Yeah "we'll have told them". As if they - or anyone else, for that matter - would believe you lying, backstabbing fuck-ups.
The point is that they would not know. And "large" or "coming" doesn't matter if you have a bunch of radar dots representing nukes rapidly approaching, and your reaction time should they not detonate over North Korea as announced but continue onwards is on the order of seconds.
So your idea that they'd just start a global world-ending war for no good reason makes you a moron.
One word: Kuba
You bet the lives of everyone on the globe on us being more lucky this time? That is way more moronic than some maybe excessive caution.
Um... maybe because there hasn't BEEN anybody "our size" since then?
Granted, let me amend that to "someone in your order of magnitude in military capabilities". There are plenty of those.
And we did pick on them. And they on us. We won. Suck eggs.
Is that what they teach in american schools? No surprise your education system sucks if it's little more than a propaganda machine. A guy named Gorbatschow did more to end the cold war then all US presidents combined.
Actually, "nobody" should be "nobody in the US". Over here in Europe, Canada is in much better standing than the US. Let's put it this way: We don't care much about Canada, but we consider them generally nice people. As for the US, if it were to sink into the ocean tomorrow, it would certainly make the headlines, but few of us would be really sorry. Our main worry would be what that means for our economy.
but if they do I guess I hope our President and Military leaders can in fact bite their lip and carpet bomb them into oblivion.
How about biting their lips and realizing that the rest of the planet is not their backyard and it's been 60 years since their intervention in some foreign conflict actually solved the problem instead of making it worse?
Perhaps one definitive, total annihilation will convice some other regimes they better play ball with us.
Or it would prove to the rest of the world that the muslim fanatics are right and you really are evil incarnate. If you were to nuke someone, no matter who or why, I would immediately join or if necessary start an initiative to pressure our government into severing all diplomatic, economic and military ties with you, and ask every other government to do the same.
You are already the only country to ever actually use nuclear weapons. If you demonstrate that you are willing to do that again, you would have become a danger to the entire world.
Stable or unstable is not by itself an argument. Most abusive relationships are pretty stable, for example. Sometimes, shaking up a fucked up situation is exactly what needs to be done.
You need to look at a map. And I don't mean a map of the US. Use Google maps, it can help you find Korea. Hint: It's in Asia. Second hint: It's the only country in the world that Google Maps doesn't have street data for.
Now you may notice which other country lies darn close. That's right, China.
Launching Nukes towards North Korea, whether from the US or from subs in the Pacific, will look a lot like they were headed towards mainland China. Even if you told the chinese what you were doing, they would be in a situation where if you were to fuck with them, they wouldn't be able to spot it until it's way too late.
a) you actually are hypocritical warmongering oil fetishists b) North Korea has no oil worth mentioning c) if they do have nukes, it could actually hurt, and you've not picked on an enemy your size since WW2, cowards
It's safer to assume that other cyphers were in use at that time. I don't know if they were better, of course.
It's been some years. What happens within the NSA usually stays secret, but not forever. We know quite a bit of what went on there in the past. I think if they had done something like that at the time of RSA, we would know by now.
I see what you mean, I understand your point about large organizations, it is a good argument for why your theory may be true.
I will not concede that it is more probable than mine. I base my conviction on historical precedent.
Accepted. We can only speculate, after all. Everyone who knows for sure will not talk for fear of waking up dead shortly after.
They probably didn't win, or they would have recommended a stronger algorithm, not a partial fix to a known insecure one.
That assumes they had a stronger one available. To the best of my knowledge, or at least according to what is public knowledge, they didn't. But of course, again that is mostly speculation. Too many unknown variables.
Isn't there a big empty space down the left side of most pages? What is the difference between it being blank or there being an advertisement there.
One occupies just some pixels on the screen, the other occupies space in my mind (to filter out).
Or in more simple terms: Ads are fucking distracting, that's their job. Every advertisement worth its money is built and designed to catch you attention. "catch your attention" is the marketing speak for "distract you".
I'd think its relevance to the site's goal would be the prime consideration.
I'd think its relevance to the site's readers should be the prime consideration.
Ironically, the less notable something is, the more likely that someone needs to look it up. Having an article on the moon landing or Washington D.C. or Washington the president on Wikipedia only serves to fill it up, as anything you can find there is readily available in at least 100 other sources. You don't need Wikipedia for that. I don't know about you, but back when I was young it was the obscure things that I looked up in my parents dead-tree encyclopedia.
Deletionism is about people deciding what is important and what isn't. The vast majority of disputed delete requests is about the notability point. And no, I'm not going to use WP slang outside of WP. I've had my share when I spent a month or two of my life checking the delete request page several times a day and weighing in on the discussions. Until I realized it's really a waste of time.
Anyway, the point is that if you decide what is important, then you are important yourself. Or at least you can feel important. And that's what it's all about - personal grandeur.
Even over here in Europe, "Fox News" is in most mental dictionaries as a current era example for propaganda and misinformation. So the news is that a study confirms it. Again.
The real question is: Is anything going to be done about it?
Ads would be the final straw for me to leave Wikipedia behind. Right now it's still useful for a quick overview of most mainstream culture or geeky topics, and an easy way to get a rough idea of most other topics.
Ads would drive me away. But so does this huge banner. Maybe it's timing, because right before the holidays you are drowned in fund drives all around. Suddenly, everyone digs out starving children (are they not starving the rest of the year?), disabled dogs, disenfranchied plants or whatever this years guilt-ridden topic is. And Wikipedia right now looks a lot like that crap.
A less in-your-face attitude, like the "progress bar" thing they had last year (or the one before?) would have better chances with me, but maybe I'm strange.
But ads? Yeah, sure. Write "we sold out" all over the site while you're at it. As far as I'm concerned, if you run ads, you have given up all pretense of being objective. Because sooner or later, someone will offer you a really nice deal if only...
While you may not be able to run around claiming that String Theory is dead and disproved, evidently there are some adjustments that need to be made."
...again
String theory is one of those theories that get changed around every time they run into trouble. I can't imagine what it would take to have it go away, aside from a paradigm change.
Proof positive that the attack was known to the NSA when they recommended the changes.
Correct
Now, why would they recommend those changes, since they had zero interest in thwarting their own primary mission by proposing an unbreakable algorithm?
I believe we can safely(?) infer that the NSA already knew of another practical attack on RSA (maybe the timing-channel one, maybe something else) yet was reasonably sure that its adversaries did not.
And I believe an organisation the size of the NSA should not be humanized. It does not have a single mind, it has many, and there is certainly a lot of politics, in-fighting, and conflicting agendas.
Maybe that time the people saying "we need to make sure our government doesn't use weak crypto" won out against the others who wanted other governments to fall into that trap.
I don't think you can "understand" an organisation like the NSA if you treat it as if it were a single human being with a single mind and purpose.
There are few organizations which have been allowed a peek into "the" Windows source code. How can you tell they didn't get the sanitized version?
Good point. It's not too difficult to make such a version that on compile acts like the other, and any checksums could be explained away by hotfixes or whatever. However, there are also foreign governments that demand the source exactly because they are afraid of the exact scenario you describe. They would certainly have a closer look - or distribute their own compiled version of the sanitized code.
I still don't think it is that simple. The NSA worked on RSA, too. The added some changes that nobody understood at that time. Many were afraid it was to weaken or allow them an easy crack. Years later it turned out that a complicated attack existed that would have considerably weakened RSA if it had not been for those NSA changes. To the best of my knowledge, no weakening has ever been linked to them.
They get to silently spy on you without ur knowledge.
If they want to spy on me specifically, it's a ton cheaper to put a TEMPEST device next door.
If they want to spy on the general public, you don't need a backdoor. Most e-mail is still sent unencrypted.
I don't think they are dumb or incompetent or not evil, not at all. I just don't think they act like in the movies. If a $5 crowbar beats a $10,000 encryption, they will certainly use the crowbar and not a $1,000,000 crypt-breaker. They will reserve that for the real stuff, you know the kind of stuff that other secret services use.
Plus, your secrets are probably simply not worth firing up the big iron.
Windows 7 doesn't crash or need to be rebooted all the time.
I run Windows 7. On the same hardware, with no "weird stuff" (e.g. hacked-up drivers or so), it definitely crashes more often than OS X, even though I use it less. It is just as definitely a big step forward from XP, but it still has quite a bit to go before it is ready for the desktop, to quote a nice Linux-on-the-desktop parody.
It simply is not cost effective unless you have money to burn and no time to waste looking for better deals.
Or you simply like the deal you are getting. More importantly, you say it yourself: You have an under-supplied market with money to burn. Who in their right mind would not want a share of that?
It must be nice to have that kind of money to blow irresponsibly when geeky students like myself struggle to pay rent through college.
It is. It's the pay-off for struggling through college, so don't feel bad about it, with any luck you'll be in the same position in a couple years.
A master key to a crypto algorithm that does not per se include one would require modifications to the algorithm. It would very likely be noticed at the very first code audit.
Seriously, I think the NSA is happy that everyone thinks they added some backdoor to windows. Because while everyone spends their time looking for it there, whatever they really did gets no attention.
Well,they can just build in backdoors to which only they have keys, and keep it secret.
They are a secret service. They know (from their own painful experience) that secrets do not stay secrets for unlimited times, and the more people know about it, the less so.
Seriously, sending an agent with a lockpick set is several orders of magnitude cheaper than creating a secret cryptographic backdoor. I'm very certain the NSA is no stranger to every trick in the book. I do, however, think that they are too smart to do the obvious thing.
You can build a PC that trounces a Mac for between half and three quarters the price.
Maybe, maybe not. There are good opinion pieces with actual numbers for both arguments on the Internet. I couldn't care less, I don't buy my machines based on price, I buy them based on my personal cost/benefit estimate. And as soon as I figure in the time I save because it doesn't crash or needs to be rebooted all the time, I'm definitely better off.
but most people don't have 2000 dollars to blow on a computer just to use MacOS,
Well, I do. As do many other people. We're a market segment exactly because we do. Your average geeky student spends all his money on the latest graphics card, but doesn't actually buy any games.
When I say "I can't be arsed" it also means that I could, if someone were actually trying to sell me something I want to buy.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah "we'll have told them". As if they - or anyone else, for that matter - would believe you lying, backstabbing fuck-ups.
The point is that they would not know. And "large" or "coming" doesn't matter if you have a bunch of radar dots representing nukes rapidly approaching, and your reaction time should they not detonate over North Korea as announced but continue onwards is on the order of seconds.
So your idea that they'd just start a global world-ending war for no good reason makes you a moron.
One word: Kuba
You bet the lives of everyone on the globe on us being more lucky this time? That is way more moronic than some maybe excessive caution.
Um... maybe because there hasn't BEEN anybody "our size" since then?
Granted, let me amend that to "someone in your order of magnitude in military capabilities". There are plenty of those.
And we did pick on them. And they on us. We won. Suck eggs.
Is that what they teach in american schools? No surprise your education system sucks if it's little more than a propaganda machine. A guy named Gorbatschow did more to end the cold war then all US presidents combined.
Actually, "nobody" should be "nobody in the US". Over here in Europe, Canada is in much better standing than the US. Let's put it this way: We don't care much about Canada, but we consider them generally nice people. As for the US, if it were to sink into the ocean tomorrow, it would certainly make the headlines, but few of us would be really sorry. Our main worry would be what that means for our economy.
but if they do I guess I hope our President and Military leaders can in fact bite their lip and carpet bomb them into oblivion.
How about biting their lips and realizing that the rest of the planet is not their backyard and it's been 60 years since their intervention in some foreign conflict actually solved the problem instead of making it worse?
Perhaps one definitive, total annihilation will convice some other regimes they better play ball with us.
Or it would prove to the rest of the world that the muslim fanatics are right and you really are evil incarnate. If you were to nuke someone, no matter who or why, I would immediately join or if necessary start an initiative to pressure our government into severing all diplomatic, economic and military ties with you, and ask every other government to do the same.
You are already the only country to ever actually use nuclear weapons. If you demonstrate that you are willing to do that again, you would have become a danger to the entire world.
Stable or unstable is not by itself an argument. Most abusive relationships are pretty stable, for example. Sometimes, shaking up a fucked up situation is exactly what needs to be done.
You need to look at a map. And I don't mean a map of the US. Use Google maps, it can help you find Korea. Hint: It's in Asia. Second hint: It's the only country in the world that Google Maps doesn't have street data for.
Now you may notice which other country lies darn close. That's right, China.
Launching Nukes towards North Korea, whether from the US or from subs in the Pacific, will look a lot like they were headed towards mainland China. Even if you told the chinese what you were doing, they would be in a situation where if you were to fuck with them, they wouldn't be able to spot it until it's way too late.
Still thinking this is a brilliant idea?
The three problems with that are
a) you actually are hypocritical warmongering oil fetishists
b) North Korea has no oil worth mentioning
c) if they do have nukes, it could actually hurt, and you've not picked on an enemy your size since WW2, cowards
Yeah, same sentiment here. I can't believe that kind of crap is not only legal, but in fact quite common.
It's as if they had intentionally built in predetermined breaking points into their democracy.
Aye, but good fun, no?
What would /. be without baseless speculations? :-)
It's safer to assume that other cyphers were in use at that time. I don't know if they were better, of course.
It's been some years. What happens within the NSA usually stays secret, but not forever. We know quite a bit of what went on there in the past. I think if they had done something like that at the time of RSA, we would know by now.
I see what you mean, I understand your point about large organizations, it is a good argument for why your theory may be true.
I will not concede that it is more probable than mine. I base my conviction on historical precedent.
Accepted. We can only speculate, after all. Everyone who knows for sure will not talk for fear of waking up dead shortly after.
They probably didn't win, or they would have recommended a stronger algorithm, not a partial fix to a known insecure one.
That assumes they had a stronger one available. To the best of my knowledge, or at least according to what is public knowledge, they didn't. But of course, again that is mostly speculation. Too many unknown variables.
Isn't there a big empty space down the left side of most pages? What is the difference between it being blank or there being an advertisement there.
One occupies just some pixels on the screen, the other occupies space in my mind (to filter out).
Or in more simple terms: Ads are fucking distracting, that's their job. Every advertisement worth its money is built and designed to catch you attention. "catch your attention" is the marketing speak for "distract you".
I'd think its relevance to the site's goal would be the prime consideration.
I'd think its relevance to the site's readers should be the prime consideration.
Ironically, the less notable something is, the more likely that someone needs to look it up. Having an article on the moon landing or Washington D.C. or Washington the president on Wikipedia only serves to fill it up, as anything you can find there is readily available in at least 100 other sources. You don't need Wikipedia for that. I don't know about you, but back when I was young it was the obscure things that I looked up in my parents dead-tree encyclopedia.
Deletionism isn't about resources, never was.
Deletionism is about people deciding what is important and what isn't. The vast majority of disputed delete requests is about the notability point. And no, I'm not going to use WP slang outside of WP. I've had my share when I spent a month or two of my life checking the delete request page several times a day and weighing in on the discussions. Until I realized it's really a waste of time.
Anyway, the point is that if you decide what is important, then you are important yourself. Or at least you can feel important. And that's what it's all about - personal grandeur.
Even over here in Europe, "Fox News" is in most mental dictionaries as a current era example for propaganda and misinformation. So the news is that a study confirms it. Again.
The real question is: Is anything going to be done about it?
Ads would be the final straw for me to leave Wikipedia behind. Right now it's still useful for a quick overview of most mainstream culture or geeky topics, and an easy way to get a rough idea of most other topics.
Ads would drive me away. But so does this huge banner. Maybe it's timing, because right before the holidays you are drowned in fund drives all around. Suddenly, everyone digs out starving children (are they not starving the rest of the year?), disabled dogs, disenfranchied plants or whatever this years guilt-ridden topic is. And Wikipedia right now looks a lot like that crap.
A less in-your-face attitude, like the "progress bar" thing they had last year (or the one before?) would have better chances with me, but maybe I'm strange.
But ads? Yeah, sure. Write "we sold out" all over the site while you're at it. As far as I'm concerned, if you run ads, you have given up all pretense of being objective. Because sooner or later, someone will offer you a really nice deal if only...
While you may not be able to run around claiming that String Theory is dead and disproved, evidently there are some adjustments that need to be made."
...again
String theory is one of those theories that get changed around every time they run into trouble. I can't imagine what it would take to have it go away, aside from a paradigm change.
Proof positive that the attack was known to the NSA when they recommended the changes.
Correct
Now, why would they recommend those changes, since they had zero interest in thwarting their own primary mission by proposing an unbreakable algorithm?
I believe we can safely(?) infer that the NSA already knew of another practical attack on RSA (maybe the timing-channel one, maybe something else) yet was reasonably sure that its adversaries did not.
And I believe an organisation the size of the NSA should not be humanized. It does not have a single mind, it has many, and there is certainly a lot of politics, in-fighting, and conflicting agendas.
Maybe that time the people saying "we need to make sure our government doesn't use weak crypto" won out against the others who wanted other governments to fall into that trap.
I don't think you can "understand" an organisation like the NSA if you treat it as if it were a single human being with a single mind and purpose.
There are few organizations which have been allowed a peek into "the" Windows source code. How can you tell they didn't get the sanitized version?
Good point. It's not too difficult to make such a version that on compile acts like the other, and any checksums could be explained away by hotfixes or whatever. However, there are also foreign governments that demand the source exactly because they are afraid of the exact scenario you describe. They would certainly have a closer look - or distribute their own compiled version of the sanitized code.
I still don't think it is that simple. The NSA worked on RSA, too. The added some changes that nobody understood at that time. Many were afraid it was to weaken or allow them an easy crack. Years later it turned out that a complicated attack existed that would have considerably weakened RSA if it had not been for those NSA changes. To the best of my knowledge, no weakening has ever been linked to them.
They get to silently spy on you without ur knowledge.
If they want to spy on me specifically, it's a ton cheaper to put a TEMPEST device next door.
If they want to spy on the general public, you don't need a backdoor. Most e-mail is still sent unencrypted.
I don't think they are dumb or incompetent or not evil, not at all. I just don't think they act like in the movies. If a $5 crowbar beats a $10,000 encryption, they will certainly use the crowbar and not a $1,000,000 crypt-breaker. They will reserve that for the real stuff, you know the kind of stuff that other secret services use.
Plus, your secrets are probably simply not worth firing up the big iron.
Windows 7 doesn't crash or need to be rebooted all the time.
I run Windows 7. On the same hardware, with no "weird stuff" (e.g. hacked-up drivers or so), it definitely crashes more often than OS X, even though I use it less. It is just as definitely a big step forward from XP, but it still has quite a bit to go before it is ready for the desktop, to quote a nice Linux-on-the-desktop parody.
It simply is not cost effective unless you have money to burn and no time to waste looking for better deals.
Or you simply like the deal you are getting. More importantly, you say it yourself: You have an under-supplied market with money to burn. Who in their right mind would not want a share of that?
It must be nice to have that kind of money to blow irresponsibly when geeky students like myself struggle to pay rent through college.
It is. It's the pay-off for struggling through college, so don't feel bad about it, with any luck you'll be in the same position in a couple years.
A master key to a crypto algorithm that does not per se include one would require modifications to the algorithm. It would very likely be noticed at the very first code audit.
Seriously, I think the NSA is happy that everyone thinks they added some backdoor to windows. Because while everyone spends their time looking for it there, whatever they really did gets no attention.
Well,they can just build in backdoors to which only they have keys, and keep it secret.
They are a secret service. They know (from their own painful experience) that secrets do not stay secrets for unlimited times, and the more people know about it, the less so.
Seriously, sending an agent with a lockpick set is several orders of magnitude cheaper than creating a secret cryptographic backdoor. I'm very certain the NSA is no stranger to every trick in the book. I do, however, think that they are too smart to do the obvious thing.
Which is why Zuckerberg and Zynga are filthy rich and you live in your mom's basement.
You can build a PC that trounces a Mac for between half and three quarters the price.
Maybe, maybe not. There are good opinion pieces with actual numbers for both arguments on the Internet. I couldn't care less, I don't buy my machines based on price, I buy them based on my personal cost/benefit estimate. And as soon as I figure in the time I save because it doesn't crash or needs to be rebooted all the time, I'm definitely better off.
but most people don't have 2000 dollars to blow on a computer just to use MacOS,
Well, I do. As do many other people. We're a market segment exactly because we do. Your average geeky student spends all his money on the latest graphics card, but doesn't actually buy any games.
When I say "I can't be arsed" it also means that I could, if someone were actually trying to sell me something I want to buy.