This is true, but you had to go somewhere to obtain them.
I very fondly remember my trips to the public library with Mum (a lot of the time I would bring back these excellent Usborne programming books).
But you had a 3 book limit (and Mum was usually kind enough to let me get something on her card as well). I'd go through that very quickly. When the library is a 40-minute round trip on foot (and you're not allowed to ride on main roads on your bike by your parents), that's a major investment of time. Faced with that, the kids of today (and despite things being much safer... they're allowed out on their own much less..) are going to plump for instant gratification every time - visit the App Store for a new pesterware game, or YouTube.
Yeah, it cost £400, which is £1,400 adjusted for inflation.
The "inexpensive" version (the Acorn Electron) still cost £200. My grandparents chipped in to help my parents buy me one.
In real terms, the Raspberry Pi (which is a fair-ish comparison - not as much I/O, but still doesn't have it's own screen, like the BBC) costs less than £10 adjusted to 1981.
Price is not the issue. People found the money back then. Computing hardware is incredibly cheap now. You can get a full laptop with screen, for a small fraction of what the BBC cost.
The issue is the wealth of distractions available to youth BECAUSE computer hardware is now incredibly cheap and ubiquitous.
The reason that kids of my age were "into computers" and we had a "great generation" of bedroom programmers who subsequently became tech workers was because simple, programmable computers were one of the few forms of entertainment available to the kids who didn't want to go out and kick a ball around or ride their bike.
This was an era when
* Things were more expensive (the toys cost.. about what they do, in numbers, these days. Only inflation means that £30 is not even 10 pints of beer for dad these days when it was more like 60 pints of beer back then.) A £200 home computer was a MAJOR expense rather than an impulse buy. * There was an hour of kids TV on weekdays
And of course
* NO INTERNET - no personal portable devices of bottomless instant gratification
I saw a great article that explained that the no.1 quality a programmer needs is persistence - in the face of ridiculous odds of getting even simple things to work.
Back then you persevered with things because the only other thing to do was go and watch Coronation Street with mother, or re-read one of the few books you could afford this month. Even deciding to start playing a game wasn't exactly an impulse choice because to load it took about 5 minutes (from audio cassette tape).
Producing more simple, programmable computers these days is missing the point, although they are greatly appreciated by folks from that great generation of bedroom programmers who like a new toy to tinker with.
What's probably needed is better software. Better like A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer better.
My phone has a battery that runs out in a day (or three, if I'm very careful not to use it).
My watch battery has been going strong for over four years. Last week I thought it had expired ; it had just popped out of the contacts. Still going strong.
Given the enormous number of times I remove my phone from my pocket just to look at the time, lock it, and return it, having the watch for days when I'm travelling on a schedule makes the money I spent on it worth it. I don't have any overhead charging it, syncing it, etc, and it's just there, on my wrist, telling the time.
I don't wear it the rest of the time, because the strap catches on the edge of things while I'm typing.
If they actually managed to put up a proper border control, people might have to pay their gardener / maid / pickers a decent wage....
It must be hard being a right-wing politician. On one hand, wanting "American jobs for Americans!". On the other hand, not wanting to actually have to pay for them.
They wouldn't need a warrant canary - they are in Denmark and not subject to the force of a National Security Letter.
But as others have pointed out, if they come out and say their SIMs are compromised, the consumer outcry will cost them many millions. They have 2 billion units in the wild.
"Corporate responsibility" (to the shareholders...) dictates that they can't admit that, even if it's true.
They sell the SIM in the expectation that you'll spend money on service. It doesn't imply that the cost of the SIM is less than $1. The dollar is likely just something to incentivize the shop to sell them.
My provider will send you a package of multiple SIM cards to give out to people, for free. Doesn't imply that they have a zero cost.
The cost of antibiotics is where it is, because the first ones were developed on a socialist basis.
Penicillin production was boosted tremendously by the Second World War ; a serious effort was made to find a way to mass produce it cheaply so that it could save the lives of war wounded. There was no requirement to put it through an expensive double-blind clinical trial.
This established a low cost for antibiotic drugs, which meant that subsequent drugs also had to have similar prices.
The return on investment for society in general on these drugs is enormous. Alas, big pharma isn't interested in the benefit to society because of the way it's funded.
The return on investment for the pharmaceutical company these days would be small in comparison to a new cancer drug, but new cancer drugs typically only have a very small niche in which they can be applied. Antibiotics would have a large niche (particularly safe ones that kill MRSA), but entering the market would require the full double blind RCT and lots of paperwork. It just wouldn't be profitable enough for the taste of the pharmacy company, even if the benefits would be incalculable.
All in all, this is a strong argument to have a nationalised (or even a global-level multi-state owned) pharmaceutical company. Which would never be supported by capitalist governments, because of their incentive structure (politicians get into power on the back of corporate contributions, and thus will tend not to support actions that could benefit the whole of humanity without maximising corporate profits).
Agreed. The CLI of gpg is horrible. There are some semi-acceptible GUI variants, not least Enigmail, and a good UI is is definitely going to be required if you are going to get general acceptance.
But the main reasons it continues to not get used are
0) Math* is hard! 1) The rise of webmail 2) Inverse network effects
* encryption being a subset of math.
0) It's hard to explain to people that they need encryption, how it works, what it is. People think email is secure! The "envelope" iconography is very misleading - email is more like a postcard, delivered by a random selection of disreputable postmen.
1) Webmail makes it much harder to do encrypted mail because to make it secure you'd have to install browser plugins. None of the webmail providers want to make one, because it will destroy their revenue stream of monetizing the analysis of your mail traffic.
2) If you want to actually use (G)PG(P) your recipient also has to grok it, install software to use it, and you have to exchange keys. This is a massive hurdle to overcome for all but the most dedicated cryptonerds. Until there is a majority of people who want to use encrypted mail, that will carry on being the case.
There are projects attempting to overcome some of these hurdles ; you have the likes of keybase.io that takes some of the sting out of key exchange (and verification).
But!
Until encryption comes with the communications software you are using out of the box, is enabled by default, interoperates with everything properly, and forces you to configure it to even use it, the vast mass people won't use it. And this is well known by the SIGINT agencies who view people actually using encryption AT ALL as a red flag that they should look closer at.
My ex-wife is a paediatrician. She ought to know better. But she has a skewed perception of risk, because she deals with the tragic cases all day long.
The same burblings emerged from our Prime Minister a few weeks ago.
From him, it was potentially forgivable as the technically ignorant ramblings of a politican trying to score some election points.
From the Director of the NSA.... he knows exactly what he's asking for. Compulsory key escrow.
They tried this already with Clipper. They were unanimously told where to shove it. Are we really going to have to fight this battle every 20 years?
Maybe he's just acting out all petulant because their biggest hack, stealing the keys from Gemalto, has come to light and they aren't going to be able to pull that one again in a hurry.
Fascism is the natural end state of capitalism; the concentration of power eventually means that the state and the corporation merge and things are done for the benefit of the corporation.
You can't have unregulated capitalism without it devolving into fascism. I think the UK and the US are already there - the essential dishonesty of our leaders, who publicly claim to want to do the best for us, then turn around and do the best for their corporate masters. The careful creation of a rhetoric of "them and us" to justify military action which just takes what they have and has us foot the bill (and much of it goes to private contractors). The brutal destruction of our public welfare systems to clear the way for much more profitable and expensive corporate systems.
Without regulation, how does this go down? Really, the only difference would be that you'd be cowed by the private armies of the corporations, rather than the force deployed by government on their behalf. Rich men act to protect what is theirs. They fear being bereft of it. The only way people lack fear is if they feel in control, and when your interests are so large, that needs a lot of control.
"Crypto" is also a terrible misnomer for cryptographically secured currencies:-)
They aren't hidden. They are public. BitCoin only works when the entire transaction ledger is available to all it's users.
In contrast, banks keep their ledger as private as possible. Historically this stems from the fact that you had to keep it secure - or people would just alter it. Then the secrecy became something that people relied on and almost more important than the security.
More like the capitalists don't dare let them succeed. It would show the world that there was another way, and demands to go that way would escalate in other states.
A cryptocurrency would be a bold step ; placing control of the money under the government, or the people, instead of a private bank.
The real problem is "Klepto" currency - the fiat currency that's thought up out of nothing. Yes, it provides liquidity, but it also provides power. If concentration of weath begets more wealth, then the guy who can grind out as much as he likes can use it to steal everything from everyone else, which is what is by and large happening.
If you've got the broken part I presume you have enough to make a model of it - you only have to hold the thing together with superglue long enough to scan it.
I can imagine improvements to the plastic materials as well - plastics with suspended carbon nanotubes or other materials to improve their tensile strength and reduce crack propagation.
Reason allows users to specify in advance the decision they want it to reach, and only then to input all the facts. The program's task was to construct a plausible series of logical-sounding steps to connect the premises with the conclusion. The only copy was sold to the US Government for an undisclosed fee.
TLDR : the suspicion is that they embedded a secret key in the maths of this random number generator algorithm that would let them break any TLS connection after snooping 32 bytes of traffic.
As Bruce takes pains to point out, you can't prove anything. But really, they were pushing an RNG with no obvious advantage over the others in the running (3x slower), known flaws (slight bias in it's output), and this great big whopping potential security hole that you might conveniently exploit if you were the one who picked the "random numbers" in the appendix.
If you replaced the symmetric key with a genuine private-key smartcard and registering on the network involved a proper negotiation and establishment of an ephemeral session key, things would be a lot more secure.
Oh, and more expensive, 'natch, which is why it's not designed like that - stupid legacy tech.
That may well be true... but the purpose of the hack is to spy on the US populace - that's the reason to have copies of these keys.
The actual hack may be within their operational remit, but the materiel they gathered using it is clearly for purposes that are not. You can't really justify the operational budget for it in that case.
Slashdot Mirror
The price rapidly went up to £400 for the Model B (as the Wikipedia page states, lower down) due to supply issues.
This is true, but you had to go somewhere to obtain them.
I very fondly remember my trips to the public library with Mum (a lot of the time I would bring back these excellent Usborne programming books).
But you had a 3 book limit (and Mum was usually kind enough to let me get something on her card as well). I'd go through that very quickly. When the library is a 40-minute round trip on foot (and you're not allowed to ride on main roads on your bike by your parents), that's a major investment of time. Faced with that, the kids of today (and despite things being much safer... they're allowed out on their own much less..) are going to plump for instant gratification every time - visit the App Store for a new pesterware game, or YouTube.
Yeah, it cost £400, which is £1,400 adjusted for inflation.
The "inexpensive" version (the Acorn Electron) still cost £200. My grandparents chipped in to help my parents buy me one.
In real terms, the Raspberry Pi (which is a fair-ish comparison - not as much I/O, but still doesn't have it's own screen, like the BBC) costs less than £10 adjusted to 1981.
Price is not the issue. People found the money back then. Computing hardware is incredibly cheap now. You can get a full laptop with screen, for a small fraction of what the BBC cost.
The issue is the wealth of distractions available to youth BECAUSE computer hardware is now incredibly cheap and ubiquitous.
.. and I'm not sure what will.
The reason that kids of my age were "into computers" and we had a "great generation" of bedroom programmers who subsequently became tech workers was because simple, programmable computers were one of the few forms of entertainment available to the kids who didn't want to go out and kick a ball around or ride their bike.
This was an era when
* Things were more expensive (the toys cost.. about what they do, in numbers, these days. Only inflation means that £30 is not even 10 pints of beer for dad these days when it was more like 60 pints of beer back then.) A £200 home computer was a MAJOR expense rather than an impulse buy.
* There was an hour of kids TV on weekdays
And of course
* NO INTERNET - no personal portable devices of bottomless instant gratification
I saw a great article that explained that the no.1 quality a programmer needs is persistence - in the face of ridiculous odds of getting even simple things to work.
Back then you persevered with things because the only other thing to do was go and watch Coronation Street with mother, or re-read one of the few books you could afford this month. Even deciding to start playing a game wasn't exactly an impulse choice because to load it took about 5 minutes (from audio cassette tape).
Producing more simple, programmable computers these days is missing the point, although they are greatly appreciated by folks from that great generation of bedroom programmers who like a new toy to tinker with.
What's probably needed is better software. Better like A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer better.
My phone has a battery that runs out in a day (or three, if I'm very careful not to use it).
My watch battery has been going strong for over four years. Last week I thought it had expired ; it had just popped out of the contacts. Still going strong.
Given the enormous number of times I remove my phone from my pocket just to look at the time, lock it, and return it, having the watch for days when I'm travelling on a schedule makes the money I spent on it worth it. I don't have any overhead charging it, syncing it, etc, and it's just there, on my wrist, telling the time.
I don't wear it the rest of the time, because the strap catches on the edge of things while I'm typing.
I think the cunt ratio approaches 1 when you do PPE (politics, philosophy, and economy - a degree who's sole purpose is to prepare you to rule).
*ding*
> At least in open-source, if they don't you can try and fix it yourself.
I've had *excellent* support from OSS projects. I've had lead developers personally upload patched builds to my FTP server.
But I've fixed bugs for myself more. Even having the source is often enough to pin down the problem without havign to patch it.
That's why it's my policy that all things being equal (or even a little unequal) to choose open-source components.
And of course, illegals
* Prop up the economy
* Depress the working wage
If they actually managed to put up a proper border control, people might have to pay their gardener / maid / pickers a decent wage....
It must be hard being a right-wing politician. On one hand, wanting "American jobs for Americans!". On the other hand, not wanting to actually have to pay for them.
They wouldn't need a warrant canary - they are in Denmark and not subject to the force of a National Security Letter.
But as others have pointed out, if they come out and say their SIMs are compromised, the consumer outcry will cost them many millions. They have 2 billion units in the wild.
"Corporate responsibility" (to the shareholders...) dictates that they can't admit that, even if it's true.
Yeah, but that's a loss-leader.
They sell the SIM in the expectation that you'll spend money on service. It doesn't imply that the cost of the SIM is less than $1. The dollar is likely just something to incentivize the shop to sell them.
My provider will send you a package of multiple SIM cards to give out to people, for free. Doesn't imply that they have a zero cost.
Exactly.
The cost of antibiotics is where it is, because the first ones were developed on a socialist basis.
Penicillin production was boosted tremendously by the Second World War ; a serious effort was made to find a way to mass produce it cheaply so that it could save the lives of war wounded. There was no requirement to put it through an expensive double-blind clinical trial.
This established a low cost for antibiotic drugs, which meant that subsequent drugs also had to have similar prices.
The return on investment for society in general on these drugs is enormous. Alas, big pharma isn't interested in the benefit to society because of the way it's funded.
The return on investment for the pharmaceutical company these days would be small in comparison to a new cancer drug, but new cancer drugs typically only have a very small niche in which they can be applied. Antibiotics would have a large niche (particularly safe ones that kill MRSA), but entering the market would require the full double blind RCT and lots of paperwork. It just wouldn't be profitable enough for the taste of the pharmacy company, even if the benefits would be incalculable.
All in all, this is a strong argument to have a nationalised (or even a global-level multi-state owned) pharmaceutical company. Which would never be supported by capitalist governments, because of their incentive structure (politicians get into power on the back of corporate contributions, and thus will tend not to support actions that could benefit the whole of humanity without maximising corporate profits).
Hippocratic oath is "do no harm"
If you think your patient will be harmed by the nocebo effect, then you have to bullshit them.
Agreed. The CLI of gpg is horrible. There are some semi-acceptible GUI variants, not least Enigmail, and a good UI is is definitely going to be required if you are going to get general acceptance.
But the main reasons it continues to not get used are
0) Math* is hard!
1) The rise of webmail
2) Inverse network effects
* encryption being a subset of math.
0) It's hard to explain to people that they need encryption, how it works, what it is. People think email is secure! The "envelope" iconography is very misleading - email is more like a postcard, delivered by a random selection of disreputable postmen.
1) Webmail makes it much harder to do encrypted mail because to make it secure you'd have to install browser plugins. None of the webmail providers want to make one, because it will destroy their revenue stream of monetizing the analysis of your mail traffic.
2) If you want to actually use (G)PG(P) your recipient also has to grok it, install software to use it, and you have to exchange keys. This is a massive hurdle to overcome for all but the most dedicated cryptonerds. Until there is a majority of people who want to use encrypted mail, that will carry on being the case.
There are projects attempting to overcome some of these hurdles ; you have the likes of keybase.io that takes some of the sting out of key exchange (and verification).
But!
Until encryption comes with the communications software you are using out of the box, is enabled by default, interoperates with everything properly, and forces you to configure it to even use it, the vast mass people won't use it. And this is well known by the SIGINT agencies who view people actually using encryption AT ALL as a red flag that they should look closer at.
Indeed.
My ex-wife is a paediatrician. She ought to know better. But she has a skewed perception of risk, because she deals with the tragic cases all day long.
The same burblings emerged from our Prime Minister a few weeks ago.
From him, it was potentially forgivable as the technically ignorant ramblings of a politican trying to score some election points.
From the Director of the NSA.... he knows exactly what he's asking for. Compulsory key escrow.
They tried this already with Clipper. They were unanimously told where to shove it. Are we really going to have to fight this battle every 20 years?
Maybe he's just acting out all petulant because their biggest hack, stealing the keys from Gemalto, has come to light and they aren't going to be able to pull that one again in a hurry.
Fascism is the natural end state of capitalism; the concentration of power eventually means that the state and the corporation merge and things are done for the benefit of the corporation.
You can't have unregulated capitalism without it devolving into fascism. I think the UK and the US are already there - the essential dishonesty of our leaders, who publicly claim to want to do the best for us, then turn around and do the best for their corporate masters. The careful creation of a rhetoric of "them and us" to justify military action which just takes what they have and has us foot the bill (and much of it goes to private contractors). The brutal destruction of our public welfare systems to clear the way for much more profitable and expensive corporate systems.
Without regulation, how does this go down? Really, the only difference would be that you'd be cowed by the private armies of the corporations, rather than the force deployed by government on their behalf. Rich men act to protect what is theirs. They fear being bereft of it. The only way people lack fear is if they feel in control, and when your interests are so large, that needs a lot of control.
"Crypto" is also a terrible misnomer for cryptographically secured currencies :-)
They aren't hidden. They are public. BitCoin only works when the entire transaction ledger is available to all it's users.
In contrast, banks keep their ledger as private as possible. Historically this stems from the fact that you had to keep it secure - or people would just alter it. Then the secrecy became something that people relied on and almost more important than the security.
More like the capitalists don't dare let them succeed. It would show the world that there was another way, and demands to go that way would escalate in other states.
A cryptocurrency would be a bold step ; placing control of the money under the government, or the people, instead of a private bank.
The real problem is "Klepto" currency - the fiat currency that's thought up out of nothing. Yes, it provides liquidity, but it also provides power. If concentration of weath begets more wealth, then the guy who can grind out as much as he likes can use it to steal everything from everyone else, which is what is by and large happening.
If you've got the broken part I presume you have enough to make a model of it - you only have to hold the thing together with superglue long enough to scan it.
I can imagine improvements to the plastic materials as well - plastics with suspended carbon nanotubes or other materials to improve their tensile strength and reduce crack propagation.
Isn't asking the NSA to secure your system like asking the fox to check the barbed wire fence around the henhouse?
Sounds like Reason..
Reason allows users to specify in advance the decision they want it to reach, and only then to input all the facts. The program's task was to construct a plausible series of logical-sounding steps to connect the premises with the conclusion. The only copy was sold to the US Government for an undisclosed fee.
They messed with an algorithm for generating pseudo-random numbers ;
Schneir's article
TLDR : the suspicion is that they embedded a secret key in the maths of this random number generator algorithm that would let them break any TLS connection after snooping 32 bytes of traffic.
As Bruce takes pains to point out, you can't prove anything. But really, they were pushing an RNG with no obvious advantage over the others in the running (3x slower), known flaws (slight bias in it's output), and this great big whopping potential security hole that you might conveniently exploit if you were the one who picked the "random numbers" in the appendix.
Yeah, that surprised me a bit.
If you replaced the symmetric key with a genuine private-key smartcard and registering on the network involved a proper negotiation and establishment of an ephemeral session key, things would be a lot more secure.
Oh, and more expensive, 'natch, which is why it's not designed like that - stupid legacy tech.
That may well be true... but the purpose of the hack is to spy on the US populace - that's the reason to have copies of these keys.
The actual hack may be within their operational remit, but the materiel they gathered using it is clearly for purposes that are not. You can't really justify the operational budget for it in that case.