> [It's a Windows app...].that allows this sort of thing and I'll bet that it's also restricted to specific players and not all MP3 players for this
thing to be effective at "protection" (and even then...).
So lemme get this straight.
The CD will only be uncopyable, if and only if I choose to install on my PC, an application from the copy control people in order to prevent myself from being able to copy it.
Shee-it, that's even dumber than saying the world can be made safe from terrorists who use crypto by passing a law asking all the terrorists to stop using real crypto and start using backdoored-crypto.
Well, I guess we know who this guy will be working for when his copy protection scheme falls flat on its ass.
> On the plus side, copy protection is always an arms race and the hackers have the upper hand. Remember when Copy
II Plus came out for the Apple II and it could break every single media-based copyprotect scheme that existed at the
time? There is still hope.
Unfortunately, I also remember when developers of software didn't go to jail for saying "it's just ROT13"?
> There's [a] phrase I don't ever want to hear applied to myself. Write permission on my retina. Shudder.
*shrug*
Depends on your perspective. I like it.
When I watch TV, I grant my TV write permission on my retina for the content. I continue to grant it write permission on my retina, but deny write permission to my eardrum, during the ads.
The reason I like the phrase? Because it confirms that I am the one controlling who has write permission. When I cease to be the one in control of who gets to [advertise|communicate|amuse] me, I have a problem.
But the use of the phrase reminds me that - at least for now - I have some say in the matter.
> The best place to hide stego in USENET binaries wouldn't be the pr0n. It'd
be the pr0n-spam, which nobody ever downloads.
Sorry to follow up to my own post.
But has anyone considered the possibility that the forged headers, path preloads, and/or hashbusters (the "random" digits after the Subject: lines in spam, or the "random" c'h,a'r`a.c,t.e'r`s inserted to foil regular expression matches in killfiles) in USENET spam might not be random?
Someone with a lot of computing power and a large archive of postings might want to look into that.
> Something on the newsgroups would be a much better place to look. the alt.binaries.pictures.* areas.
Finally, the excuse I've been looking for to download copious quantities of pr0n! (Honest, honey, I'm just looking for stego!)
Actually, you've got me thinking. The best place to hide stego in USENET binaries wouldn't be the pr0n. It'd be the pr0n-spam, which nobody ever downloads.
> Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems
[sun.com] fame said in a speech that there are going to be some "third time owned" effects in the marketplace.
What he meant was that with the original (new) cost of the equipment it is difficult to make a venture
(whether it be telecom or internet) profitable. The second time around is better, but still not good enough. By
the time the equipment ends up in it's third set of hands the cost has likely decreased to the point where the
service can be offered at the current market rate and yet be profitable.
Which is true.
But it's a long way of saying "The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese."
All it really means is that the billions of dollars in capital to build the network got evaporated when the shareholders and bondholders took a bath in bankruptcy, and after a couple of iterations of "Oops, we couldn't make it work, here, you take it off our hands for 30 cents on the dollar", the "cost" drops.
The "cost" of building the network, of course, hasn't dropped -- only what people are willing to sell the network for once it's been built.
Of course, those are the risks you take when you invest capital. In this case, the shareholders and bondholders got burned, but the world got a pretty neat network out of the deal.
> There certainly are good uses to strong crypto, but this is not one of them. If the Taliban find out you use strong
crypto [Emphasis added], and understand what that is, they will simply kill you.
So what you're saying is that groups operating within Afghanistan to expose the Taliban's activities need to use strong crypto in such a way that the Taliban don't find out they're using it.
So we need wide access to not just crypto, then, but stego too.
I think that makes my point, rather than detracts from it -- the same tools that might help Their Wackos (terrorists) infiltrate Us , can also be used to enable Our Wackos (human rights activists) to infiltrate Them.
Apart from the fact that killing 7000 civilians is arguably a war crime, the operational details of the missions of both groups are remarkably similar -- live a normal life, undetected by the authorities, until you can accomplish your mission. Whether your mission is the murder of 7000 civilians, or the surreptitious taking of pictures of stonings and public executions and leakage of said stories to the West, doesn't matter from an operational standpoint -- the ability to communicate undetected is a vital tool.
Well, up until yesterday (when the Taliban made posession of computer or communications equipment itself punishable by death, regardless of whether crypto is involved), rendering the debate moot.
Not completely moot, though -- they demonstrate by their actions that a few women with digital cameras and laptops present a greater threat to their society than their hijackers do to ours.
1) We saw what the media did to Zimmerman, trying to portray him as torn up over PGP. He's not.
2) What if this is more of the same?
But on to original point - while Hellman admits his view of NSA as "Darth Vader" was "human but... ridiculous" - perhaps he's overlooking the number of people whose lives were saved by strong crypto?
Or perhaps there's nobody in Tibet resisting the Chinese? Or perhaps there was nobody in the former Soviet Union using crypto during the coup? Or perhaps the Berlin Wall came down, in part, because people were able to communicate without Stasi eavesdropping on them.
Or perhaps the women who infiltrated Afghanistan in defence of native women being slaughtered by the Taliban were only able to get their stories out -- stories that have been publicized time and again over the past few years, and that have nothing to do with the present crisis -- because they're able to communicate securely.
If (and in light of the Zimmerman distortions, I see it as a very big "If") Hellman is having second thoughts about public-key crypto, I urge him to look at the good it's brought.
NYC was One Big Atrocity. We'll never know how many Little Personal Attrocities Hellman's tech has prevented, but I'd bet it's in the thousands.
> "I'll carry an ID card when you shove it up my cold, dead ass"
Shh! Stop giving our Congresscritters ideas!
("And as you can see, fellow Congresspeople, by implementing the ID card into a Sony(tm) Memory Stick and demanding rectal insertion, not only can I personally count on generous campaign donations from Sony, we can all benefit by buying shares in companies that make personal lubricants and hemorroidal creams before we pass this vital legislation! It's a good thing we have terrorism as an excuse. I mean, we'd look awful funny saying 'it's for the children' on this one...")
Re:Layoffs, Firings or 'Volunteerism'...?
on
Morals and Layoffs
·
· Score: 3
> Chief among the innovations in the program is the new "volunteer status" which allows employees to
continue working for HP and serving HP customers without actually getting paid. While the money
they would have made is not tax deductible, they are, as Fiorina put it, perfectly free to brag about it
as they would for any volunteer work. The company has outlined preliminary plans for
Habitat-For-Humanity-style t-shirts for the new volunteers.
Y'know, the funny thing is that if I had moderator points, I'd be torn between (+1, Funny) and (+1, Informative).
> "You would be shocked to learn what people will do for a t-shirt," said Fiorina.
"You would be shocked to know that at the rate your merger is going, a T-shirt will soon cost more than a share of Hewlett-Packard", said Tackhead.
(No, the real reason this can't be a real press-release is because nither Capellas nor Carly could come up with an idea like this and express it in a single sentence. Or even a 30,000-word memo, for that matter. But judging from they way they were gushing all over each other on National Business Report the day HP took over Compaq, I'll bet we see a new merged entity spun off in nine months;-)
"I was shocked at what Capellas would do for a T-shirt", said Fiorina, "but figured, hey, they're his shareholders, not mine."
Corporate Republic - Katz forgot something.
on
Morals and Layoffs
·
· Score: 1
Quoth Katz:
> In the Corporate Republic, where corporations fund the political
system, control most mass media, write legislation, and now dominate
entertainment and culture
...and pay us to build the products they sell that enable them to do so, thereby enabling us to buy neat toys and surf the web on company time and post messages to Slashdot.
When my employer pays me, or makes good on the severance portions of the employment contract (even if that portion reads merely "We can fire your azz at will!"), they've made good.
Why can't Katz deal with that?
Re:This has been going on for 30 years
on
Morals and Layoffs
·
· Score: 2
> As someone who worked through the 90-91 recession, this is nothing new, keep your skills up to
date and keep rolling with the punches.
And aren't us geeks - as Katz described us himself - "in the Tech
Nation, populated by educated, mobile, skilled and independent-minded
workers"
So if we get laid off, are we not more, not less, likely to find similar work quickly?
And if - again, as Katz himself says, and most of us understood when we signed on to our jobs - "Tasks and missions are
temporal, the people employed to execute them highly disposable.
Work and workers are both flexible and expendable."
...then doesn't that imply that we knew damn well what we were getting into when we signed on? And that we signed on anyways?
My employer owes me what it agreed to when I signed my offer of employment. I owe it what I agreed to when I signed that letter.
Nothing less, nothing more.
If my employer chooses to pay me large bonuses, that's its prerogative. If I choose to work long hours to get a project done, that's my prerogative. Usually there's a link between the two. Sometimes there's not.
But there's a difference between rights - outlined above - and obligations. We're obliged to do only that we agreed to do. We owe each other nothing after that.
> This is a perversion of what Ashcroft requested. Hackers who attempt to disrupt key systems that are vital
to protecting human life, for example the FAA's radar systems, are terrorists. And they are.
On that, we agree.
Upon reading the draft bill, I'm not happy with all of the provisions in the bill, but I really don't see anything that says "guy with programming sk1llz == terrorist."
I do see an expansion of The List Of Bad Things We Can Do To Felons (such as DNA sampling), but that's a far cry from "all [cr]ackers are terrorists", let alone "all Hackers are now terrorists and will have to give up DNA samples".
Indeed, only crackers who attack "protected systems" (meaning.gov and.mil boxen - not the d00d who hax0rz the average web site) appear to be in line to get their asses handed to them on a silver platter under this Act, and those provisions I can support. (Hell, those are about the only provisions I'd support;-)
Earlier, I made a post that said "If you've got programming skills, get the hell outa here." I retract that post. This bill, while odious for many means, is not a declaration that American doesn't want its programmers anymore.
Serves me right for replying to/. before reading the fscking article;-)
> at $2500 pr. gram, It would be something like $350M to send Steve Balmer up there on a one way ticket. Maybe we should all throw in a buck or two ?
Yeah, but having seen that Monkey Dance video, are you sure he wouldn't just jump up and down on the lunar surface until he finally achieved lunar escape velocity?
> this seems like a huge step in the wrong direction. if we move to a level of abstraction devoid of details, how can we possibly
innovate and improve?
Why would anybody ever need to innovate when we have Microsoft to do that for us?
(I agree - relying on the OS to make the distinction between "data stored on my computer" and "data stored on someone else's computer" - is a Very Bad Idea. Where it's voluntary, such as FreeNet, it's a Good Thing. But abstracting the concept of "ownership" out of the user's hands by default is evil, pure evil.)
> > The scientific community must recognize the harms these rules pose and provide guidance about how to
improve the anticircumvention rules. > >
Translated to Slashdot-speak: >
D00d, DMCA is fsckin LAME! IANAL but we need to get this fscker struck down. I heard you can go to jail
and stuff just for ROT13ing your name. There are real examples of this but I'm not gonna bother quoting them or
posting links.
Funny you mentioned translation.
I'm in a cynical mood today. I mean, I bet she gets paid a hell of a lot of money, and all she has to do is read Slashdot at +5, and translate into academicspeak.
Nice work if you can get it. But I wouldn't dignify it by calling it research.
> With cryptography
reigning supreme, it makes no sense to turn back the clock. Instead of crippling their own citizens, they should
be looking for weaknesses in public key cryptography!
And as you correctly point out, when fighting Enigma, the codebreakers had the upper hand.
One thing (source: That awesome NOVA documentary on Bletchley Park) that bears repeating is that some of the biggest "breaks" in the cracking of Enigma (and its successors) often came from operator error on the part of the enemy soldier in the field, who didn't know how to use Enigma securely.
That's not to say that Enigma was ever secure by today's standards -- only to say that the task of breaking it was made easier by screwups on the part of the enemy. (How many times have you walked by a cubicle and seen a password scribbled on a Post-it note? Your co-worker doesn't see it as a security risk, because they don't know the implications of what they're doing. The German soldier in the field made similar mistakes.)
I would assume our codebreakers know about the exposure created by operator error, and are working on the problem as we speak. (And I wish them the best of luck - and I mean that sincerely, not in jest.)
As computer systems grow in complexity, the number of avenues for such mistakes on the part of our new enemy increases exponentially. For any given communications channel, I can think of dozens of ways in which information could be extracted. I'm sure you can too.
On that note, though, I'd ask you (not you-the-poster specifically, but all of the generic "you" reading this), however, to keep your speculations on ways in which the Bad Guys could slip up to yourself. I'm sure our codebreakers have already thought these holes. I'm not convinced the Bad Guys have thought of them all, and I'd like to see the balance of power tilted in our favor as much as possible.
I was originally going to write something about how our current war is rather like the Battle of the Atlantic in WW2 - hunting down U-boats that had total domination of the seas, and protecting merchant mariners who lacked air cover for much of their journey - a battle in which crypto was absolutely vital.
Then I realized the current war has something else in common with past wars:
> How many dollars have non-US businesses already lost because of NSA giving information captured by Echelon to US companies? It would be hypocritical for US residents to complain of
activities that they do themselves routinely.
Absolutely correct...
...which makes it all the more suicidal for us to knowingly re-expose ourselves to that risk (remember, the French did it to us too on behalf of one of their companies;-) while other countries' corporate transmissions remain secure.
> An alternative to direct key escrow is the system used by Lotus Notes for their export versions a while back.
Known as a "Work Factor Reduction Field"
And how many billions of dollars would US businesses lose when their "secure" communications were cracked, not by NSA, but by foreign competitors?
Bin Laden may have made hundreds of millions of dollars by buying put options in airline and reinsurance companies two weeks ago.
Do we really want to give him and his associates access to that kind of money with the touch of a keyboard?
Do we really want to find out what our enemies could do with that kind of money if he could operate underneath the radar, possibly making several such transactions, over the course of ten years?
NSA isn't the only bunch of folks with access to supercomputers.
#include <beowulf_joke.h>/* ha ha, only serious/*
If anything can be cracked, it will be. Our financial system relies on the security and integrity of businesses' ability to communicate.
Just as the enemy can engage in asymmetrical warfare on the physical battlefield (lobbing 767s into our physical infrastructure, where we can't bomb Afghanistan to the Stone Age 'cuz the Russians beat us to it), they can also engage in asymmetrical warfare in the infosphere (destabilization through insertion of false transactions into our financial systems, a task greatly simplified through a reduction in cryptographic strength -- again choosing to fight where they have no comparable financial infrastructure that we can target in return).
If NSA still has any pull with Congress, I hope they'll be able to nip this one in the bud. I'd even go so far as to suggest that the second part of their mandate -- defending American communications from compromise -- obliges them to try.
> Run a pirated copy of FrontPage to create an MS-Bashing page to be served on a pirated copy of IIS
running on a pirated copy of Win2K, just to violate as many licenses as possible!
Write a variant of Nimda that, instead of using IIS to serve the.eml file to more victims, creates a uses IIS to display the Frontpage logo alongside a picture of Bill Gates buggering a goat.
"This is your web content. This is your web content on Frontpage. Any questions?"
For bonus points, have the hijacked server mail the BSA goons and/or the piracy hotline @microsoft.com, with a message saying "Suspected license violation - web site created by Frontpage makes disparaging comments about Microsoft products".
Slashdot Mirror
So lemme get this straight.
The CD will only be uncopyable, if and only if I choose to install on my PC, an application from the copy control people in order to prevent myself from being able to copy it.
Shee-it, that's even dumber than saying the world can be made safe from terrorists who use crypto by passing a law asking all the terrorists to stop using real crypto and start using backdoored-crypto.
Well, I guess we know who this guy will be working for when his copy protection scheme falls flat on its ass.
Unfortunately, I also remember when developers of software didn't go to jail for saying "it's just ROT13"?
*shrug*
Depends on your perspective. I like it.
When I watch TV, I grant my TV write permission on my retina for the content. I continue to grant it write permission on my retina, but deny write permission to my eardrum, during the ads.
The reason I like the phrase? Because it confirms that I am the one controlling who has write permission. When I cease to be the one in control of who gets to [advertise|communicate|amuse] me, I have a problem.
But the use of the phrase reminds me that - at least for now - I have some say in the matter.
Sorry to follow up to my own post.
But has anyone considered the possibility that the forged headers, path preloads, and/or hashbusters (the "random" digits after the Subject: lines in spam, or the "random" c'h,a'r`a.c,t.e'r`s inserted to foil regular expression matches in killfiles) in USENET spam might not be random?
Someone with a lot of computing power and a large archive of postings might want to look into that.
Finally, the excuse I've been looking for to download copious quantities of pr0n! (Honest, honey, I'm just looking for stego!)
Actually, you've got me thinking. The best place to hide stego in USENET binaries wouldn't be the pr0n. It'd be the pr0n-spam, which nobody ever downloads.
Which is true.
But it's a long way of saying "The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese."
All it really means is that the billions of dollars in capital to build the network got evaporated when the shareholders and bondholders took a bath in bankruptcy, and after a couple of iterations of "Oops, we couldn't make it work, here, you take it off our hands for 30 cents on the dollar", the "cost" drops.
The "cost" of building the network, of course, hasn't dropped -- only what people are willing to sell the network for once it's been built.
Of course, those are the risks you take when you invest capital. In this case, the shareholders and bondholders got burned, but the world got a pretty neat network out of the deal.
So what you're saying is that groups operating within Afghanistan to expose the Taliban's activities need to use strong crypto in such a way that the Taliban don't find out they're using it.
So we need wide access to not just crypto, then, but stego too.
I think that makes my point, rather than detracts from it -- the same tools that might help Their Wackos (terrorists) infiltrate Us , can also be used to enable Our Wackos (human rights activists) to infiltrate Them.
Apart from the fact that killing 7000 civilians is arguably a war crime, the operational details of the missions of both groups are remarkably similar -- live a normal life, undetected by the authorities, until you can accomplish your mission. Whether your mission is the murder of 7000 civilians, or the surreptitious taking of pictures of stonings and public executions and leakage of said stories to the West, doesn't matter from an operational standpoint -- the ability to communicate undetected is a vital tool.
Well, up until yesterday (when the Taliban made posession of computer or communications equipment itself punishable by death, regardless of whether crypto is involved), rendering the debate moot.
Not completely moot, though -- they demonstrate by their actions that a few women with digital cameras and laptops present a greater threat to their society than their hijackers do to ours.
And based on that, my money's on the West.
2) What if this is more of the same?
But on to original point - while Hellman admits his view of NSA as "Darth Vader" was "human but ... ridiculous" - perhaps he's overlooking the number of people whose lives were saved by strong crypto?
Or perhaps there's nobody in Tibet resisting the Chinese? Or perhaps there was nobody in the former Soviet Union using crypto during the coup? Or perhaps the Berlin Wall came down, in part, because people were able to communicate without Stasi eavesdropping on them.
Or perhaps the women who infiltrated Afghanistan in defence of native women being slaughtered by the Taliban were only able to get their stories out -- stories that have been publicized time and again over the past few years, and that have nothing to do with the present crisis -- because they're able to communicate securely.
If (and in light of the Zimmerman distortions, I see it as a very big "If") Hellman is having second thoughts about public-key crypto, I urge him to look at the good it's brought.
NYC was One Big Atrocity. We'll never know how many Little Personal Attrocities Hellman's tech has prevented, but I'd bet it's in the thousands.
Shh! Stop giving our Congresscritters ideas!
("And as you can see, fellow Congresspeople, by implementing the ID card into a Sony(tm) Memory Stick and demanding rectal insertion, not only can I personally count on generous campaign donations from Sony, we can all benefit by buying shares in companies that make personal lubricants and hemorroidal creams before we pass this vital legislation! It's a good thing we have terrorism as an excuse. I mean, we'd look awful funny saying 'it's for the children' on this one...")
Y'know, the funny thing is that if I had moderator points, I'd be torn between (+1, Funny) and (+1, Informative).
> "You would be shocked to learn what people will do for a t-shirt," said Fiorina.
"You would be shocked to know that at the rate your merger is going, a T-shirt will soon cost more than a share of Hewlett-Packard", said Tackhead.
(No, the real reason this can't be a real press-release is because nither Capellas nor Carly could come up with an idea like this and express it in a single sentence. Or even a 30,000-word memo, for that matter. But judging from they way they were gushing all over each other on National Business Report the day HP took over Compaq, I'll bet we see a new merged entity spun off in nine months ;-)
"I was shocked at what Capellas would do for a T-shirt", said Fiorina, "but figured, hey, they're his shareholders, not mine."
> In the Corporate Republic, where corporations fund the political system, control most mass media, write legislation, and now dominate entertainment and culture
When my employer pays me, or makes good on the severance portions of the employment contract (even if that portion reads merely "We can fire your azz at will!"), they've made good.
Why can't Katz deal with that?
And aren't us geeks - as Katz described us himself - "in the Tech Nation, populated by educated, mobile, skilled and independent-minded workers"
So if we get laid off, are we not more, not less, likely to find similar work quickly?
And if - again, as Katz himself says, and most of us understood when we signed on to our jobs - "Tasks and missions are temporal, the people employed to execute them highly disposable. Work and workers are both flexible and expendable."
My employer owes me what it agreed to when I signed my offer of employment. I owe it what I agreed to when I signed that letter.
Nothing less, nothing more.
If my employer chooses to pay me large bonuses, that's its prerogative. If I choose to work long hours to get a project done, that's my prerogative. Usually there's a link between the two. Sometimes there's not.
But there's a difference between rights - outlined above - and obligations. We're obliged to do only that we agreed to do. We owe each other nothing after that.
Moderators - please mod my original post original post down. As in, "(1, Didn't Read The Fscking Article Before Posting)"
On that, we agree.
Upon reading the draft bill, I'm not happy with all of the provisions in the bill, but I really don't see anything that says "guy with programming sk1llz == terrorist."
I do see an expansion of The List Of Bad Things We Can Do To Felons (such as DNA sampling), but that's a far cry from "all [cr]ackers are terrorists", let alone "all Hackers are now terrorists and will have to give up DNA samples".
Indeed, only crackers who attack "protected systems" (meaning .gov and .mil boxen - not the d00d who hax0rz the average web site) appear to be in line to get their asses handed to them on a silver platter under this Act, and those provisions I can support. (Hell, those are about the only provisions I'd support ;-)
Earlier, I made a post that said "If you've got programming skills, get the hell outa here." I retract that post. This bill, while odious for many means, is not a declaration that American doesn't want its programmers anymore.
Serves me right for replying to /. before reading the fscking article ;-)
"If you have programming skills, get the fuck out of the States and take your skills with you. Your country obviously doesn't want you anymore."
(Am I now a felon?)
Yeah, but having seen that Monkey Dance video, are you sure he wouldn't just jump up and down on the lunar surface until he finally achieved lunar escape velocity?
Yeah. Not Osama. Someone we can trust, like the head of FBI counterintelligence. What was his name again?
Oh yeah, Robert Hanssen.
Why would anybody ever need to innovate when we have Microsoft to do that for us?
(I agree - relying on the OS to make the distinction between "data stored on my computer" and "data stored on someone else's computer" - is a Very Bad Idea. Where it's voluntary, such as FreeNet, it's a Good Thing. But abstracting the concept of "ownership" out of the user's hands by default is evil, pure evil.)
>
> Translated to Slashdot-speak:
> D00d, DMCA is fsckin LAME! IANAL but we need to get this fscker struck down. I heard you can go to jail and stuff just for ROT13ing your name. There are real examples of this but I'm not gonna bother quoting them or posting links.
Funny you mentioned translation.
I'm in a cynical mood today. I mean, I bet she gets paid a hell of a lot of money, and all she has to do is read Slashdot at +5, and translate into academicspeak.
Nice work if you can get it. But I wouldn't dignify it by calling it research.
And as you correctly point out, when fighting Enigma, the codebreakers had the upper hand.
One thing (source: That awesome NOVA documentary on Bletchley Park) that bears repeating is that some of the biggest "breaks" in the cracking of Enigma (and its successors) often came from operator error on the part of the enemy soldier in the field, who didn't know how to use Enigma securely.
That's not to say that Enigma was ever secure by today's standards -- only to say that the task of breaking it was made easier by screwups on the part of the enemy. (How many times have you walked by a cubicle and seen a password scribbled on a Post-it note? Your co-worker doesn't see it as a security risk, because they don't know the implications of what they're doing. The German soldier in the field made similar mistakes.)
I would assume our codebreakers know about the exposure created by operator error, and are working on the problem as we speak. (And I wish them the best of luck - and I mean that sincerely, not in jest.)
As computer systems grow in complexity, the number of avenues for such mistakes on the part of our new enemy increases exponentially. For any given communications channel, I can think of dozens of ways in which information could be extracted. I'm sure you can too.
On that note, though, I'd ask you (not you-the-poster specifically, but all of the generic "you" reading this), however, to keep your speculations on ways in which the Bad Guys could slip up to yourself. I'm sure our codebreakers have already thought these holes. I'm not convinced the Bad Guys have thought of them all, and I'd like to see the balance of power tilted in our favor as much as possible.
I was originally going to write something about how our current war is rather like the Battle of the Atlantic in WW2 - hunting down U-boats that had total domination of the seas, and protecting merchant mariners who lacked air cover for much of their journey - a battle in which crypto was absolutely vital.
Then I realized the current war has something else in common with past wars:
Loose lips sink ships.
(Whereupon I shall shut the fsck up :-)
I wonder if the shitweasel gets the message goatse.cx is sending him.
(This time, it might pay to visit goatse.cx, before you moderate ;-)
Absolutely correct...
And how many billions of dollars would US businesses lose when their "secure" communications were cracked, not by NSA, but by foreign competitors?
Bin Laden may have made hundreds of millions of dollars by buying put options in airline and reinsurance companies two weeks ago.
Do we really want to give him and his associates access to that kind of money with the touch of a keyboard?
Do we really want to find out what our enemies could do with that kind of money if he could operate underneath the radar, possibly making several such transactions, over the course of ten years?
NSA isn't the only bunch of folks with access to supercomputers.
#include <beowulf_joke.h> /* ha ha, only serious /*
If anything can be cracked, it will be. Our financial system relies on the security and integrity of businesses' ability to communicate.
Just as the enemy can engage in asymmetrical warfare on the physical battlefield (lobbing 767s into our physical infrastructure, where we can't bomb Afghanistan to the Stone Age 'cuz the Russians beat us to it), they can also engage in asymmetrical warfare in the infosphere (destabilization through insertion of false transactions into our financial systems, a task greatly simplified through a reduction in cryptographic strength -- again choosing to fight where they have no comparable financial infrastructure that we can target in return).
If NSA still has any pull with Congress, I hope they'll be able to nip this one in the bud. I'd even go so far as to suggest that the second part of their mandate -- defending American communications from compromise -- obliges them to try.
Write a variant of Nimda that, instead of using IIS to serve the .eml file to more victims, creates a uses IIS to display the Frontpage logo alongside a picture of Bill Gates buggering a goat.
"This is your web content. This is your web content on Frontpage. Any questions?"
For bonus points, have the hijacked server mail the BSA goons and/or the piracy hotline @microsoft.com, with a message saying "Suspected license violation - web site created by Frontpage makes disparaging comments about Microsoft products".
>
> "ON Sunday from 1PM to 3PM all the men will be strip searched by Pamela Anderson."
And this, my friends, is how we'll achieve the "Transparent Society" notion espoused by Brin. (Just think, we get to return the favor!)