The main risk isn't with weaknesses or back doors in AES, even though it's possible that there is an as-yet-unrecognized weakness.
The risk is that the drive may, unbeknownst to the owner, cache and store the encryption keys somewhere inside the drive, either on the media or in nonvolatile memory, making it available to those that know where to find it.
Even if the standard drive firmware doesn't do that, how would you know that the firmware of the drive wasn't modified sometime after manufacture and before purchase to install such a back door?
If you were an agent of some government that wanted to be able to access data on disk drives whose owners believe them to be encrypted, what better way to do that than to either convince the drive vendors to install a back door for you, or to let you tamper with the drives at some point in the process? That would eliminate a whole lot of hassle for you, and there are only a few drive vendors you'd have to subvert.
I think I'll stick to LUKS and dm-crypt. It's not a perfect solution, and it's still possible that someone could subvert my encryption, but doing it in the software I have some measure of control over clearly makes it harder for them than doing it in hardware that I have no choice but to trust blindly.
Am I paranoid? Sure. Probably no one is trying to steal my keys or my data. But the likelyhood of the existence of a back door has NOTHING to do with whether the bad guys (or maybe the good guys?) are interested in my data. Even if no one intends to steal my data today, once a back door exists it can be used against me in the future.
The whole point of SSP is to use microwave frequencies that have low atmospheric attenuation. Microwave to electricity conversion by a rectenna farm will be very efficient, so the overall system efficiency is much higher than use of land-based solar with space-based mirrors.
In this case, step 6 ("??") is entirely superfluous. The profit of step 7 is directly derived from step 5.
If we start devloping space-based solar in the near future, a space elevator approach will not likely be used. Instead we'll use expendable launch vehicles such as the Atlas V. Once a pilot system is working, it can be used to produce fuel for further launches, significantly lowering the ongoing program expenses.
Keeping it in case Project Constellation doesn't work isn't an option, because all the infrastructure that is necessary to support the Shuttle will already be gone; a non-trivial part of it is *already* gone. They pulled the handle a few years ago, and it would cost tens of billions of dollars to start the program up again. The contracts to build parts such as external tanks have already been completed, and building more of anything Shuttle-related is not as simple as just putting out another contract for bids. Many of skills necessary would have to be redeveloped, and everything would have to be completely requalified.
What if there's a national need for space access in the meantime before the new system is up and ready? We're fucked then.
There isn't any "national need for space access" that we can't meet without the Shuttle.
It is unsurprising that there are many people who would like to do away with anonymity, since there are people who abuse anonymity. However, that's true of all rights, and we don't give up important rights just because some people abuse them. We need to resist the temptation to give up rights, because doing so will make the world a worse place overall, and won't actually solve the perceived problem.
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." -- H.L. Mencken
I agree that the G1 isn't nearly as stylish in appearance as the iPhone. However, the physical construction seems quite solid.
If you're referring to the display motion, that's actually quite robust, even though to a casual inspection it might not seem that way. A lot of engineering and testing went into that mechanism.
Personally, I don't choose a phone for the purpose of impressing other people with how cool I am. The G1 works quite well, so not being as stylish as the iPhone doesn't bother me that much. The phone usually spends more than 23 hours a day either in my pocket or on the nightstand, so it's not as if I spend a great deal of time looking at it.
If Google was uninterested in the end-user's extensibility of Android, they wouldn't have made the SDK publicly available at no charge.
I suspect the reason the G1 won't allow installation of non-signed firmware is due to carrier (T-Mobile) requirements, not because Google doesn't want you to be able to hack it.
Until it ships, we won't know how open it is. Even ignoring the carrier lock, the G1 won't install non-signed firmware, so it's less open than many of us would like. Since the Kogan phone isn't carrier-locked, maybe it will allow non-signed firmware as well.
Is half that of the G1. Not bad for the price, but if I had to choose between the two I'd pick the G1. Since I'm a developer, I'll buy one anyhow, to ensure that my apps work well on it.
They kept this pretty quiet up to now, not the kind of information policy I would expect from CERN.
Why? It's not a security vulnerability affecting your computer, so there's no particular security-related reason for you to urgently need to know when the LHC will be online again. It therefore makes perfect sense for them not to offer minute-to-minute updates. It's more appropriate for them to adhere to standards for dissemination of scientific information, which includes waiting until they have something fairly definitive to announce, rather than a bunch of seat-of-the-pants statements.
Aside from the title, in Bender's Game I only spotted one reference to Ender's Game. That reference did have me laughing quite a bit, to the puzzlement of friends I was with at the time.
Unfortunately not. Maybe in a future firmware release.
Re:I haven't followed the whole Android business,
on
T-Mobile G1 Rooted
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· Score: 1
wasn't this supposed to be an open platform anyway?
That's like saying that a Tivo is an open platform because it runs Linux. Sorry, it ain't so.
Android is an open platform. It's released under open source licenses, and anyone can make Android-based devices.
The G1 happens to run Android, but is not open. It contains a lot of stuff that is not part of the open-source Android platform. It will not run firmware that is not signed, so even though you can build your own version of the Android firmware, you can't run it on a G1, and even if you did, it would only have a subset of the G1 functionality.
If you build your own Android-based firmware, it would be no problem to get root access, but you're not supposed to be able to get root access on a G1, and especially not by starting a telnetd as a non-root user.
Android does NOT run everything as root. They have a security model that uses separate user ids for many things, and root for almost nothing.
When you start the telnetd, it is as a non-root user, and the telnetd is not setuid. However, when you connect to the telnetd from a telnet client, you get a root shell. Something extremely weird and/or broken seems to be going on in there.
If we can build an automated distillery and have it working before sending people, that's great. I'm a little bit skeptical as that seems like it's substantially more difficult than sending the living quarters and other consumables.
The first time around, the fuel for the return needs to be sent from Earth, in case production on Mars doesn't work as planned. (Unless unmanned fuel production can be established and tested before sending humans, which seems unlikely.)
The original LEM definitely won't do, but what's necessary is closer to a LEM than to a vehicle that can travel to Earth orbit from Earth's surface.
Rather than having the LEM-like vehicle rendezvous with the cycler directly, it might dock with a CSM-like vehicle left in Mars orbit, and the combination might then rendezvous with the cycler. There's no point in dropping all the fuel needed for the cycler rendezvous to the surface of Mars and then launch it again.
The cycler isn't *sufficient* to solve all of the problems of bringing a crew back, but it certainly would solve some of them.
A one-way mission is obviously far easier, but if you can't find qualified astronauts willing to go on a one-way mission, there's no point to it. Sending unwilling people, or willing people who aren't qualified, accomplishes nothing worthwhile.
It solves the problem of having the supplies for the return trip. They only have to be launched from earth and rendevous with the cycler; they don't have to be launched from Mars, or even escape from Mars orbit.
Yes, you want the colony to be as self-sufficient as possible. But since it's likely to take a long time to reach that, early on you have to send a LOT of provisions to Mars in advance of sending people.
The only thing you bring back from Mars is a tiny crew return vehicle, which as you say has to launch from the surface and rendezvous with the cycler. Yes, that's a very big engineering challenge. However, it can be delivered in pieces, and doesn't have to be delivered at the same time that the crew is delivered. You launch the return vehicle first.
It might have two parts, one for surface to orbit, docking with another part for orbit to cycler.
Agreed that we should have a robot mission to return samples from Mars first. If we can't do that, there's no point in sending people.
You need a way to get back. You don't want to decelerate all of the supplies for the return trip to inject them into Mars orbit, then have to accelerate them again to leave. Just leave all the supplies for the return on the cycler (or, more likely, restock it at this end on each cycle).
Getting stuff out of Mars orbit is extremely expensive, so you want to bring back as little from Mars orbit as possible, which is just the crew and a tiny vehicle they use to rendezvous with the cycler.
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The risk is that the drive may, unbeknownst to the owner, cache and store the encryption keys somewhere inside the drive, either on the media or in nonvolatile memory, making it available to those that know where to find it.
Even if the standard drive firmware doesn't do that, how would you know that the firmware of the drive wasn't modified sometime after manufacture and before purchase to install such a back door?
If you were an agent of some government that wanted to be able to access data on disk drives whose owners believe them to be encrypted, what better way to do that than to either convince the drive vendors to install a back door for you, or to let you tamper with the drives at some point in the process? That would eliminate a whole lot of hassle for you, and there are only a few drive vendors you'd have to subvert.
I think I'll stick to LUKS and dm-crypt. It's not a perfect solution, and it's still possible that someone could subvert my encryption, but doing it in the software I have some measure of control over clearly makes it harder for them than doing it in hardware that I have no choice but to trust blindly.
Am I paranoid? Sure. Probably no one is trying to steal my keys or my data. But the likelyhood of the existence of a back door has NOTHING to do with whether the bad guys (or maybe the good guys?) are interested in my data. Even if no one intends to steal my data today, once a back door exists it can be used against me in the future.
Well, sure, but not to educate the public *too* much.
The whole point of SSP is to use microwave frequencies that have low atmospheric attenuation. Microwave to electricity conversion by a rectenna farm will be very efficient, so the overall system efficiency is much higher than use of land-based solar with space-based mirrors.
If we start devloping space-based solar in the near future, a space elevator approach will not likely be used. Instead we'll use expendable launch vehicles such as the Atlas V. Once a pilot system is working, it can be used to produce fuel for further launches, significantly lowering the ongoing program expenses.
There isn't any "national need for space access" that we can't meet without the Shuttle.
Richard Branson didn't win the X-Prize.
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." -- H.L. Mencken
Yes, botnets should work quite well for key cracking. I'd be somewhat surprised if this isn't already being done.
If you're referring to the display motion, that's actually quite robust, even though to a casual inspection it might not seem that way. A lot of engineering and testing went into that mechanism.
Personally, I don't choose a phone for the purpose of impressing other people with how cool I am. The G1 works quite well, so not being as stylish as the iPhone doesn't bother me that much. The phone usually spends more than 23 hours a day either in my pocket or on the nightstand, so it's not as if I spend a great deal of time looking at it.
I suspect the reason the G1 won't allow installation of non-signed firmware is due to carrier (T-Mobile) requirements, not because Google doesn't want you to be able to hack it.
Until it ships, we won't know how open it is. Even ignoring the carrier lock, the G1 won't install non-signed firmware, so it's less open than many of us would like. Since the Kogan phone isn't carrier-locked, maybe it will allow non-signed firmware as well.
Is half that of the G1. Not bad for the price, but if I had to choose between the two I'd pick the G1. Since I'm a developer, I'll buy one anyhow, to ensure that my apps work well on it.
Why? It's not a security vulnerability affecting your computer, so there's no particular security-related reason for you to urgently need to know when the LHC will be online again. It therefore makes perfect sense for them not to offer minute-to-minute updates. It's more appropriate for them to adhere to standards for dissemination of scientific information, which includes waiting until they have something fairly definitive to announce, rather than a bunch of seat-of-the-pants statements.
Aside from the title, in Bender's Game I only spotted one reference to Ender's Game. That reference did have me laughing quite a bit, to the puzzlement of friends I was with at the time.
Unfortunately not. Maybe in a future firmware release.
That's like saying that a Tivo is an open platform because it runs Linux. Sorry, it ain't so.
Android is an open platform. It's released under open source licenses, and anyone can make Android-based devices.
The G1 happens to run Android, but is not open. It contains a lot of stuff that is not part of the open-source Android platform. It will not run firmware that is not signed, so even though you can build your own version of the Android firmware, you can't run it on a G1, and even if you did, it would only have a subset of the G1 functionality.
If you build your own Android-based firmware, it would be no problem to get root access, but you're not supposed to be able to get root access on a G1, and especially not by starting a telnetd as a non-root user.
Android does NOT run everything as root. They have a security model that uses separate user ids for many things, and root for almost nothing. When you start the telnetd, it is as a non-root user, and the telnetd is not setuid. However, when you connect to the telnetd from a telnet client, you get a root shell. Something extremely weird and/or broken seems to be going on in there.
If we can build an automated distillery and have it working before sending people, that's great. I'm a little bit skeptical as that seems like it's substantially more difficult than sending the living quarters and other consumables.
The first time around, the fuel for the return needs to be sent from Earth, in case production on Mars doesn't work as planned. (Unless unmanned fuel production can be established and tested before sending humans, which seems unlikely.)
Rather than having the LEM-like vehicle rendezvous with the cycler directly, it might dock with a CSM-like vehicle left in Mars orbit, and the combination might then rendezvous with the cycler. There's no point in dropping all the fuel needed for the cycler rendezvous to the surface of Mars and then launch it again.
A one-way mission is obviously far easier, but if you can't find qualified astronauts willing to go on a one-way mission, there's no point to it. Sending unwilling people, or willing people who aren't qualified, accomplishes nothing worthwhile.
It solves the problem of having the supplies for the return trip. They only have to be launched from earth and rendevous with the cycler; they don't have to be launched from Mars, or even escape from Mars orbit.
Yes, you want the colony to be as self-sufficient as possible. But since it's likely to take a long time to reach that, early on you have to send a LOT of provisions to Mars in advance of sending people.
It might have two parts, one for surface to orbit, docking with another part for orbit to cycler.
Agreed that we should have a robot mission to return samples from Mars first. If we can't do that, there's no point in sending people.
Getting stuff out of Mars orbit is extremely expensive, so you want to bring back as little from Mars orbit as possible, which is just the crew and a tiny vehicle they use to rendezvous with the cycler.