Actually, armed with contextual information, it might be possible to break a one time pad, not by exploiting the pad, but the humans.
First, the 'random' number source. If I know what the random number generator is, I can make guesses as to the probability distribution of letters in the pad.
Second, the language of transmission. If I know you're communicating in say English, I know the frequency that I can expect letters and even certain words to appear.
I now have at least two interesting probabilities to work with. So, in looking at the brute force generated messages, I can quickly eliminate ones that don't conform to the expected distributions.
OTP's are often susceptible to 'out of band' methods of cracking. The more I know about the context of the message, the manner it was generated, who what when and where it was sent to and from, the more accurate guesses I can make. It's almost impossible to get an exact crack, but the more messages sent using a certain one time pad, the more likely it is that a heuristic can be generated to analyze it.
They propose a combination of juries being volunteer and having the ability to override existing law.
You sir, have not read your jury pamphlet. Jury Nullification. Juries are _supposed_ to override unjust laws. It's in their mandate. The judges just don't tell you.
Looking at recent press releases, that's pretty close:
May 22, 2001 - VA Linux Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: LNUX), the expert provider of Linux and Open Source solutions, today reported revenue of $20.3 million for its third fiscal quarter, 2001, ended April 28, compared to revenue of $34.6 million in the same quarter of fiscal 2000. Net loss for the quarter, on a pro forma basis, excluding non-cash and non-recurring charges, was ($0.38) per share. In the same quarter last year the Company reported a pro forma loss per share of ($0.13). Revenue and net loss per share results were slightly better than indicated in the Company's press release dated April 26.
VA Linux Systems also reported a non-recurring restructuring charge of $46.8 million in the quarter. $33.8 million related to the acceleration of deferred stock compensation amortization, $4.9 million of the charge represented cash expenditures and the balance was comprised of other non-cash charges.
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
When winXP is released, modify your web site to display the following message to users of IE6, instead of your content:
"Your current browser, IE6, employs a utility known as smart tags. This feature modifies the contents of our web pages before you view them. As we at [yoursite.com] have no ablity to control or monitor this feature, we cannot assure the acuracy or integrity of the pages that you are viewing. Consequently, we cannot allow you to view our site as we can no longer assure you that the ideas and content contained herin are an acurate representation of [yoursite.com].
But no one will do that, cause then you'd have all of three visitors to your web site.
MS will include smart tags, if you use there opt-out version, you are still using smart tags. The only way to fight this is at.htaccess. Who's willing to do this? Nobody I know. Slashdot is a commercial web site, and so won't be doing anything like this, even though it would improve the editorial integrity of the content. (Well....) If a large number of web sites did blocked IE6, MS would remove the feature.
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
Back when they first decided not to present, I remember they caught some flak from folks who thought they should have stood up to the RIAA. I think caving to the RIAA was a brilliant masterstroke on the part of Felton. He could have stood up and said, 'Go to hell, I'm gonna present.' Then they would have gone to court and it would have been like DeCSS where you have, 'a virtual certainty' that the paper would have been supressed. Now, the paper has been suppressed. There is no if's and's or butt's. This puts Felton in a much better position, he has been victimized and research has been suppressed. There is no 'well, this might have happen but we went to court first.'
Felton did what the MPAA should have done in cases like this. Wait for the action to be committed before you go to court over the ability of one side to do that action. Brilliant, level headed thinking. I just may fill out that application to Princeton this fall.
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
Recent activity on the XP-beta tester lists suggests that the product activation methods are running into a few problems in the real world. (Like oh, say, arbitrairly shutting off access to the product, very bad thing to have happen at a big company depending on ms office) It is quite possible that microsoft has decided that discretion is the better part of profits, and will hold back on a major american release of subscription based software untill they are sure they have this whole sending-and-activating software over the internet thing worked out.
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
Or it could just be:
1. They ignore you
2. They laff at ya
3. They fight you
4. They incorperate what's left of your bloody corpse into their corprate food plan.
Just ask netscape or any of the hundreds of other copmanies Ms has killed.
Gandhi knew what he was doing and wasen't arrogant. Of course, there is no sense of elitism in the open source community so there is no threat of falling the way of an arrogrant failure, which I'm sure Gandi also had a quote for.
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
This effectively makes it impossible for commercial software companies to include source code that is licensed under the GPL into their products, since by doing so, they are constrained to give away the fruits of their labor.
Leaps and bounds in the fields of logic. Soooo, somehow the closed source methadology makes it possible to include source code in other products? Microsoft wouldn't give me the windows source even if I offered to pay for it and keep it closed. (Simply because I don't have enough cash to offer them. But does that mean that the product I want to write is therfore less deserving of access to the windows source than one put forth by some oen with cash?) So they're method is no better than the method they are rallying against.
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
The MPAA contends that DeCSS has the ablity to inflect "actual harm". Yet, this program is freely avaliable all over. I can download it no sweat. Yet, in the face of easy access to this terrible tool of copyright infingement, the moive industry is still raking in billions. Due to this court case, DeCSS propagated itself farther than it ever could of without a lawsuit. Yet, the moive industry is no worse for wear.
If DeCSS is so bad, why then, when it is as wide spread as it ever has been, is the moive industry not in line at a soup kitchen?
DeCSS is out, it's effect can be studied. The moive industry is not being hurt by it. Where's their argument?
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
A candy bar contains roughly the equvilant energy of a stick of dynamite, it's just a bit tricker to get that energy out. First you take powedered oxygen. (It's not really pure oxygen, but some sort of oxydizer in a very compact form) As you heat it up the the oxygen is released. Drop in the snickers bar, and boom, combustion. Don't feel like blowing your face off? M&M's are a perfect pelet sized fuel.
The oxygen wants to burn so bad it rips apart the sugars in the candy bar and goes boom. Sorta like if you take two blocks of dry ice and put a strip of flamable metal inbetween, say magnesium. (sp?) Light one end of the strip and it will burn to the other side despit the lack of oxygen. Take apart the two blocks of dry ice and you'll find a black line when the metal was. The metal wanted to burn so bad, it literaly striped the oxygen outta the C02 leaving the carbon behind. Very cool, give it a try.
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
but what about those poor guys selling aeroplanes? Are they being forced to relocate?
So what exactly will ICANN be telling them?
Hi there, you've had your domain for a while, and were real smart in registering early so you could have a three letter name that actually has something to do with your company name, but, we didn't have that foresight, and now we want the name that describes your company, cause it also describes some archaic acronym that only nerds know about, so we're kicking you out, and ya know, we run this show and we're real good friends with the WIPO so there's not a whole bunch you can do about it.
Yeah, I really wanna see the letter ICANN sends explaining why that company has to hand over their domain name. I personly think that ICANN doesn't have a chance in court on that issue, and if I owned aso.com, well, you know.
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
Think about how difficult that system was to make. Camera's and infrared sensors positioned at angles so they grab a person's face and eyes then splicing it all together into something useful. The technology, or at least the code, behind it must be impressive. The algorithms at use will probably show up in other things pretty soon, it's just that profiling super-market shoppers is the most profitable at the moment.
Sure right now it's being used to surreptitiously spy on people, but, think what you could do with it.
Systems like this could allow a computer terminal to figure out who is using it, and who else is in the room. No more passwords, no silly biometric scans, sit down at a computer and it knows who you are. Have your computer automatically minimize that quake game when your boss/mom walks into the room.
This system could probably also be expanded to figure out things about people, if their happy/sad, athletic/fat, pretty/ugly, and react accordingly. Understanding human emotions and reacting to them is one of the starting points for believable AI capable of passing the Turing test.
Sure, its being sued for something insidious right now, but think about the technical marvels behind it. Beats the heck out of a stupid 8,000-computer search engine cluster.
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
So? The CIA is not allowed to conduct domestic operations. Also, the safeweb site makes it quite clear that the CIA is just funding them, they don't have anything to do with running the site. The safeweb system also makes it impossible for safeweb, let alone the CIA, to track users. Get your facts straight before spouting parinod theories.
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
That brings in the question of what are people, more importantly, what is life. Strictly speaking, the clone did not undergo Darwinian evolution to appear on the earth. NASA's defintion of life would them rank them somewhere in the range of a virus.
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
I think we're all getting a bit ahead of ourselves. It took somewhere in the range of 500 attempts to produce one Dolly. What do you do with those five hundred dead or deformed human clones? Let them ban cloning on humans. We're not ready technicaly to do it.
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, armed with contextual information, it might be possible to break a one time pad, not by exploiting the pad, but the humans.
First, the 'random' number source. If I know what the random number generator is, I can make guesses as to the probability distribution of letters in the pad.
Second, the language of transmission. If I know you're communicating in say English, I know the frequency that I can expect letters and even certain words to appear.
I now have at least two interesting probabilities to work with. So, in looking at the brute force generated messages, I can quickly eliminate ones that don't conform to the expected distributions.
OTP's are often susceptible to 'out of band' methods of cracking. The more I know about the context of the message, the manner it was generated, who what when and where it was sent to and from, the more accurate guesses I can make. It's almost impossible to get an exact crack, but the more messages sent using a certain one time pad, the more likely it is that a heuristic can be generated to analyze it.
They propose a combination of juries being volunteer and having the ability to override existing law.
You sir, have not read your jury pamphlet. Jury Nullification. Juries are _supposed_ to override unjust laws. It's in their mandate. The judges just don't tell you.
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
But no one will do that, cause then you'd have all of three visitors to your web site.
MS will include smart tags, if you use there opt-out version, you are still using smart tags. The only way to fight this is at
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
Dude, he was being sarcastic.
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
Back when they first decided not to present, I remember they caught some flak from folks who thought they should have stood up to the RIAA. I think caving to the RIAA was a brilliant masterstroke on the part of Felton. He could have stood up and said, 'Go to hell, I'm gonna present.' Then they would have gone to court and it would have been like DeCSS where you have, 'a virtual certainty' that the paper would have been supressed. Now, the paper has been suppressed. There is no if's and's or butt's. This puts Felton in a much better position, he has been victimized and research has been suppressed. There is no 'well, this might have happen but we went to court first.'
Felton did what the MPAA should have done in cases like this. Wait for the action to be committed before you go to court over the ability of one side to do that action. Brilliant, level headed thinking. I just may fill out that application to Princeton this fall.
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
Recent activity on the XP-beta tester lists suggests that the product activation methods are running into a few problems in the real world. (Like oh, say, arbitrairly shutting off access to the product, very bad thing to have happen at a big company depending on ms office) It is quite possible that microsoft has decided that discretion is the better part of profits, and will hold back on a major american release of subscription based software untill they are sure they have this whole sending-and-activating software over the internet thing worked out.
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
Or it could just be:
1. They ignore you
2. They laff at ya
3. They fight you
4. They incorperate what's left of your bloody corpse into their corprate food plan.
Just ask netscape or any of the hundreds of other copmanies Ms has killed.
Gandhi knew what he was doing and wasen't arrogant. Of course, there is no sense of elitism in the open source community so there is no threat of falling the way of an arrogrant failure, which I'm sure Gandi also had a quote for.
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
The MPAA contends that DeCSS has the ablity to inflect "actual harm". Yet, this program is freely avaliable all over. I can download it no sweat. Yet, in the face of easy access to this terrible tool of copyright infingement, the moive industry is still raking in billions. Due to this court case, DeCSS propagated itself farther than it ever could of without a lawsuit. Yet, the moive industry is no worse for wear.
If DeCSS is so bad, why then, when it is as wide spread as it ever has been, is the moive industry not in line at a soup kitchen?
DeCSS is out, it's effect can be studied. The moive industry is not being hurt by it. Where's their argument?
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
I always liked the snickers rocket approch.
A candy bar contains roughly the equvilant energy of a stick of dynamite, it's just a bit tricker to get that energy out. First you take powedered oxygen. (It's not really pure oxygen, but some sort of oxydizer in a very compact form) As you heat it up the the oxygen is released. Drop in the snickers bar, and boom, combustion. Don't feel like blowing your face off? M&M's are a perfect pelet sized fuel.
The oxygen wants to burn so bad it rips apart the sugars in the candy bar and goes boom. Sorta like if you take two blocks of dry ice and put a strip of flamable metal inbetween, say magnesium. (sp?) Light one end of the strip and it will burn to the other side despit the lack of oxygen. Take apart the two blocks of dry ice and you'll find a black line when the metal was. The metal wanted to burn so bad, it literaly striped the oxygen outta the C02 leaving the carbon behind. Very cool, give it a try.
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
So what exactly will ICANN be telling them?
Yeah, I really wanna see the letter ICANN sends explaining why that company has to hand over their domain name. I personly think that ICANN doesn't have a chance in court on that issue, and if I owned aso.com, well, you know.
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
So what happens to x.org?
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
Think about how difficult that system was to make. Camera's and infrared sensors positioned at angles so they grab a person's face and eyes then splicing it all together into something useful. The technology, or at least the code, behind it must be impressive. The algorithms at use will probably show up in other things pretty soon, it's just that profiling super-market shoppers is the most profitable at the moment.
Sure right now it's being used to surreptitiously spy on people, but, think what you could do with it.
Systems like this could allow a computer terminal to figure out who is using it, and who else is in the room. No more passwords, no silly biometric scans, sit down at a computer and it knows who you are. Have your computer automatically minimize that quake game when your boss/mom walks into the room.
This system could probably also be expanded to figure out things about people, if their happy/sad, athletic/fat, pretty/ugly, and react accordingly. Understanding human emotions and reacting to them is one of the starting points for believable AI capable of passing the Turing test.
Sure, its being sued for something insidious right now, but think about the technical marvels behind it. Beats the heck out of a stupid 8,000-computer search engine cluster.
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
And just for the record, echelon, or derivitives and fig(Newtons)mints of your imagination thereof, is run by the NSA.
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
And espo812 seems to have provided the link detailing the link between the CIA and Safeweb. Supporting reseach and owning are different.
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
I imagine IM gets a good number of hits. Logging that kind of information for any period of time would really start to take up space.
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
So? The CIA is not allowed to conduct domestic operations. Also, the safeweb site makes it quite clear that the CIA is just funding them, they don't have anything to do with running the site. The safeweb system also makes it impossible for safeweb, let alone the CIA, to track users. Get your facts straight before spouting parinod theories.
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
https://www.safeweb.com
If you don't want to be tracked, make it hard to be tracked
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
Will a clone be the same as everyone else?
That brings in the question of what are people, more importantly, what is life. Strictly speaking, the clone did not undergo Darwinian evolution to appear on the earth. NASA's defintion of life would them rank them somewhere in the range of a virus.
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
I think we're all getting a bit ahead of ourselves. It took somewhere in the range of 500 attempts to produce one Dolly. What do you do with those five hundred dead or deformed human clones? Let them ban cloning on humans. We're not ready technicaly to do it.
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.