If you can write well, you can bullshit through almost anything. It really does help at work.
I can write well, and that ability helped me to bullshit my way through English class (e.g. writing essays about books I never read), but it never helped me BS my way through linear algebra or electronic devices.
In the workplace, this ability actually hinders me, as I compulsively spend time editing technical documents for grammar when no one else cares.
Rolling Stone is NOT an independant media company. See media conglomerate. And they won't cover you unless you're up and coming AND on a major label.
That's not strictly true. What about Ani Difranco, Queen of Indie? Has she been in Rolling Stone? Let's check... yup:
http://members.tripod.com/~Dykeland/rswomyn.html
Of course, that's not the reason I replied.
You can't get on the radio because it's all owned by Clear Channel, hence why you hear the same 15 songs being played on every radio station. Even classic rock has sold out so you only hear like 5 bands on classic rock stations nowadays. Zeppelin, Aerosmith, AC/DC and two others.
I have listened to classic rock radio regularly in several (Canadian) cities and I never observed that. I don't know if they are owned by Clear Channel, but we have media conglomerates too. One of those stations plays "classic rock of the past and present", which I think is a crock of shit, but they all play way more than "5 bands" and "15 songs".
From what I have read about police states (and learned from talking to people who grew up in Communist countries), you *do* feel a lot safer walking down the street at night knowing that big brother may be watching.
Maybe they should ask Academics who are less invested in and benifited from the current patent process... At least academics have obligations other than making fat sacks of cash for stock holders.
On the other hand, many academics don't have any obligation other than to seek out fame and advance their own career. They don't have to please the stockholders because their salaries are paid by the taxpayers and by poor, starving students.
For some reason,/. is very sympathetic to academia. I've never really figured out why.
Okay, is it just me but when I highlight the address bar in Firefox and pause for about 1 second, some stupid Mozilla menu pops up in the bottom right portion of my screen and then it usually opens a new e-mail. It is completely puzzling to me.
Logical and coherent Cut&Paste support is one of the best things about Windows and one of the worst things about Linux. If you want to know what needs to be improved about Linux before we can start teaching it to soccer moms, that would be a good start.
Take Google, perhaps Jack and Jill don't go up the hill, they go to Google: JJW!TGGL9834. Or on Hotmail, perhaps Hotmail went up the hill: HMW!TH9834. Mix and match for various web sites.
The key to this is that it thwarts automated password harvesting, which is pretty much all you need. If you're ultra-paraniod (e.g. if you think the government is out to get you) then you might need more. Because this technique can potentially be cracked fairly easily by hand.
Say that an unscrupulous website owner does a manual analysis of your password. Maybe he owns more than one site so he can compare and contrast. Let's say he already knows your passwords to Hotmail and Google. Guessing your variant for any other site shouldn't be that difficult.
Simple, a badly maintained car can cause death. A badly maintained Xbox will cost you $99 for a new one. Anyone else spotting the difference here?
All I know is that I read on/. that software should be open because software is like a car. Now I am reading that cars should be "open" because cars are like software. So which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Why, no, I haven't. OTOH, it doesn't look like much more than a "404 Page Not Found".
The problem is not the bookmark. Apparently, this site just doesn't allow deep linking.
Go to the home page and follow the links to Consumer & Media Resources -> Factsheets & Resources -> Debunking Urban Legends About So-Called "Frivolous Lawsuits" and the Civil Justice System -> Click Here For the Truth About the McDonaild's Coffee Case.
Instead, I propose that we create a set of trading cards with a piece of bubble gum inside it. These would be something like the cards that suck.com made a few years ago, only with people that weren't all 15-minute famers.
Umm.. yeah. I remember that I read that suck.com founder's book on day trading. Does it strike anyone as weird that this website is up, frozen like a time capsule at Dec 21, 2000? Who's still paying for the site hosting?
And thus my statement "As long as the best way to recreate the pad is by randomly guessing until you happen to hit on it, then the pad is secure"
In other words, as long as there is no way to determine the OTP than to try every single possible N-bit pad, then it is impossible to determine which one is correct.
Well, I happen to disagree that those two statements are equivalent. The first one sounds like the pad can be cracked by brute force. As for the other part, let me say that there are secure algorithms that have been proven to be secure. I'm not an expert; I don't know precisely what that means. I do know that it means that someone has taken a mathematical look at it and determined that certain assumptions on which the crypto system relies on are actually true.
Yes, I'm aware of these security proofs. You can prove things about any cryptosystem, not just those with "reversible keystreams". Of course this stuff is fairly subjective. Generally the axioms for the proof are more specific than you the examples you gave. E.g. "Assume that P is an ideal random number generator."
But I am a bit puzzled by your terminology. I have never heard of a "reversible keystream". A google search for "reversible keystream" returns no hits (although there are 153 instances of those 2 words occuring in the same document.
If the pad is random then it is secure. As long as the best way to recreate the pad is by randomly guessing until you happen to hit on it, then the pad is secure.
Arrgh... The same thing explained wrong twice in the same thread. The perfect/provable security of a one time pad is that you *can't* keep guessing until you happen to hit on it. Since for a given N-bit ciphertext, there exists some N-bit key that maps to *any* N-bit plaintext, there is no way to distinguish a correct answer from an incorrect one. Even better, there are encryption algorithms that ARE provably correct. We don't yet have a general way to prove any crypto system secure or not, but for special cases we can do it (the most important criteria is that the keystream is reversible in the implementation; that is, that, given the entire state of the system one can go forward or backward in the keystream arbitrarily)
That was just one of those typical comments that fits the mould of an insightful comment, but really isn't. See below.
I hope you've misquoted him. Personally, I know of no provably secure means of encryption and decryption [de-encryption].
And now you're misinterpreting him as well. "Secure", "provably secure", and "perfectly secure" are three different things and *YOU* seem to have trouble with the difference. The OP's prof is talking good sense. When it comes to cryptography, companies should stick with using the best common practice rather than trying to invent their own. It's the exact same advice you would get from Schneier. I know that it is widely believed [although I don't know whether an infrastructure is in place within which it could be proved] that one time pads are secure
One-time pads *are* provably perfectly secure (in a cryptographic sense), but they are irrelevant in almost every practical application of cryptography. And yet every two bit amateur cryptographer on/. (i.e. someone who has read an edition of Crypto Gram) will mention them at every possible opportunity. This may appear to prove their knowledge, but it actually demonstrates their ignorance. As for the standard encryption and authentication techniques, to the best of my knowledge, it is still an open question as to whether there are holes in Rivest-Shamir-Adleman
See this is where you really pissed me off and goaded me into replying. 99% of the people reading your comment already know what RSA is. 90% of them probably know that it stands for Rivest-Shamir-Adleman, but no one actually calls it that except for pretentious wankers who want to appear smart.
I always called it Back Bacon. (Living in Ottawa) Thats because you live in CANADA
We don't call it AMERICAN FOOTBALL in this country, even though thats what the rest of the world calls it...
Yeah, but in Canada we just say "football" to refer to either Canadian football or American football. (And then disambiguate by naming the league.)
The thing that puzzles us is that this so called "Canadian bacon" is not something that a Canadian would normally eat, except maybe on a pizza (in which case we call it Canadian bacon as well). What we call bacon is the same thing you call bacon. Tom Green once appeared on the Tonight show drunk and covered in bacon to protest this fact.
if I leave my back door unlocked at night, I am to blame if someone breaks in. I say that is bullshit. I say I have a gun, and if someone breaks in, they are getting shot.
You have a gun in the house and you still leave your back door unlocked? Think of the children!
Slashdot Mirror
Do they mean 28 actual spyware programs? That seems pretty hard to swallow. Or do they mean 28 tracking cookies (which are OS independent).
-a
If you can write well, you can bullshit through almost anything. It really does help at work.
I can write well, and that ability helped me to bullshit my way through English class (e.g. writing essays about books I never read), but it never helped me BS my way through linear algebra or electronic devices.
In the workplace, this ability actually hinders me, as I compulsively spend time editing technical documents for grammar when no one else cares.
-a
Not bad for 24hrs work!!! :-)
Except that a good software developer can make $1000 for 24 hours of work (spread out over 3 days).
-a
Ah leaners. We were into multi-level leaners. We put them in elevators and sent them to floors of rival houses!
But for an elevator leaner, how do you get the door to close? (Or do you remain in the elevator?)
-a
Rolling Stone is NOT an independant media company. See media conglomerate. And they won't cover you unless you're up and coming AND on a major label.
l
That's not strictly true. What about Ani Difranco, Queen of Indie? Has she been in Rolling Stone? Let's check... yup:
http://members.tripod.com/~Dykeland/rswomyn.htm
Of course, that's not the reason I replied.
You can't get on the radio because it's all owned by Clear Channel, hence why you hear the same 15 songs being played on every radio station. Even classic rock has sold out so you only hear like 5 bands on classic rock stations nowadays. Zeppelin, Aerosmith, AC/DC and two others.
I have listened to classic rock radio regularly in several (Canadian) cities and I never observed that. I don't know if they are owned by Clear Channel, but we have media conglomerates too. One of those stations plays "classic rock of the past and present", which I think is a crock of shit, but they all play way more than "5 bands" and "15 songs".
-a
From what I have read about police states (and learned from talking to people who grew up in Communist countries), you *do* feel a lot safer walking down the street at night knowing that big brother may be watching.
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There has been cases in the UK where people have been found guily of GBH (wounding a person) when the act was 100% consenting
In the case of consenting GBH, who pays the medical bills?
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Why (#include "NumYearsAdminingBoxes.h")? That doesn't make sense. It should be just NUMYEARSADMININGBOXES or $NUMYEARSADMININGBOXES.
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Maybe they should ask Academics who are less invested in and benifited from the current patent process... At least academics have obligations other than making fat sacks of cash for stock holders.
/. is very sympathetic to academia. I've never really figured out why.
On the other hand, many academics don't have any obligation other than to seek out fame and advance their own career. They don't have to please the stockholders because their salaries are paid by the taxpayers and by poor, starving students.
For some reason,
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What annoys me the most is when copying/pasteing URL's. I'll highlight© a url somewhere then I go and paste it into firefox. Out of habbit I'll go and highlight the current URL and control+v what I assume I'm pasteing... and end up with the same URL that I started with.
Okay, is it just me but when I highlight the address bar in Firefox and pause for about 1 second, some stupid Mozilla menu pops up in the bottom right portion of my screen and then it usually opens a new e-mail. It is completely puzzling to me.
Logical and coherent Cut&Paste support is one of the best things about Windows and one of the worst things about Linux. If you want to know what needs to be improved about Linux before we can start teaching it to soccer moms, that would be a good start.
-a
Take Google, perhaps Jack and Jill don't go up the hill, they go to Google: JJW!TGGL9834. Or on Hotmail, perhaps Hotmail went up the hill: HMW!TH9834. Mix and match for various web sites.
The key to this is that it thwarts automated password harvesting, which is pretty much all you need. If you're ultra-paraniod (e.g. if you think the government is out to get you) then you might need more. Because this technique can potentially be cracked fairly easily by hand.
Say that an unscrupulous website owner does a manual analysis of your password. Maybe he owns more than one site so he can compare and contrast. Let's say he already knows your passwords to Hotmail and Google. Guessing your variant for any other site shouldn't be that difficult.
-a
Simple, a badly maintained car can cause death. A badly maintained Xbox will cost you $99 for a new one. Anyone else spotting the difference here?
/. that software should be open because software is like a car. Now I am reading that cars should be "open" because cars are like software. So which came first, the chicken or the egg?
All I know is that I read on
-a
Why, no, I haven't. OTOH, it doesn't look like much more than a "404 Page Not Found".
The problem is not the bookmark. Apparently, this site just doesn't allow deep linking.
Go to the home page and follow the links to Consumer & Media Resources -> Factsheets & Resources -> Debunking Urban Legends About So-Called "Frivolous Lawsuits" and the Civil Justice System -> Click Here For the Truth About the McDonaild's Coffee Case.
-a
My favorite "unbelievable but true" negligence lawsuit is this one:
Man sues bar after slipping on residue from friend's pork-based shoes.
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Have you read this article?
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Any idea of whether they will try to compress the whole story into one book or will they make multiple movies?
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Instead, I propose that we create a set of trading cards with a piece of bubble gum inside it. These would be something like the cards that suck.com made a few years ago, only with people that weren't all 15-minute famers.
Umm.. yeah. I remember that I read that suck.com founder's book on day trading. Does it strike anyone as weird that this website is up, frozen like a time capsule at Dec 21, 2000? Who's still paying for the site hosting?
-a
F-iay ou-yay an-cay ead-ray his-tay, ou-yay ust-jay roke-bay he-tay DMCA. (c) 2004, All Rights Reserved.
I just broke the CDM? Huh?
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Cops are "people in general."
Don't be ridiculous. Cops have to pass a screening exam, and they undergo special training. Cops are a non-representative sample of all people.
(Which is not to say that cops are perfect or anything.)
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First, the premise that security is no more than avoiding lawsuits for copyright infringement.
Yeah... and the fact that this premise was copied verbatim from the article and also included in the slashdot summary.
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And thus my statement "As long as the best way to recreate the pad is by randomly guessing until you happen to hit on it, then the pad is secure"
In other words, as long as there is no way to determine the OTP than to try every single possible N-bit pad, then it is impossible to determine which one is correct.
Well, I happen to disagree that those two statements are equivalent. The first one sounds like the pad can be cracked by brute force.
As for the other part, let me say that there are secure algorithms that have been proven to be secure. I'm not an expert; I don't know precisely what that means. I do know that it means that someone has taken a mathematical look at it and determined that certain assumptions on which the crypto system relies on are actually true.
Yes, I'm aware of these security proofs. You can prove things about any cryptosystem, not just those with "reversible keystreams". Of course this stuff is fairly subjective. Generally the axioms for the proof are more specific than you the examples you gave. E.g. "Assume that P is an ideal random number generator."
But I am a bit puzzled by your terminology. I have never heard of a "reversible keystream". A google search for "reversible keystream" returns no hits (although there are 153 instances of those 2 words occuring in the same document.
-a
If the pad is random then it is secure. As long as the best way to recreate the pad is by randomly guessing until you happen to hit on it, then the pad is secure.
Arrgh... The same thing explained wrong twice in the same thread. The perfect/provable security of a one time pad is that you *can't* keep guessing until you happen to hit on it. Since for a given N-bit ciphertext, there exists some N-bit key that maps to *any* N-bit plaintext, there is no way to distinguish a correct answer from an incorrect one.
Even better, there are encryption algorithms that ARE provably correct. We don't yet have a general way to prove any crypto system secure or not, but for special cases we can do it (the most important criteria is that the keystream is reversible in the implementation; that is, that, given the entire state of the system one can go forward or backward in the keystream arbitrarily)
I don't even know what that means!
-a
That was just one of those typical comments that fits the mould of an insightful comment, but really isn't. See below.
/. (i.e. someone who has read an edition of Crypto Gram) will mention them at every possible opportunity. This may appear to prove their knowledge, but it actually demonstrates their ignorance.
I hope you've misquoted him. Personally, I know of no provably secure means of encryption and decryption [de-encryption].
And now you're misinterpreting him as well. "Secure", "provably secure", and "perfectly secure" are three different things and *YOU* seem to have trouble with the difference. The OP's prof is talking good sense. When it comes to cryptography, companies should stick with using the best common practice rather than trying to invent their own. It's the exact same advice you would get from Schneier.
I know that it is widely believed [although I don't know whether an infrastructure is in place within which it could be proved] that one time pads are secure
One-time pads *are* provably perfectly secure (in a cryptographic sense), but they are irrelevant in almost every practical application of cryptography. And yet every two bit amateur cryptographer on
As for the standard encryption and authentication techniques, to the best of my knowledge, it is still an open question as to whether there are holes in Rivest-Shamir-Adleman
See this is where you really pissed me off and goaded me into replying. 99% of the people reading your comment already know what RSA is. 90% of them probably know that it stands for Rivest-Shamir-Adleman, but no one actually calls it that except for pretentious wankers who want to appear smart.
-a
I always called it Back Bacon. (Living in Ottawa)
Thats because you live in CANADA
We don't call it AMERICAN FOOTBALL in this country, even though thats what the rest of the world calls it...
Yeah, but in Canada we just say "football" to refer to either Canadian football or American football. (And then disambiguate by naming the league.)
The thing that puzzles us is that this so called "Canadian bacon" is not something that a Canadian would normally eat, except maybe on a pizza (in which case we call it Canadian bacon as well). What we call bacon is the same thing you call bacon. Tom Green once appeared on the Tonight show drunk and covered in bacon to protest this fact.
-a
if I leave my back door unlocked at night, I am to blame if someone breaks in. I say that is bullshit. I say I have a gun, and if someone breaks in, they are getting shot.
You have a gun in the house and you still leave your back door unlocked? Think of the children!
-a