Yes, but for some reason that's a common error. I've seen WEP expanded to 'Wireless Encryption Protocol' in a few places. It's just one of those things, it seems.
You're right. He says he has proven it, but before spending $20,000 on a patent it would be a very smart thing to have a cryptographer review his proof. I suspect a flaw would be readily apparent to someone skilled with the subject.
It can't be 'unbreakable' under the normal definition of the word. It's impossible because truly unbreakable crypto requires a key that contains at least as much information as the plaintext, and a 'many-time pad' does not satisfy this precondition.
It would seem to me that this simple observation disproves his claim without even knowing his algorithm.
On that note, and thinking about security again, has anyone else considered that if anti-virus software companies actually succeeded in stamping out the proliferation of viruses they might well put themselves out of business?
I'm not the 'conspiracy theorist' type, but sometimes you have to wonder a bit.
I don't think you've look at the questions the Supreme Court will be examining.
There are two:
1. Did the D.C. Circuit err in holding that Congress has the power under the Copyright Clause to extend retroactively the term of existing copyrights?
2. Is a law that extends the term of existing copyrights 'categorically immune from challenge under the first amendment'?
Note that neither question would strike down the entire act. The first, if they agreed (and many think it is likely they will agree), would strike down the retroactive portion of the law. The second only asserts it is possible to strike down the law through such a challenge, because the D.C. Circuit said it was not.
The original name of the suit was "Eldred vs. Reno", but was renamed with the administration change.
It's not like Reno had much to do with it either, though. Congress passed the bill into law. At the time it was dubbed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, as he and later his widow pushed for it. Bono was actually in favour of unlimited copyright terms, but that is prohibited by the US constitution.
A Forrester Research report that was released a few weeks ago also attributed the decline in CD sales to the rise in console game sales. People have only so much money to spend on entertainment, and the cut-throat Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo battle appears to be affecting the music industry for the worse.
They also said the bad economy was a factor, and said specifically they didn't believe piracy to be having any significant effect.
Yes! I was just about to post this same observation. Think relative, not absolute here! Yet another example of common innumeracy.
First of all the population of Europe is over 800 million. The article did not say the EU. Indeed, this report shows non-EU countries contribute to that total.
Canada and the US together have about 315 million people. This means Internet penetration in Europe doesn't even approach that of North America (which is in fact contrary to an observation in the posted article).
Of course I'll admit that it is a semi-interesting statistic, although it will be more interesting when European numbers actually pass North American numbers, including Mexico. As it is, the stat is rather contrived.
Not even that. It is not at all uncommon for ships to disappear without a trace at sea, especially in the ocean where there are strong currents and the water is deep. It takes substantial effort to locate a sunken ship even when you know exactly where it sank.
The myth is more of a media phenomenon, much like the alleged curse of King Tut's tomb. It was a twisting of facts and numbers by a writer to create the illusion of something supernatural, with the aim of bringing in a lot of readers (because frankly, people love this stuff). It's essentially tabloid writing.
There were a couple of pieces written in the fifties noting disappearances in that general area, but the Bermuda Triangle as we know it was invented by a magazine writer in 1964.
The Skeptic's Dictionary explains the Triangle pretty well.
I saw that show as well. However, the whole Bermuda Triangle thing is just a media-propagated myth. The number of ship wrecks and plane crashes in that area is no greater than would be statistically expected. The fact that some disappearances have never been explained is unremarkable; that's the nature of disasters at sea.
The Triangle is no different than any other patch of ocean that has comparable sea and air traffic.
Lloyd's of London, for instance, charges no extra premium for ships passing through the area. It's not considered high risk.
To address your original point, though, it is still largely a theoretical phenomenon. There is no proof that methane bubbles have ever destroyed a ship (or plane, for that matter).
You might want to note that the initiative you linked to is going nowhere, and helped get Brian Tobin railroaded out of federal politics.
Most Canadians thought there were better things to spend $4 billion on than universal broadband.
I didn't mean to say geography is the only factor, but it's certainly a big one. You still can't get high speed everywhere, and our clustered population was certainly a large boon to the people building the infrastructure you're talking about.
This is also true, but it's a bit of a chicken and egg thing as well. Increasing usage of cell phones allows providers to bring down prices, thereby encouraging more usage.
You are correct in that pricing of landlines has a lot to do with it. Even without SMS and MMS, cell phones have much deeper market penetration.
But I was referring to the statistics that show in developed countries 'advanced' cell phone usage (which exludes voice) is inversely proportional to PC ownership rates.
In Japan you can transfer pictures and even video over cell phones easily. In North America you can't, and some people complain about it. But we would just do all that multimedia stuff over computers.
Yes. Our service is pretty much the same as what you guys have. Basic phone service provides unlimited local calls for about $25/month CDN (around $18 US). And like you guys, we can choose between long distance providers to get a good plan.
To be honest, our broadband supply is fairly limited, in most places having the choice between one cable provider (Rogers, Cogeco, or Shaw) and one DSL provider (Bell-Sympatico). They are competitive, and they are not profitable. Over the last couple of years they've been in a tight battle for market share. They have recently begun raising prices (from $40/month to $45/month CDN). They are soon to introduce bit caps on usage as well.
This is a very good point. I take issue with the submitter saying 'as usual...', since such comparisons are almost always naive and ignorant of various factors.
I live in Canada which has higher broadband usage than the US. But that's because a our population is largely concentrated in a couple of small areas: the 'Golden Horseshoe' around Lake Ontario (Toronto) and the British Columbian lower mainland (Vancouver). By providing saturation coverage just to those relatively small areas, DSL and cable providers are offering services to over a third of Canada's population.
Another common bad comparison is with cell phone technology, where Europe and Asia have much wider usage, resulting in more advanced technology. The reality of the situation is not that North America has been neglecting this area of technology, but simply we don't have the same kind of demand.
We prefer to use personal computers than cell phones. Teenagers don't pay money to 'text' each other on there cell phones here, instead they use ICQ and MSN for free. As a result it makes no sense for our telecoms to dump countless billions into expanding our cellular infrastructure and improving our cell phones' data capabilities. They wouldn't get the same kind of returns as NTT Docomo and Vodafone do overseas.
Computer Science students who started in 1997 or later had the option to use Java instead of MODULA-3. Java is now being taught to first years in lieu of Pascal, and they can carry it through to third year when C++ is first required. At least, that was the state of the school when I graduated last year.
Since the last "ice age" as we know them ended just over 10,000 years ago, that time scale is WAY to short to show up on the scale of this article.
This is correct. It's also easily apparent just by looking at climate evidence.
Considering the 'recent' Ice Age started 2 million years ago, the 10,000 year period of warmth we are experiencing could easily be an anomaly, or a brief thaw, and not a definitive end.
This does put the scope of the paper into better perspective. Of course, it also reminds us that we may not be as important as we think. On a greater scale, the worst Global Warming scenario we can think of might only appear as a slight blip in the Earth's climate history.
What I found interesting about this case is that if she had been drinking tea, the case would have been dismissed.
Coffee is supposed to be served at 140, but tea should always be made from boiled water without letting it cool. The plaintiff's reasoning would not have held in that case.
What people have to realize about law suits is that it is irrelevant whether the plaintiff is at fault. The question is whether the defendant is also at fault.
Yes, I was a bit cautious as well. But I tried it out on a Win2K machine and it didn't damage anything, and there are no weird processes running around.
It looks kosher. I think these guys are just some low-profile developers doing some cool stuff and hoping not to get sued by Sierra.
Still, it is *use at your own risk* software. I wouldn't put it on a machine with sensitive data.
Where is it described as such? In crypto, 'one-way' means 'irreversible' or at least 'computationally irreversible'. The only time I have seen the term 'one-way cipher' used is in referring to hash functions.
Hey, thanks, I think I just figured out what my Master's thesis will be...;-) "On Cryptographically Secure Write-Once, Read-Never Memory And Its Application To Buzzword-Compliant Technologies."
If you switch to the University of Dayton, they'll probably give you a grant for it.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but for some reason that's a common error. I've seen WEP expanded to 'Wireless Encryption Protocol' in a few places. It's just one of those things, it seems.
It can't be 'unbreakable' under the normal definition of the word. It's impossible because truly unbreakable crypto requires a key that contains at least as much information as the plaintext, and a 'many-time pad' does not satisfy this precondition.
It would seem to me that this simple observation disproves his claim without even knowing his algorithm.
I'm not the 'conspiracy theorist' type, but sometimes you have to wonder a bit.
There are two:
1. Did the D.C. Circuit err in holding that Congress has the power under the Copyright Clause to extend retroactively the term of existing copyrights?
2. Is a law that extends the term of existing copyrights 'categorically immune from challenge under the first amendment'?
Note that neither question would strike down the entire act. The first, if they agreed (and many think it is likely they will agree), would strike down the retroactive portion of the law. The second only asserts it is possible to strike down the law through such a challenge, because the D.C. Circuit said it was not.
It's not like Reno had much to do with it either, though. Congress passed the bill into law. At the time it was dubbed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, as he and later his widow pushed for it. Bono was actually in favour of unlimited copyright terms, but that is prohibited by the US constitution.
I believe they have done just that, in terms of revenue. They are still a good distance from catching up to the music biz, though.
But, as I said above, the gap is closing.
They also said the bad economy was a factor, and said specifically they didn't believe piracy to be having any significant effect.
First of all the population of Europe is over 800 million. The article did not say the EU. Indeed, this report shows non-EU countries contribute to that total.
Canada and the US together have about 315 million people. This means Internet penetration in Europe doesn't even approach that of North America (which is in fact contrary to an observation in the posted article).
Of course I'll admit that it is a semi-interesting statistic, although it will be more interesting when European numbers actually pass North American numbers, including Mexico. As it is, the stat is rather contrived.
The myth is more of a media phenomenon, much like the alleged curse of King Tut's tomb. It was a twisting of facts and numbers by a writer to create the illusion of something supernatural, with the aim of bringing in a lot of readers (because frankly, people love this stuff). It's essentially tabloid writing.
There were a couple of pieces written in the fifties noting disappearances in that general area, but the Bermuda Triangle as we know it was invented by a magazine writer in 1964.
The Skeptic's Dictionary explains the Triangle pretty well.
The Triangle is no different than any other patch of ocean that has comparable sea and air traffic.
Lloyd's of London, for instance, charges no extra premium for ships passing through the area. It's not considered high risk.
To address your original point, though, it is still largely a theoretical phenomenon. There is no proof that methane bubbles have ever destroyed a ship (or plane, for that matter).
Most Canadians thought there were better things to spend $4 billion on than universal broadband.
I didn't mean to say geography is the only factor, but it's certainly a big one. You still can't get high speed everywhere, and our clustered population was certainly a large boon to the people building the infrastructure you're talking about.
You are correct in that pricing of landlines has a lot to do with it. Even without SMS and MMS, cell phones have much deeper market penetration.
But I was referring to the statistics that show in developed countries 'advanced' cell phone usage (which exludes voice) is inversely proportional to PC ownership rates.
In Japan you can transfer pictures and even video over cell phones easily. In North America you can't, and some people complain about it. But we would just do all that multimedia stuff over computers.
Yes. Our service is pretty much the same as what you guys have. Basic phone service provides unlimited local calls for about $25/month CDN (around $18 US). And like you guys, we can choose between long distance providers to get a good plan.
To be honest, our broadband supply is fairly limited, in most places having the choice between one cable provider (Rogers, Cogeco, or Shaw) and one DSL provider (Bell-Sympatico). They are competitive, and they are not profitable. Over the last couple of years they've been in a tight battle for market share. They have recently begun raising prices (from $40/month to $45/month CDN). They are soon to introduce bit caps on usage as well.
I live in Canada which has higher broadband usage than the US. But that's because a our population is largely concentrated in a couple of small areas: the 'Golden Horseshoe' around Lake Ontario (Toronto) and the British Columbian lower mainland (Vancouver). By providing saturation coverage just to those relatively small areas, DSL and cable providers are offering services to over a third of Canada's population.
Another common bad comparison is with cell phone technology, where Europe and Asia have much wider usage, resulting in more advanced technology. The reality of the situation is not that North America has been neglecting this area of technology, but simply we don't have the same kind of demand.
We prefer to use personal computers than cell phones. Teenagers don't pay money to 'text' each other on there cell phones here, instead they use ICQ and MSN for free. As a result it makes no sense for our telecoms to dump countless billions into expanding our cellular infrastructure and improving our cell phones' data capabilities. They wouldn't get the same kind of returns as NTT Docomo and Vodafone do overseas.
I started at UW in 1996.
Personally, I'd have no problem pitching in 8 cents if my country wanted to send a craft to the moon.
Is it still a phone tap if the FBI informs you they will henceforth be listening to all your calls?
This is correct. It's also easily apparent just by looking at climate evidence.
Considering the 'recent' Ice Age started 2 million years ago, the 10,000 year period of warmth we are experiencing could easily be an anomaly, or a brief thaw, and not a definitive end.
This does put the scope of the paper into better perspective. Of course, it also reminds us that we may not be as important as we think. On a greater scale, the worst Global Warming scenario we can think of might only appear as a slight blip in the Earth's climate history.
No. Although the Canadian government has been investigating the possibility of a DMCA equivalent.
Looks like I'll be picking up a new hobby...
Coffee is supposed to be served at 140, but tea should always be made from boiled water without letting it cool. The plaintiff's reasoning would not have held in that case.
What people have to realize about law suits is that it is irrelevant whether the plaintiff is at fault. The question is whether the defendant is also at fault.
It looks kosher. I think these guys are just some low-profile developers doing some cool stuff and hoping not to get sued by Sierra.
Still, it is *use at your own risk* software. I wouldn't put it on a machine with sensitive data.
I played their remake of King's Quest, and it wasn't too bad.
Where is it described as such? In crypto, 'one-way' means 'irreversible' or at least 'computationally irreversible'. The only time I have seen the term 'one-way cipher' used is in referring to hash functions.
If you switch to the University of Dayton, they'll probably give you a grant for it.