- Government should limit itself to the powers named in the Constitution, which include banning gay marriages and censoring the Internet.
I agree with all your points except this one. Administrations on both sides have generally kept their paws off the Internet *except* for some censorship ("think about the children, and everyone on the Internet is a pedophile (not, say, just the same people that exist on the city streets)!"). *Clinton* was the one that signed the Communication Decency Act, which was the first law censoring the Internet.
I think conservatives, for the most part, are just as compassionate as liberals, but we follow the "teach a man to fish" philosophy as opposed to the "give a man a fish" philosophy.
So who, exactly, has Bush been teaching to fish recently?
Abortion is murder (simple biological fact, aborted human life == dead human)
And what does it matter?
We have laws against killing *mature* humans in place specifically because a society where killing mature humans is allowed is much less effective -- if I have to run around with a gun and be suspicious of everyone, I get a lot less done. Most people have no problems with killing cows or pigs, say. Zillions of sperm die each day. The only people that have a problem with killing a fetus are those that have chosen as a fundamental value that killing a fetus is unacceptable. I'm all for letting people decide that killing *their* fetus is unacceptable, just as I am all for letting people pray in the direction of Mecca. What I take issue with is when people try to force their values on other people, values which have no pragmatic backing.
gay marriage is just a continuation of our unelected judges writing law in clear violation of their Constitutional restraints
I'm lost as to what you mean. First, the primary people allowing gay marriage have been *elected* *administrators*, like the mayor of San Francisco. Second, the role of the judge is to interpret law. Neither the law nor the US Consitution forbids gay marriage. In the United States, unless something is specifically made illegal, it is legal. Judges have looked at our legal code and said "nope, nothing banning it". The only way they'd be writing law is if they decided in the *other* direction.
Conservatives have *tried* to push through national law banning gay marriage and it has been shot down by the bulk of America. This is just the majority speaking, nothing more.
sex ed shouldn't be entrusted to the government education monopoly
I'll call bullshit again. You are free to send your child to a private school, to homeschool them, or what-have-you. Sex ed is an *extremely* PC process that makes no value statements. The question is simply whether or not children should remain ignorant of something that has huge social impact and is a significant chunk of our biology.
social programs should be funded by voluntary contributions and not tax money confiscated by force (try not paying your taxes sometime)
We tried that, early on in the United States. The federal government had no power to ensure itself any income. It didn't work, because not surprisingly, nobody wanted to fund it.
a rather large subset of Muslims have declared war on all Americans who don't think and act as they do (that includes you)
"Rather large subset"? There are *millions* of Muslims in the United States *alone* that aren't out "declaring war". And how did you manage to forget about abortion clinic bombings and shootings?
and we have to deal with that, and we shouldn't make environmentalism a substitute for traditional religion.
There are people who irrationally support environmentalism -- "we can't hurt the cute fluffy kitties in the rainforests!" However, there are very clear and accepted economic, game-theoretic reasons for supporting environmentalism -- it's a public-good problem, where it is in the interest of individuals to damage the environment for short-term profit, even if it winds up hurting everyone down the road. Environment-protecting laws were not made by legislators looking at fluffy kitties.
Most atheists are frauds who find substitute deities (environmentalism, Communism, heck just look at all the Castro worshippers).
No. Neither environmentalism nor communism is a religion. They are a set of techniques and analysis for dealing with a public good and government, respectively. There are no fundamental, axiomic values that must be accepted as a part of either, as is necessary to be a Christian.
The ideas behind the "ten commandments" are really a big part of the social foundation of the country. The "family values" kick is a recognition that if everyone were to follow the non-religious ten-commandments things would be a lot more civil in this country.
If everyone were to follow communist ideology, things would be a lot nicer as well. The problem is that communism is less robust against abuse than capitalism.
One of Osama's primary goals is to render us a religious oligarchy under the religion of Islam.
I've been unaware that "rendering the United States a religious oligarchy under the religions of Islam" was *ever* claimed by al Qaeda as a goal. And even if that was the case, why on earth would they go after the United States, a relatively *difficult* to Islamize country? Why do you think that bombing civilians would build up support for a theocracy in that same country? No, the only place that I've heard people certain that bin Laden and the "rest of those Muslims" are out to take over the United States and make all Christians Muslim is on rightnation.us.
Last question, we should vote for Bush because Bin Laden is a Kerry supporter?
I'd say that it's a pretty safe bet that bin Laden is not a Kerry supporter.
Let's think about bin Laden's role. He is a religious fundamentalist. He wants the US to stop buying off Middle East administrations, stop setting up puppet administrations, and reduce their culture and religion-disintegrating inflence.
His current actions are through terrorism. Now, how many countries have simply backed down because of terrorism? Not a hell of a lot. No, what he's done is provoked the United States into acting in an extremely polarizing manner, which has severely damaged international opinion and gained militant Islam more support. If the US *stopped* invading countries and simply started working on diplomatic and propaganda solution, it would be *much* harder to raise a standard to draw people in. If you know that you're going to have an enemy that you can't currently beat, your best move is to make him alienate as many people as possible and make yourself appear to be an appealing ally. Kerry is, if anything, likely to be less easily manipulated than Bush.
How about a little alternative fuel research and cut off Saudi Arabia from the world economy?
*Here* I can agree, but it's not going to happen. Both President Bush and Vice-President Cheney have very strong ties to corporate oil interests, and this would be even more disasterous for those interests than Saudi Arabia.
Voting for a third party simply eliminates your political power.
If you really want to make an impact for your beliefs, the first change to make is to advocate and get instantiated preferential voting or another form of vote reform so that the system is not necessarily two-party.
Voting for a third party doesn't do you a bit of good. The only plausible explanation I've ever heard was that "it will make the closest candidate more willing to deal with our groups". Well, frankly, if that was going to happen, it would have happened by now. Kerry would have bent over backwards to make Nader supporters happy. (Or, for that matter, Bush to make Libertarians happy, but instead his administration has been extremely interventionist, militant, and spent far more than it has taken in.) You can't ask for a more ideal situation -- an incredibly tight race, and Nader having blown Democratic hopes last time.
The only people that benefit from you voting for a third party are those that want your closest realistic choice not to win. Those who politically oppose you.
Ignore people telling you to vote for a third party. They are simply out to hurt you.
Comments like "The US electorate needs to wake up" only piss Americans off.
Really? Last I looked, a lot of Americans (and the majority of ones on Slashdot, if you consider the generally non-religious, college-educated, young status of the bulk of folks on here) aren't really pleased with Bush.
Guess what? Most Americans don't really like your spineless fucking governments either!
When, exactly, was the last time Bush showed "spine"? Was it when he sent a bunch of young men overseas to fight a war (much like the one he dodged in Vietnam) to overthrow a bunch of religious types that we put in power in the first place? Was it when he decided to send more young men to kill off a bunch of vastly outgunned and overmatched Iraqis? It seems to *me* that he was telling other people to attack those people that might pose a potential personal risk to him. I'm not sure what part of that requires spine. I'll give you that after those young men were (mostly) finished killing and being killed, he did fly over for a photo op in a military outfit. Of course, his trip was kept secret, so that he wouldn't be exposed to any risk, but I guess that maybe he thought he was -- I mean, the risk of the pilot that ferried him to the carrier screwing up and crashin is probably vastly greater than a typical American's risk of being killed by a terrorist aboard an airplane.
How would you feel if your country was attacked and the rest of the world told you that you can't do anything about it?
I don't believe anyone said "you can't do anything about it". They said "Invading Iraq because a bunch of Saudi Arabaians killed some of your people is stupid and makes no sense." The US has been one of the most terrorism-free nations *ever* -- I remember that a huge theme of Oklahoma City was that significant terrorism had *finally* hit the United States. Yet places like South Africa and Indonesia weren't very interested in supporting the United States' invasion. I'd say that that's an interesting data point.
How would you feel if your friends were dying because they believed in the cause of liberating Iraq and Afghanistan and trying to secure the world from terrorist groups like al-Qaeda?
I'd be very angry at the man that fed them propaganda and sent them overseas, producing more terrorists than they killed and caused their blood to be shed for oil. I wouldn't really give a damn whether some random French guy condemned the guy that did this.
Because they supply arms and material support to our enemies.
The funny thing is that you have this almost entirely backwards -- a huge chunk of the arms floating around are actually from the United States. We directly supplied bin Laden with weapons and supplies when he was attacking the USSR. And Iran/Contra? *We've* been dropping weapons off with militant Islamic groups for a long, long time.
Then when we really needed the Germans and the French, they backed off.
You mean to invade Iraq? Seems to me that France and Germany ended up being right about the invasion, and us wrong -- why would we criticize them? Iraq didn't have anything to do with 9/11, didn't have weapons of mass destruction, had told al Qaeda to shove off, and really didn't have anything other than a dictator who had balls large enough to antagonize the Bush dynasty.
Hell, even the Statue of Liberty that got shown in all those shots with the missing WTC in the background, the "liberty still stands" thing, was given to us by the French.
Thanks for backing up their theory that the world won't react because they don't have the will, heart, or strength to face down the worst evil the world has seen since Hitler.
Uh, the US has killed a lot more civilians in the past couple of years around the world than people around the world have killed US civilians. Hell, Bosnia alone probably saw more than 9/11, ignoring Iraq entirely. Which is the greater evil?
change the slogan here from "News For Nerds, Stuff That Matters" to "Kerry For President, Republicans Are Evil, and Democrats are 100% Perfect!"
I don't agree one bit. If anything, Slashdot has a Libertarian slant.
Disliking Bush as President certainly does not have to be because of party lines. I know one *very* ardent Republican who benefitted greatly from Bush tax cuts. He *hates* Bush -- Dubya is, frankly, a lousy president.
Now, McCain (or anyone more moderate, less violent, and more competent than Bush) could probably garner a lot more support on Slashdot -- I haven't seen much criticism of McCain, and the few times he's come up it's generally been pro-geek stuff. But as long as Bush insists on being:
(a) a religious fundamentalist, determined to hammer a traditionalist Christian value set down every American's throat by use of state powers,
(b) an ardent militarist, to the point of making poor and ineffective foreign policy decisions,
(c) a man who surrounds himselves with men like the *extremely* militant and probably corrupt Cheney, the militant Rumsfeld, and the religious and uber-pro-expanded-police-powers and reduction-of-civil-rights Ashcroft,
(d) stupid (I mean, come on, even when Bush ran the first time, the image he projected was someone that would have a comptent cabinet to listen to)
(e) anti-research,
(f) anti-condom (the largest weapon in the fight against AIDS in Africa, and the cheapest and most practical way to keep birth rates under control),
(g) anti-gay,
(h) anti-environment,
(i) pro-large-corporation, anti-consumer (as in the HMO lawsuit restrictions),
(j) pro-PATRIOT-Act,
(k) pro-Iraq-invasion (there still has bee no apology to Iraq for invading them based on what was, in the most positive light, incorrect intelligence information)
I and many like me are going to be extremely unhappy with the way he's going. Some of these points are unavoidable; I doubt I'm going to see a President that perfectly agrees with me on every issue. However, nobody wants to have a President of the United States that goes against them on just about every point out there.
I bet 50% of the people who vote for Bush are voting because Kerry wants to make friends with terrorists instead of destroying them.
News for you: "destroying terrorists" has generally not worked well, because you can only oppress people to a certain point before you just get someone else willing to die. See Israel, see Ireland. The United States wiping out terrorism makes as much sense as Microsoft wiping out open source. It just doesn't *work*. There's no single organization. What say you manage to kill off every person currently in al Quada? Then you have a lot of angry people. It's been demonstrated that it only takes four guys who know each other willing to die with knives to take over an airplane. And, heck, that's a pretty elaborate plot. There are much easier routes -- make a fertilizer bomb, or release nasty chemicals next to building air intakes. As long as you have a lot of people who perceive that the United States is oppressing people and culture, there will be terrorism.
The US is good at marketing. Why can't we work in projecting a "the US is a bunch of good guys, not something you want to fight" image?
I bet 50% of the people who vote for Bush vote because Kerry would have us be nice to the terrorists so they don't hate us so much.
I don't think so, though I wish he would (well, "present a more appealing image to the Middle East", rather than "be nice to the terrorists", but pretty much, yes).
I bet 50% of the people who vote for Bush because the veterans who served with Kerry in Vietnam say that he can't be trusted to lead the country.
[shrug] Some do, though the people in his boat disagree. Frankly, they knew Kerry years ago and knew him in the capacity of a combat boat commander. I'm dubious as to how well that reflects on Kerry's ability to be a government administrator (or acrobat, or sign painter, for that matter). I *know* that I've just lived through four years of the Bush administration, and I *know* that Bush doesn't do a very good job. There are a lot of times when what I wanted the US to be doing very much different from what Bush had the US doing.
I bet 50% of the people who vote for Bush are voting because Kerry would turn over our national sovereignty to organizations like the UN, which allowed Saddam Hussein to enrich himself with the thoroughly corrupt oil-for-food program.
(a) No president has ever had interest in "turning over our national sovereignty". That's absurd. If you mean "might have listened to the UN when they were condemning us for invading Iraq", I have to point out that that's a long way from "turning over national sovereignty", unless there are no other nations left in the world.
(b) The food-for-oil program was corrupt, yes. It was a mechanism of buying off the leaders of the country. We do the exact same thing (and have, for many, many years), with the same degree of corruption, by use of "foreign aid" for years. It keeps foreign administrations nicely in check, and it's cheaper than fighting wars.
Because, unless a pilot chooses to leave the cockpit during a hijacking (probably not a good idea), he is in a small, enclosed space that is not very ideal for use of a gun.
In addition, a captured gun would provide a severe risk, and arming pilots would put a gun at a known point onboard.
The suggestion about arming everyone onboard *would* probably stop hijackers, but has other risks. Accidental deaths from stupid gun usage would probably far exceed hijacking-related deaths avoided. People get drunk and do stupid things on flights, and having guns around would be about as smart as arming everyone in a bar.
I could see maybe having a panic button that could be activated by stewardesses, pilots, and maybe even passengers that releases a stun gun to every passenger.
anyway, putting a JHP into a terrorist is a guaranteed stopper, rubber bullets might just piss them off more.
I really think that that's a bad idea, though your point about the gun not being dangerous to the integrity of the plane is well taken.
Forget, for a moment, that the plane won't go down. The air marshall is going to be in a position of possibly having to fire at multiple targets on a crowded deck with everyone's head right at chest level and no way for them to get to cover. Even if he makes a perfect shot, the bullet may penetrate and hit someone else. Even police officers on the nastiest streets are going to hesitate before shooting in an environment like that.
There are a couple of characteristics that can be taken advantage of:
1) Passengers probably outnumber hijackers (God, I'm tired of assuming that all hijackers are going to be "terrorists").
2) In an environment without arms or significant weapons, it is likely that numbers will prevail, especially if everyone is desperate.
3) It is probably difficult for a hijacker to smuggle onboard a gun with a significant number of rounds of ammunition. Bombs have already been considered, and in any case are not what we are currently worried about. On the other hand, there are a huge number of way to smuggle knives onboard (prisoners have come up with a vast number of ways to produce and hide shivs). You could take a metal plate in the bottom of a laptop, cut it diagonally to leave a sharp edge, fit the two halves together again, and replace it in the base of the laptop and it will pass any security screening. This probably means that a hijacker will not be able to amplify his ability to cause physical harm by more than a factor of perhaps 3 -- I'd say that four alerted and desperate men could probably bring down even a competent knife-wielder with a shiv.
4) On a flight, it is likely that hijackers are both desperate and (it has been demonstrated) can outnumber air marshalls (of which there is probably no more than one). A man with a handgun against four hijackers, probably armed with knives (especially with the need to at least try to avoid shooting civilians), is taking a not insignificant risk. Furthermore, a handgun provides an effective harm-causing amplification tool -- if the gun is captured by hijackers, the situation becomes significantly worse.
It seems to me that the goal of the air marshall should be to keep the situation static enough for passengers to regain control of the situation. Pepper spray or a stun gun is likely to have a more rapid impact on someone than anything short of a shotgun, is not nearly as dangerous if captured, and allows passengers to regain control of the vehicle.
Passengers should be instructed as to their duties in the event of a hijacking, just as they are currently responsible for an escape hatch.
Over 3K people die from traffic accidents each month, every month, and have since well before 9/11.
We have spent vastly more on our "War on Terror", the most compelling incident of which killed 3k people, than we have been spending on research to improve the safety of the vastly more dangerous automobile. If we had taken the many tens of billions of dollars that we spent on invading Iraq *alone* (and we'll leave off the question of why exactly invading Iraq was part of the "War on Terror") and instead put it into, say, computer-guided automobile research and possibly deploying experimental support systems (like transmitters or indicators along roads to help cars guide themselves), we would have saved *far* more lives.
Iraq is a classic case of an administration being able to sell people on stupid abuses of budget because it allowed them to have direct Executive Branch control over funding and funnel money to companies (Halliburton, as always, being the most infamous offender).
Fischer is/was a great chess player, but the guy thinks that Sept. 11 was a great thing, and so... he's a shithead. I don't care what kinda chess skillz he has - he is a shithead.
Bobby Fischer started playing chess and got good at it.
When he won a world championship, he was turned into a political tool.
When he wanted to stop playing, he was hounded by the press.
When he went to play (and win) a chess game in Yugoslavia, he had US agents start hunting him. He has had to spend many years living in secret on the run, (and is now and elderly man).
Do you seriously, honestly expect him *not* to be angry with the United States? Oh, yes, he's got an angry quote saying that September 11 was a great thing, and that he wished that the United States would crumble. There are hordes of US nationalists saying that "all towelheads should be killed" on rightnation.us. If the man is going to be condemned for a quote he made once, I should think that the same logic can equally apply to imprison a number of the people on rightnation.us.
And Michael Moore is a fat boob.
I have not seen Fahrenheit 9/11, but I have read Stupid White Men and seen Bowling for Columbine. Michael Moore does bring up some good points, but ultimately he's a propagandist, a Karl Rove for the Libertarian party. I dislike Moore doing things like the Charleton Heston footage (which said essentially nothing about the actual issues behind widespread gun ownership) about as much as I dislike Rove attacking Kerry's military record.
All that being said, I don't recall endorsing Moore, and I can't figure out why you brought him up.
My question is that does such a hash function live up to Shamir's and Rivest's claims?
You'd be much better off asking a cryptography newsgroup/forum/mailing list than me -- I'm not a cryptographer. Use of prime factorization in hash generation in an earlier post of mine was an idea that I just pulled out of the air without no thought or references. It was not intended to be a serious suggestion -- I simply needed an example of a simple, obvious one-way operation that could be done using a processor.
I would have provided links, but for Slashdot's 160 character limitation.
Obviously, as has been pointed out by many, the Yugoslavia tournament dates way back to before the War on Terror -- on the other hand, it is only the post-9/11 extreme nationalism in the United States that would allow a country to have extradited and prosecute an elderly man who has been on the run for many years for playing a *chess game*, especially a man who was once lauded as a pillar against the "evil" Soviet Union.
The fact that the man is horribly disillusioned with the United States seems quite reasonable; he wanted to play chess, and was turned into a political tool, had his name illegally commercialized, was hunted by US agents, and had to live in exile due to playing a chess game. It seems quite reasonable to dislike a country that has done something like this to you.
One of the inventors at Microsoft appears to be this gentleman, who works on Apache and is a "founding member of the OpenSSL project". If an OpenSSL guy is unaware of sudo, we're living in Bizarro world.
But that's not how corporate research works. Nobody cares how good the patents you get are. Microsoft cross-licenses with all their competitors, anyway. Modern corporate researchers just produce legal fodder -- a slew of patents, which can be used to prevent new entrants from entering a field -- existing oligopolies are maintained by cross-licensing of patents.
Sir, your example does not shoot down the parent post.
The two referenced examples were Benjamin Franklin and Pastor Niemoller.
Bejamin Franklin lived in a situation where massive property damage had just been caused by lawbreaking -- theft and destruction of property in the Boston Tea Party, refusal to pay taxes, violence against troops (and killing of them). The crackdown on rights were justified by the British based on lawbreaking and deaths.
Pastor Neimoller lived in a situation where the Reichstag (basically, our Senate building) had just been burned down by what the government claimed were communist terrorists. The crackdown on rights as justified by the attack on the nation's government.
Traditionally, governments that have been allowed to remove civil rights for "emergency reasons" that stretch on indefinintely have not done very well.
Despite all of this, I am pulled out of every single line in every airport I ever go through and my bags are generally searched thoroughly if not emptied entirely. Why is that? I am a short white glasses wearing female computer technician.
There are relatively few jobs other than airport security screeners that have minimal requirements, have had to hire a ton of people extremely rapidly in a short period of time, and allow hirees to pat down choice females from a line.
For the less of us, what methods do you use to enforce this? It seems to me if you have the code that generates the hash, you could reverse engineer it and generate collissions just as easy. Why not?
Understand that I am not a cryptographer, and not the best person to get an answer on this. Here's one link that might help.
Basically, I can give you an intuitive idea of why this is possible. At first blush, you look at any single operation that a computer can do, and say to yourself "It's easy to come up with a set of input parameters to that operation that yields the same output. Every hash I can do is made up of individual instructions. Given that, why don't I just reverse each step in order, until I have the original inputs that will solve my hashing algorithm for the desired output?"
For instance, adding two numbers A1 and B1 and taking the result C as output -- as "reversable for some value". I can easily choose a value A2, subtract it from C, and get another number B2 which again gives C as output.
A cryptographer would say "there are no 'one way' operations apparent to you".
Sometimes reversing a basic operation *can* be expensive. Prime factorizations are not, as far as I know, used in any hashing algorithms, but they are used in encryption, and prime factorization is an example of a one-way operation. Suppose I take in two numbers, with the constraint that the two are primes. Checking to see whether a number is prime is reasonably fast, with runtime order of something the log of the tested number to some constant power, so it isn't that hard to enforce this constraint. The output would be the two numbers multiplied together. Finding the two input prime numbers required to produce the output prime number, the reverse operation, takes *much* longer than the actual checking and multiplication involved in producing the output number.
There is probably a lot more involved in producing a good one-way hash -- but at least I can demonstrate one example of a one-way operation on a computer.
Medal of Honor is, from a technological standpoint, nothing that new. It's just quite polished, has high production values, and tons and tons of scripting.
Need For Speed Underground is another game in a long series (at least four titles, now).
To be fair, you are skipping over a few points -- just because something is a sequel does not mean that it is not original. Metroid Prime, at least, while it is just another first person shooter, did some reasonably unusual things for the genre. It's no Rez, but it's got more than the typical degree of evolution in a game (that being said, I think that it was a lousy game, but still more unique than the average game).
A lot of games that people play *years* after their release didn't necessarily sell well. This guy is giving a recipe for cult classics, and for the sort of thing that a game reviewer, weary of the "same game" over and over, would like. You're right that this is probably not the ideal thing to do for financial success. Among other things:
* A game reviewer probably views a franchise tie-in (such as a movie) as a bad thing, as it limits content, plot, development time, and has had a bad history. Traditionally, franchise games have sold well.
* A game reviewer puts more emphasis on new and unique gameplay. He's played all of the dozen FPSes released in the last twelve months. If I buy two games a year, however, I'm quite happy getting vanilla examples of a game, because all the new things are interesting.
* A game reviewer gets more out of homage to other games than a light gamer.
* A game reviewer is going to generally be more willing to learn rules (especially since he may already know the rules of a genre) than a light gamer. Things like tutorials, unless very clever and unusual, are unlikely to interest a game reviewer much, but may matter very much to someone who is not familiar with the latest-and-greatest in the genre.
* A game reviewer is generally going to be more tolerant of high hardware demands than a light gamer. Most people out there do not have high-end machines. This is generally not an issue for a game reviewer.
* A game reviewer is generally going to be more tolerant of patches than a light gamer. Most people out there do not want to screw around with seeing whether patches are coming out and running patches, if they even know what to do and how to do it.
Well, yes. It's pretty obvious that Microsoft is doing the Right Thing with SP2. The changes, in fact, are what we'd like to have every Linux distro doing.
The unreasonable and unwarranted criticism of Microsoft on every front regarding SP2 ("It's not secure", "It's not backwards compatible", "It's taking too long to come out", "It was released before it was ready") has nothing to do with the quality of SP2 (which, as far as I can tell, is pretty decent). Microsoft screwed over their customers and competitors for years, and produced a lot of dislike. Now, they're simply paying off, in installments, the debt in public relations that they incurred. Why do you think Microsoft gets bashed for every minor thing on Slashdot, no matter how trivial? It isn't because a bunch of techies woke up one day and said "I sure do hate that Microsoft -- I just can't stand their name!"
All they found here were two values C, D for which H(C) = H(D). Anyone who thinks this was suprising needs to take a look at the idea of a hash:
The existence of collisions is obvious. The point is that it should be so phenomenally difficult to find a collision that you can't ever come up with one in a sane amount of time.
If they could find two data values with less than, say, 80 bits of data that both hash to the same, then that's something, 'cause that could be someone's password.
That would be unlikely to be a big deal. For passwords, I can just brute force the password, maybe precompute a dictionary of password hashes.
Slashdot Mirror
- Government should limit itself to the powers named in the Constitution, which include banning gay marriages and censoring the Internet.
I agree with all your points except this one. Administrations on both sides have generally kept their paws off the Internet *except* for some censorship ("think about the children, and everyone on the Internet is a pedophile (not, say, just the same people that exist on the city streets)!"). *Clinton* was the one that signed the Communication Decency Act, which was the first law censoring the Internet.
I think conservatives, for the most part, are just as compassionate as liberals, but we follow the "teach a man to fish" philosophy as opposed to the "give a man a fish" philosophy.
So who, exactly, has Bush been teaching to fish recently?
Abortion is murder (simple biological fact, aborted human life == dead human)
And what does it matter?
We have laws against killing *mature* humans in place specifically because a society where killing mature humans is allowed is much less effective -- if I have to run around with a gun and be suspicious of everyone, I get a lot less done. Most people have no problems with killing cows or pigs, say. Zillions of sperm die each day. The only people that have a problem with killing a fetus are those that have chosen as a fundamental value that killing a fetus is unacceptable. I'm all for letting people decide that killing *their* fetus is unacceptable, just as I am all for letting people pray in the direction of Mecca. What I take issue with is when people try to force their values on other people, values which have no pragmatic backing.
gay marriage is just a continuation of our unelected judges writing law in clear violation of their Constitutional restraints
I'm lost as to what you mean. First, the primary people allowing gay marriage have been *elected* *administrators*, like the mayor of San Francisco. Second, the role of the judge is to interpret law. Neither the law nor the US Consitution forbids gay marriage. In the United States, unless something is specifically made illegal, it is legal. Judges have looked at our legal code and said "nope, nothing banning it". The only way they'd be writing law is if they decided in the *other* direction.
Conservatives have *tried* to push through national law banning gay marriage and it has been shot down by the bulk of America. This is just the majority speaking, nothing more.
sex ed shouldn't be entrusted to the government education monopoly
I'll call bullshit again. You are free to send your child to a private school, to homeschool them, or what-have-you. Sex ed is an *extremely* PC process that makes no value statements. The question is simply whether or not children should remain ignorant of something that has huge social impact and is a significant chunk of our biology.
social programs should be funded by voluntary contributions and not tax money confiscated by force (try not paying your taxes sometime)
We tried that, early on in the United States. The federal government had no power to ensure itself any income. It didn't work, because not surprisingly, nobody wanted to fund it.
a rather large subset of Muslims have declared war on all Americans who don't think and act as they do (that includes you)
"Rather large subset"? There are *millions* of Muslims in the United States *alone* that aren't out "declaring war". And how did you manage to forget about abortion clinic bombings and shootings?
and we have to deal with that, and we shouldn't make environmentalism a substitute for traditional religion.
There are people who irrationally support environmentalism -- "we can't hurt the cute fluffy kitties in the rainforests!" However, there are very clear and accepted economic, game-theoretic reasons for supporting environmentalism -- it's a public-good problem, where it is in the interest of individuals to damage the environment for short-term profit, even if it winds up hurting everyone down the road. Environment-protecting laws were not made by legislators looking at fluffy kitties.
Most atheists are frauds who find substitute deities (environmentalism, Communism, heck just look at all the Castro worshippers).
No. Neither environmentalism nor communism is a religion. They are a set of techniques and analysis for dealing with a public good and government, respectively. There are no fundamental, axiomic values that must be accepted as a part of either, as is necessary to be a Christian.
The ideas behind the "ten commandments" are really a big part of the social foundation of the country. The "family values" kick is a recognition that if everyone were to follow the non-religious ten-commandments things would be a lot more civil in this country.
If everyone were to follow communist ideology, things would be a lot nicer as well. The problem is that communism is less robust against abuse than capitalism.
One of Osama's primary goals is to render us a religious oligarchy under the religion of Islam.
I've been unaware that "rendering the United States a religious oligarchy under the religions of Islam" was *ever* claimed by al Qaeda as a goal. And even if that was the case, why on earth would they go after the United States, a relatively *difficult* to Islamize country? Why do you think that bombing civilians would build up support for a theocracy in that same country? No, the only place that I've heard people certain that bin Laden and the "rest of those Muslims" are out to take over the United States and make all Christians Muslim is on rightnation.us.
Last question, we should vote for Bush because Bin Laden is a Kerry supporter?
I'd say that it's a pretty safe bet that bin Laden is not a Kerry supporter.
Let's think about bin Laden's role. He is a religious fundamentalist. He wants the US to stop buying off Middle East administrations, stop setting up puppet administrations, and reduce their culture and religion-disintegrating inflence.
His current actions are through terrorism. Now, how many countries have simply backed down because of terrorism? Not a hell of a lot. No, what he's done is provoked the United States into acting in an extremely polarizing manner, which has severely damaged international opinion and gained militant Islam more support. If the US *stopped* invading countries and simply started working on diplomatic and propaganda solution, it would be *much* harder to raise a standard to draw people in. If you know that you're going to have an enemy that you can't currently beat, your best move is to make him alienate as many people as possible and make yourself appear to be an appealing ally. Kerry is, if anything, likely to be less easily manipulated than Bush.
How about a little alternative fuel research and cut off Saudi Arabia from the world economy?
*Here* I can agree, but it's not going to happen. Both President Bush and Vice-President Cheney have very strong ties to corporate oil interests, and this would be even more disasterous for those interests than Saudi Arabia.
Voting for a third party simply eliminates your political power.
If you really want to make an impact for your beliefs, the first change to make is to advocate and get instantiated preferential voting or another form of vote reform so that the system is not necessarily two-party.
Voting for a third party doesn't do you a bit of good. The only plausible explanation I've ever heard was that "it will make the closest candidate more willing to deal with our groups". Well, frankly, if that was going to happen, it would have happened by now. Kerry would have bent over backwards to make Nader supporters happy. (Or, for that matter, Bush to make Libertarians happy, but instead his administration has been extremely interventionist, militant, and spent far more than it has taken in.) You can't ask for a more ideal situation -- an incredibly tight race, and Nader having blown Democratic hopes last time.
The only people that benefit from you voting for a third party are those that want your closest realistic choice not to win. Those who politically oppose you.
Ignore people telling you to vote for a third party. They are simply out to hurt you.
Comments like "The US electorate needs to wake up" only piss Americans off.
Really? Last I looked, a lot of Americans (and the majority of ones on Slashdot, if you consider the generally non-religious, college-educated, young status of the bulk of folks on here) aren't really pleased with Bush.
Guess what? Most Americans don't really like your spineless fucking governments either!
When, exactly, was the last time Bush showed "spine"? Was it when he sent a bunch of young men overseas to fight a war (much like the one he dodged in Vietnam) to overthrow a bunch of religious types that we put in power in the first place? Was it when he decided to send more young men to kill off a bunch of vastly outgunned and overmatched Iraqis? It seems to *me* that he was telling other people to attack those people that might pose a potential personal risk to him. I'm not sure what part of that requires spine. I'll give you that after those young men were (mostly) finished killing and being killed, he did fly over for a photo op in a military outfit. Of course, his trip was kept secret, so that he wouldn't be exposed to any risk, but I guess that maybe he thought he was -- I mean, the risk of the pilot that ferried him to the carrier screwing up and crashin is probably vastly greater than a typical American's risk of being killed by a terrorist aboard an airplane.
How would you feel if your country was attacked and the rest of the world told you that you can't do anything about it?
I don't believe anyone said "you can't do anything about it". They said "Invading Iraq because a bunch of Saudi Arabaians killed some of your people is stupid and makes no sense." The US has been one of the most terrorism-free nations *ever* -- I remember that a huge theme of Oklahoma City was that significant terrorism had *finally* hit the United States. Yet places like South Africa and Indonesia weren't very interested in supporting the United States' invasion. I'd say that that's an interesting data point.
How would you feel if your friends were dying because they believed in the cause of liberating Iraq and Afghanistan and trying to secure the world from terrorist groups like al-Qaeda?
I'd be very angry at the man that fed them propaganda and sent them overseas, producing more terrorists than they killed and caused their blood to be shed for oil. I wouldn't really give a damn whether some random French guy condemned the guy that did this.
Because they supply arms and material support to our enemies.
The funny thing is that you have this almost entirely backwards -- a huge chunk of the arms floating around are actually from the United States. We directly supplied bin Laden with weapons and supplies when he was attacking the USSR. And Iran/Contra? *We've* been dropping weapons off with militant Islamic groups for a long, long time.
Then when we really needed the Germans and the French, they backed off.
You mean to invade Iraq? Seems to me that France and Germany ended up being right about the invasion, and us wrong -- why would we criticize them? Iraq didn't have anything to do with 9/11, didn't have weapons of mass destruction, had told al Qaeda to shove off, and really didn't have anything other than a dictator who had balls large enough to antagonize the Bush dynasty.
Hell, even the Statue of Liberty that got shown in all those shots with the missing WTC in the background, the "liberty still stands" thing, was given to us by the French.
Thanks for backing up their theory that the world won't react because they don't have the will, heart, or strength to face down the worst evil the world has seen since Hitler.
Uh, the US has killed a lot more civilians in the past couple of years around the world than people around the world have killed US civilians. Hell, Bosnia alone probably saw more than 9/11, ignoring Iraq entirely. Which is the greater evil?
Spinele
change the slogan here from "News For Nerds, Stuff That Matters" to "Kerry For President, Republicans Are Evil, and Democrats are 100% Perfect!"
I don't agree one bit. If anything, Slashdot has a Libertarian slant.
Disliking Bush as President certainly does not have to be because of party lines. I know one *very* ardent Republican who benefitted greatly from Bush tax cuts. He *hates* Bush -- Dubya is, frankly, a lousy president.
Now, McCain (or anyone more moderate, less violent, and more competent than Bush) could probably garner a lot more support on Slashdot -- I haven't seen much criticism of McCain, and the few times he's come up it's generally been pro-geek stuff. But as long as Bush insists on being:
(a) a religious fundamentalist, determined to hammer a traditionalist Christian value set down every American's throat by use of state powers,
(b) an ardent militarist, to the point of making poor and ineffective foreign policy decisions,
(c) a man who surrounds himselves with men like the *extremely* militant and probably corrupt Cheney, the militant Rumsfeld, and the religious and uber-pro-expanded-police-powers and reduction-of-civil-rights Ashcroft,
(d) stupid (I mean, come on, even when Bush ran the first time, the image he projected was someone that would have a comptent cabinet to listen to)
(e) anti-research,
(f) anti-condom (the largest weapon in the fight against AIDS in Africa, and the cheapest and most practical way to keep birth rates under control),
(g) anti-gay,
(h) anti-environment,
(i) pro-large-corporation, anti-consumer (as in the HMO lawsuit restrictions),
(j) pro-PATRIOT-Act,
(k) pro-Iraq-invasion (there still has bee no apology to Iraq for invading them based on what was, in the most positive light, incorrect intelligence information)
I and many like me are going to be extremely unhappy with the way he's going. Some of these points are unavoidable; I doubt I'm going to see a President that perfectly agrees with me on every issue. However, nobody wants to have a President of the United States that goes against them on just about every point out there.
I bet 50% of the people who vote for Bush are voting because Kerry wants to make friends with terrorists instead of destroying them.
News for you: "destroying terrorists" has generally not worked well, because you can only oppress people to a certain point before you just get someone else willing to die. See Israel, see Ireland. The United States wiping out terrorism makes as much sense as Microsoft wiping out open source. It just doesn't *work*. There's no single organization. What say you manage to kill off every person currently in al Quada? Then you have a lot of angry people. It's been demonstrated that it only takes four guys who know each other willing to die with knives to take over an airplane. And, heck, that's a pretty elaborate plot. There are much easier routes -- make a fertilizer bomb, or release nasty chemicals next to building air intakes. As long as you have a lot of people who perceive that the United States is oppressing people and culture, there will be terrorism.
The US is good at marketing. Why can't we work in projecting a "the US is a bunch of good guys, not something you want to fight" image?
I bet 50% of the people who vote for Bush vote because Kerry would have us be nice to the terrorists so they don't hate us so much.
I don't think so, though I wish he would (well, "present a more appealing image to the Middle East", rather than "be nice to the terrorists", but pretty much, yes).
I bet 50% of the people who vote for Bush because the veterans who served with Kerry in Vietnam say that he can't be trusted to lead the country.
[shrug] Some do, though the people in his boat disagree. Frankly, they knew Kerry years ago and knew him in the capacity of a combat boat commander. I'm dubious as to how well that reflects on Kerry's ability to be a government administrator (or acrobat, or sign painter, for that matter). I *know* that I've just lived through four years of the Bush administration, and I *know* that Bush doesn't do a very good job. There are a lot of times when what I wanted the US to be doing very much different from what Bush had the US doing.
I bet 50% of the people who vote for Bush are voting because Kerry would turn over our national sovereignty to organizations like the UN, which allowed Saddam Hussein to enrich himself with the thoroughly corrupt oil-for-food program.
(a) No president has ever had interest in "turning over our national sovereignty". That's absurd. If you mean "might have listened to the UN when they were condemning us for invading Iraq", I have to point out that that's a long way from "turning over national sovereignty", unless there are no other nations left in the world.
(b) The food-for-oil program was corrupt, yes. It was a mechanism of buying off the leaders of the country. We do the exact same thing (and have, for many, many years), with the same degree of corruption, by use of "foreign aid" for years. It keeps foreign administrations nicely in check, and it's cheaper than fighting wars.
Because, unless a pilot chooses to leave the cockpit during a hijacking (probably not a good idea), he is in a small, enclosed space that is not very ideal for use of a gun.
In addition, a captured gun would provide a severe risk, and arming pilots would put a gun at a known point onboard.
The suggestion about arming everyone onboard *would* probably stop hijackers, but has other risks. Accidental deaths from stupid gun usage would probably far exceed hijacking-related deaths avoided. People get drunk and do stupid things on flights, and having guns around would be about as smart as arming everyone in a bar.
I could see maybe having a panic button that could be activated by stewardesses, pilots, and maybe even passengers that releases a stun gun to every passenger.
anyway, putting a JHP into a terrorist is a guaranteed stopper, rubber bullets might just piss them off more.
I really think that that's a bad idea, though your point about the gun not being dangerous to the integrity of the plane is well taken.
Forget, for a moment, that the plane won't go down. The air marshall is going to be in a position of possibly having to fire at multiple targets on a crowded deck with everyone's head right at chest level and no way for them to get to cover. Even if he makes a perfect shot, the bullet may penetrate and hit someone else. Even police officers on the nastiest streets are going to hesitate before shooting in an environment like that.
There are a couple of characteristics that can be taken advantage of:
1) Passengers probably outnumber hijackers (God, I'm tired of assuming that all hijackers are going to be "terrorists").
2) In an environment without arms or significant weapons, it is likely that numbers will prevail, especially if everyone is desperate.
3) It is probably difficult for a hijacker to smuggle onboard a gun with a significant number of rounds of ammunition. Bombs have already been considered, and in any case are not what we are currently worried about. On the other hand, there are a huge number of way to smuggle knives onboard (prisoners have come up with a vast number of ways to produce and hide shivs). You could take a metal plate in the bottom of a laptop, cut it diagonally to leave a sharp edge, fit the two halves together again, and replace it in the base of the laptop and it will pass any security screening. This probably means that a hijacker will not be able to amplify his ability to cause physical harm by more than a factor of perhaps 3 -- I'd say that four alerted and desperate men could probably bring down even a competent knife-wielder with a shiv.
4) On a flight, it is likely that hijackers are both desperate and (it has been demonstrated) can outnumber air marshalls (of which there is probably no more than one). A man with a handgun against four hijackers, probably armed with knives (especially with the need to at least try to avoid shooting civilians), is taking a not insignificant risk. Furthermore, a handgun provides an effective harm-causing amplification tool -- if the gun is captured by hijackers, the situation becomes significantly worse.
It seems to me that the goal of the air marshall should be to keep the situation static enough for passengers to regain control of the situation. Pepper spray or a stun gun is likely to have a more rapid impact on someone than anything short of a shotgun, is not nearly as dangerous if captured, and allows passengers to regain control of the vehicle.
Passengers should be instructed as to their duties in the event of a hijacking, just as they are currently responsible for an escape hatch.
Over 3K people die from traffic accidents each month, every month, and have since well before 9/11.
We have spent vastly more on our "War on Terror", the most compelling incident of which killed 3k people, than we have been spending on research to improve the safety of the vastly more dangerous automobile. If we had taken the many tens of billions of dollars that we spent on invading Iraq *alone* (and we'll leave off the question of why exactly invading Iraq was part of the "War on Terror") and instead put it into, say, computer-guided automobile research and possibly deploying experimental support systems (like transmitters or indicators along roads to help cars guide themselves), we would have saved *far* more lives.
Iraq is a classic case of an administration being able to sell people on stupid abuses of budget because it allowed them to have direct Executive Branch control over funding and funnel money to companies (Halliburton, as always, being the most infamous offender).
Fischer is/was a great chess player, but the guy thinks that Sept. 11 was a great thing, and so... he's a shithead. I don't care what kinda chess skillz he has - he is a shithead.
Bobby Fischer started playing chess and got good at it.
When he won a world championship, he was turned into a political tool.
When he wanted to stop playing, he was hounded by the press.
When he went to play (and win) a chess game in Yugoslavia, he had US agents start hunting him. He has had to spend many years living in secret on the run, (and is now and elderly man).
Do you seriously, honestly expect him *not* to be angry with the United States? Oh, yes, he's got an angry quote saying that September 11 was a great thing, and that he wished that the United States would crumble. There are hordes of US nationalists saying that "all towelheads should be killed" on rightnation.us. If the man is going to be condemned for a quote he made once, I should think that the same logic can equally apply to imprison a number of the people on rightnation.us.
And Michael Moore is a fat boob.
I have not seen Fahrenheit 9/11, but I have read Stupid White Men and seen Bowling for Columbine. Michael Moore does bring up some good points, but ultimately he's a propagandist, a Karl Rove for the Libertarian party. I dislike Moore doing things like the Charleton Heston footage (which said essentially nothing about the actual issues behind widespread gun ownership) about as much as I dislike Rove attacking Kerry's military record.
All that being said, I don't recall endorsing Moore, and I can't figure out why you brought him up.
My question is that does such a hash function live up to Shamir's and Rivest's claims?
.sig:
You'd be much better off asking a cryptography newsgroup/forum/mailing list than me -- I'm not a cryptographer. Use of prime factorization in hash generation in an earlier post of mine was an idea that I just pulled out of the air without no thought or references. It was not intended to be a serious suggestion -- I simply needed an example of a simple, obvious one-way operation that could be done using a processor.
As for the
Mole.
Student forum moderator.
I would have provided links, but for Slashdot's 160 character limitation.
Obviously, as has been pointed out by many, the Yugoslavia tournament dates way back to before the War on Terror -- on the other hand, it is only the post-9/11 extreme nationalism in the United States that would allow a country to have extradited and prosecute an elderly man who has been on the run for many years for playing a *chess game*, especially a man who was once lauded as a pillar against the "evil" Soviet Union.
The fact that the man is horribly disillusioned with the United States seems quite reasonable; he wanted to play chess, and was turned into a political tool, had his name illegally commercialized, was hunted by US agents, and had to live in exile due to playing a chess game. It seems quite reasonable to dislike a country that has done something like this to you.
One of the inventors at Microsoft appears to be this gentleman, who works on Apache and is a "founding member of the OpenSSL project". If an OpenSSL guy is unaware of sudo, we're living in Bizarro world.
But that's not how corporate research works. Nobody cares how good the patents you get are. Microsoft cross-licenses with all their competitors, anyway. Modern corporate researchers just produce legal fodder -- a slew of patents, which can be used to prevent new entrants from entering a field -- existing oligopolies are maintained by cross-licensing of patents.
Sir, your example does not shoot down the parent post.
The two referenced examples were Benjamin Franklin and Pastor Niemoller.
Bejamin Franklin lived in a situation where massive property damage had just been caused by lawbreaking -- theft and destruction of property in the Boston Tea Party, refusal to pay taxes, violence against troops (and killing of them). The crackdown on rights were justified by the British based on lawbreaking and deaths.
Pastor Neimoller lived in a situation where the Reichstag (basically, our Senate building) had just been burned down by what the government claimed were communist terrorists. The crackdown on rights as justified by the attack on the nation's government.
Traditionally, governments that have been allowed to remove civil rights for "emergency reasons" that stretch on indefinintely have not done very well.
Despite all of this, I am pulled out of every single line in every airport I ever go through and my bags are generally searched thoroughly if not emptied entirely. Why is that? I am a short white glasses wearing female computer technician.
There are relatively few jobs other than airport security screeners that have minimal requirements, have had to hire a ton of people extremely rapidly in a short period of time, and allow hirees to pat down choice females from a line.
She wrote programs. I'm not sure what other term you'd use for such a person.
For all the talk about the Hurd, RMS doesn't use the Hurd.
Back before Linux was unusable, Linus used Minix.
For the less of us, what methods do you use to enforce this? It seems to me if you have the code that generates the hash, you could reverse engineer it and generate collissions just as easy. Why not?
Understand that I am not a cryptographer, and not the best person to get an answer on this. Here's one link that might help.
Basically, I can give you an intuitive idea of why this is possible. At first blush, you look at any single operation that a computer can do, and say to yourself "It's easy to come up with a set of input parameters to that operation that yields the same output. Every hash I can do is made up of individual instructions. Given that, why don't I just reverse each step in order, until I have the original inputs that will solve my hashing algorithm for the desired output?"
For instance, adding two numbers A1 and B1 and taking the result C as output -- as "reversable for some value". I can easily choose a value A2, subtract it from C, and get another number B2 which again gives C as output.
A cryptographer would say "there are no 'one way' operations apparent to you".
Sometimes reversing a basic operation *can* be expensive. Prime factorizations are not, as far as I know, used in any hashing algorithms, but they are used in encryption, and prime factorization is an example of a one-way operation. Suppose I take in two numbers, with the constraint that the two are primes. Checking to see whether a number is prime is reasonably fast, with runtime order of something the log of the tested number to some constant power, so it isn't that hard to enforce this constraint. The output would be the two numbers multiplied together. Finding the two input prime numbers required to produce the output prime number, the reverse operation, takes *much* longer than the actual checking and multiplication involved in producing the output number.
There is probably a lot more involved in producing a good one-way hash -- but at least I can demonstrate one example of a one-way operation on a computer.
Medal of Honor is, from a technological standpoint, nothing that new. It's just quite polished, has high production values, and tons and tons of scripting.
Need For Speed Underground is another game in a long series (at least four titles, now).
To be fair, you are skipping over a few points -- just because something is a sequel does not mean that it is not original. Metroid Prime, at least, while it is just another first person shooter, did some reasonably unusual things for the genre. It's no Rez, but it's got more than the typical degree of evolution in a game (that being said, I think that it was a lousy game, but still more unique than the average game).
A lot of games that people play *years* after their release didn't necessarily sell well. This guy is giving a recipe for cult classics, and for the sort of thing that a game reviewer, weary of the "same game" over and over, would like. You're right that this is probably not the ideal thing to do for financial success. Among other things:
* A game reviewer probably views a franchise tie-in (such as a movie) as a bad thing, as it limits content, plot, development time, and has had a bad history. Traditionally, franchise games have sold well.
* A game reviewer puts more emphasis on new and unique gameplay. He's played all of the dozen FPSes released in the last twelve months. If I buy two games a year, however, I'm quite happy getting vanilla examples of a game, because all the new things are interesting.
* A game reviewer gets more out of homage to other games than a light gamer.
* A game reviewer is going to generally be more willing to learn rules (especially since he may already know the rules of a genre) than a light gamer. Things like tutorials, unless very clever and unusual, are unlikely to interest a game reviewer much, but may matter very much to someone who is not familiar with the latest-and-greatest in the genre.
* A game reviewer is generally going to be more tolerant of high hardware demands than a light gamer. Most people out there do not have high-end machines. This is generally not an issue for a game reviewer.
* A game reviewer is generally going to be more tolerant of patches than a light gamer. Most people out there do not want to screw around with seeing whether patches are coming out and running patches, if they even know what to do and how to do it.
Well, yes. It's pretty obvious that Microsoft is doing the Right Thing with SP2. The changes, in fact, are what we'd like to have every Linux distro doing.
The unreasonable and unwarranted criticism of Microsoft on every front regarding SP2 ("It's not secure", "It's not backwards compatible", "It's taking too long to come out", "It was released before it was ready") has nothing to do with the quality of SP2 (which, as far as I can tell, is pretty decent). Microsoft screwed over their customers and competitors for years, and produced a lot of dislike. Now, they're simply paying off, in installments, the debt in public relations that they incurred. Why do you think Microsoft gets bashed for every minor thing on Slashdot, no matter how trivial? It isn't because a bunch of techies woke up one day and said "I sure do hate that Microsoft -- I just can't stand their name!"
Kinda like an overjoyed astronomer that finds a comet heading into a collision course with Earth.
*I'd* be happy. Missing seeing that comet would definitely suck.
All they found here were two values C, D for which H(C) = H(D). Anyone who thinks this was suprising needs to take a look at the idea of a hash:
The existence of collisions is obvious. The point is that it should be so phenomenally difficult to find a collision that you can't ever come up with one in a sane amount of time.
If they could find two data values with less than, say, 80 bits of data that both hash to the same, then that's something, 'cause that could be someone's password.
That would be unlikely to be a big deal. For passwords, I can just brute force the password, maybe precompute a dictionary of password hashes.