms for everyone--to give, e.g., Chinese dissidents the freedom to criticize their government, while at the same time giving us in the West freedom from those who abuse anonymity.
The only time a compromise of freedom can be justified is when every reasonable method at increasing everyone's freedom has failed. What so offended me was the parent poster's glib assumption that it was necessary for us in the West to lose an essential freedom (the right to have our public forums be free from those who abuse anonymity) so that other people elsewhere might gain an essential freedom.
That's not to say I give the state a free ride when it comes to the penal system. The recidivist rates are nothing short of appalling. But in principle, at least, yes, you're entirely right. Locking up criminals is immoral. The only instance in which it can be justified is as a last-ditch measure to limit the amount by which the world's freedoms are being diminished.