Your argument is based on a false dilemma: in your world, either the bill has been read in full by a *single* person, or it's completely unverified. You ignore the possibility that multiple collaborating people could read the bill and together verify its correctness. You're not arguing in good faith.
Re:And this is a nearly unsolveable problem.
on
GSM Decryption Published
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· Score: 5, Informative
There are differing levels of obscurity and differing levels of difficulty to get useful information out of the obsfucation, but in the end, its all just security through obscurity.
That's a strawman. You're using "obscurity" with two subtly different meanings. The OP's point is that the secret of a system should not depend on the algorithm; that is, a restatement of Kerckhoff's principle, which says that a system's security should reside in the key. When someone invokes the phrase "security through obscurity", what we mean is a system that violates Kerckhoff's principle and places essential details in the cryptosystem itself, which is far more difficult to keep secret than a key.
"Obscurity" of the key and "obscurity" of the cryptosystem are distinct concepts that shouldn't be conflated, but you did just that. Perhaps it is you who should refrain from commenting on security.
Re:Is the newest version deployed everywhere?
on
GSM Decryption Published
·
· Score: 5, Informative
BTW, the algorithm used by 3G networks is different. It is based on AES and the design is publically available.
No it's not. The cipher used for 3G service is KASUMI, which is already vulnerable to a better-than-brute-force attack. (Even if it weren't, a 64-bit block is too small.)
When will people learn? Never roll your own damn cryptography. No matter how clever or paranoid you are, you're not clever and paranoid enough. Just use AES.
AIUI, precise timekeeping is only needed for longitude. Can't you find your latitude and heading by looking at the north star? (The elevation of the north star above the horizon is equal to your latitude.)
Yes, I am. Aren't you comfortable using an operating system that's too large for any one person to understand in its entirety?
We're long past the days when a single human being could understand all the details of our most complex systems. What a single person can do is learn the broad outlines, and look up detailed information as needed. It's called reductionism, and it's the foundation of all progress we've made since Aristotle.
Each word of that 3,000 page bill has been read thousands of times, even if not by the same person each time. What's wrong with that?
Of course, your response will be that we shouldn't need laws that are that complex in the first place. Well, what do you base that on? Your gut feeling? Modern society is complex. Maybe it needs nuanced and sophisticated laws.
Have you considered that the people harping about a "3,000 page bill" are the ones who passed the byzantine Medicare Part D system? That maybe they're exploiting the hysterical reaction some people have to the page count to serve their ulterior interests? Besides, you know what would be simpler than the current bill? Single payer.
Reasonable people differ on the substance of legislation, but opposing something based on its complexity alone smacks of corrosive know-nothingism. Would you arbitrary limit the Linux kernel to 30,000 lines of code? Who gets to decide what kind of complexity is reasonable? You? Rush Limbaugh? Based on what metric?
Is it really necessary to politicize even the purest scientific discoveries, and to turn even the slightest enrichment of our collective knowledge into an opportunity for a fleeting partisan jab?
Nobody uses the earth's magnetic field for navigation these days.
The magnetic reversal, when it happens, will not be sudden. The dipole moment of Earth's magnetic field will gradually become less prominent, and quadropole (and higher-order) moments will strengthen. Gradually.
I get an Amtrak sleeper car. For only a little more than a cattle-class cross-country air ticket, I can spend few days in a moving hotel room (with shower!), and see some of the most gorgeous terrain in the entire nation. Plus, with cell phone tethering, I can actually get work done on the train. Plus, there's actual sit-down dining available.
And hell, the coach seats are more spacious than first class ones aboard all but the mightiest aircraft.
Sure, rail travel takes longer than flying, but is that such a problem when planning ahead, and when actually being on the train isn't so bad? Besides: with any luck, we'll have more high-speed rail in the future.
Besides: if you really want, you can NAT IPv6. IPv6 has private address blocks just like IPv4.
Honestly, NATing might be useful just to avoid network renumbering if you're not big enough to get an AS number.
It's not *that* evil, because with IPv6, we'll have enough public addresses to make a one-to-one NAT scheme feasible, which will allow incoming connections to work transparently.
Target dumps toxic waste off the Ivory Coast. For a company their size that's diligence. Now list companies in the Fortune 500 that neither know nor care about inexpensive toxic waste disposal and report back how much that's costing the shareholders.
No, really. Well, the best cultivar, the Gros Michel, anyway. It was a hugely profitable worldwide monoculture that was easy prey for the panama disease. The banana we eat today is the less tasty, more easily bruised Cavendish variety.
that wealthy people and corporations across the whole country would immediately restructure so as to skirt the burdens of your scheme.
I see statements like this one often. What makes you think that regulations, no matter how well-written, can always be avoided? I like to think the courts are more competent than that.
Typically, seizing the assets of the wealthy in order to redistribute them to the masses leads to majority unemployment and hyperinflation. Just like twentieth-century South America.
Or present-day Zimbabwe. You're right: uncontrolled, ad-hoc, and chaotic confiscation produces economic mayhem. Granted, in all these cases, the economic populism was also coupled with a thoroughly rotten political system (take, say, Peronism) which confuses the analysis somewhat.
But that's not to say that all wealth redistribution will cause catastrophe. In the 1950s and 60s, we had high top-end income taxes here that worked very well; Europe still does, and they're better off for them, having some of the lowest gini coefficients and the highest standards of living in the world.
In order to make wealth redistribution work:
don't take property directly: instead, put a tax on wealth
spend the additional revenue on infrastructure and social development with Keynesian properties (like healthcare and education)
make the process fair and transparent: use simple rules that convince everyone the process is happening according to established principles
make the maximum wealth level high enough to provide plenty of incentive to work
(By the way: instead of causing hyperinflation, raising our top-end tax rates would substantially reduce our budget deficit, strengthening the dollar.)
The year is 315 AD, and the absolute despot of the western world, Caesar Flavius Valerius Aurelius Constantinus Augustus has commissioned a Mission Acc^W^W triumphal arch to celebrate a battle his army* won for him three years ago. He orders that this arch be constructed in the style of triumphal arches of emperors long ago.
The only problem is that a century of warfare, overtaxation, hyperinflation, and neglect has driven the Roman middle class to extinction, along with its sculptors, masons, goldsmiths and painters. There is nobody left alive who knows how to build a triumphal arch! Yet you are a loyal imperial servant (capricious executions tend to breed a kind of loyalty), and you have to figure out a way to give the emperor what he wants.
What do you do? You build the basic framework of an arch. You take statues from the forum of Trajan and stick them on top of your arch. You chisel some ba-relief sculptures off of Hadrian's buildings, touch them up to look like your emperor, and paste them onto your structure.
At the end of the day, you show your emperor his "new" arch, and all is well. You go to bed that night and don't think anything of it, because it's routine and expected to cannibalize old monuments. If everyone does it, it can't be wrong, right? It can't indicate that your culture is terminally sick, can it?
* By that time the army had a huge portion of auxiliari^W mercenar^Wprivate security contractors. Italians go the war? That was so 100AD.
You have to do it that way due to the Equal Protection clause
IANAL, but I don't see how that clause applies here. We're not talking about discriminating based on a protected category like race or gender, but rather on size, and we've been doing that for 100 years.
You're focusing on the wrong problem. The issue isn't corporate personhood, but rather with certain legal persons (natural or corporate) having too much power. It really isn't any better for the person "J.P. Morgan" to be able to buy a congressman than it is for company "J.P. Morgan Chase" to be able to do the same thing.
Changing some arcane corporate classification don't help a damned thing.
What will help is limiting how influential a single person can be. Limit the maximum size of corporations. Institute a super-progressive income tax that asymptotically approaches 100% as you reach, say, the 99th percentile of the population.
No man on earth is worth FOUR BILLION times that of another human being, no matter who is he or what he's done.
We're not going to have more than two parties until we change the way we vote. Our simple plurality voting system naturally leads to a two-party steady state system as surely an electron orbiting a proton leads to a hydrogen atom in the ground state. No amount of imploring, scolding, pleading or whining will change that reality.
If you really want more diverse representation, change the way we vote. Granted, a perfect voting system is impossible, but we can far better than the system we have today.
That said, I'm not sure that adding political parties will necessary end corruption. After all, the British have a multi-party proportional system and still ended up with Tony Blair and Darth Mandelson. Corruption is a different problem, and is best fought by an enthusiastic and educated public demanding sunshine laws and public campaign financing.
Slashdot Mirror
Your argument is based on a false dilemma: in your world, either the bill has been read in full by a *single* person, or it's completely unverified. You ignore the possibility that multiple collaborating people could read the bill and together verify its correctness. You're not arguing in good faith.
That's a strawman. You're using "obscurity" with two subtly different meanings. The OP's point is that the secret of a system should not depend on the algorithm; that is, a restatement of Kerckhoff's principle, which says that a system's security should reside in the key. When someone invokes the phrase "security through obscurity", what we mean is a system that violates Kerckhoff's principle and places essential details in the cryptosystem itself, which is far more difficult to keep secret than a key.
"Obscurity" of the key and "obscurity" of the cryptosystem are distinct concepts that shouldn't be conflated, but you did just that. Perhaps it is you who should refrain from commenting on security.
No it's not. The cipher used for 3G service is KASUMI, which is already vulnerable to a better-than-brute-force attack. (Even if it weren't, a 64-bit block is too small.)
When will people learn? Never roll your own damn cryptography. No matter how clever or paranoid you are, you're not clever and paranoid enough. Just use AES.
AIUI, precise timekeeping is only needed for longitude. Can't you find your latitude and heading by looking at the north star? (The elevation of the north star above the horizon is equal to your latitude.)
Yes, I am. Aren't you comfortable using an operating system that's too large for any one person to understand in its entirety?
We're long past the days when a single human being could understand all the details of our most complex systems. What a single person can do is learn the broad outlines, and look up detailed information as needed. It's called reductionism, and it's the foundation of all progress we've made since Aristotle.
Each word of that 3,000 page bill has been read thousands of times, even if not by the same person each time. What's wrong with that?
Of course, your response will be that we shouldn't need laws that are that complex in the first place. Well, what do you base that on? Your gut feeling? Modern society is complex. Maybe it needs nuanced and sophisticated laws.
Have you considered that the people harping about a "3,000 page bill" are the ones who passed the byzantine Medicare Part D system? That maybe they're exploiting the hysterical reaction some people have to the page count to serve their ulterior interests? Besides, you know what would be simpler than the current bill? Single payer.
Interesting link. Thanks!
I really can't tell whether you're kidding or not.
Reasonable people differ on the substance of legislation, but opposing something based on its complexity alone smacks of corrosive know-nothingism. Would you arbitrary limit the Linux kernel to 30,000 lines of code? Who gets to decide what kind of complexity is reasonable? You? Rush Limbaugh? Based on what metric?
There's also the gyrocompass, which finds true north, and which doesn't depend on the earth's magnetic field. It'd work on Mars.
Is it really necessary to politicize even the purest scientific discoveries, and to turn even the slightest enrichment of our collective knowledge into an opportunity for a fleeting partisan jab?
Merry Christmas to you too.
Why would I want to keep flying?
I get an Amtrak sleeper car. For only a little more than a cattle-class cross-country air ticket, I can spend few days in a moving hotel room (with shower!), and see some of the most gorgeous terrain in the entire nation. Plus, with cell phone tethering, I can actually get work done on the train. Plus, there's actual sit-down dining available.
And hell, the coach seats are more spacious than first class ones aboard all but the mightiest aircraft.
Sure, rail travel takes longer than flying, but is that such a problem when planning ahead, and when actually being on the train isn't so bad? Besides: with any luck, we'll have more high-speed rail in the future.
Besides: if you really want, you can NAT IPv6. IPv6 has private address blocks just like IPv4.
Honestly, NATing might be useful just to avoid network renumbering if you're not big enough to get an AS number.
It's not *that* evil, because with IPv6, we'll have enough public addresses to make a one-to-one NAT scheme feasible, which will allow incoming connections to work transparently.
Target dumps toxic waste off the Ivory Coast. For a company their size that's diligence. Now list companies in the Fortune 500 that neither know nor care about inexpensive toxic waste disposal and report back how much that's costing the shareholders.
The banana went extinct 60 years ago.
No, really. Well, the best cultivar, the Gros Michel, anyway. It was a hugely profitable worldwide monoculture that was easy prey for the panama disease. The banana we eat today is the less tasty, more easily bruised Cavendish variety.
And now, panama disease has mutated and is threatening our Cavendish monoculture.
We never do learn our lessons, I suppose.
Ah, I stand corrected. Sorry about that.
As Coffea arabica has shown us, in the age of man, being delicious is a very powerful adaption.
I see statements like this one often. What makes you think that regulations, no matter how well-written, can always be avoided? I like to think the courts are more competent than that.
Or present-day Zimbabwe. You're right: uncontrolled, ad-hoc, and chaotic confiscation produces economic mayhem. Granted, in all these cases, the economic populism was also coupled with a thoroughly rotten political system (take, say, Peronism) which confuses the analysis somewhat.
But that's not to say that all wealth redistribution will cause catastrophe. In the 1950s and 60s, we had high top-end income taxes here that worked very well; Europe still does, and they're better off for them, having some of the lowest gini coefficients and the highest standards of living in the world.
In order to make wealth redistribution work:
(By the way: instead of causing hyperinflation, raising our top-end tax rates would substantially reduce our budget deficit, strengthening the dollar.)
Dammit. I'd just hit "Submit" when I remembered this sublime article: Nation's Rappers Down to Last Two Samples.
Sometimes, everyone making the decision that's best for himself leads to an outcome that's terrible for everyone.
You call that a mash-up? This is a mash-up:
The year is 315 AD, and the absolute despot of the western world, Caesar Flavius Valerius Aurelius Constantinus Augustus has commissioned a Mission Acc^W^W triumphal arch to celebrate a battle his army* won for him three years ago. He orders that this arch be constructed in the style of triumphal arches of emperors long ago.
The only problem is that a century of warfare, overtaxation, hyperinflation, and neglect has driven the Roman middle class to extinction, along with its sculptors, masons, goldsmiths and painters. There is nobody left alive who knows how to build a triumphal arch! Yet you are a loyal imperial servant (capricious executions tend to breed a kind of loyalty), and you have to figure out a way to give the emperor what he wants.
What do you do? You build the basic framework of an arch. You take statues from the forum of Trajan and stick them on top of your arch. You chisel some ba-relief sculptures off of Hadrian's buildings, touch them up to look like your emperor, and paste them onto your structure.
At the end of the day, you show your emperor his "new" arch, and all is well. You go to bed that night and don't think anything of it, because it's routine and expected to cannibalize old monuments. If everyone does it, it can't be wrong, right? It can't indicate that your culture is terminally sick, can it?
* By that time the army had a huge portion of auxiliari^W mercenar^Wprivate security contractors. Italians go the war? That was so 100AD.
IANAL, but I don't see how that clause applies here. We're not talking about discriminating based on a protected category like race or gender, but rather on size, and we've been doing that for 100 years.
You're focusing on the wrong problem. The issue isn't corporate personhood, but rather with certain legal persons (natural or corporate) having too much power. It really isn't any better for the person "J.P. Morgan" to be able to buy a congressman than it is for company "J.P. Morgan Chase" to be able to do the same thing.
Changing some arcane corporate classification don't help a damned thing.
What will help is limiting how influential a single person can be. Limit the maximum size of corporations. Institute a super-progressive income tax that asymptotically approaches 100% as you reach, say, the 99th percentile of the population.
No man on earth is worth FOUR BILLION times that of another human being, no matter who is he or what he's done.
We're not going to have more than two parties until we change the way we vote. Our simple plurality voting system naturally leads to a two-party steady state system as surely an electron orbiting a proton leads to a hydrogen atom in the ground state. No amount of imploring, scolding, pleading or whining will change that reality.
If you really want more diverse representation, change the way we vote. Granted, a perfect voting system is impossible, but we can far better than the system we have today.
That said, I'm not sure that adding political parties will necessary end corruption. After all, the British have a multi-party proportional system and still ended up with Tony Blair and Darth Mandelson. Corruption is a different problem, and is best fought by an enthusiastic and educated public demanding sunshine laws and public campaign financing.