Nope, she just used her US one via webmail, which was 256-bit AES encrypted. There is no way they were spying on that
Actually if they changed the CA root certificates in the browser they'd have no problem spying on an SSL connection, no matter how strong the encryption. (I'm assuming your mother was checking her mail from an untrusted machine in an internet cafe.) I hope the system mentioned in the article distributes public key fingerprints as well as proxy addresses, rather than relying on a hierarchical PKI.
Do you really believe the government doesn't have ways of cracking common encryption techniques if it wants to?
Yes, I believe that. Cryptanalysis is an international science - take the recent SHA-1 collision attack, for example. I'm sure the NSA would love a backdoor into the world's encryption systems, but luckily the NSA realises that there are plenty of talented cryptographers in other countries who would be able to find and exploit any such backdoor, damaging the business and military interests of America and its allies.
As long as a significant fraction of the world's cryptanalysts are located outside of Fort Meade, the NSA's best bet is to recommend the strongest cryptosystems it knows about.
True, the US has a lower mean population density, but I doubt the population density of a US city is much lower than that of a European city of comparable size. Most people live in cities, and pollution is concentrated around cities, so the presence of unpolluted spaces in between might not make big a difference to most people's health.
It's comforting to know that our future robot masters will have terrifying, alien faces with which to express their terrifying, alien throught processes.
Let's say I want to work out whether any network interfaces that use DHCP are currently configured. Under Unix I'd have to do something like the following:
Read the interfaces(5) man page and write a parser for the unique file format
Read the ifconfig(8) man page and write a parser for the unique output format
Write a tiny bit of glue code to connect my parsers
With MSH/Monad/PowerShell, I'd only have to do number 3. It's not a question of doing anything that's impossible under Unix, it's just a question of making things easier. Like I said in my previous post, you could rewrite all the Unix command-line tools to understand XML, you could replace 1001 config file formats with XML, you could give bash an SQL-like filter syntax and access to an enormous standard library... and I hope someone does. Someone with more time than me.;-) But so far MS seems to be ahead in this particular area.
Um, it's not just about writing scripts, it's about all of the command-line tools being able to understand structured data. So instead of writing some godawful ad hoc parser in sed or perl to connect two programs, you can just pass structured data directly from one program to the other. ArsTechnica had a nice article about it in October. You can access.NET APIs from the command line, pass objects through pipes without losing type information, invoke their methods at the other end, perform SQL-like queries on pipes, serialise and deserialise objects...
Personally I'd love to have this kind of power in Unix, but you'd have to redesign all the config file formats and the command-line utilities from the ground up... it would be cool, but it wouldn't really be Unix any more.
It's not so much television as it is what's on television.
I'm with McLuhan - the medium is the message. Television stifles debate because to watch television you must become silent, attentive and still. The content of the programs is almost irrelevant.
Do you have to install any special patches to make your system immune to mortar attacks? My Linux box sometimes crashes when I just set fire to it and kick it downstairs (stock 2.4.16 kernel with SMP disabled).
Re:Is communism bad in theory or only in practice?
on
Google's China Problem
·
· Score: 1
I agree with what you say about the knee-jerk reaction to the word 'communism' and I'm surprised you haven't already been flamed to death by the caffeine-addled libertarian hordes...
Personally I have the following reservations about communism:
Pooling everyone's resources and distributing them according to need requires three things: centralised power, intelligence-gathering, and planning.
Power attracts the worst people - if you centralise power, the worst people will all be attracted to the same place.
Intelligence-gathering is hard when everyone has an incentive to lie about their needs and the intelligence-gatherers don't have any particular incentive to distinguish lies from truth.
People aren't as good at planning as they like to think they are. Software has shown us that designing a system you don't fully understand is possible for one person, easy for a small group, and almost inevitable for a large group.
None of these arguments depends on historical examples, but it's easy to find examples of all three problems in any communist society.
Let's say you're a diplomat, or maybe the director of a controversial film about Islam. Instead of trying to discover your top-secret itinerary and get close to you with a gun, I just plant bombs near a couple of busy roads and program them to go off when they detect the RFID tag in your passport (or your tyres, or your newspaper, or your bodyguard's shirt). It might be weeks before you pass near one of the bombs, by which time I can be out of the country.
Alternatively let's say you're a member of a non-violent pressure group. Human surveillance is expensive - the government has to choose its targets carefully, which provides a certain amount of breathing space for less dangerous activists. But with a few well-placed RFID sensors it's possible to record the movements of an almost unlimited number of people for the same price as one, and what government wouldn't take advantage of free intelligence?
I was recently involved in a similar installation at the Slade Centre for Electronic Media in London. The technical side was pretty simple: kismet to intercept packets, tcpdump to parse the output and a bit of Perl to trigger FluidSynth sounds based on the source, destination and packet type. We also detected Bluetooth devices using a USB dongle and GSM activity using a wideband AM receiver designed for paranoid hippies.
The hardest part was choosing the right sounds to represent each type of packet. It's interesting that the Ball State artists chose bells, because we also used deep tubular bells for WiFi beacons and high glockenspiel notes for data packets - you can hear what it sounded like here (20MB mp3).
there is a (for all practical purposes) infinite supply of energy available to us. It's just a matter of capturing the energy as it falls from space.
Here we go again... recovering kinetic energy from meteorites has been the Holy Grail of alternative energy since it was first suggested by Jerry Garcia in the 1960s. The fact is, there are several logistical hurdles that still need to be overcome (predicting where the meteorites are going to fall, building strong enough rubber bands, transporting the flywheel between landing sites, I could go on....)
I'd say the technology is 3-5 years from being practical, and probably 10 years from being profitable.
Military Intelligence has released a list of the secrets that have been recovered and those that are still at large. Among the recovered secrets:
The B2 Stealth Bomber is just a decoy made out of balsa wood and black paper; smart bombs are actually delivered by UPS
Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone; the FBI and Secret Service were so embarrassed by their failure to protect the President from some wandering nutjob that they spent the next 30 years trying to create the impression there had been some kind of conspiracy
A 1989 Cheers episode that made reference to the Kennedy assassination was seized by the CIA minutes before it was scheduled to air; the tape went missing, and so far 11 American civilians have been killed in the effort to prevent it reaching a wider audience
Aging Cuban guerillas launched a successful coup in Washington DC while the nation's attention was focussed on the last episode of Sex and the City. President-for-Life Fidel Castro described it as "a good day to bury good news".
Traffic analysis looks at the size and timing of packets, not their contents. If you tunnel Freenet through an SSH connection it will still look almost the same from the point of view of traffic analysis.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually if they changed the CA root certificates in the browser they'd have no problem spying on an SSL connection, no matter how strong the encryption. (I'm assuming your mother was checking her mail from an untrusted machine in an internet cafe.) I hope the system mentioned in the article distributes public key fingerprints as well as proxy addresses, rather than relying on a hierarchical PKI.
The whitelist would give Western consumers a very convenient list of companies to boycott, however...
Yes, I believe that. Cryptanalysis is an international science - take the recent SHA-1 collision attack, for example. I'm sure the NSA would love a backdoor into the world's encryption systems, but luckily the NSA realises that there are plenty of talented cryptographers in other countries who would be able to find and exploit any such backdoor, damaging the business and military interests of America and its allies.
As long as a significant fraction of the world's cryptanalysts are located outside of Fort Meade, the NSA's best bet is to recommend the strongest cryptosystems it knows about.
True, the US has a lower mean population density, but I doubt the population density of a US city is much lower than that of a European city of comparable size. Most people live in cities, and pollution is concentrated around cities, so the presence of unpolluted spaces in between might not make big a difference to most people's health.
I'm sure it's got absolutely nothing to do with industrial pollution. Only a paranoid hippy would think that.
It's comforting to know that our future robot masters will have terrifying, alien faces with which to express their terrifying, alien throught processes.
The scientific worldview begs to disagree. ;-)
With MSH/Monad/PowerShell, I'd only have to do number 3. It's not a question of doing anything that's impossible under Unix, it's just a question of making things easier. Like I said in my previous post, you could rewrite all the Unix command-line tools to understand XML, you could replace 1001 config file formats with XML, you could give bash an SQL-like filter syntax and access to an enormous standard library... and I hope someone does. Someone with more time than me. ;-) But so far MS seems to be ahead in this particular area.
Personally I'd love to have this kind of power in Unix, but you'd have to redesign all the config file formats and the command-line utilities from the ground up... it would be cool, but it wouldn't really be Unix any more.
I'm with McLuhan - the medium is the message. Television stifles debate because to watch television you must become silent, attentive and still. The content of the programs is almost irrelevant.
Why would they need a back door in your cable modem when your ISP's forwarding them all your traffic?
Do you have to install any special patches to make your system immune to mortar attacks? My Linux box sometimes crashes when I just set fire to it and kick it downstairs (stock 2.4.16 kernel with SMP disabled).
Personally I have the following reservations about communism:
None of these arguments depends on historical examples, but it's easy to find examples of all three problems in any communist society.
Of course - the same applies to a single physical book or CD. But do you have the right to stop people all over the world from building similar sheds?
<html><head>...
Oh great, another dupe...
Alternatively let's say you're a member of a non-violent pressure group. Human surveillance is expensive - the government has to choose its targets carefully, which provides a certain amount of breathing space for less dangerous activists. But with a few well-placed RFID sensors it's possible to record the movements of an almost unlimited number of people for the same price as one, and what government wouldn't take advantage of free intelligence?
The hardest part was choosing the right sounds to represent each type of packet. It's interesting that the Ball State artists chose bells, because we also used deep tubular bells for WiFi beacons and high glockenspiel notes for data packets - you can hear what it sounded like here (20MB mp3).
Here we go again... recovering kinetic energy from meteorites has been the Holy Grail of alternative energy since it was first suggested by Jerry Garcia in the 1960s. The fact is, there are several logistical hurdles that still need to be overcome (predicting where the meteorites are going to fall, building strong enough rubber bands, transporting the flywheel between landing sites, I could go on....)
I'd say the technology is 3-5 years from being practical, and probably 10 years from being profitable.
I smell a Darwin Award...
Must...
stop...
fibbing!
Got to get...
back to my haikus!
So many syllables... wasted!
That
is
very
intriguing.
How did they get from
zero to one and then to two?
Maybe he's Swedish.
Traffic analysis looks at the size and timing of packets, not their contents. If you tunnel Freenet through an SSH connection it will still look almost the same from the point of view of traffic analysis.
http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~tkarag/papers/BLINC.pdf
http://guh.nu/projects/ta/safeweb/safeweb.html
http://www.ir.bbn.com/~krash/unpubs/TM1321.pdf
http://www.icir.org/vern/papers/stepping/