This is usually the case only with the so-called terminator technology that is designed to make them infertile. This is the stuff that greedy American corporations want to sell to poor countries so that they will be dependent on us. But if what the article says is true, it's just the generic stuff grown in the US that they are shipping. This stuff grows just like normal corn... do you think US farmers would pay to re-engineer a fieldfull of corn every year?
Furthermore, if what you say were actually the case, the seeds would not grow if the natives sow them... so they wouldn't get the GM corn in the first place.... which would alleviate the problem, not make it worse.
Um, just wondering... how was the above comment flamebait? I could see it as stupid, offtopic, or whatever... oh well, why am I arguing? It's not like karma matters...
Do you really think complex DRM schemes are going to lead to usable and inexpensive devices and content?
Well, yes and no. Remember that Microsoft has substantial financial and market reserves. If they price Palladium at far below cost (at first) and market it like crazy, they might get everyone (except that precious few percent that have a clue) to buy it. And then what? CD players might still be able to play pirated CDs or MP3s (though perhaps not, due to cheap--a few dollars--embedded microcontrollers), but computers won't burn them.
If MS is successful, everything in 5 years will require Palladium support. And the Mac users and the Linux users (perhaps having grown slightly more numerous) won't care much, except that eventually, Intel CPUs will require Palladium! So then it will be the Linux/AMD and Mac users... etc. If MS wins, they get to decide what we use and when... they control eevveerryytthhiinngg.
Then the prices go up... And you think that they won't take a small loss in the short term for that?
And if quantum computing is developed, it'll be a whole new ball game (since the adversary will have an exponential amount of resources).
Not really. Quantum computing is not all that. It does not give the user an exponential amount of resources, but it does speed up factoring by a ridiculous amount, breaking RSA. There is no currently published algorithm to break, say, DH/DSS (i.e. discrete logarithms) with it.
That said, it isn't clear that quantum computing is actually practical. It certainly is not parallelizable, and it may turn out to be computationally harder to get the atoms in the right states than it would be to factor your number in the first place. But use DH just to be sure.
128 bit encryption is for symmetric (i.e. private) key encryption. It is nearly unbreakable. The problem is that you have to arrange a key with the person to whom you're sending the message, which could be difficult, especially if you don't know him or her.
That's where public key crypto comes in. Knowing that my PGP public key ID is 0x84B0FDB8, you could send me a message that only I could decode, unless the NSA has a few very interesting secrets. Since I have to publish information (namely how to encrypt the message), this type of code is inherently easier to break. RSA can be broken by factoring a large number, and a 128-bit number poses little challenge for even the Sieve of Eratosthenes on a fast computer, so longer ones are needed. The question is, how much longer?
Which is why I use DH/DSS, which operates with the (slightly) harder problem of discrete logarithms.
from the Houston Chronicle article:
County Attorney Mike Stafford said he will resume his investigation into whether the security breach was corrected as promptly as county officials learned of it and the origin of a pornographic picture found on the clerk's office server in March.
Now it's not exactly clear what happened, but you can't tell me that demonstrating that someone's server is insecure by turning their server into a goatse.cx mirror is a white hat operation. Or, well, you could, but i'd laugh at you.
(First question) In that case, can you suggest some clever software to steg stuff into JPEGs? Preferably PGP compatible?
(Second question) Sure, if we FFT the data (or the like) it will survive the transform of one compression, but what about when it is recompressed at a lower ratio? Is there anything we can do about this (like using the lowest frequency coefficients)? Or should we submit our graphics uncompressed and let Tripod compress them once?
Err, what? No, I'm just curious, I don't have anything to hide...
there is always a lag between science breakthroughs and the product market. They have the technology to store this stuff, but not to mass-produce it or make it cheaply or have it pass 10khr reliability tests etc...
Just because someone creates a storage medium/method that will hold 10x as much data as a hard drive today, doesn't mean that they have the facilities to mass-produce it, and its drivers, quickly and cheaply enough to put them on the market yet. This is why the headlines always warn, this will take a couple of years to market.
Because Diceware is so much easier. Just roll 5d6 a couple of times, and you have a secure password, à la "cleft cam synod lacy yr." Well, so the paranoid ones of you will use 10 words to match the strength of the hash, but...
That's already in PGP. You can make split keys easily. And it is easy to program your own: to make an m-of-n system, where you need m of the n pieces to recover the password, let r_1 through r_m-1 be lists of random integers 0 to 256, with lengths equal to that of the password.
Then share number s of the password, part i is r_1[i]+s*r_2[i]+s^2*r_3[i]+...+s^(m-2)*r_m-1[i]+s^ (m-1)*password[i] all mod 257. If you have m of the shares, say keys numbered s_1...s_m, you reconstruct (leaving out the [i]'s this time) as password=key_s_1/((s_1-s_2)(s_1-s_3)...)+key_s_2/( (s_2-s_1)(s_2-s_3)...)+...+key_s_m/((s_m-s_1)...).
I hope that isn't patented, it's just a back-of-the-envelope calculation with VanderMonde matrices. All you have to do then is have everyone encrypt their share(s) with a different password, and integrate the key-rejoining routine with the password-entry system so that the employees don't get to see it after reconstructing it, and you're done. The cool thing about the system is that m-1 of the shares give no information about the password, assuming the random number generator you used is good enough.
There are more efficient, deterministic ways of factorization than NFS.
True, but not by much, and if the jump was as big as claimed, not for long. But these guys revised it down considerably.
Additionally, in the not too distant future, off-the-shelf quantum computers will be able to make short work of 1024+.
Physicists aren't even sure if quantum computers are practical... sure Shor's algo made short work of factoring 15, but what if it turns out that engineering the rather arbitrary entanglements required for Shor's is NP-complete? Then what? That possibility hasn't been ruled out yet, and making those entanglements is already pretty hard...
Actually, monopolies are not socially efficient, i.e. capitalism does not work perfectly in this case. And this industry is hard to enter because of high equipment prices and people who want unlimited bandwidth for cheap, so it is likely to stay a monopoly. Sorry.
The SACD uses a different sampling technique from a CD. Both of them stare with a sigma delta modulator, which breaks the analog signal from the mic into a series of pulses, the denser the pulses the higher the amplitude. A normal recording counts the pulses over about 45 microseconds (for 44.1 kHz) to get a 16-or 24-bit wide number IIRC. when the music is played back, it is converted back to 1-bit by, say, varying the duty cycle of a pulse-width modulator.
The SACD just records the pulses from the SD modulator to disc, which is responsible for the huge number of samples.
So instead of being 44.1 kHz*16 or 24 bits per sample, it is 1.2 MHz at one bit per sample. Therefore, it looks *less* like an analog wave than a CD recording. Essentially, Sony regards counting the pulses as a very effective but slightly lossy compression method that they wish to eschew. BTW I can barely tell the difference. Even a good MP3 is good enough for me.
Really. Everyone I know that has broadband (and most who don't) download illegal MP3's. Everyone I know with a CD burner burns music CDs for their friends, and most of them pirate software, too. The bottom line is, people want to get something for nothing.
Of course, not everything they do costs the music industry. It's not like these people would buy all this music if they couldn't get it free. But they still should be able to copy protect as long as we can still make backups (think encryption, and none of the pussy proprietary stuff, just use AES or TWOFISH).
On the other hand, I don't like the SACD format. It seems like a waste of information to me: upsampling followed by slightly lossy compression should get the job done better. But I am not an audiophile.
What we really need is more competition in the marketplace. We need at least a dozen different services, then one of them would relaise the good niche market of people with their own cable modems.
Maybe. But you may be forgetting a bit of microeconomics. Recall that AT&T has almost monopoly power in the markets they serve (not too many places have two cable modem providers.) Recall also that they are making very little actual profit, but as a monopoly, they are making economic profits. The fact that people are bitching about their prices show that their economic profits are substantial.
Now, consider what happens if the market becomes competitive. If it were perfectly competitive, firms would be making no economic profits at all, so their actual profits would be much less than AT&T's. In other words, every cable company would be losing money. Even if the market were imperfectly competitive, companies would be making little or no money. And that is a bad thing because if companies go out of business then none of us has cable.
The reason that the market is not competitive is that there are significant barriers to entry, namely the cost of servers, the cost of laying cable, and the small amount of money that you make from it. The upshot of all this is that the market will not be competitive for the forseeable future, and five years from now, you will still be on/., bitching about bandwidth prices.
Just think, you could have the Windows "Clouds" wallpaper all over your room! Imagine that! Gee, if that were my wallpaper, I know I'd feel like I was actually in the clouds.
Really? If I had the Windows "Clouds" wallpaper all over my room, I'd feel like I was in Hell!
A friend of mine was working on something like this tag. His company was designing a tag which was passive like the Fowler tag, but I think it did not have any rewrite capabilities, and he said the range was on the order of tens of meters. He said the tags were nearly invincible and cost only a couple cents apiece. This sort of thing would be much better for widespread usage than the other tags, although you couldn't record on the tag when it was sold... you'd have to do that on the internet or something.
Here is a (somewhet incomplete) answer to the two questions everyone seems to have about 2TB of data:
1) Where would you store it? Well, you could store it in a holographic Tapestry drive. The prototype, just unveiled a few months ago, stores 100GB in a removable disk, and that is nowhere near the max density of the technology. In their section on projects for the tech, they say that a floppy-sized disk should hold about 1TB in a couple years. Impressive.
2) What would you do with it? Well, other than high-definition video or scientific experiments, nothing on your own PC, unless you are making a database of all the MP3s ever made or backing up the Library of Congress. But on a file server, you could easily use this much space. The 2TB limit will probably never affect most home users (realizes he will be quoted as an idiot in 10 years when 50TB HDs are standard). On the other hand, Tapestry will probably be useful in portable devices, esp video cameras.
Slashdot Mirror
This is usually the case only with the so-called terminator technology that is designed to make them infertile. This is the stuff that greedy American corporations want to sell to poor countries so that they will be dependent on us. But if what the article says is true, it's just the generic stuff grown in the US that they are shipping. This stuff grows just like normal corn... do you think US farmers would pay to re-engineer a fieldfull of corn every year?
Furthermore, if what you say were actually the case, the seeds would not grow if the natives sow them... so they wouldn't get the GM corn in the first place.... which would alleviate the problem, not make it worse.
Um, just wondering... how was the above comment flamebait? I could see it as stupid, offtopic, or whatever... oh well, why am I arguing? It's not like karma matters...
Well, yes and no. Remember that Microsoft has substantial financial and market reserves. If they price Palladium at far below cost (at first) and market it like crazy, they might get everyone (except that precious few percent that have a clue) to buy it. And then what? CD players might still be able to play pirated CDs or MP3s (though perhaps not, due to cheap--a few dollars--embedded microcontrollers), but computers won't burn them.
If MS is successful, everything in 5 years will require Palladium support. And the Mac users and the Linux users (perhaps having grown slightly more numerous) won't care much, except that eventually, Intel CPUs will require Palladium! So then it will be the Linux/AMD and Mac users... etc. If MS wins, they get to decide what we use and when... they control eevveerryytthhiinngg.
Then the prices go up... And you think that they won't take a small loss in the short term for that?
Let's hope so.
And if quantum computing is developed, it'll be a whole new ball game (since the adversary will have an exponential amount of resources).
Not really. Quantum computing is not all that. It does not give the user an exponential amount of resources, but it does speed up factoring by a ridiculous amount, breaking RSA. There is no currently published algorithm to break, say, DH/DSS (i.e. discrete logarithms) with it.
That said, it isn't clear that quantum computing is actually practical. It certainly is not parallelizable, and it may turn out to be computationally harder to get the atoms in the right states than it would be to factor your number in the first place. But use DH just to be sure.
128 bit encryption is for symmetric (i.e. private) key encryption. It is nearly unbreakable. The problem is that you have to arrange a key with the person to whom you're sending the message, which could be difficult, especially if you don't know him or her.
That's where public key crypto comes in. Knowing that my PGP public key ID is 0x84B0FDB8, you could send me a message that only I could decode, unless the NSA has a few very interesting secrets. Since I have to publish information (namely how to encrypt the message), this type of code is inherently easier to break. RSA can be broken by factoring a large number, and a 128-bit number poses little challenge for even the Sieve of Eratosthenes on a fast computer, so longer ones are needed. The question is, how much longer?
Which is why I use DH/DSS, which operates with the (slightly) harder problem of discrete logarithms.
from the Houston Chronicle article:
County Attorney Mike Stafford said he will resume his investigation into whether the security breach was corrected as promptly as county officials learned of it and the origin of a pornographic picture found on the clerk's office server in March.
Now it's not exactly clear what happened, but you can't tell me that demonstrating that someone's server is insecure by turning their server into a goatse.cx mirror is a white hat operation. Or, well, you could, but i'd laugh at you.
read the other comments, don't mod me
(First question) In that case, can you suggest some clever software to steg stuff into JPEGs? Preferably PGP compatible?
(Second question) Sure, if we FFT the data (or the like) it will survive the transform of one compression, but what about when it is recompressed at a lower ratio? Is there anything we can do about this (like using the lowest frequency coefficients)? Or should we submit our graphics uncompressed and let Tripod compress them once?
Err, what? No, I'm just curious, I don't have anything to hide...
with AOL, you can use it 1000 hours a month! errr... wait...
there is always a lag between science breakthroughs and the product market. They have the technology to store this stuff, but not to mass-produce it or make it cheaply or have it pass 10khr reliability tests etc...
Just because someone creates a storage medium/method that will hold 10x as much data as a hard drive today, doesn't mean that they have the facilities to mass-produce it, and its drivers, quickly and cheaply enough to put them on the market yet. This is why the headlines always warn, this will take a couple of years to market.
Because Diceware is so much easier. Just roll 5d6 a couple of times, and you have a secure password, à la "cleft cam synod lacy yr." Well, so the paranoid ones of you will use 10 words to match the strength of the hash, but...
That's already in PGP. You can make split keys easily. And it is easy to program your own: to make an m-of-n system, where you need m of the n pieces to recover the password, let r_1 through r_m-1 be lists of random integers 0 to 256, with lengths equal to that of the password.
^ (m-1)*password[i] all mod 257. If you have m of the shares, say keys numbered s_1...s_m, you reconstruct (leaving out the [i]'s this time) as password=key_s_1/((s_1-s_2)(s_1-s_3)...)+key_s_2/( (s_2-s_1)(s_2-s_3)...)+...+key_s_m/((s_m-s_1)...).
Then share number s of the password, part i is r_1[i]+s*r_2[i]+s^2*r_3[i]+...+s^(m-2)*r_m-1[i]+s
I hope that isn't patented, it's just a back-of-the-envelope calculation with VanderMonde matrices. All you have to do then is have everyone encrypt their share(s) with a different password, and integrate the key-rejoining routine with the password-entry system so that the employees don't get to see it after reconstructing it, and you're done. The cool thing about the system is that m-1 of the shares give no information about the password, assuming the random number generator you used is good enough.
how about "Toss RedHat idol"? or "idle as short dot"?
Thanks to Wordsmith's Internet Anagram Server for these.
This vulnerability is a bigger problem than you may think. For more information, see this article.
There are more efficient, deterministic ways of factorization than NFS.
True, but not by much, and if the jump was as big as claimed, not for long. But these guys revised it down considerably.
Additionally, in the not too distant future, off-the-shelf quantum computers will be able to make short work of 1024+.
Physicists aren't even sure if quantum computers are practical... sure Shor's algo made short work of factoring 15, but what if it turns out that engineering the rather arbitrary entanglements required for Shor's is NP-complete? Then what? That possibility hasn't been ruled out yet, and making those entanglements is already pretty hard...
Actually, monopolies are not socially efficient, i.e. capitalism does not work perfectly in this case. And this industry is hard to enter because of high equipment prices and people who want unlimited bandwidth for cheap, so it is likely to stay a monopoly. Sorry.
The SACD uses a different sampling technique from a CD. Both of them stare with a sigma delta modulator, which breaks the analog signal from the mic into a series of pulses, the denser the pulses the higher the amplitude. A normal recording counts the pulses over about 45 microseconds (for 44.1 kHz) to get a 16-or 24-bit wide number IIRC. when the music is played back, it is converted back to 1-bit by, say, varying the duty cycle of a pulse-width modulator.
The SACD just records the pulses from the SD modulator to disc, which is responsible for the huge number of samples.
So instead of being 44.1 kHz*16 or 24 bits per sample, it is 1.2 MHz at one bit per sample. Therefore, it looks *less* like an analog wave than a CD recording. Essentially, Sony regards counting the pulses as a very effective but slightly lossy compression method that they wish to eschew. BTW I can barely tell the difference. Even a good MP3 is good enough for me.
Really. Everyone I know that has broadband (and most who don't) download illegal MP3's. Everyone I know with a CD burner burns music CDs for their friends, and most of them pirate software, too. The bottom line is, people want to get something for nothing.
Of course, not everything they do costs the music industry. It's not like these people would buy all this music if they couldn't get it free. But they still should be able to copy protect as long as we can still make backups (think encryption, and none of the pussy proprietary stuff, just use AES or TWOFISH).
On the other hand, I don't like the SACD format. It seems like a waste of information to me: upsampling followed by slightly lossy compression should get the job done better. But I am not an audiophile.
What we really need is more competition in the marketplace. We need at least a dozen different services, then one of them would relaise the good niche market of people with their own cable modems.
/., bitching about bandwidth prices.
Maybe. But you may be forgetting a bit of microeconomics. Recall that AT&T has almost monopoly power in the markets they serve (not too many places have two cable modem providers.) Recall also that they are making very little actual profit, but as a monopoly, they are making economic profits. The fact that people are bitching about their prices show that their economic profits are substantial.
Now, consider what happens if the market becomes competitive. If it were perfectly competitive, firms would be making no economic profits at all, so their actual profits would be much less than AT&T's. In other words, every cable company would be losing money. Even if the market were imperfectly competitive, companies would be making little or no money. And that is a bad thing because if companies go out of business then none of us has cable.
The reason that the market is not competitive is that there are significant barriers to entry, namely the cost of servers, the cost of laying cable, and the small amount of money that you make from it. The upshot of all this is that the market will not be competitive for the forseeable future, and five years from now, you will still be on
Just think, you could have the Windows "Clouds" wallpaper all over your room! Imagine that! Gee, if that were my wallpaper, I know I'd feel like I was actually in the clouds.
Really? If I had the Windows "Clouds" wallpaper all over my room, I'd feel like I was in Hell!
Moderation Totals: Flamebait=1, Troll=1, Total=2.
A friend of mine was working on something like this tag. His company was designing a tag which was passive like the Fowler tag, but I think it did not have any rewrite capabilities, and he said the range was on the order of tens of meters. He said the tags were nearly invincible and cost only a couple cents apiece. This sort of thing would be much better for widespread usage than the other tags, although you couldn't record on the tag when it was sold... you'd have to do that on the internet or something.
Here is a (somewhet incomplete) answer to the two questions everyone seems to have about 2TB of data:
1) Where would you store it?
Well, you could store it in a holographic Tapestry drive. The prototype, just unveiled a few months ago, stores 100GB in a removable disk, and that is nowhere near the max density of the technology. In their section on projects for the tech, they say that a floppy-sized disk should hold about 1TB in a couple years. Impressive.
2) What would you do with it?
Well, other than high-definition video or scientific experiments, nothing on your own PC, unless you are making a database of all the MP3s ever made or backing up the Library of Congress. But on a file server, you could easily use this much space. The 2TB limit will probably never affect most home users (realizes he will be quoted as an idiot in 10 years when 50TB HDs are standard). On the other hand, Tapestry will probably be useful in portable devices, esp video cameras.