You can discount gibberish and orders for lamb chops if you are quite confident that the message was, for example, English text, and that "lamb chops" was not a code phrase for something like "crates of ammunition". But you still can't distinguish between "FOURTEENTH TANK BRIGADE WILL ATTACK ON NOVEMBER TWELFTH" vs. "EIGTH INFANTRY BRIGADE RETREATING WITH HEAVY CASUALTIES". In any case, code words, code phrases, abbreviations, jargon and spelling errors can all be reasonably expected in legitimate military and espionage communications, so without detailed inside information, you can't even discount a possible decoding like "RABBITS ARE RUNNING DUE TO CRITICAL LAMB CHOP SHORTAGES". For any given message length, it is quite possible to come up with possible decodings of the same length with exactly contradictory meanings. Thus, even in real life, an intercepted OTP message only gives you an opportunity for traffic analysis.
When properly implemented, one-time pad messages are truly unbreakable in the lab and in practice. Successful cryptanalysis of them is only possible when serious mistakes are made, such as using a single key more than once, using a key that can be predicted by some means, etc.
As an aside, Between Silk and Cyanide was an interesting account of one person's involvement in WW2 cryptography related to espionage operations. If we can assume the author's account is accurate, then there was a lot of WW2 espionage activity using ciphers other than OTP, and OTP (in particular, OTP using letters rather than numbers) was a later development in the war, still further delayed by the complications of distributing key material. So, it makes sense to me for cryptologists to have made an attempt at breaking this recovered cryptogram based on the possibility that some system other than OTP was used to encipher it.
Incidentally, five-letter groups of seemingly-random characters is a common form for enciphered text, and is not specific to OTP. It's conventional to break enciphered text into five-letter groups to make it easier to avoid losing one's place when transmitting it by telegraph or teletype. Cipher machines such as my US WW2 M-209B or my Soviet cold-war Fialka even automatically space the ciphertext out into five-letter groups. It takes actual analysis of a ciphertext to determine what system(s) may have been used to create it. For practical purposes, there will often be information called "indicators" embedded in the ciphertext, so that a busy cipher clerk will know which machine to use and which key to load into it to process that message. There are extant examples of such indicator systems that I've seen, such as in WW2 training materials for message center staff. Knowledge of the indicator system(s) in use by a particular adversary can help a cryptographer determine the best approach for a particular intercepted message, such as "assume this message is a Playfair cipher from some low-level guy we don't really care about", "send this one straight to the folks breaking Enigma traffic", or "put this one in the don't-bother-trying box".
Even if we give the shooters the maximum benefit of the doubt and pretend that none of them deliberately tried to shoot down the drones, the drone owners have no rational basis to be surprised or upset that their drones were shot. They deliberately flew it into an area where they knew that target shooting was occurring (never mind that the targets happened to be live in this case). If you repeatedly run around on busy freeways, then can you reasonably expect some outcome other than eventually getting hit by a vehicle?
If you wish to have a long and healthy life, then it is not wise to dress up as a target and then run across an active shooting range. It's even less wise to deliberately antagonize the shooters before doing so.
Now that I think about it, I wish those protesters would come protest at my local rifle range. Moving drones would be more fun and challenging to shoot at than stationary paper targets.
In this application, the serial interface on the dock connector would not be sufficient. It's common to use a PC to implement ham radio modems via the PC's sound card. The radios rarely have built-in modems, and there are a lot of different digital modem protocols used on the ham bands for data, images, etc. New protocols pop up fairly often, and these days it's unusual to use dedicated modem hardware for this application instead of implementing the modem in software. Interface to the radio is via its analog microphone input and speaker output, or often via a line-level analog interface connector provided for connecting external modems.
Many radios have a serial port for controlling radio functions like tuning, and the dock serial interface would be useful for that. The actual data path would still need to go through analog I/O such as the headphone jack or line-level signals on the dock connector.
I would still be happy to see the sort of interface you describe for other applications, but this is complicated by Apple keeping the full dock connector interface specification under wraps, and only releasing it under NDA to companies that Apple deems worthy. Thus, companies like Belkin can crank out mountains of low-quality crap for the iPhone, yet an entrepreneur is effectively barred from marketing innovative hardware accessories for iPhones.
It's not physically possible to smoke in a vacuum, is it? There's nothing to support combustion, unless maybe your cigarettes contain a built-in oxidizer of some sort.
SHHHH! Please don't give the tobacco industry any more product ideas. Hard vacuum is my last refuge from second-hand cigarette smoke.
But seriously, even though I despise the smell of tobacco smoke and I prefer to avoid hanging out with smokers because of their typical lingering stench, I'm absolutely opposed to the legislation being discussed here.
That IS indeed real time. Relativity tells us nothing can have an effect here in less time. I don't know if you're trolling or just ignorant, but by your definition you can never look at the stars, galaxies or nebulae in the sky in real time either because they're all at varying distances and we're seeing light that originated anything from about 4 to several million years ago. With telescopes you can go back billions.
Unless you live near a big city, in which case most of the light you can see in the sky at night (other than moonlight) originated within the last quarter millisecond.
I am personally in favor of having a weapon handy, knowing how to use it, and taking necessary precautions to make sure my kids (not that I have any yet) can't get their hands on it without supervision before they're ready. Whether you agree with that or not, I would heartily endorse having a dog, if you house train the dog, let it live in the house, and make it a true member of your family. I don't think you are likely to find a better bodyguard than a dog protecting its own pack. Encourage the dog to share the kid's bed. Make them constant companions for each other. Teach your kid that the dog is his or her best friend, and is to be loved like a brother or sister. Teach the dog that he or she is a valued member of the family (or as the dog will see it, his or her pack), and that protecting the kid is its job. My dogs are better than any alarm system I could buy, and they're great friends, too.
The things I buy that come with a camera that I don't want usually don't have mechanical shutters, since I tend to favor those shiny Apple products. So, I stick labels over the unwanted cameras. Ditto on the Lenovo Thinkpads that they force me to use at work. On my MacBook Pro, Apple conveniently put a strong magnet right next to the camera, so it gets a 2" length of a metal machinist's ruler stuck there, with a small hole punched in it to expose the ambient light sensor. I can easily slide it aside for those very rare occasions when I want to use the built-in camera.
Why is it getting so difficult to find any product without a camera, clock, flashlight and/or AM/FM radio integrated into it any more? Get off my lawn!
And the pyrotechnic charges are electrically initiated, by an electronic system that monitors electrical signals from accelerometers. It won't function if it's turned off.
I haven't heard of electric milk trucks before. We had milk delivery when I was a kid in the 70s, but I don't remember what sort of vehicle the milk man drove.
"Either case results in a bitcoin that cannot be spent, so it is effectively destroyed."
Inaccessible is not destroyed. Lost treasures are recovered all the time. You'd need an insurance policy that covers loss, not merely destruction to cover this.
It is a moot point, because the ability to recover a truly lost private key would render the whole system worthless as currently implemented. If you can recover a lost private key with nothing but the information in the block chain then you can also spend anybody else's bitcoins. So, the bitcoin currency (assuming it is still in use) will be revised to use improved crypto before the existing crypto becomes practically breakable (thus avoiding the ability to spend bitcoins without prior knowledge of the corresponding private keys), or else it will utterly fail (rendering all bitcoins valueless).
For practical purposes, a bitcoin which belongs to an address for which no copy of the private key exists has the same value as a piece of paper currency which has been burned to ashes. Some remnant exists; the lost bitcoin is still recorded in the block chain, and the atoms that composed that dollar bill still exist (and may even form a visible pile). But neither can be spent any more, and thus either can be said to have been destroyed.
Send it to a nonexistent address, or lose the private key that is needed to send the bitcoin to somebody else. Either case results in a bitcoin that cannot be spent, so it is effectively destroyed. So, if you lose your bitcoin wallet and all backups of it, the associated bitcoins are gone for good.
Both situations have happened, and bitcoins have been lost forever as a result. Well, if and when it becomes practical to break the encryption that bitcoin is based on, then it should be possible to recover those lost private keys. I think that is a moot point though, because that would also render the current implementation worthless, and cause it to be replaced with something else (optimistically assuming that anybody still cares about bitcoin once computing power renders the crypto trivially breakable).
In my Western experience, I have a hard time conceiving of power being provided by somebody other than a private commercial interest that'd rush right out and pull the meter the moment bills stopped getting paid. However, would a state-run facility receiving state-owned power in a non-capitalist nation even bother with a meter? In that situation, when the facility was shut down, would workers just throw anything of interest in trucks and drive away, not bothering to disconnect power or do any other rigorous decommissioning? Would the power provider know or care that the facility no longer had a reason to receive power?
I'm just speculating here. I really don't know whether that might make sense at a facility like this one, and I don't know much about how things are/were run over there. I would be surprised to come across an abandoned factory that still had the lights on, but maybe my experience here isn't applicable over there?
Slashdot Mirror
You can discount gibberish and orders for lamb chops if you are quite confident that the message was, for example, English text, and that "lamb chops" was not a code phrase for something like "crates of ammunition". But you still can't distinguish between "FOURTEENTH TANK BRIGADE WILL ATTACK ON NOVEMBER TWELFTH" vs. "EIGTH INFANTRY BRIGADE RETREATING WITH HEAVY CASUALTIES". In any case, code words, code phrases, abbreviations, jargon and spelling errors can all be reasonably expected in legitimate military and espionage communications, so without detailed inside information, you can't even discount a possible decoding like "RABBITS ARE RUNNING DUE TO CRITICAL LAMB CHOP SHORTAGES". For any given message length, it is quite possible to come up with possible decodings of the same length with exactly contradictory meanings. Thus, even in real life, an intercepted OTP message only gives you an opportunity for traffic analysis.
When properly implemented, one-time pad messages are truly unbreakable in the lab and in practice. Successful cryptanalysis of them is only possible when serious mistakes are made, such as using a single key more than once, using a key that can be predicted by some means, etc.
As an aside, Between Silk and Cyanide was an interesting account of one person's involvement in WW2 cryptography related to espionage operations. If we can assume the author's account is accurate, then there was a lot of WW2 espionage activity using ciphers other than OTP, and OTP (in particular, OTP using letters rather than numbers) was a later development in the war, still further delayed by the complications of distributing key material. So, it makes sense to me for cryptologists to have made an attempt at breaking this recovered cryptogram based on the possibility that some system other than OTP was used to encipher it.
Incidentally, five-letter groups of seemingly-random characters is a common form for enciphered text, and is not specific to OTP. It's conventional to break enciphered text into five-letter groups to make it easier to avoid losing one's place when transmitting it by telegraph or teletype. Cipher machines such as my US WW2 M-209B or my Soviet cold-war Fialka even automatically space the ciphertext out into five-letter groups. It takes actual analysis of a ciphertext to determine what system(s) may have been used to create it. For practical purposes, there will often be information called "indicators" embedded in the ciphertext, so that a busy cipher clerk will know which machine to use and which key to load into it to process that message. There are extant examples of such indicator systems that I've seen, such as in WW2 training materials for message center staff. Knowledge of the indicator system(s) in use by a particular adversary can help a cryptographer determine the best approach for a particular intercepted message, such as "assume this message is a Playfair cipher from some low-level guy we don't really care about", "send this one straight to the folks breaking Enigma traffic", or "put this one in the don't-bother-trying box".
Even if we give the shooters the maximum benefit of the doubt and pretend that none of them deliberately tried to shoot down the drones, the drone owners have no rational basis to be surprised or upset that their drones were shot. They deliberately flew it into an area where they knew that target shooting was occurring (never mind that the targets happened to be live in this case). If you repeatedly run around on busy freeways, then can you reasonably expect some outcome other than eventually getting hit by a vehicle?
If you wish to have a long and healthy life, then it is not wise to dress up as a target and then run across an active shooting range. It's even less wise to deliberately antagonize the shooters before doing so.
Now that I think about it, I wish those protesters would come protest at my local rifle range. Moving drones would be more fun and challenging to shoot at than stationary paper targets.
Different strokes for different folks, I guess.
In this application, the serial interface on the dock connector would not be sufficient. It's common to use a PC to implement ham radio modems via the PC's sound card. The radios rarely have built-in modems, and there are a lot of different digital modem protocols used on the ham bands for data, images, etc. New protocols pop up fairly often, and these days it's unusual to use dedicated modem hardware for this application instead of implementing the modem in software. Interface to the radio is via its analog microphone input and speaker output, or often via a line-level analog interface connector provided for connecting external modems.
Many radios have a serial port for controlling radio functions like tuning, and the dock serial interface would be useful for that. The actual data path would still need to go through analog I/O such as the headphone jack or line-level signals on the dock connector.
I would still be happy to see the sort of interface you describe for other applications, but this is complicated by Apple keeping the full dock connector interface specification under wraps, and only releasing it under NDA to companies that Apple deems worthy. Thus, companies like Belkin can crank out mountains of low-quality crap for the iPhone, yet an entrepreneur is effectively barred from marketing innovative hardware accessories for iPhones.
It's not physically possible to smoke in a vacuum, is it? There's nothing to support combustion, unless maybe your cigarettes contain a built-in oxidizer of some sort.
SHHHH! Please don't give the tobacco industry any more product ideas. Hard vacuum is my last refuge from second-hand cigarette smoke.
But seriously, even though I despise the smell of tobacco smoke and I prefer to avoid hanging out with smokers because of their typical lingering stench, I'm absolutely opposed to the legislation being discussed here.
Perhaps the Sun is helping to pull the atoms apart via inflicted gravitational force on a very slight level.
Then please explain how solar tides affect the decay rate while much stronger lunar tides do not.
That IS indeed real time. Relativity tells us nothing can have an effect here in less time. I don't know if you're trolling or just ignorant, but by your definition you can never look at the stars, galaxies or nebulae in the sky in real time either because they're all at varying distances and we're seeing light that originated anything from about 4 to several million years ago. With telescopes you can go back billions.
Unless you live near a big city, in which case most of the light you can see in the sky at night (other than moonlight) originated within the last quarter millisecond.
Is political science necessary?
YES! If political science majors studied things like engineering or computer science instead, then who would sell me coffee?
I am personally in favor of having a weapon handy, knowing how to use it, and taking necessary precautions to make sure my kids (not that I have any yet) can't get their hands on it without supervision before they're ready. Whether you agree with that or not, I would heartily endorse having a dog, if you house train the dog, let it live in the house, and make it a true member of your family. I don't think you are likely to find a better bodyguard than a dog protecting its own pack. Encourage the dog to share the kid's bed. Make them constant companions for each other. Teach your kid that the dog is his or her best friend, and is to be loved like a brother or sister. Teach the dog that he or she is a valued member of the family (or as the dog will see it, his or her pack), and that protecting the kid is its job. My dogs are better than any alarm system I could buy, and they're great friends, too.
Yes, but what happens when you use your autonomous car and there is a pedestrian there that wasn't on google maps???
The car automatically sends an update to Google based on input from the front bumper limit switch.
The things I buy that come with a camera that I don't want usually don't have mechanical shutters, since I tend to favor those shiny Apple products. So, I stick labels over the unwanted cameras. Ditto on the Lenovo Thinkpads that they force me to use at work. On my MacBook Pro, Apple conveniently put a strong magnet right next to the camera, so it gets a 2" length of a metal machinist's ruler stuck there, with a small hole punched in it to expose the ambient light sensor. I can easily slide it aside for those very rare occasions when I want to use the built-in camera.
Why is it getting so difficult to find any product without a camera, clock, flashlight and/or AM/FM radio integrated into it any more? Get off my lawn!
Interesting! Thanks for the correction.
And the pyrotechnic charges are electrically initiated, by an electronic system that monitors electrical signals from accelerometers. It won't function if it's turned off.
Yes, I've driven golf carts, but I don't play golf. ;)
Lead acid batteries also commonly power forklifts, scissor lifts and wheelchairs.
But the most on-topic lead acid battery vehicle I've driven was a converted VW Golf (if I recall correctly) that I worked on in college.
I haven't heard of electric milk trucks before. We had milk delivery when I was a kid in the 70s, but I don't remember what sort of vehicle the milk man drove.
Have you ever seen a lead-acid battery powered vehicle?
Yes. I've driven a few, too.
Whoosh.
"Either case results in a bitcoin that cannot be spent, so it is effectively destroyed."
Inaccessible is not destroyed. Lost treasures are recovered all the time. You'd need an insurance policy that covers loss, not merely destruction to cover this.
It is a moot point, because the ability to recover a truly lost private key would render the whole system worthless as currently implemented. If you can recover a lost private key with nothing but the information in the block chain then you can also spend anybody else's bitcoins. So, the bitcoin currency (assuming it is still in use) will be revised to use improved crypto before the existing crypto becomes practically breakable (thus avoiding the ability to spend bitcoins without prior knowledge of the corresponding private keys), or else it will utterly fail (rendering all bitcoins valueless).
For practical purposes, a bitcoin which belongs to an address for which no copy of the private key exists has the same value as a piece of paper currency which has been burned to ashes. Some remnant exists; the lost bitcoin is still recorded in the block chain, and the atoms that composed that dollar bill still exist (and may even form a visible pile). But neither can be spent any more, and thus either can be said to have been destroyed.
How does one destroy a bitcoin?
Send it to a nonexistent address, or lose the private key that is needed to send the bitcoin to somebody else. Either case results in a bitcoin that cannot be spent, so it is effectively destroyed. So, if you lose your bitcoin wallet and all backups of it, the associated bitcoins are gone for good.
Both situations have happened, and bitcoins have been lost forever as a result. Well, if and when it becomes practical to break the encryption that bitcoin is based on, then it should be possible to recover those lost private keys. I think that is a moot point though, because that would also render the current implementation worthless, and cause it to be replaced with something else (optimistically assuming that anybody still cares about bitcoin once computing power renders the crypto trivially breakable).
Decades of boredom punctuated by nanoseconds of hard radiation.
Moderation doesn't work on my iPad 2, either.
I like my Apple products, but this endless pissing match between them and Samsung doesn't endear them to me.
Congratulations on getting your ham ticket!
In my Western experience, I have a hard time conceiving of power being provided by somebody other than a private commercial interest that'd rush right out and pull the meter the moment bills stopped getting paid. However, would a state-run facility receiving state-owned power in a non-capitalist nation even bother with a meter? In that situation, when the facility was shut down, would workers just throw anything of interest in trucks and drive away, not bothering to disconnect power or do any other rigorous decommissioning? Would the power provider know or care that the facility no longer had a reason to receive power?
I'm just speculating here. I really don't know whether that might make sense at a facility like this one, and I don't know much about how things are/were run over there. I would be surprised to come across an abandoned factory that still had the lights on, but maybe my experience here isn't applicable over there?
Once I injured my back, and my doctor prescribed a collection of meds that caused Monday to be the day after Friday.