I did say "alleged backdoor"... I didn't want to cause a panic.:)
I'm talking of the tampering done on the S-boxes by the NSA when IBM sent them over. Cryptanalysis shows that the NSA strenghtened aspects of it, while other aspects seemed purposefully weakened. I don't have the details... It's mentioned in Bruce Scheier's "Applied Cryptography".
Cryptanalysis has shown DES to be secure, but there remains the lingering doubt that the NSA tampered with it on purpose to facilitate their own brand of secret cryptanalysis algorithms. Hey, I'm sure DES has been cracked by the NSA a long time ago. It ain't for nothing that the AES is being selected.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Oh, and miss the golden opportunity of a story to put X-Files to shame? It's all really obvious to me.
JFK Jr. knew about it, and tried to counteract the NSA by flying away to Mexico in a plane. Now, the NSA were afraid, so they contacted Naval Intelligence, who downed JFK Jr.'s plane by using the HAARP project and a bit of plutonium from Cassini.
But fortunately, the aliens infiltrated Microsoft (not that it's hard) and they mind-controlled the programmer to put the REAL key value of NSA_KEY in place! And it's up to the Linux community to save the world and provide strong crypto to dolphins to they don't end up in the FBI's tuna salads.
It's not because it's false that it ain't fun.:)
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
I just love this. What Linux GUI's are working towards is a total compatibility between window managers.
Some at one point in the brilliant future in which Open Source rules totally, you'll have the choice of OS (Linux, Sun, BSD, etc.), the choice of GUI (KDE, Gnome, etc.) and the choice of winmanagers.
It sure beats trying to pass freedom as the ability to change fonts, colours and wallpaper!
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Regarding the NSA taking the "easy way in" as an explanation of why they need a backdoor to crack NT:
I think if I were both lazy and resourceful (I know, same thing) like the NSA is, I wouldn't put in a silly backdoor. Even if it's closed-source, it doesn't mean that you won't have tons of security consultants poking around the OS, and let's face it, Win98 source code was available in parts even before it came out. (Or so I remember from warez sites... Feel free to contradict me on this.)
What I'd do is, sit down with Microsoft security experts (tee hee... sorry, couldn't help it) and map out how their own security works. Then, instead of requiring a backdoor in the OS itself, make a small, portable tool that exploits a security hole so obscure that only by being NSA dudes and working with Microsoft can you find it.
And if at some point along the line your security hole is made public, then it's just a silly security hole, not a NSA mole. So you sit down again with MS security (hah hah hah! oops) and find another one.
Am I missing something here? A direct backdoor still sounds like a silly idea to me.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
You know, at first I was outraged and shocked at this article. But now I can't help but smirk.
No one figured out that backdoor until Microsoft forgot to remove the explicit name NSA_Key in NT 4 SP 5? What kind of joke is this? Or is it a programmer at Microsoft that's covertly working for the Open Source movement?:)
I also find it pretty pathetic that the NSA would need to contact Microsoft and implement a backdoor to access NT. I sure know most crackers I know don't need a friggin' insider at MS to crack NT until it weeps.
So I see three possibilities about this:
It's a hoax of some sort, or a private joke by the NT programmers. It sure is working.
It's a decoy. The NSA has a backdoor somewhere else, much less obvious, and this is meant to make us believe the NSA backdoor has been found. I mean, the alleged backdoor in DES is much more complex and subtle than multiplying my a fixed key when encrypting.
It's true, and the NSA are truly pathetic, and their cryptanalysis talents are severely, severely overrated.
I find the third option to be the most amusing.:)
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
...is that every time some lame M$ site is cracked, people start thinking none of the Internet is secure. When a virus strikes some Windoze 95 workstation, they figure no OS is secure. When their precious NT workstation bombs, they think it's to be expected from any networked workstation.
Hotmail being cracked is not the end of Web-based mail. It's just a sign that M$ isn't doing its homework when it comes to security, and that people should withdraw their support for companies that do not provide secure storage and operation, if it's an important concern of theirs.
It certainly is one of mine, and all it means is that I use encrypted Webmail for less significant yet private issues, and PGP when I want real privacy. And it's why I do not have nor ever had a M$-owned Hotmail account.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
this is different (so far) in that it was two totally seperate areas of study that found the same thing, not some freaks in the desert.
To me, the difference is that someone has made the claim that the Universe is radically different from what we know, based on a sample of data that was not peer-validated. If you remember the data on cold fusion, it made perfect sense if you adjusted the y-axis, and didn't lead to such mind-boggling conclusions.
I'm willing to bet this is exactly the same. Inventive scientists deduce important rules based on experimental data. Rigorous scientists double-check their data before deducing important rules. What we need is inventive, rigorous scientists.
Slashdotia
pronounced Slash-dosh-ya?:)
Sounds good to me.:) As we all know, Slashdotia is the Capital of Slashdom.:)
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Since when is Chaos Theory ridiculed by the scientific community because it's a little wild? And how in hell could the popularity of Jurassic Park ruin the work of Chaos Theoricists?
They're trying to sweeten up the deal by placing the guys behind this as innovators who took on a controversial path. That's just downright silly. I took Chaos Theory grad. courses in college, and let me tell you it's so widely-used that it's like saying electricity is a controversial theory. Let me also tell you that what they're trying to say has absolutely nothing to do with Chaos Theory.
I mean! I hope they never make a movie starring Jeff Goldblum about Newton's life, because we might end up refuting Classical Mechanics (even at non-relativistic speeds) tomorrow, wouldn't we? And those movies 'IQ' and 'Young Einstein' really ruined Relativity for me. Drat.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
The problem here is how you define and measure a rare occurence. Let me give you an example.
Let's say one night you watch the results of the lottery on TV, and the numbers '1-2-3-4-5-6' come up. Is that a rare occurence? No. That sequence is as likely to occur than your birthday and your girlfriend's birthday combined into esoteric equations.
Example number 2: I'm with this girl one night. I say my astrological sign is Scorpio. "Really!" she exclaims, "I'm Scorpio too!" What are the probabilities of that happening? 1/144? No, just 1/12. At one point (and cryptos will be familiar with this) if you add people, it becomes a rare event that you do not find people with the same sign.
All that graph is showing me is that the guys (I'm hesitating to call them scientists - I mean, they published in "serious papers"? Come on. Names, please) looked purposefully for freak occurences, discarding other "rare" occurences that were perfectly normal. That's why the left side of the graph is wider.
Thing is, the Gaussian curve doesn't come out of nowhere; it's not arbitrary. For instance, in statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics, you get bell curve distributions precisely because of the distribution of particle states.
All these guys are saying is, "rare events are not as rare as we think they are". That's not because the bell curve is wrong, it's because we seem to forget how huge the Earth provides a sample.
What are the odds of being struck by lightning twice? One in a billion? We're 6 billion on this Earth. It's bound to happen to someone. Same thing with winning the grand prize lottery once or twice.
And, again, same thing with floods or tornadoes. Yes, in themselves they're rare. When taken alone they seem improbable. But on the scale of the planet, that's the kind of thing that happens.
Alright, anyone got another article on cold fusion lying around?
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
The thing that was wrong with the world of Gattaca was not that people were better as a whole, but rather that it led to a discrimination of "lesser" individuals. That's the same kind of mentality that breeds racism. The story of Gattaca could have been non-scifi, and taking place either in the USA in the 50's.
It says that no matter what your apparent potential is, it is not your potential that matters but what you do with it.
And I couldn't care to live in a world, however enhanced, where this fact isn't recognised.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Hmm, that raises an interesting question, but I'm afraid we'll be straying into political affiliations with this.
Does, say, heart transplants provide an unfair advantage to the rich? Perhaps it does, because it lets them live longer (and reproduce and have more children and make more money while alive, blah blah Darwin blah.) College? Yep, that's definitely an advantage too.
Would the solution be to ban it for everyone because some people cannot afford it? Your point is, I think, very valid on this: no, of course not. We shouldn't deprive someone of something because others cannot afford it. I don't want anyone to take away my ISP access because the guys on the streets cannot access it, and I don't demand that Pentium III's be banned because my current computer can't run the next Quake.:)
I think the moral imperative is, naturally, for the Government to help those without funds to access such things as medical care and college, but that's a liberal position and the more conservative-minded of you will disagree. The more radical ones will call me a filthy Red.:)
In the end, augmentation of intelligence, if practical, would be considered an enhancement of the kind of plastic surgery, breast implants (I know, depressing) and laser surgery. The argument would naturally be that the ability to learn is enough to get one through life except in the most drastic cases (such as a certified idiot at less than 70 IQ.)
So, the Government will likely sponsor idiots to get an IQ boost, and the rich will shell out tons of cash to get their learning abilities enhanced and get their otherwise moronic jock boy through Princeton with A grades.
And while this endures, the common-day idiots, those who can tie their shoelaces but are still looking for the any key, will endure. Pretty grim, really.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Doh, yes. Deep Blue Sea = sharks, Lake Placid = alligator. You can certainly understand how, beyond the choice of species, the difference was tenuous to make at best.:)
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
They're called religious objections. Something about believing man to be the "perfect" creation of a god or gods, and therefore altering this creation is a bad thing in the eyes of those god(s). Go ask a religious fundamentalist if this is a good thing, and they'll probably tell you it's not.
I don't call this ethical objections, I call this religious hypocrisy. Getting a heart transplant is altering God's creation. Getting a prosthetics is altering God's creation. And I altered God's creation when I got a tattoo.
So I couldn't care less about religious fundamentalists with close-minded objections.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
There's a condition called hypermnesia that sounds similar to this... Hypermnesiacs have a memory to put a herd of psychic elephants to shame. They can read the phonebook once, and they'll remember every phone number.
Why is that bad, you ask? Well, because they can't turn this thing off. If you read from a book, they're assaulted with images and associations; it's like a sensory overflow. It's very unpleasant and can lead to some serious psychological troubles.
I wonder if that's what the mice are suffering from. Remember that mice's sensory maps are much less defined than us; what I mean is, read a chapter of Moby Dick to a mouse and she'll remember some talking for 15 minutes. Read it to a human, and he'll remember the references, the tone, the depth of the voice, the placement of words, etc.
So perhaps it's harmless on mice, but on men, I bet it could be a real pain in the brain.
So no thanks; I don't want this.:)
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Sounds a lot like a bad Stephen King movie I remember...
Another case of reality catching up to science-fiction. I love it; it makes me feel like we really are living in the Year 2000! (Well, we will be in 4 months.)
What exactly are the ethical oppositions to this? Except from bad sci-fi warnings, I fail to see how it would be wrong to augment the intelligence of the human race as a whole. Of course, learning ability has nothing to do with social or emotional intelligence, so it might just turn all of mankind into socially-misadapted geeks.
Of course, a real problem arises if the procedure is not dispensed to the whole of mankind, but to some sort of ethnic or social elite. We don't need the rich to get more intelligent as a whole: the beauty of intelligence right now is that it comes up in unexpected places, and gives a real edge to anyone to change their destiny.
Other than that, I don't have a problem with intelligence augmentation. We seem to think of intelligence as a God-given gift, whereas, say, an athletic build is just a lot of work. By this I mean people think you can work up to a strong built, but you have to be "gifted" to display intelligence. I say, if we can artificially augment strength, why not augment intelligence.
What would that imply? Less stupid lusers, more Linux-savvy... I bet Microsoft are shitting their pants.:):)
Hey, I'd love to see the next Kasparov disqualified for unlawful IQ boosting.:)
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Hey, the Barbie PC ain't that ugly... I mean, I'd rather die than be caught using it, but for a young girl, it looks sombre enough not to make you go into diabetic shock every time you see it. It's an OK computer design with flower prints on it. It's not like adolescent girls won't cover it with stickers anyway.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Slashdot Mirror
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
No, but there were as much of an eyesore!
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
I wasn't that fast on the uptake, but I did inquire if he had gotten past the advanced chapter on "Hello, world!" programming...
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
And such a beauty would surely become my "Open Source" of beer!
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
At least now when I surf the web, I do it for work. :) What would you rather get paid for? Watch electroscope readings or read Slashdot?
People are turning to CS because it's cooler, it's hip, the pay's good, the market is booming.
On the other end, it also means we end up with lusers as fellow programmers. A Visual Basic developper once asked me what a DLL was. Eek!
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
I'm talking of the tampering done on the S-boxes by the NSA when IBM sent them over. Cryptanalysis shows that the NSA strenghtened aspects of it, while other aspects seemed purposefully weakened. I don't have the details... It's mentioned in Bruce Scheier's "Applied Cryptography".
Cryptanalysis has shown DES to be secure, but there remains the lingering doubt that the NSA tampered with it on purpose to facilitate their own brand of secret cryptanalysis algorithms. Hey, I'm sure DES has been cracked by the NSA a long time ago. It ain't for nothing that the AES is being selected.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Oh, and miss the golden opportunity of a story to put X-Files to shame? It's all really obvious to me.
JFK Jr. knew about it, and tried to counteract the NSA by flying away to Mexico in a plane. Now, the NSA were afraid, so they contacted Naval Intelligence, who downed JFK Jr.'s plane by using the HAARP project and a bit of plutonium from Cassini.
But fortunately, the aliens infiltrated Microsoft (not that it's hard) and they mind-controlled the programmer to put the REAL key value of NSA_KEY in place! And it's up to the Linux community to save the world and provide strong crypto to dolphins to they don't end up in the FBI's tuna salads.
It's not because it's false that it ain't fun. :)
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Some at one point in the brilliant future in which Open Source rules totally, you'll have the choice of OS (Linux, Sun, BSD, etc.), the choice of GUI (KDE, Gnome, etc.) and the choice of winmanagers.
It sure beats trying to pass freedom as the ability to change fonts, colours and wallpaper!
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
I think if I were both lazy and resourceful (I know, same thing) like the NSA is, I wouldn't put in a silly backdoor. Even if it's closed-source, it doesn't mean that you won't have tons of security consultants poking around the OS, and let's face it, Win98 source code was available in parts even before it came out. (Or so I remember from warez sites... Feel free to contradict me on this.)
What I'd do is, sit down with Microsoft security experts (tee hee... sorry, couldn't help it) and map out how their own security works. Then, instead of requiring a backdoor in the OS itself, make a small, portable tool that exploits a security hole so obscure that only by being NSA dudes and working with Microsoft can you find it.
And if at some point along the line your security hole is made public, then it's just a silly security hole, not a NSA mole. So you sit down again with MS security (hah hah hah! oops) and find another one.
Am I missing something here? A direct backdoor still sounds like a silly idea to me.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
No one figured out that backdoor until Microsoft forgot to remove the explicit name NSA_Key in NT 4 SP 5? What kind of joke is this? Or is it a programmer at Microsoft that's covertly working for the Open Source movement? :)
I also find it pretty pathetic that the NSA would need to contact Microsoft and implement a backdoor to access NT. I sure know most crackers I know don't need a friggin' insider at MS to crack NT until it weeps.
So I see three possibilities about this:
It's a hoax of some sort, or a private joke by the NT programmers. It sure is working.
It's a decoy. The NSA has a backdoor somewhere else, much less obvious, and this is meant to make us believe the NSA backdoor has been found. I mean, the alleged backdoor in DES is much more complex and subtle than multiplying my a fixed key when encrypting.
It's true, and the NSA are truly pathetic, and their cryptanalysis talents are severely, severely overrated.
I find the third option to be the most amusing. :)
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Hotmail being cracked is not the end of Web-based mail. It's just a sign that M$ isn't doing its homework when it comes to security, and that people should withdraw their support for companies that do not provide secure storage and operation, if it's an important concern of theirs.
It certainly is one of mine, and all it means is that I use encrypted Webmail for less significant yet private issues, and PGP when I want real privacy. And it's why I do not have nor ever had a M$-owned Hotmail account.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
To me, the difference is that someone has made the claim that the Universe is radically different from what we know, based on a sample of data that was not peer-validated. If you remember the data on cold fusion, it made perfect sense if you adjusted the y-axis, and didn't lead to such mind-boggling conclusions.
I'm willing to bet this is exactly the same. Inventive scientists deduce important rules based on experimental data. Rigorous scientists double-check their data before deducing important rules. What we need is inventive, rigorous scientists.
Sounds good to me. :) As we all know, Slashdotia is the Capital of Slashdom. :)
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
They're trying to sweeten up the deal by placing the guys behind this as innovators who took on a controversial path. That's just downright silly. I took Chaos Theory grad. courses in college, and let me tell you it's so widely-used that it's like saying electricity is a controversial theory. Let me also tell you that what they're trying to say has absolutely nothing to do with Chaos Theory.
I mean! I hope they never make a movie starring Jeff Goldblum about Newton's life, because we might end up refuting Classical Mechanics (even at non-relativistic speeds) tomorrow, wouldn't we? And those movies 'IQ' and 'Young Einstein' really ruined Relativity for me. Drat.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
The problem here is how you define and measure a rare occurence. Let me give you an example.
Let's say one night you watch the results of the lottery on TV, and the numbers '1-2-3-4-5-6' come up. Is that a rare occurence? No. That sequence is as likely to occur than your birthday and your girlfriend's birthday combined into esoteric equations.
Example number 2: I'm with this girl one night. I say my astrological sign is Scorpio. "Really!" she exclaims, "I'm Scorpio too!" What are the probabilities of that happening? 1/144? No, just 1/12. At one point (and cryptos will be familiar with this) if you add people, it becomes a rare event that you do not find people with the same sign.
All that graph is showing me is that the guys (I'm hesitating to call them scientists - I mean, they published in "serious papers"? Come on. Names, please) looked purposefully for freak occurences, discarding other "rare" occurences that were perfectly normal. That's why the left side of the graph is wider.
Thing is, the Gaussian curve doesn't come out of nowhere; it's not arbitrary. For instance, in statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics, you get bell curve distributions precisely because of the distribution of particle states.
All these guys are saying is, "rare events are not as rare as we think they are". That's not because the bell curve is wrong, it's because we seem to forget how huge the Earth provides a sample.
What are the odds of being struck by lightning twice? One in a billion? We're 6 billion on this Earth. It's bound to happen to someone. Same thing with winning the grand prize lottery once or twice.
And, again, same thing with floods or tornadoes. Yes, in themselves they're rare. When taken alone they seem improbable. But on the scale of the planet, that's the kind of thing that happens.
Alright, anyone got another article on cold fusion lying around?
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
It says that no matter what your apparent potential is, it is not your potential that matters but what you do with it.
And I couldn't care to live in a world, however enhanced, where this fact isn't recognised.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Does, say, heart transplants provide an unfair advantage to the rich? Perhaps it does, because it lets them live longer (and reproduce and have more children and make more money while alive, blah blah Darwin blah.) College? Yep, that's definitely an advantage too.
Would the solution be to ban it for everyone because some people cannot afford it? Your point is, I think, very valid on this: no, of course not. We shouldn't deprive someone of something because others cannot afford it. I don't want anyone to take away my ISP access because the guys on the streets cannot access it, and I don't demand that Pentium III's be banned because my current computer can't run the next Quake. :)
I think the moral imperative is, naturally, for the Government to help those without funds to access such things as medical care and college, but that's a liberal position and the more conservative-minded of you will disagree. The more radical ones will call me a filthy Red. :)
In the end, augmentation of intelligence, if practical, would be considered an enhancement of the kind of plastic surgery, breast implants (I know, depressing) and laser surgery. The argument would naturally be that the ability to learn is enough to get one through life except in the most drastic cases (such as a certified idiot at less than 70 IQ.)
So, the Government will likely sponsor idiots to get an IQ boost, and the rich will shell out tons of cash to get their learning abilities enhanced and get their otherwise moronic jock boy through Princeton with A grades.
And while this endures, the common-day idiots, those who can tie their shoelaces but are still looking for the any key, will endure. Pretty grim, really.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
I don't call this ethical objections, I call this religious hypocrisy. Getting a heart transplant is altering God's creation. Getting a prosthetics is altering God's creation. And I altered God's creation when I got a tattoo.
So I couldn't care less about religious fundamentalists with close-minded objections.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Why is that bad, you ask? Well, because they can't turn this thing off. If you read from a book, they're assaulted with images and associations; it's like a sensory overflow. It's very unpleasant and can lead to some serious psychological troubles.
I wonder if that's what the mice are suffering from. Remember that mice's sensory maps are much less defined than us; what I mean is, read a chapter of Moby Dick to a mouse and she'll remember some talking for 15 minutes. Read it to a human, and he'll remember the references, the tone, the depth of the voice, the placement of words, etc.
So perhaps it's harmless on mice, but on men, I bet it could be a real pain in the brain.
So no thanks; I don't want this. :)
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
I wonder if the real-life mice will suffer the same fate... Now that would be a surprise on the scale of Dolly aging as fast as her clone mother!
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
"A planet where APES evolved from MEN??"
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Another case of reality catching up to science-fiction. I love it; it makes me feel like we really are living in the Year 2000! (Well, we will be in 4 months.)
What exactly are the ethical oppositions to this? Except from bad sci-fi warnings, I fail to see how it would be wrong to augment the intelligence of the human race as a whole. Of course, learning ability has nothing to do with social or emotional intelligence, so it might just turn all of mankind into socially-misadapted geeks.
Of course, a real problem arises if the procedure is not dispensed to the whole of mankind, but to some sort of ethnic or social elite. We don't need the rich to get more intelligent as a whole: the beauty of intelligence right now is that it comes up in unexpected places, and gives a real edge to anyone to change their destiny.
Other than that, I don't have a problem with intelligence augmentation. We seem to think of intelligence as a God-given gift, whereas, say, an athletic build is just a lot of work. By this I mean people think you can work up to a strong built, but you have to be "gifted" to display intelligence. I say, if we can artificially augment strength, why not augment intelligence.
What would that imply? Less stupid lusers, more Linux-savvy... I bet Microsoft are shitting their pants. :):)
Hey, I'd love to see the next Kasparov disqualified for unlawful IQ boosting. :)
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."