All top secret information should flow through one time pad systems.
Look at it this way. What does disk space cost these days? Imagine getting a 30 gigabyte one time pad file on its own little SSD drive. How much data could be passed back and forth as theoretically unbreakable encryption? At the very least 30 gigabytes of data. In practice, probably at least a magnitude beyond that.
No, at most 30 gigabytes. The next byte you send will start to reveal previous traffic.
Three things are required for a one time pad - that the key be shared, random and non-repeated. A one time pad is very much breakable if the key is not both random and non-repeated, and the biggest problem with its use can be the sharing of the keys.
The Soviet "Verona" traffic was decoded because they reused pads (keys), rendering the message decryption straightforward, and also revealing the keys. The revealed keys were found to have some further weaknesses, as they were made manually (apparently by secretaries told to type randomly on their typewriters). These weaknesses included an avoidance of repeated characters, a tendency to alternate hands (a character on the left side of the keyboard would be likely to be followed by one on the right), and (IIRC) a preference for character pairs and triplets that didn't require too much stretching of the hands. (On the top line of a QWERTY keyboard, this means that, say, an initial "q" would be unlikely to be followed by another "q", that it would be likely to be followed by a letter in the "u - p" range, and that the third character would be more likely to be a q, w or e than an r, t or y.)
Now, officially, that amount of manual non-randomness wasn't enough to break further Soviet one time pad encryptions, but I suspect that they were. I have also heard rumors that later use of random keys generated by electronic circuits had problems as the physical limitations of the electronic circuitry imposed a low-pass filtering that made these keys, again, not totally random. Note that true randomness is what is needed here - common digital pseudorandom techniques, such hashing with SHA-1, may help to obscure weaknesses, but they will not make a non-random key random.
In this case, I would worry very much about
- whether the physical technique produces a truly random key and - how to satisfy myself that today's random key is totally independent of every previous key. If this is, say, dependent on where the laser is pointing to in the glass, how far apart does each pointing need to be to make sure that the results are independent, and can I securely verify that today's direction is sufficiently different from every previous time and - as the technique is passing an initial sequence of bits through the randomizer glass, how random does the initial sequence need to be ? What weaknesses are imposed by non-randomness in that initial sequence.
I could easily see this technique being secure in theory but massively broken in practice by some weakness in how the glass is made or handled or in the initial keys.
Note, by the way, that the two parties must physically get together to generate the key, so in a sense this is really a secure key storage device. Once they use up their stored keys, they have to meet again to be able to send more messages, which of course is the real problem with one time keys (and why, for example, the Soviets reused some of the Verona keys).
And, finally, this technique might make a cool way of doing truly secure hashing.
That is indeed how the WWII "scrambler" phones worked, but that was not viewed as nearly as secure as a one time pad (required for all messages dealing with Enigma decrypts) and the Germans did decode at least some scrambler phone communications.
The cryptographic trouble is that the inherent correlations of the human voice are still present, just overlaid by noise, and you can use that knowledge to extract the signal (the voice) from the noise. It did prevent idle eavesdropping, which I think was more the point.
That's a typo (well, 2), but it is interesting that they picked these two, which shows that they understand basically nothing about the philosophy and work of either figure.
Here is a hint - Mother Theresa did not treat the dying, only comforted them, and Gandhi believed in rejecting technology and returning to a simpler era. So, the simplest answer for both is, nothing.
But what if it isn't quantum and we've built an entire computer and don't know how it really works? At that point you may as well throw up your hands and yell magic.
Gravitational lensing surveys have pretty much ruled out this Dark Matter explanation for black holes (or any other dark compact objects) with masses > about 10^-7 Solar Masses, and it is very hard to see how smaller black holes could have ever formed.
It also goes to higher energy, and the longer the experiment lasts, the higher the energy range that will be explored (it is count-limited at the highest energies).
I think that the real purpose of the Google I/O in San Francisco was to show just how clueless Google's top executives are in their "Billionaire Bubble."
It's the extended mission (to 2016) that may be cut short. The primary mission is already over, in 2012.
They still have 2 reaction wheels, and also thrusters, and a fair amount of fuel. In the press release there was a discussion of options, which "are likely to include steps to attempt to recover wheel functionality and to investigate the utility of a hybrid mode, using both wheels and thrusters."
My guess is that, if they cannot recover pointed mode, they will put the spacecraft in a slow roll, which (if it is slow enough) would be good enough to detect hot Jupiters, but not Earth-like planets.
And you can see storms from 2000 light years away?
Lorentz boosting (BEER) was used to detect the planet - think of this as a way of observing a Doppler shift from the light curve, without doing spectra (which Kepler cannot do). It was confirmed by getting time on big telescopes and getting actual spectra. The Doppler shifts plus the BEER data gave a good orbit (subject to the usual sin inclination ambiguity). Then this orbit was used to model and remove the Lorentz boosting, and the Kepler data was used to make a light curve. As it turns out from manual inspection of the light-curve, the planet actually does pass in front of and behind its star, as seen from Earth, and so the usual transit tools could be brought out and used (the light of the star+planet can be differenced from the light of the star alone). These are very sensitive.
No "storms" were detected. What was detected was super-rotation, a la Venus, a rotation of the entire atmosphere (assuming the planet itself is locked into a once per orbit rotation state). This was detected as a phase offset between maximum heating and maximum Doppler shift, best explained they feel "by a phase shift of the planetary thermal modulation due to the equatorial superrotation phenomena." Not bad for a relatively small number of photons....
Apparently this object was miscategorized as an eclispsing binary (i.e., two stars, not star + planet), which is why it wasn't picked out of the data earlier.
How many of these planets are in the goldilocks zone? Sure we can find them; but which ones are livable for Carbon based lifeforms?
According to the catalog, 10 (out of 885) are confirmed so far. From the catalog, "Gliese 581d, Kepler-22b, Gliese 667Cc, Gliese 581g, Gliese 163c, HD 40307g, Tau Cetie, Kepler-62e, Kepler-62f, and Kepler-61b are the only known exoplanets that might be considered potentially habitable or object of interest for the search for life.
There are a further 18 (out of 2716) unconfirmed Kepler candidates that (if they are not false positives) also may reside in their habitable zones. These should be confirmed (or rejected) in due course. Of course, "potentially habitable" does not mean you want to start considering a new vacation home. If Venus and Mars were reversed (i.e., Venus was in Mars's orbit, and Mars in Venus's), each would probably be nicely habitable. As they are, not so much, at least, not without a considerable amount of planetary engineering.
The original paper, "BEER analysis of Kepler and CoRoT light curves: I. Discovery of Kepler-76b: A hot Jupiter with evidence for superrotation," is here.
This planet was discovered by Lorentz boosting, the theory of which predates Einstein. Meanwhile, 20 exoplanets have been discovered to date using gravitational lensing, an application of General Relativity (a theory created by Einstein ) that was itself first predicted by Einstein. Somehow, the press release (and thus all the subsequent press) failed to mention these "Einstein planets."
Resist this. The dirty secret is that 0.08 is already in the range of normal population variation, especially when age is factored in (i.e., a good fraction of the over-60 population sober are worse drivers than a good fraction of the 20-30 yr old population at 0.08). Lower it and, for example, I don't see how you could rationally also allow anyone over the age of 60 to drive.
Of course, I don't think that there is much rationality in these matters.
This is late, I know, but for the record IceCube (the most sensitive neutrino telescope) has announced that it did not see any neutrinos from this GRB,
If you go on the arxiv.org site, you see, right at the top
Cornell UniversityLibrary We gratefully acknowledge support from the Simons Foundation and member institutions
It was started with (minimal*) government support; I don't think it gets any now. I agree that journals need to make costs, and even a profit; that doesn't mean that their material can't be generally available as well.
*There used to be a picture on the site of the server it ran on, in the clutter under its creator's desk.
The free arxiv.org servers hold most of science behind these paywalls, at least in physics and astronomy. It would be interesting to see if there is a difference in citation rank between paywalled papers on arxiv, and those that are not (and, thus, frequently unobtainable without payment).
Got a question : as a proton, one among many, accelerates into a black hole, what is going on with the individual quarks? What shape do they form? What virtual particles are materialized, in what pattern? What structure do they develop?
Don't know. Nobody knows.
In GR, nothing much, until they fall into the singularity at the center of a black hole (although tidal forces would rip even a proton apart as it got close to the singularity, and that would generate a lot of particle production). At the singularity itself, the equations fail, and so GR makes no predictions.
In string theory there may be holographic effects that turn the event horizon into a "firewall," which has been in the scientific news a lot lately (search on "black hole firewall"), which would destroy the proton as soon as it entered the black hole. Or, maybe not, as string theory is by no means settled, and may not even have a connection with reality (having no experimental constraints).
There is a very profound mathematical fact at the center of GR - you cannot see a singularity and report on it. This is called "cosmic censorship," and it seems to be inviolable (in the theory, at least). If you are outside an event horizon, you can't see the singularity. Once you cross it, you may be able to (in fact, it would be in a sense all you could see), but you cannot report back to the outside. The holographic string theory firewall appears to be very different, but maybe it isn't, as you cannot report back in that theory, either. So, GR has an inadequacy (the divide by zero in the center of a black hole), but it is not possible to ever get any information about it experimentally. My intuition says that this may be the key to the entire problem, if we could but grasp its true meaning.
Note - Fermi detected a 94 GeV photon from Gamma Ray Burst GRB 130427A (over 1/2 the Higgs energy), and many photons in the GeV range, which bodes well for quantum gravity constraints.
That photon had a wavelength of ~ 10^-17 meters, or 10 million yoctometers
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All top secret information should flow through one time pad systems.
Look at it this way. What does disk space cost these days? Imagine getting a 30 gigabyte one time pad file on its own little SSD drive. How much data could be passed back and forth as theoretically unbreakable encryption? At the very least 30 gigabytes of data. In practice, probably at least a magnitude beyond that.
No, at most 30 gigabytes. The next byte you send will start to reveal previous traffic.
Three things are required for a one time pad - that the key be shared, random and non-repeated. A one time pad is very much breakable if the key is not both random and non-repeated, and the biggest problem with its use can be the sharing of the keys.
The Soviet "Verona" traffic was decoded because they reused pads (keys), rendering the message decryption straightforward, and also revealing the keys. The revealed keys were found to have some further weaknesses, as they were made manually (apparently by secretaries told to type randomly on their typewriters). These weaknesses included an avoidance of repeated characters, a tendency to alternate hands (a character on the left side of the keyboard would be likely to be followed by one on the right), and (IIRC) a preference for character pairs and triplets that didn't require too much stretching of the hands. (On the top line of a QWERTY keyboard, this means that, say, an initial "q" would be unlikely to be followed by another "q", that it would be likely to be followed by a letter in the "u - p" range, and that the third character would be more likely to be a q, w or e than an r, t or y.)
Now, officially, that amount of manual non-randomness wasn't enough to break further Soviet one time pad encryptions, but I suspect that they were. I have also heard rumors that later use of random keys generated by electronic circuits had problems as the physical limitations of the electronic circuitry imposed a low-pass filtering that made these keys, again, not totally random. Note that true randomness is what is needed here - common digital pseudorandom techniques, such hashing with SHA-1, may help to obscure weaknesses, but they will not make a non-random key random.
In this case, I would worry very much about
- whether the physical technique produces a truly random key and
- how to satisfy myself that today's random key is totally independent of every previous key. If this is, say, dependent on where the laser is pointing to in the glass, how far apart does each pointing need to be to make sure that the results are independent, and can I securely verify that today's direction is sufficiently different from every previous time and
- as the technique is passing an initial sequence of bits through the randomizer glass, how random does the initial sequence need to be ? What weaknesses are imposed by non-randomness in that initial sequence.
I could easily see this technique being secure in theory but massively broken in practice by some weakness in how the glass is made or handled or in the initial keys.
Note, by the way, that the two parties must physically get together to generate the key, so in a sense this is really a secure key storage device. Once they use up their stored keys, they have to meet again to be able to send more messages, which of course is the real problem with one time keys (and why, for example, the Soviets reused some of the Verona keys).
And, finally, this technique might make a cool way of doing truly secure hashing.
That is indeed how the WWII "scrambler" phones worked, but that was not viewed as nearly as secure as a one time pad (required for all messages dealing with Enigma decrypts) and the Germans did decode at least some scrambler phone communications.
The cryptographic trouble is that the inherent correlations of the human voice are still present, just overlaid by noise, and you can use that knowledge to extract the signal (the voice) from the noise. It did prevent idle eavesdropping, which I think was more the point.
That's a typo (well, 2), but it is interesting that they picked these two, which shows that they understand basically nothing about the philosophy and work of either figure.
Here is a hint - Mother Theresa did not treat the dying, only comforted them, and Gandhi believed in rejecting technology and returning to a simpler era. So, the simplest answer for both is, nothing.
But what if it isn't quantum and we've built an entire computer and don't know how it really works? At that point you may as well throw up your hands and yell magic.
Sounds like being a parent.
Gravitational lensing surveys have pretty much ruled out this Dark Matter explanation for black holes (or any other dark compact objects) with masses > about 10^-7 Solar Masses, and it is very hard to see how smaller black holes could have ever formed.
It also goes to higher energy, and the longer the experiment lasts, the higher the energy range that will be explored (it is count-limited at the highest energies).
People who are interested in these matters should follow Matt Strassler's science blog, Of Particular Significance, which covered these same points back at the beginning of April, and then again two weeks later.
Apparently markets corrupt as well, just by their nature.
I think that the real purpose of the Google I/O in San Francisco was to show just how clueless Google's top executives are in their "Billionaire Bubble."
There is also ESA's CHEOPS, a planet finder, also intended for launch in 2017.
It's the extended mission (to 2016) that may be cut short. The primary mission is already over, in 2012.
They still have 2 reaction wheels, and also thrusters, and a fair amount of fuel. In the press release there was a discussion of options, which "are likely to include steps to attempt to recover wheel functionality and to investigate the utility of a hybrid mode, using both wheels and thrusters."
My guess is that, if they cannot recover pointed mode, they will put the spacecraft in a slow roll, which (if it is slow enough) would be good enough to detect hot Jupiters, but not Earth-like planets.
And you can see storms from 2000 light years away?
Lorentz boosting (BEER) was used to detect the planet - think of this as a way of observing a Doppler shift from the light curve, without doing spectra (which Kepler cannot do). It was confirmed by getting time on big telescopes and getting actual spectra. The Doppler shifts plus the BEER data gave a good orbit (subject to the usual sin inclination ambiguity). Then this orbit was used to model and remove the Lorentz boosting, and the Kepler data was used to make a light curve. As it turns out from manual inspection of the light-curve, the planet actually does pass in front of and behind its star, as seen from Earth, and so the usual transit tools could be brought out and used (the light of the star+planet can be differenced from the light of the star alone). These are very sensitive.
No "storms" were detected. What was detected was super-rotation, a la Venus, a rotation of the entire atmosphere (assuming the planet itself is locked into a once per orbit rotation state). This was detected as a phase offset between maximum heating and maximum Doppler shift, best explained they feel "by a phase shift of the planetary thermal modulation due to the equatorial superrotation phenomena." Not bad for a relatively small number of photons....
Apparently this object was miscategorized as an eclispsing binary (i.e., two stars, not star + planet), which is why it wasn't picked out of the data earlier.
How many of these planets are in the goldilocks zone? Sure we can find them; but which ones are livable for Carbon based lifeforms?
According to the catalog, 10 (out of 885) are confirmed so far. From the catalog, "Gliese 581d, Kepler-22b, Gliese 667Cc, Gliese 581g, Gliese 163c, HD 40307g, Tau Cetie, Kepler-62e, Kepler-62f, and Kepler-61b are the only known exoplanets that might be considered potentially habitable or object of interest for the search for life.
There are a further 18 (out of 2716) unconfirmed Kepler candidates that (if they are not false positives) also may reside in their habitable zones. These should be confirmed (or rejected) in due course. Of course, "potentially habitable" does not mean you want to start considering a new vacation home. If Venus and Mars were reversed (i.e., Venus was in Mars's orbit, and Mars in Venus's), each would probably be nicely habitable. As they are, not so much, at least, not without a considerable amount of planetary engineering.
The original paper, "BEER analysis of Kepler and CoRoT light curves: I. Discovery of Kepler-76b: A hot Jupiter with evidence for superrotation," is here.
This planet was discovered by Lorentz boosting, the theory of which predates Einstein. Meanwhile, 20 exoplanets have been discovered to date using gravitational lensing, an application of General Relativity (a theory created by Einstein ) that was itself first predicted by Einstein. Somehow, the press release (and thus all the subsequent press) failed to mention these "Einstein planets."
Resist this. The dirty secret is that 0.08 is already in the range of normal population variation, especially when age is factored in (i.e., a good fraction of the over-60 population sober are worse drivers than a good fraction of the 20-30 yr old population at 0.08). Lower it and, for example, I don't see how you could rationally also allow anyone over the age of 60 to drive.
Of course, I don't think that there is much rationality in these matters.
This is very late, but just in case, a brief answer.
The virtual particles in question would be massive enough and small enough that in GR they would be full fledged black holes.
This is late, I know, but for the record IceCube (the most sensitive neutrino telescope) has announced that it did not see any neutrinos from this GRB,
Yes, and when those people die or change jobs, poof goes their work !
If you go on the arxiv.org site, you see, right at the top
It was started with (minimal*) government support; I don't think it gets any now. I agree that journals need to make costs, and even a profit; that doesn't mean that their material can't be generally available as well.
*There used to be a picture on the site of the server it ran on, in the clutter under its creator's desk.
The free arxiv.org servers hold most of science behind these paywalls, at least in physics and astronomy. It would be interesting to see if there is a difference in citation rank between paywalled papers on arxiv, and those that are not (and, thus, frequently unobtainable without payment).
Got a question : as a proton, one among many, accelerates into a black hole, what is going on with the individual quarks? What shape do they form? What virtual particles are materialized, in what pattern? What structure do they develop?
Don't know. Nobody knows.
In GR, nothing much, until they fall into the singularity at the center of a black hole (although tidal forces would rip even a proton apart as it got close to the singularity, and that would generate a lot of particle production). At the singularity itself, the equations fail, and so GR makes no predictions.
In string theory there may be holographic effects that turn the event horizon into a "firewall," which has been in the scientific news a lot lately (search on "black hole firewall"), which would destroy the proton as soon as it entered the black hole. Or, maybe not, as string theory is by no means settled, and may not even have a connection with reality (having no experimental constraints).
There is a very profound mathematical fact at the center of GR - you cannot see a singularity and report on it. This is called "cosmic censorship," and it seems to be inviolable (in the theory, at least). If you are outside an event horizon, you can't see the singularity. Once you cross it, you may be able to (in fact, it would be in a sense all you could see), but you cannot report back to the outside. The holographic string theory firewall appears to be very different, but maybe it isn't, as you cannot report back in that theory, either. So, GR has an inadequacy (the divide by zero in the center of a black hole), but it is not possible to ever get any information about it experimentally. My intuition says that this may be the key to the entire problem, if we could but grasp its true meaning.
Just think of it as nerd humor.
Note - Fermi detected a 94 GeV photon from Gamma Ray Burst GRB 130427A (over 1/2 the Higgs energy), and many photons in the GeV range, which bodes well for quantum gravity constraints.
That photon had a wavelength of ~ 10^-17 meters, or 10 million yoctometers
you're welcome