By raiding school systems, they have no proof of who downloaded the copyright infringed files
Why is that? according to the article:
Each person who uses a school computer must log in with a password, Tait said, which means every user can be tracked.
Just speaking hypothetically, if a student does break a law on school property, does that make them immune from the laws? I don't see what the big deal is that they check the computers at school or somebody's job. If someone is breaking the law (which, regardless of whether it's "Gestapo crap", it's still the law), and they get a court order to approve a search....
Searching school/work computers is not valid, but searching home computers is? Believe me, I'd rather have someone raid the computers at work than these guys come into my home. Or is it that you just don't want anyone searched at all? How then would the law be enforced?
I wonder if they are going to have some kind of "reboot" feature in case the hardware starts failing or the software goes haywire. (Insert standard Windows BSOD joke here.) Seriously, though, I'd hate to see somebody's limbs just start moving erratically and without any control. That would be a nightmare.
I don't know how they would actually implement such a feature, but it just seems kinda dangerous to me without it.
Broadcast Radio quality has fallen to the point where I simply don't listen to it. Local traffic? Ha, it's usually old information. I get better information via my cell phone. Quality music? Rrrrright.... if you like to hear the same seven songs played hundreds of times within a month.
The thing that always gets me about broadcast radio is the tendency to lump all commercial breaks into one super-long segment at the bottom of the hour. That way, they can advertise "50 minutes of commercial-free music"... but they don't tell you that means "10 minutes of music-free commercials." It annoys just about everyone I know, so any service that got rid of that is bound to do well.
(Of course, I am a little biased. My father is the operations manager at a broadcast radio station, and his station doesn't do that. They play maybe a max of 3-4 commercials in a row, but spread out over the entire hour. They actually play more commercials, but it seems like less.)
As for music variety, I see satellite radio falling into the same trap. True, there will be some stations that don't do that, but that is also true for broadcast radio.... just not the big/popular (read: Clear Channel) stations.
Mars Global Warming
on
A New Ice Age?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Or perhaps our probes are polluting the Martian atmosphere?;-)
Are you implying that these scientists' predictions of doom are wrong? That would mean that they're just "stretching the truth" to get more grant money and don't care about being credible!... oh, wait.
Another method would be splitting up the key so that no one person can decrypt your message. You could put the key on an easily destroyed object which you keep on your person (protected with a memorized passkey). If you are about to be captured you destroy the key - now you have no information worth torturing you for.
You don't even need to destroy the key. If you use some form of secret sharing (e.g., Shamir's algebraic method), just one part of the key wouldn't give your assailant any help at all.
Using RSA as an example, here's a less-than-six-step process for finding the private key given the public key (exponent e and modulus m=pq):
(1) Factor m into p and q (both distinct primes).
(2) Calculate phi(m) = (p-1)(q-1).
(3) Find the reciprocal of e in this new modulus phi(m). That's the private key.
Once you have step 1, the rest takes a very short amount of time (less than a second). And you don't even need a sample message....
The problem is you can solve for the third thing, but some things are harder to solve for than others. All of the security of public key cryptosystems depend on the "hardness" of the "third thing" you need to solve for.
To give an easy example of how one way can be harder than the other, try doing this problem by hand:
Given y = x^3 - x^2 + 5x - 4,
(1) Find y given x=3.
(2) Find x given y=10.
Why is one way harder than the other? Because it's easy to multiply things together, but not so easy to factor. It's the same thing with cryptosystems. So, I doubt anyone will find a simple algorithm to make them equally "easy." The best factoring algorithms in the world are still nowhere as simple as multiplication.
OTOH, quantum computing can do exponential time problems in something like linear time, so a quantum computer could just factor and we'd be done with it. No need for a fancy mathematical algorithm. We already know how to do it -- it's built right into the cryptosystem.
Slashdot Mirror
By raiding school systems, they have no proof of who downloaded the copyright infringed files
Why is that? according to the article:
Just speaking hypothetically, if a student does break a law on school property, does that make them immune from the laws? I don't see what the big deal is that they check the computers at school or somebody's job. If someone is breaking the law (which, regardless of whether it's "Gestapo crap", it's still the law), and they get a court order to approve a search....
Searching school/work computers is not valid, but searching home computers is? Believe me, I'd rather have someone raid the computers at work than these guys come into my home. Or is it that you just don't want anyone searched at all? How then would the law be enforced?
I wonder if they are going to have some kind of "reboot" feature in case the hardware starts failing or the software goes haywire. (Insert standard Windows BSOD joke here.) Seriously, though, I'd hate to see somebody's limbs just start moving erratically and without any control. That would be a nightmare.
I don't know how they would actually implement such a feature, but it just seems kinda dangerous to me without it.
Broadcast Radio quality has fallen to the point where I simply don't listen to it. Local traffic? Ha, it's usually old information. I get better information via my cell phone. Quality music? Rrrrright.... if you like to hear the same seven songs played hundreds of times within a month.
The thing that always gets me about broadcast radio is the tendency to lump all commercial breaks into one super-long segment at the bottom of the hour. That way, they can advertise "50 minutes of commercial-free music"... but they don't tell you that means "10 minutes of music-free commercials." It annoys just about everyone I know, so any service that got rid of that is bound to do well.
(Of course, I am a little biased. My father is the operations manager at a broadcast radio station, and his station doesn't do that. They play maybe a max of 3-4 commercials in a row, but spread out over the entire hour. They actually play more commercials, but it seems like less.)
As for music variety, I see satellite radio falling into the same trap. True, there will be some stations that don't do that, but that is also true for broadcast radio.... just not the big/popular (read: Clear Channel) stations.
Or perhaps our probes are polluting the Martian atmosphere? ;-)
Are you implying that these scientists' predictions of doom are wrong? That would mean that they're just "stretching the truth" to get more grant money and don't care about being credible!... oh, wait.
Another method would be splitting up the key so that no one person can decrypt your message. You could put the key on an easily destroyed object which you keep on your person (protected with a memorized passkey). If you are about to be captured you destroy the key - now you have no information worth torturing you for.
You don't even need to destroy the key. If you use some form of secret sharing (e.g., Shamir's algebraic method), just one part of the key wouldn't give your assailant any help at all.
Using RSA as an example, here's a less-than-six-step process for finding the private key given the public key (exponent e and modulus m=pq):
(1) Factor m into p and q (both distinct primes).
(2) Calculate phi(m) = (p-1)(q-1).
(3) Find the reciprocal of e in this new modulus phi(m). That's the private key.
Once you have step 1, the rest takes a very short amount of time (less than a second). And you don't even need a sample message....
The problem is you can solve for the third thing, but some things are harder to solve for than others. All of the security of public key cryptosystems depend on the "hardness" of the "third thing" you need to solve for.
To give an easy example of how one way can be harder than the other, try doing this problem by hand:
Given y = x^3 - x^2 + 5x - 4,
(1) Find y given x=3.
(2) Find x given y=10.
Why is one way harder than the other? Because it's easy to multiply things together, but not so easy to factor. It's the same thing with cryptosystems. So, I doubt anyone will find a simple algorithm to make them equally "easy." The best factoring algorithms in the world are still nowhere as simple as multiplication.
OTOH, quantum computing can do exponential time problems in something like linear time, so a quantum computer could just factor and we'd be done with it. No need for a fancy mathematical algorithm. We already know how to do it -- it's built right into the cryptosystem.
And who would ever need more than 640k photons?