It's happening already, I think, with turn-key solutions floating around featuring 20-35% accuracy. I don't have 100%, more like 80% or so, and I am a human.
OT, but I found a way to make RECAPTCHA entertaining. With two words given, I always just type one of the words, and put "fuck" for the other. The accuracy falls below 50%, but the giggles make it all worthwhile.
Do you understand what Akamai is doing? They are caching and mirroring, so they are not speeding up a few donors at the expense of everybody else. They are speeding up what their customers want, at their customers' expense, without slowing down other transactions, which is great.
Network neutrality is not about "free stuff" at all, it's about no discrimination based on source and destination. If a cartel of major ISPs is paid to promote YouTube, say, at the expense of everyone else's video site, small businesses everywhere will feel the sting. And the other big thing here is censorship. Without network neutrality, a Christian lobby, for example, may be able to block or throttle down A LOT of stuff. And, considering how much money they have, you can be sure that the network content will become more similar to the day-time cable.
Your point about wanting to access movies and music without paying for it is without merit. We are all paying for data transfer, and without network neutrality in place, even the free-as-in-freedom content which artists created with the intention of sharing freely will be marginalized, because it will compete with a handful of extremely well-funded commercial offerings.
A car analogy really works here, I think. The internet is kind of like the road system: it is designed from the ground up so that any host can communicate with any other host, as long as they pay for data transfer. Just like the roads are designed so that anyone in the USA can travel anywhere in the USA, as long as they have a car or can afford a bus. Imagine that almost all good roads in the USA are private and that there is no law which amounts to "road neutrality". The road barons would be able to isolate whole states and prevent the workforce from moving to a place with better employment opportunities. In this context, your opposition is similar to saying that we don't need road neutrality because some people would use it to drive to a titty bar. Who cares, there is much, much more at stake: our freedom to express ourselves, to educate ourselves, and our economic freedom.
There are already secure GPLed VOIP clients, several of them. They are all internet-only, afaik, and that's the way it should be, if you think about it for about 4 seconds. Let the copper and the cells die already: their architecture and/or protocols are vastly inferior to the internet's for every purpose imaginable.
There is already a "social networking app" that is infinitely more configurable than all the commercial ones put together, and has bullet-proof security. It's called Apache.
There is IM already, XMPP, which has great free clients and servers.
I will probably sound like a no-good elitist that I am, but lately I am becoming convinced that the main problem with the Free Software adoption is that most users are simply too passive or too inept when it comes to communicating with computers. They do not want to or are unable to take control solely due to their technical ineptitude. Many users treat computers as glorified TVs, or glorified filing cabinets, or glorified phones. They do not realize that personal computers are best employed as body-and-mind extensions, as tools so powerful, intelligent, and personal that one would be insane to allow some other party to read a single bit from one's RAM or to run a single instruction on one's CPU. Most people have that down with their thoughts: very few go around and spread true rumors about their personal lives and thoughts. For many, a torture would be needed before they divulge their secrets, and for some even that will fail.
But they don't treat their computers as parts of themselves, and they don't treat public terminals as persons. They prefer gesturing rather than talking (GUI vs. CLI), again, because they are just too lazy or too dumb to learn how to speak the language computers can understand. Of course they don't need free software: it has no intrinsic benefit for them. You can give them Ubuntu, and they will install Skype and Flash on it the very same day because they just don't want to care. They only switch to Free Software when their heads are on fire: when it becomes clear that a proprietary vendor completely shafted them by, say, locking in their data and then abandoning support. Or when they cannot afford the fees anymore. Or when the software just gets worse and worse every year, and one day the work which relies on it grinds to a halt. And right away they are faced with the fact that the Free Software is tailored to a person who cares about god damn control and ability to use the hardware and the software the way they want, which usually comes at the expense of users having to educate themselves about what a computer can and cannot do. And so they actually jump the ship at the first opportunity and leap back into the Big Brother's arms.
In light of the above, I can see only one effective way to bring the Free Software to the masses, and it is education.
The software itself, while already superb, can be improved, but that alone won't even begin to close the gap.
Suspicious of the alien's intentions, Lisa sneaks into the kitchen and finds a book titled How To Cook Humans. She takes the book and shows it to the aliens, who explain to her that part of the title was obscured by space dust, which they then blow away to reveal the title How To Cook For Humans. Lisa, skeptical at this, blows off more space dust, revealing the title to be How To Cook Forty Humans. The aliens blow off the last of the space dust, finally revealing the real title How To Cook For Forty Humans. ~ WIKI
No, now is the time to promote free software and free hardware, and teach people to use it. PGP is completely useless (worse that useless) if your OS is remote-controlled by someone else, especially since someone else is a US firm with a market position to loose. These clowns will be more than happy to fold over to the government's demands. They are kicking themselves as we speak for not being more invasive on your computer.
Yeah, it's easy to forget about AV vendors after switching to GNU/Linux. It's pretty funny how AV guys are turning into these sleazy protection racket outfits. People ask me sometimes for an advice on virus protection on Windoze, and I just cannot bring myself to endorse anything. Get rid of Explorer, Outlook, Office, anything by Adobe; prompt updates, regular backups, and then just pray. Or get Ubuntu.
IMHO, it could easily be industrial sabotage by a competitor of Siemens. Iran just got in the way. The linked articles indicate that the worm does not seem to be harmful at the moment, so, really, Siemens is worse off than Iran right now.
So in order to get your high-speed internet back, you have to go to court, and sue, and prove that you didn't break the law? Did it occur to you that it is impossible to prove that you didn't share files, unless the ISP in question imaged and backed up every transaction, which they almost certainly didn't?
Now you cannot do it, silly:) That's, like, literally, the only way they can catch these crooks: they wait for them to slip up and admit it. (If tapping a phone costs dozens of thousands, I cannot even imagine how much a computer forensics expedition would costs.) Someone who keeps their mouth shout probably got away with a heist like that every time.
Of course, if you gonna give out these sentences to people who never abused a child and were only found to have some pictures taken by some sick daddy 20 years ago and leaked to the internet, then you have to give harsher punishments to people who tried to frame. But this one Weiner going to jail (not even a prison, bro!) won't change the fact that it is remarkably easy to pull off this heist. Several seconds alone with your unlocked computer is enough time to put a back door from a USB, regardless of OS. I personally cannot feel happy about this ruling: even though this particular one is just (if correct), it also highlights the madness of persecuting thought-crimes.
Citizens own cats. The cats' interests are their owners' interests.
Corporations (sometimes) own wage slaves. The corporations' interests are their slaves' interests.
Your statement is just as inane, but you don't see it because you choose to ignore completely the fact that large corporations are super-organisms who have their own agendas.
It is clear from your post that there is no problem with RMS' argument: the problem is that people and firms are widely unaware of being shafted by proprietary software vendors. May be if you, me, and others here take this message out to the masses, something will change.
I don't think anyone has any issues with Stallman sharing his own work voluntarily
Actually, plenty of people are. If Stallman was to fix a bug in Windows 7 where it stops working when it cannot phone home, there would be helluva effort to prevent him from distributing the working code: all his own original work.
In this case, one side really wants to use the word "stealing" to be used, because of the emotional baggage of associated with it (it's wrong, it's bad, no one honest would do it,...). The other side wants to use the word "sharing" similarly (it's good, everyone is taught to share, no one is harmed,...).
We've all heard the arguments for why firing up a BT client and downloading a file is not "stealing". Will you give as a hint as to why doing the same is not "sharing"? What is it about letting other people to make copies of your files—"your" meaning, the files you have on your computer—what is it about making copies for free, in a non-commercial setting, that makes it unfit to be called "sharing"? Take BT as an example. Is giving voluntary? Yes. Are there strings attached to the exchange? No. From Wiktionary:
1. To give part of what one has to somebody else to use or consume.
2. To have in common.
The first meaning is for physical goods, the second one is for cultural ones. The second meaning does not apply to file-sharing? Ill-suited for it? Why?
Copying other people's stuff and giving it away isn't "sharing."
This is incredibly stupid. A digital file (which is just a large integer number) is not "other people's stuff", unless
you convince the courts that people should pay YOU for their privilege to help each other.
Just because this sharing is illegal, doesn't make it
any less of a "sharing". If I stole food from a supermarket and gave some to a hungry
child, would I be sharing? Not according to you, apparently, at least not if feeding
the hungry is illegal in my jurisdiction. If I take a useful program, fix bugs in it,
and give it to everyone for free, just like I got it for free, am I not sharing?
If copyright and patent law was to be abolished in a given country, would you consider
non-commercial file-copying sharing then?
Shouting, running, making a fool out of himself. I think if only he would do the sort of things he does without calling a ruckus, then people might take him more seriously.
May be he doesn't care about being taken seriously. May be he just wants people to be serious about defending their own right to free expression. And I am sorry for people who are turned away from his lucid arguments because they think that non-violent protests against economic oppression and political censorship are "extremism": can people be any more docile?
But if it's a one time pad, then it doesn't make any sense to ask for decryption key, right? The pad is the decryption key. To nab you, a court would have to assume that not giving a key to a one time pad is illegal somehow. Then everyone in possession of a one time pad would be a criminal. Do you think that would fly in USA, for one?
AES looks neat, but I decided to spend some time on this problem because I like how in my case, a successful attack would involve solving an np-complete problem in sub-exponential time. I wonder if that is true for AES...
I won't make a prediction about a proportion, but it seems to me that orphaned blocks of compressed files would seem pretty darn random, and almost everyone has those.
Also, in GNU/Linux at least, there is shred utility that does what it sounds like: overwrites files with patterns (optionally, with zeroes) before erasing them. May be it works on OS X too?
I've been working on this very problem for a while now. An easier version, even: how to encrypt a single file in a way that makes it indistinguishable from random data? The algorithm must allow for a short password (dozens of bytes), and should be able to encrypt very large files. Optimally, an attacker may see the algorithm and may suspect correctly what the plaintext is, but should still be unable to prove that the given cyphertext is the output of the algorithm. That is, the only way to "prove" that should be by a brute-force password search, whereas finding a working password of a few dozen bytes is proof enough. This is good enough because a brute-force search over 60^30 passwords is kind of slow.
I further simplified the problem by saying that the size of a file needs not to be hidden: it's a separate task, and a much easier one.
I have a reason to approach the problem this way. If I have on my computer a file named "one-time-pad.bin", and it looks like a one time pad, then it must be a one time pad. The very existence of an encrypted partition should be enough to convince anyone that there is encrypted data. If a multi-sheaf algorithm is used, then there is a reasonable suspicion that there are multiple sheafs. Either way, the owner seems to be hiding something. Burying data in JPG and similar tricks are also sketchy, as it is almost certainly possible to distinguish (statistically) a benign JPG from the one steganographically altered, although this can be avoided by hiding very little data in very large files. Here, at least, there is an expensive solution.
I can think of at least one other way to do it, here goes my original description on the internet. Say, we want to use passwords with length up to B bits and encrypt files with length up to M bits. Fix forever B random binary strings of length M each, call them N = {n_1, n_2,... , n_M}. The set of 2^B passwords is in a bijective correspondence with the set of subsets of N, for example a password like 110101... will select the subset {n_1, n_2, n_4, n_6,...}. Treat n_i in that subset as integers and add them. Threat the plaintext as an integer and add it to (or XOR with) the result. One can think of it as of constructing a one time pad (one of 2^B) and XORing with it. Even if the attacker knows n_i for each i, and the plaintext (without loss of generality, all zero), and the cyphertext, she still has to decompose the cyphertext as a sum of a subset of N, and even deciding whether or not it can be done is np-hard. The complexity will be exponential as long as both M and B are large, which they are in expected applications.
The nicest feature here is that with a non-trivial password, the cyphertext will look as random as they get! It will be a sum of carefully pre-selected random numbers, padded with the plaintext.
One obvious limitation is that each password can only be used once, since similar plaintexts will produce similar hypertexts, but that could be remedied. A bigger problem, IMHO, is that this algorithm requires B random binary strings of length M each to be built-in. Just to give you an idea, if you want to encrypt files of size up to 1 GiB with passwords of size up to 512 bits, then you need to keep around 512 GiB of pad. Either that, or be able to generate really really fast 512 random reals (random here meaning, the same every time, but completely unrelated), which is very sketchy: the reals could easily be so related that the subset sum will allow for a sub-exponential solution.
I would be very interested to hear from anyone about this idea.
I may have another way of solving the same hiding problem, and it has to do with a completely different, yet, IMHO, also very fascinating way of turning a short binary string into a very long and random-looking binary string in a one-way fashion. I decided that I won't implement the subset sum solution unless I am totally sure that I cannot find something more elegant, so feel free to steal my idea above and code it in.
Slashdot Mirror
It's happening already, I think, with turn-key solutions floating around featuring 20-35% accuracy. I don't have 100%, more like 80% or so, and I am a human.
OT, but I found a way to make RECAPTCHA entertaining. With two words given, I always just type one of the words, and put "fuck" for the other. The accuracy falls below 50%, but the giggles make it all worthwhile.
Do you understand what Akamai is doing? They are caching and mirroring, so they are not speeding up a few donors at the expense of everybody else. They are speeding up what their customers want, at their customers' expense, without slowing down other transactions, which is great.
(eval (car (setq gnu '(gnu is not unix))))
(gnu is not unix)
Network neutrality is not about "free stuff" at all, it's about no discrimination based on source and destination. If a cartel of major ISPs is paid to promote YouTube, say, at the expense of everyone else's video site, small businesses everywhere will feel the sting. And the other big thing here is censorship. Without network neutrality, a Christian lobby, for example, may be able to block or throttle down A LOT of stuff. And, considering how much money they have, you can be sure that the network content will become more similar to the day-time cable.
Your point about wanting to access movies and music without paying for it is without merit. We are all paying for data transfer, and without network neutrality in place, even the free-as-in-freedom content which artists created with the intention of sharing freely will be marginalized, because it will compete with a handful of extremely well-funded commercial offerings.
A car analogy really works here, I think. The internet is kind of like the road system: it is designed from the ground up so that any host can communicate with any other host, as long as they pay for data transfer. Just like the roads are designed so that anyone in the USA can travel anywhere in the USA, as long as they have a car or can afford a bus. Imagine that almost all good roads in the USA are private and that there is no law which amounts to "road neutrality". The road barons would be able to isolate whole states and prevent the workforce from moving to a place with better employment opportunities. In this context, your opposition is similar to saying that we don't need road neutrality because some people would use it to drive to a titty bar. Who cares, there is much, much more at stake: our freedom to express ourselves, to educate ourselves, and our economic freedom.
There are already secure GPLed VOIP clients, several of them. They are all internet-only, afaik, and that's the way it should be, if you think about it for about 4 seconds. Let the copper and the cells die already: their architecture and/or protocols are vastly inferior to the internet's for every purpose imaginable.
There is already a "social networking app" that is infinitely more configurable than all the commercial ones put together, and has bullet-proof security. It's called Apache.
There is IM already, XMPP, which has great free clients and servers.
I will probably sound like a no-good elitist that I am, but lately I am becoming convinced that the main problem with the Free Software adoption is that most users are simply too passive or too inept when it comes to communicating with computers. They do not want to or are unable to take control solely due to their technical ineptitude. Many users treat computers as glorified TVs, or glorified filing cabinets, or glorified phones. They do not realize that personal computers are best employed as body-and-mind extensions, as tools so powerful, intelligent, and personal that one would be insane to allow some other party to read a single bit from one's RAM or to run a single instruction on one's CPU. Most people have that down with their thoughts: very few go around and spread true rumors about their personal lives and thoughts. For many, a torture would be needed before they divulge their secrets, and for some even that will fail.
But they don't treat their computers as parts of themselves, and they don't treat public terminals as persons. They prefer gesturing rather than talking (GUI vs. CLI), again, because they are just too lazy or too dumb to learn how to speak the language computers can understand. Of course they don't need free software: it has no intrinsic benefit for them. You can give them Ubuntu, and they will install Skype and Flash on it the very same day because they just don't want to care. They only switch to Free Software when their heads are on fire: when it becomes clear that a proprietary vendor completely shafted them by, say, locking in their data and then abandoning support. Or when they cannot afford the fees anymore. Or when the software just gets worse and worse every year, and one day the work which relies on it grinds to a halt. And right away they are faced with the fact that the Free Software is tailored to a person who cares about god damn control and ability to use the hardware and the software the way they want, which usually comes at the expense of users having to educate themselves about what a computer can and cannot do. And so they actually jump the ship at the first opportunity and leap back into the Big Brother's arms.
In light of the above, I can see only one effective way to bring the Free Software to the masses, and it is education. The software itself, while already superb, can be improved, but that alone won't even begin to close the gap.
Not until they are friends on Friendster.
Suspicious of the alien's intentions, Lisa sneaks into the kitchen and finds a book titled How To Cook Humans. She takes the book and shows it to the aliens, who explain to her that part of the title was obscured by space dust, which they then blow away to reveal the title How To Cook For Humans. Lisa, skeptical at this, blows off more space dust, revealing the title to be How To Cook Forty Humans. The aliens blow off the last of the space dust, finally revealing the real title How To Cook For Forty Humans. ~ WIKI
No, now is the time to promote free software and free hardware, and teach people to use it. PGP is completely useless (worse that useless) if your OS is remote-controlled by someone else, especially since someone else is a US firm with a market position to loose. These clowns will be more than happy to fold over to the government's demands. They are kicking themselves as we speak for not being more invasive on your computer.
Yeah, it's easy to forget about AV vendors after switching to GNU/Linux. It's pretty funny how AV guys are turning into these sleazy protection racket outfits. People ask me sometimes for an advice on virus protection on Windoze, and I just cannot bring myself to endorse anything. Get rid of Explorer, Outlook, Office, anything by Adobe; prompt updates, regular backups, and then just pray. Or get Ubuntu.
IMHO, it could easily be industrial sabotage by a competitor of Siemens. Iran just got in the way. The linked articles indicate that the worm does not seem to be harmful at the moment, so, really, Siemens is worse off than Iran right now.
So in order to get your high-speed internet back, you have to go to court, and sue, and prove that you didn't break the law? Did it occur to you that it is impossible to prove that you didn't share files, unless the ISP in question imaged and backed up every transaction, which they almost certainly didn't?
And what do you do when they report you the third time, even you did not break any laws?
Now you cannot do it, silly :) That's, like, literally, the only way they can catch these crooks: they wait for them to slip up and admit it. (If tapping a phone costs dozens of thousands, I cannot even imagine how much a computer forensics expedition would costs.) Someone who keeps their mouth shout probably got away with a heist like that every time.
Of course, if you gonna give out these sentences to people who never abused a child and were only found to have some pictures taken by some sick daddy 20 years ago and leaked to the internet, then you have to give harsher punishments to people who tried to frame. But this one Weiner going to jail (not even a prison, bro!) won't change the fact that it is remarkably easy to pull off this heist. Several seconds alone with your unlocked computer is enough time to put a back door from a USB, regardless of OS. I personally cannot feel happy about this ruling: even though this particular one is just (if correct), it also highlights the madness of persecuting thought-crimes.
I'm tired of waiting for the new Fallout game that does not suck and blow at the same time.
Citizens own cats. The cats' interests are their owners' interests.
Corporations (sometimes) own wage slaves. The corporations' interests are their slaves' interests.
Your statement is just as inane, but you don't see it because you choose to ignore completely the fact that large corporations are super-organisms who have their own agendas.
It is clear from your post that there is no problem with RMS' argument: the problem is that people and firms are widely unaware of being shafted by proprietary software vendors. May be if you, me, and others here take this message out to the masses, something will change.
I don't think anyone has any issues with Stallman sharing his own work voluntarily
Actually, plenty of people are. If Stallman was to fix a bug in Windows 7 where it stops working when it cannot phone home, there would be helluva effort to prevent him from distributing the working code: all his own original work.
In this case, one side really wants to use the word "stealing" to be used, because of the emotional baggage of associated with it (it's wrong, it's bad, no one honest would do it, ...). The other side wants to use the word "sharing" similarly (it's good, everyone is taught to share, no one is harmed, ...).
We've all heard the arguments for why firing up a BT client and downloading a file is not "stealing". Will you give as a hint as to why doing the same is not "sharing"? What is it about letting other people to make copies of your files—"your" meaning, the files you have on your computer—what is it about making copies for free, in a non-commercial setting, that makes it unfit to be called "sharing"? Take BT as an example. Is giving voluntary? Yes. Are there strings attached to the exchange? No. From Wiktionary:
1. To give part of what one has to somebody else to use or consume.
2. To have in common.
The first meaning is for physical goods, the second one is for cultural ones. The second meaning does not apply to file-sharing? Ill-suited for it? Why?
Copying other people's stuff and giving it away isn't "sharing."
This is incredibly stupid. A digital file (which is just a large integer number) is not "other people's stuff", unless you convince the courts that people should pay YOU for their privilege to help each other. Just because this sharing is illegal, doesn't make it any less of a "sharing". If I stole food from a supermarket and gave some to a hungry child, would I be sharing? Not according to you, apparently, at least not if feeding the hungry is illegal in my jurisdiction. If I take a useful program, fix bugs in it, and give it to everyone for free, just like I got it for free, am I not sharing? If copyright and patent law was to be abolished in a given country, would you consider non-commercial file-copying sharing then?
Shouting, running, making a fool out of himself. I think if only he would do the sort of things he does without calling a ruckus, then people might take him more seriously.
May be he doesn't care about being taken seriously. May be he just wants people to be serious about defending their own right to free expression. And I am sorry for people who are turned away from his lucid arguments because they think that non-violent protests against economic oppression and political censorship are "extremism": can people be any more docile?
But if it's a one time pad, then it doesn't make any sense to ask for decryption key, right? The pad is the decryption key. To nab you, a court would have to assume that not giving a key to a one time pad is illegal somehow. Then everyone in possession of a one time pad would be a criminal. Do you think that would fly in USA, for one?
AES looks neat, but I decided to spend some time on this problem because I like how in my case, a successful attack would involve solving an np-complete problem in sub-exponential time. I wonder if that is true for AES...
I won't make a prediction about a proportion, but it seems to me that orphaned blocks of compressed files would seem pretty darn random, and almost everyone has those.
Also, in GNU/Linux at least, there is shred utility that does what it sounds like: overwrites files with patterns (optionally, with zeroes) before erasing them. May be it works on OS X too?
I've been working on this very problem for a while now. An easier version, even: how to encrypt a single file in a way that makes it indistinguishable from random data? The algorithm must allow for a short password (dozens of bytes), and should be able to encrypt very large files. Optimally, an attacker may see the algorithm and may suspect correctly what the plaintext is, but should still be unable to prove that the given cyphertext is the output of the algorithm. That is, the only way to "prove" that should be by a brute-force password search, whereas finding a working password of a few dozen bytes is proof enough. This is good enough because a brute-force search over 60^30 passwords is kind of slow.
I further simplified the problem by saying that the size of a file needs not to be hidden: it's a separate task, and a much easier one.
I have a reason to approach the problem this way. If I have on my computer a file named "one-time-pad.bin", and it looks like a one time pad, then it must be a one time pad. The very existence of an encrypted partition should be enough to convince anyone that there is encrypted data. If a multi-sheaf algorithm is used, then there is a reasonable suspicion that there are multiple sheafs. Either way, the owner seems to be hiding something. Burying data in JPG and similar tricks are also sketchy, as it is almost certainly possible to distinguish (statistically) a benign JPG from the one steganographically altered, although this can be avoided by hiding very little data in very large files. Here, at least, there is an expensive solution.
I can think of at least one other way to do it, here goes my original description on the internet. Say, we want to use passwords with length up to B bits and encrypt files with length up to M bits. Fix forever B random binary strings of length M each, call them N = {n_1, n_2, ... , n_M}. The set of 2^B passwords is in a bijective correspondence with the set of subsets of N, for example a password like 110101... will select the subset {n_1, n_2, n_4, n_6, ...}. Treat n_i in that subset as integers and add them. Threat the plaintext as an integer and add it to (or XOR with) the result. One can think of it as of constructing a one time pad (one of 2^B) and XORing with it. Even if the attacker knows n_i for each i, and the plaintext (without loss of generality, all zero), and the cyphertext, she still has to decompose the cyphertext as a sum of a subset of N, and even deciding whether or not it can be done is np-hard. The complexity will be exponential as long as both M and B are large, which they are in expected applications.
The nicest feature here is that with a non-trivial password, the cyphertext will look as random as they get! It will be a sum of carefully pre-selected random numbers, padded with the plaintext.
One obvious limitation is that each password can only be used once, since similar plaintexts will produce similar hypertexts, but that could be remedied. A bigger problem, IMHO, is that this algorithm requires B random binary strings of length M each to be built-in. Just to give you an idea, if you want to encrypt files of size up to 1 GiB with passwords of size up to 512 bits, then you need to keep around 512 GiB of pad. Either that, or be able to generate really really fast 512 random reals (random here meaning, the same every time, but completely unrelated), which is very sketchy: the reals could easily be so related that the subset sum will allow for a sub-exponential solution.
I would be very interested to hear from anyone about this idea.
I may have another way of solving the same hiding problem, and it has to do with a completely different, yet, IMHO, also very fascinating way of turning a short binary string into a very long and random-looking binary string in a one-way fashion. I decided that I won't implement the subset sum solution unless I am totally sure that I cannot find something more elegant, so feel free to steal my idea above and code it in.