The actual electronics of a ti-89 will fit perfectly well in a ti-83+ case (at least this worked with the old black models, I don't know about the new translucent ones). You have to re-learn what some of the keys are, since the labels will be off, but overall, it's an easy way to sneak the most powerful calculator available into standardized tests that ban it. It's not too difficult to write an assembler program that emulates the ti-83 home screen on the ti-89, if you are extra paranoid. I wonder if I could profitably sell a couple of these cheater calculators on ebay?
I know learning on your own gets you more hacker cred, but a class in electronics might be of real help. Oscilloscopes (especially digital ones), signal generators, various meters, myriad small components, microcontroler test boards, simulation software, and more all cost lots of money. A community college can often give you access to all these in addition to what is hopefully useful instruction. Try to talk to your professor and explain the background you have in digital technology, and try to test/qualify out of any introductory courses that simple explain binary/hex/octal and boolean logic on the digital side, or simply do basic Ohm's law/network theory type stuff on the analog side.
If you want to go through the effort to get good randomness, why not use a method that is fairly simple and proven secure under some testing? This looks like an easy apparatus to make that also could be pretty secure. http://www.willware.net:8080/hw-rng.html/
There are schematics for lots of other HRNGs on the web.
On the other hand, your choice of a random data source might not matter much at all. Although I'm sure none of this is proven in the formal sense of the word, I strongly suspect that any source of entropy that has some original indeturminability (due to true randomness in the physical world*, complexity of the data's origin, or lack of a human means to measure the source of the data's origin**) is as good a source as any other. Computers can extract entropy from a mix of ordered and disordered data. The data compression WinZIP and bzip2 do is a good example of this. Therefore, I suspect that the security of an RNG rests less or the inherent entropy of the source then on the quality of the algorithm used to amass usable random numbers from the source data.
*if that exists at all
**think Heisenberg uncertainty principle
My life is easy My life ain't hard I spend all day in my fucking back yard I ain't go not money and I don't care My parents let me use their credit cards I Ain't got nowhere to go so I'm movin on the street see people say i got no ambition But I least i give a shit about the stuff i eat yea i care about nutrition Tried to get a job at the retail store, but I could not stand the competion so I spend all my time at hanging out at the shore, giving myself a skin conditon I Ain't got nowhere to go so im movin on my feet People say I got no ambition Well at least i give a shit about the stuff I eat Yea i care about nutrition Yea i guess i get upset when i see on the tv all the people in this world that are starving Well there is nothing in this world that can come and bother me when i smell the turkey that is carving I am starving!! Moses I'm starving! My folks say I gotta get myself a job and they ain't gonna support me All I am to them is just a lazy slob why is it that they did not abort me? whoo! I guess I must hang out on broad and south living by my intuition well at least I give a shit what i put into my mouth yea i care about nutrition Nutrition is good for me --atom and his package
You "don't think there's much evidence" of what? I'd PERSONALLY rather be bribed (a couple of clean young attractive bisexual girls willing to do anything, a few million in cash, and maybe some land out west.........please) then be put in a concentration camp. However, massive corruption can be as bad for the economy and society as a whole as a military dictatorship.
What happens to a society when the moneyed interests have a controling influence in everything? The Government. The Media. The Schools. NPR had an exellent segment yesterday on Peru's National Intelligence leader durring the Fujimori regime. The jist of it was that he was able to run a de-facto authoritarian country, not through physical coersion, but through bribing everyone. Even if the RIAA and MPAA has no army, their wealthy legal department and overall financial influence could be enough to silence just about anyone important the world over.
Google for free ssh connections, and chain a few of them together just to be sure. I run a free shell service myself (but its currently down for upgrading).
Everyone benefits from portability. As someone who has run several Linux and BSD distributions, Solaris, IRIX, OSX, and HP-UX, and seen more packages become available for all platforms, I definitely think that the more software that works across multiple *nixes, the more people will use *nix instead of Windows. Getting the latest OSS packages the originally ran on GNU/Linux or BSD ported to proprietary Unix also helps keep these older platforms afloat in a rapidly changing IT world.
What's really sad is how many admins don't change the IOS "enable" level account from its default of "cisco". If we cared about the security of large IP networks, we would really be working on and using openbgpd anyways.
Packing all this circuitry will cost more in heat and fabrication costs then conventional cpus. SPARC and MIPS CPUs get more flops, mips, and overall thoroughput per watt and per millions of transistors on a die. Maybe we will see a resurgence of eligent RISC designs as dual/quad/oct core chips become more previlent.
I guess I wasn't clear enough in my description of the situation. I didn't do anything to the school computers. I set up the proxy at my OWN HOUSE! Durring the weeks that I was banned from the network, I only TOUCHED a school computer (and didn't touch anything else on the network: ie switches, hubs, cables, etc) once. I entered file:// into a browser to get a directory listing. I was expelled for talking to other students about the existance of the proxy, not for causing any damage to the school network.
"Who gives a flying fuck what you appreciate? You have to play by their rules. Welcome to life."
Maybe no one gives a fuck what I think....(although I do get some responce on slashdot). I, however, give a fuck about my generation's understanding of the world. I don't want my peers voting if the only political news they get is censored. I don't want them as my manager, attorney, or legislator if they don't understand how the most important communications medium of our time, the internet, works. Ignorance and obedience leads to totalitarianism. I don't have to play by their petty rules if they don't play by the rules of the constitution (Tinker v. Des Moins establishes that I have free speech in school). Sure, they have the power to kick me out...but every student has the power to refuse to even go to school*, much less submit to the curriculum. If everyone just used the power they have to the max, we would live in a nightmare of realpolitic, one that would quickly descend into war.
*Maybe they not only have the power not to go, but the right. Doesn't the Thirteenth Amendment state that:
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
Isn't being forced into a room, each weekday, for indoctronation and physical coersion (random drug searches, solitary confinement in detention, etc) a type of involintary servatude? You can argue that parochial or private school exists as an alternative, but not all communities have access to these and homeschooling is just not economically viable for most parents.
Expecting you email address to not be public is as stupid as expecting your real address not to be public. Anyone in your real community could probably find out your address, phone number, and the school you attended using no more tools/knowledge then a half an hour of time, your name, and a phone book. Why should you expect MORE pricacy from an online community?!?! I agree that individual mails are more polite on mailing lists then massive TO: blocks, but the whole idea that your email address is private is just ignorant and leads to the SPAM problem we have now. Because any idiot can put shit in your in mailbox, we need more authentication for actually accepting that mail then just a single public MAIL_ADDRESS string. The ideal system IMHO would be a mail client that would only accept email signed with your public key. It's still something you can distribute publically....but only you can read messages people send to you. Since people could sign messages with thier private keys, you also eliminate the problem with fake headers and spoofed mail. Plus, spammers just don't have the processing power to PGP each message they send.
As a former phreaker kiddie, http://angelfire.com/linux/the1 I know how trivial it is to "tap" or disable someone's phone with physical access to the outside of their home or the TNI in their neighborhood. This is not a major threat, because someone whould have to directly be targeting your phone to 0wn it...and if you knew people (non-government) were after your phone conversations, you can put a lock on the grey customer access box on your house, and ask your CO to secure your TNI. Perhaps someone could theoretically compromise the CO's switching equiptment, but that required either good social engneering or real leet skills. But your phone is just your phone, nothing else, so attacks are limited.
VOIP is actually more physically secure then PSTN. You can't just hook a speaker up to a DSL line and hear the conversation on it. The problem is, your computer, and every router between you and your VOIP provider, is a general purpose device. Other people and services have access to it for all kinds of legitimate reasons; each of these provides places where people/programs can input data that can potentially directly effect your voice communications or get privilage escilation on the device and indirectly effect it. ANY security person knows to be wary of input! And think of all the ways of getting input to (and theoretically compromising) a PC. What we need is a dedicated physical console for VOIP (a small linksys network device running OpenBSD or Linux and asterix sounds good). The actual VOIP data should be sent through an SSH tunnel or some kind of VPN.
As an Eagle Scout who earned the "Computers" merit badge, I'm glad the Boy Scouts of America hasn't gotten this bad yet...However, the american computers merit badge isn't much better. It's quite outdated. The book pictures a 5 1/4-inch floppys and dot matrix printers as modern hardware. It also makes no refrence to GPL software including GNU/Linux. It implies software piracy is wrong but does not mention freedom and shareing as important values. Hopefully progress can be made. The free software movement is reaching out to scouting.
Greg Graffin (of Bad Religion fame) has been working on a project to survey academic opinion on biological origins. You can check out some of the process here:
I know this is OT...hope I have the kerma to burn.
I am intrested in HP 712 systems. I have a 712/60 and would like to play with some other similar systems. They are inexpensive, small, low power, and quiet and seam to run Linux and HPUX both well (and I would like to try out the openbsd and NeXTStep ports).
Contact me at the_one@ameritech.net or AIM: Da1the0ne
Not only is quantum cryptography not not a code or traditional cryptographic system, it is not exactly a perfectly "secure transmission medium" as some/.ers have suggested. It is a method of interception detection. It is a HARDWARE system that uses entanglement or the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to send photons in such a way that the communication system itself can always detect eavesdropping (and logically would cease transmission if interception is detected). It is not untapable....but any taping would do little good since it would be noticed.
Slashdot Mirror
The actual electronics of a ti-89 will fit perfectly well in a ti-83+ case (at least this worked with the old black models, I don't know about the new translucent ones). You have to re-learn what some of the keys are, since the labels will be off, but overall, it's an easy way to sneak the most powerful calculator available into standardized tests that ban it. It's not too difficult to write an assembler program that emulates the ti-83 home screen on the ti-89, if you are extra paranoid. I wonder if I could profitably sell a couple of these cheater calculators on ebay?
I know learning on your own gets you more hacker cred, but a class in electronics might be of real help. Oscilloscopes (especially digital ones), signal generators, various meters, myriad small components, microcontroler test boards, simulation software, and more all cost lots of money. A community college can often give you access to all these in addition to what is hopefully useful instruction. Try to talk to your professor and explain the background you have in digital technology, and try to test/qualify out of any introductory courses that simple explain binary/hex/octal and boolean logic on the digital side, or simply do basic Ohm's law/network theory type stuff on the analog side.
apt-get update; apt-get upgrade
(On my SPARC, MIPS, PA-RISC, and x86 machines) For portability and package management, nothing beats debian.
http://www.willware.net:8080/hw-rng.html/
There are schematics for lots of other HRNGs on the web.
On the other hand, your choice of a random data source might not matter much at all. Although I'm sure none of this is proven in the formal sense of the word, I strongly suspect that any source of entropy that has some original indeturminability (due to true randomness in the physical world*, complexity of the data's origin, or lack of a human means to measure the source of the data's origin**) is as good a source as any other. Computers can extract entropy from a mix of ordered and disordered data. The data compression WinZIP and bzip2 do is a good example of this. Therefore, I suspect that the security of an RNG rests less or the inherent entropy of the source then on the quality of the algorithm used to amass usable random numbers from the source data.
*if that exists at all
**think Heisenberg uncertainty principle
My life is easy
My life ain't hard
I spend all day in my fucking back yard
I ain't go not money and I don't care
My parents let me use their credit cards
I Ain't got nowhere to go so I'm movin on the street
see people say i got no ambition
But I least i give a shit about the stuff i eat
yea i care about nutrition
Tried to get a job at the retail store, but I could not stand the competion
so I spend all my time at hanging out at the shore, giving myself a skin conditon
I Ain't got nowhere to go so im movin on my feet
People say I got no ambition
Well at least i give a shit about the stuff I eat
Yea i care about nutrition
Yea i guess i get upset when i see on the tv all the people in this world that are starving
Well there is nothing in this world that can come and bother me when i smell the turkey that is carving
I am starving!! Moses I'm starving!
My folks say I gotta get myself a job and they ain't gonna support me
All I am to them is just a lazy slob why is it that they did not abort me? whoo!
I guess I must hang out on broad and south
living by my intuition
well at least I give a shit what i put into my mouth
yea i care about nutrition
Nutrition is good for me
--atom and his package
This sort of bullshit would never happen if teen agers could vote.
You "don't think there's much evidence" of what? I'd PERSONALLY rather be bribed (a couple of clean young attractive bisexual girls willing to do anything, a few million in cash, and maybe some land out west.........please) then be put in a concentration camp. However, massive corruption can be as bad for the economy and society as a whole as a military dictatorship.
What happens to a society when the moneyed interests have a controling influence in everything? The Government. The Media. The Schools. NPR had an exellent segment yesterday on Peru's National Intelligence leader durring the Fujimori regime. The jist of it was that he was able to run a de-facto authoritarian country, not through physical coersion, but through bribing everyone. Even if the RIAA and MPAA has no army, their wealthy legal department and overall financial influence could be enough to silence just about anyone important the world over.
For that price I'd rather get a used onyx.
Google for free ssh connections, and chain a few of them together just to be sure. I run a free shell service myself (but its currently down for upgrading).
Everyone benefits from portability. As someone who has run several Linux and BSD distributions, Solaris, IRIX, OSX, and HP-UX, and seen more packages become available for all platforms, I definitely think that the more software that works across multiple *nixes, the more people will use *nix instead of Windows. Getting the latest OSS packages the originally ran on GNU/Linux or BSD ported to proprietary Unix also helps keep these older platforms afloat in a rapidly changing IT world.
http://www.openbgpd.org/
Packing all this circuitry will cost more in heat and fabrication costs then conventional cpus. SPARC and MIPS CPUs get more flops, mips, and overall thoroughput per watt and per millions of transistors on a die. Maybe we will see a resurgence of eligent RISC designs as dual/quad/oct core chips become more previlent.
http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch05s02.html
I guess I wasn't clear enough in my description of the situation. I didn't do anything to the school computers. I set up the proxy at my OWN HOUSE! Durring the weeks that I was banned from the network, I only TOUCHED a school computer (and didn't touch anything else on the network: ie switches, hubs, cables, etc) once. I entered file:// into a browser to get a directory listing. I was expelled for talking to other students about the existance of the proxy, not for causing any damage to the school network.
"Who gives a flying fuck what you appreciate? You have to play by their rules. Welcome to life."
Maybe no one gives a fuck what I think....(although I do get some responce on slashdot). I, however, give a fuck about my generation's understanding of the world. I don't want my peers voting if the only political news they get is censored. I don't want them as my manager, attorney, or legislator if they don't understand how the most important communications medium of our time, the internet, works. Ignorance and obedience leads to totalitarianism. I don't have to play by their petty rules if they don't play by the rules of the constitution (Tinker v. Des Moins establishes that I have free speech in school). Sure, they have the power to kick me out...but every student has the power to refuse to even go to school*, much less submit to the curriculum. If everyone just used the power they have to the max, we would live in a nightmare of realpolitic, one that would quickly descend into war.
*Maybe they not only have the power not to go, but the right. Doesn't the Thirteenth Amendment state that:
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
Isn't being forced into a room, each weekday, for indoctronation and physical coersion (random drug searches, solitary confinement in detention, etc) a type of involintary servatude? You can argue that parochial or private school exists as an alternative, but not all communities have access to these and homeschooling is just not economically viable for most parents.
(What happened to me)
http://www.textfiles.com/uploads/incident.txt
http://www.teamquest.com/resources/gunther/ldavg1. shtml
http://the1.no-ip.com/~the1/johnbench.txt
You can download the john the ripper source code here:
http://www.openwall.com//john/
and then build it and run your own tests.
Expecting you email address to not be public is as stupid as expecting your real address not to be public. Anyone in your real community could probably find out your address, phone number, and the school you attended using no more tools/knowledge then a half an hour of time, your name, and a phone book. Why should you expect MORE pricacy from an online community?!?! I agree that individual mails are more polite on mailing lists then massive TO: blocks, but the whole idea that your email address is private is just ignorant and leads to the SPAM problem we have now. Because any idiot can put shit in your in mailbox, we need more authentication for actually accepting that mail then just a single public MAIL_ADDRESS string. The ideal system IMHO would be a mail client that would only accept email signed with your public key. It's still something you can distribute publically....but only you can read messages people send to you. Since people could sign messages with thier private keys, you also eliminate the problem with fake headers and spoofed mail. Plus, spammers just don't have the processing power to PGP each message they send.
VOIP is actually more physically secure then PSTN. You can't just hook a speaker up to a DSL line and hear the conversation on it. The problem is, your computer, and every router between you and your VOIP provider, is a general purpose device. Other people and services have access to it for all kinds of legitimate reasons; each of these provides places where people/programs can input data that can potentially directly effect your voice communications or get privilage escilation on the device and indirectly effect it. ANY security person knows to be wary of input! And think of all the ways of getting input to (and theoretically compromising) a PC. What we need is a dedicated physical console for VOIP (a small linksys network device running OpenBSD or Linux and asterix sounds good). The actual VOIP data should be sent through an SSH tunnel or some kind of VPN.
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7813/
The BSA needs to respond.
http://www.cornellevolutionproject.org/
I have a copy of the dissertation itself...I might scan it and post it in the name of free exchange ideas, although it would be somewhat dishonnest.
I know this is OT...hope I have the kerma to burn.
I am intrested in HP 712 systems. I have a 712/60 and would like to play with some other similar systems. They are inexpensive, small, low power, and quiet and seam to run Linux and HPUX both well (and I would like to try out the openbsd and NeXTStep ports).
Contact me at the_one@ameritech.net or AIM: Da1the0ne
Not only is quantum cryptography not not a code or traditional cryptographic system, it is not exactly a perfectly "secure transmission medium" as some /.ers have suggested. It is a method of interception detection. It is a HARDWARE system that uses entanglement or the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to send photons in such a way that the communication system itself can always detect eavesdropping (and logically would cease transmission if interception is detected). It is not untapable....but any taping would do little good since it would be noticed.
See
http://www.stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html
http://www.phrack.org/show.php?p=22&a=4