Symmetric vs. public-key cyphers...
on
RSA-576 Factored
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· Score: 5, Informative
I'm not an expert, but IIRC you're talking about apples and oranges here.
When 128-bit cyphers are described as "secure", they're almost certainly talking about symmetriccyphers - that is, the key you use to encrypt the message is the same as the key you use to decrypt the message. There are no known ways to break currently acceptable symmetric cyphers (such as 3-DES and AES) faster than brute force - that is, trying each key one at a time. If you have a 128-bit key, this will on average take (2^128 / 2 = 2^127 ~= 10^38) tries before you get the key. This will take billions of years to do, even using a massively parallel computer.
The other sort of encryption, the sort we are talking about here, is public-key encryption, where you use two different keys to scramable and descramble the message. The advantage of this method is you can create a key pair, and give one key to everyone who wants to send you a message (the public key), and while they can send you message securely, it is very difficult for them to figure out your private key (and thhus read messages other people have sent you).
The bad news with public-key encryption is that the algorithms are considerably weaker than with secret-key cyphers. You can mount considerably quicker attacks than just brute-forcing the keyspace. Therefore, you need longer keys for equivalent levels of security. With RSA, the most common method, figuring out your private key from your public key is done by trying to figure out the factor of a very, very large number that is the product of two very large prime numbers. This is still very difficult to do, but it is a simpler problem than brute-forcing an entire keyspace. These Germans have just demonstrated the ability to factor a larger such number than anyone else has done before.
Whilst this is interesting, from what (little) I understand of cryptography it's still a very long way from here to cracking 1024 bit RSA keys. In any case, as the hardware makes it easier for the attackers, it makes it practical to go with longer encryption keys, so faster hardware is neither a help nor hindrance to attackers. The one proviso is, of course, the security of data encrypted by older cyphers.
When people say "audit trail", they mean "audit trail where the voter verifies that the printout reflects who they voted for". That neatly deals with your scheme, at least as I understand it.
Let's not confuse "baud", and "bits per second", firstly. "Bits per second" is how much data you transfer over the line, and is the figure modem users need to care about. "Baud" is, roughly, the number of symbols per second transmitted, however, each symbol can carry more than one bit. All modems since the 2400-bps days transmit more than one bit per signal. I am not sure of the actual baud rate of modern modems, but rest assured that is far lower than 56,000.
Even given this, the limit of analog modems across standard phone lines (from one analog line to another) is 33.6k (uncompressed). This is very close to the theoretical limits you can squeeze across a carrier with a phone line's properties.
56k modems, however, pull more trickery. They only work when the ISP has incoming digital lines, and IIRC they somehow disable the line filters that normally limit maximum bandwidth (in the analog signal sense) on a phone line to allow more data to be transferred. 56k modems do actually transmit 56,000 (or, in practice, more like 48,000 or 50,000) uncompressed bits per second.
Whilst I haven't ridden on the 300 km/h French TGV, I have ridden on the German ICE trains, and they are insanely great. Power sockets, big comfy chairs, good food, beer, and coffees in the restaurant, even (cellular, not wifi) net access. It's not cheap, but it's very, very good. Not to mention frequent and bloody quick.
Whilst there are inter-country trains, it's still a damn long way between, say, Hamburg and Rome, and planes would be quicker than the current generation of very fast trains. 600 km/h maglevs will increase considerably the distance over which a train's travel times are comparable to city-airport-airport-city.
Fosters (or their Australian brewing subsidiary CUB) makes quite a few domestic beers. In Melbourne, their full-strength lagers are Carlton Draught, Victoria Bitter (which is really a lager), and Crown Lager (their "premium" beer), as well as small amounts of Fosters. Crown Lager, frankly, does taste quite like Fosters Lager, but they are not the same.
The deal with these "desktop replacement" notebooks is that they are quite large and heavy, with desktop CPUs and physically larger (and thus cheaper and sometimes faster) hard disks and such. 3D graphics aside, they are as fast as desktop machines - much faster than the "thin and light" notebooks that cost similar amounts. They are also fitted with big LCD screens (16 and 17 inch LCD's in some cases) However, they weigh a ton and have batteries that don't last very long at all.
Personally, I think these things are like road-biased SUVs - overpriced hybrids that by being adequate for two tasks are not very good at either. Gimme a real desktop machine, a thin-and-light (or, better still, an ultralight), and rsync and you've got a much better solution.
I've done that flight recently
on
Son of Concorde
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Well, not quite, but Melbourne-Frankfurt (with stopover in Singapore), and also LA-Melbourne (a 15-hour nonstop flight, until recently the world's longest scheduled flight). I defy anyone to do those routes and then tell me there's not a latent market for supersonic travel.
That ad *was* recycled...
on
Recycling TV Ads
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· Score: 4, Funny
Well, not actually recycled, but remade (with all the Canadian references replaced with Australian ones) to sell Fosters Lager on Australian TV during the Sydney Olympics. The Fosters version was worse, however. The Molson ad was clearly tongue-in-cheek, but the Fosters ad took itself seriously.
At least it failed - no self-respecting Aussie drinks Fosters, then or now:)
I stand corrected...I (mistakenly) thought Brian Kernighan also received a Turing Award. Of course, in the "well-known CS people at Princeton list" there's also Sedgewick, whose algorithms textbook is one of the most popular introductory textbooks on the topic.
Professor Edward Felten is on the faculty at Princeton, and he's featured on Slashdot on a regular basis on DMCA issues (on the side of the angels).
Not to mention that there are three (IIRC) Turing Award winners at Princeton, amongst other leading lights of theoretical computer science. That, and when Princeton is sitting on a multi-billion dollar endowment, they don't really have to care all that much about what/. says about them:)
The term "open source" did not exist when Raymond, Perens, and co. devised it in 1998 (or so). The creators of the phrase specifically intended it for software that met the Open Source definition (ie GPL'd, BSD-licensed, or similarly-licensed software).
They didn't attempt to redefine the language for their personal use, they invented a phrase to describe a concept.
Space elevator makes *everything* easier...
on
The Case for the Moon
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Including Moon missions, Mars missions, asteroid belt missions - in fact, if you get a space elevator most of the Solar System becomes your oyster. However, nobody has demonstrated a macroscopic-size sample of a material that is strong enough to make a space elevator, let alone the ability to churn out thousands of tonnes of the stuff.
IMHO, throwing some money at nanotube research is a very good investment, considering the myriad applications. However, designing your entire space program around a technology that may never be possible seems overly risky.
...that the people who oppose(d) the Administration's actions on Iraq are also concerned about national security, but they believe that the invasion was not the right way to go about promoting it?
In other words, where you say "proactive", there's plenty of people who say "reckless, foolhardy, and ally-alienating".
I'm not a mechanical engineer or a physicist, but apparently a substantial number of both working on the idea have considered the shock problem manageable, if you cast big enough springs and dampers - and, no, they weren't light-years long.
Freeman Dyson worked on the project, called "Project Orion", in the 1950's. His son wrote a book on the subject. One of the major problems with the damping was the springs getting out of control if one of the bombs was a dud...
Modern designers have looked at alternative approaches for damping the shock, like using a more sail-like structure at a much greater distance from the bomb detonation. Most of them seem convinced it can be made to work. The biggest problem is the radioactive fallout, which will likely preclude their use as a way to lift off from Earth.
The NYT and Washington Post "left-leaning"? You have to be kidding. For example look at a mainstream centre-left newspaper from the UK, The Guardian. Like I said, whilst it may be known as a left-wing rag, it is a well-respected, commercial, high-circulation broadsheet. Compare its take on world news to the NYT and then tell me the Times and Post are left wing.
I very much doubt it. Quantum computers are going to suck at everything except the specialised applications they are very good at.
That is, unless we ever build the quantum computers on steroids that supposedly will be able to solve all problems in NP. From what very little I understand about this, the physicists are still not sure whether these are even theoretically possible or not, but theey haven't ruled them out either. If we ever get one of those babies, the world changes completely overnight.
They're both tricky. America's had accidents in both phases. In fact, the "staying alive whilst up there" part is pretty tough too - remember Apollo 13?
...but if he's responsible for purchasing trucks then they should know enough about them to understand and evaluate the advice they are receiving from their experts...
Sorry, but that's just not true. Tech is a fundamental part of large business - if it breaks, your business can go under, and better tech can be a major source of competitive advantage. An executive who doesn't have a working understanding of technology is like an executive who doesn't have a working understanding of accountancy or marketing. Even for Krispy Kreme.
Imagine if the owner of a pro football team not only didn't know a thing about football, but refused to listen to the coach and players about football matters (which they are paid a lot of money to be experts in), and insisted on calling the plays himself and made the calls based on what he'd heard his son's coach yell out out on the sidelines of his junior league game.
If such a thing were tried in the NFL, people would fall over themselves laughing. But it is precisely the situation many IT staff find themselves in.
To be honest, though, I don't think that executives that know absolutely nothing are that common any more. More likely is the executive that has the latest laptop that gets used for playing solitaire, and browsing forbes.com and zdnet.com, and imposes an immediate upgrade to Office 2003 because the advertisements are pretty and Information Rights Management sounds so cool!
Is it just me, or can anyone see a great opportunity for some extra profits with a properly-located hidden videocamera here? "Pay up, or we send this video of you trying to insert your business card in the CD-ROM drive - not to mention wandering into the server room and asking what the pretty lights do - to the board?"
Note that you probably couldn't just e-mail the board the relevant clip, because the board would be just as clueless about technology...
But then again, $750 a month for a couple of hours training sounds pretty close to blackmail to me:)
I'm no expert in the area, but as I understand it quantum computers as currently envisiaged are no help. In fact, quantum computers, if one can ever be built, are not useful for terribly much, except cracking public-key encryption and doing quantum physics simulations.
There are hypotheses that a quantum computer with still greater abilities might be built one day in the distant future. This machine would have the ability to solve "NP-complete" problems quickly. However, even if such a machine was constructed, this wouldn't help either. Chess (or a generalization of chess to an nxn board), is EXPTIME-complete, which means it provably takes exponential time to find the best chess move. So, essentially, we are screwed as far as brute-forcing chess.
Maybe some clever mathematician will be able to prove some properties about chess that might reduce the search space enough to make a brute force search feasible, but don't hold your breath.
Slashdot Mirror
When 128-bit cyphers are described as "secure", they're almost certainly talking about symmetriccyphers - that is, the key you use to encrypt the message is the same as the key you use to decrypt the message. There are no known ways to break currently acceptable symmetric cyphers (such as 3-DES and AES) faster than brute force - that is, trying each key one at a time. If you have a 128-bit key, this will on average take (2^128 / 2 = 2^127 ~= 10^38) tries before you get the key. This will take billions of years to do, even using a massively parallel computer.
The other sort of encryption, the sort we are talking about here, is public-key encryption, where you use two different keys to scramable and descramble the message. The advantage of this method is you can create a key pair, and give one key to everyone who wants to send you a message (the public key), and while they can send you message securely, it is very difficult for them to figure out your private key (and thhus read messages other people have sent you).
The bad news with public-key encryption is that the algorithms are considerably weaker than with secret-key cyphers. You can mount considerably quicker attacks than just brute-forcing the keyspace. Therefore, you need longer keys for equivalent levels of security. With RSA, the most common method, figuring out your private key from your public key is done by trying to figure out the factor of a very, very large number that is the product of two very large prime numbers. This is still very difficult to do, but it is a simpler problem than brute-forcing an entire keyspace. These Germans have just demonstrated the ability to factor a larger such number than anyone else has done before.
Whilst this is interesting, from what (little) I understand of cryptography it's still a very long way from here to cracking 1024 bit RSA keys. In any case, as the hardware makes it easier for the attackers, it makes it practical to go with longer encryption keys, so faster hardware is neither a help nor hindrance to attackers. The one proviso is, of course, the security of data encrypted by older cyphers.
When people say "audit trail", they mean "audit trail where the voter verifies that the printout reflects who they voted for". That neatly deals with your scheme, at least as I understand it.
Even given this, the limit of analog modems across standard phone lines (from one analog line to another) is 33.6k (uncompressed). This is very close to the theoretical limits you can squeeze across a carrier with a phone line's properties.
56k modems, however, pull more trickery. They only work when the ISP has incoming digital lines, and IIRC they somehow disable the line filters that normally limit maximum bandwidth (in the analog signal sense) on a phone line to allow more data to be transferred. 56k modems do actually transmit 56,000 (or, in practice, more like 48,000 or 50,000) uncompressed bits per second.
Whilst there are inter-country trains, it's still a damn long way between, say, Hamburg and Rome, and planes would be quicker than the current generation of very fast trains. 600 km/h maglevs will increase considerably the distance over which a train's travel times are comparable to city-airport-airport-city.
Fosters (or their Australian brewing subsidiary CUB) makes quite a few domestic beers. In Melbourne, their full-strength lagers are Carlton Draught, Victoria Bitter (which is really a lager), and Crown Lager (their "premium" beer), as well as small amounts of Fosters. Crown Lager, frankly, does taste quite like Fosters Lager, but they are not the same.
Personally, I think these things are like road-biased SUVs - overpriced hybrids that by being adequate for two tasks are not very good at either. Gimme a real desktop machine, a thin-and-light (or, better still, an ultralight), and rsync and you've got a much better solution.
Well, not quite, but Melbourne-Frankfurt (with stopover in Singapore), and also LA-Melbourne (a 15-hour nonstop flight, until recently the world's longest scheduled flight). I defy anyone to do those routes and then tell me there's not a latent market for supersonic travel.
At least it failed - no self-respecting Aussie drinks Fosters, then or now:)
I stand corrected...I (mistakenly) thought Brian Kernighan also received a Turing Award. Of course, in the "well-known CS people at Princeton list" there's also Sedgewick, whose algorithms textbook is one of the most popular introductory textbooks on the topic.
Not to mention that there are three (IIRC) Turing Award winners at Princeton, amongst other leading lights of theoretical computer science. That, and when Princeton is sitting on a multi-billion dollar endowment, they don't really have to care all that much about what /. says about them :)
They didn't attempt to redefine the language for their personal use, they invented a phrase to describe a concept.
IMHO, throwing some money at nanotube research is a very good investment, considering the myriad applications. However, designing your entire space program around a technology that may never be possible seems overly risky.
In other words, where you say "proactive", there's plenty of people who say "reckless, foolhardy, and ally-alienating".
Freeman Dyson worked on the project, called "Project Orion", in the 1950's. His son wrote a book on the subject. One of the major problems with the damping was the springs getting out of control if one of the bombs was a dud...
Modern designers have looked at alternative approaches for damping the shock, like using a more sail-like structure at a much greater distance from the bomb detonation. Most of them seem convinced it can be made to work. The biggest problem is the radioactive fallout, which will likely preclude their use as a way to lift off from Earth.
The NYT and Washington Post "left-leaning"? You have to be kidding. For example look at a mainstream centre-left newspaper from the UK, The Guardian. Like I said, whilst it may be known as a left-wing rag, it is a well-respected, commercial, high-circulation broadsheet. Compare its take on world news to the NYT and then tell me the Times and Post are left wing.
That is, unless we ever build the quantum computers on steroids that supposedly will be able to solve all problems in NP. From what very little I understand about this, the physicists are still not sure whether these are even theoretically possible or not, but theey haven't ruled them out either. If we ever get one of those babies, the world changes completely overnight.
Despite all protestations to the contrary, that fact is what missile defence is all about.
They're both tricky. America's had accidents in both phases. In fact, the "staying alive whilst up there" part is pretty tough too - remember Apollo 13?
...but if he's responsible for purchasing trucks then they should know enough about them to understand and evaluate the advice they are receiving from their experts...
If such a thing were tried in the NFL, people would fall over themselves laughing. But it is precisely the situation many IT staff find themselves in.
To be honest, though, I don't think that executives that know absolutely nothing are that common any more. More likely is the executive that has the latest laptop that gets used for playing solitaire, and browsing forbes.com and zdnet.com, and imposes an immediate upgrade to Office 2003 because the advertisements are pretty and Information Rights Management sounds so cool!
Note that you probably couldn't just e-mail the board the relevant clip, because the board would be just as clueless about technology...
But then again, $750 a month for a couple of hours training sounds pretty close to blackmail to me :)
There are hypotheses that a quantum computer with still greater abilities might be built one day in the distant future. This machine would have the ability to solve "NP-complete" problems quickly. However, even if such a machine was constructed, this wouldn't help either. Chess (or a generalization of chess to an nxn board), is EXPTIME-complete, which means it provably takes exponential time to find the best chess move. So, essentially, we are screwed as far as brute-forcing chess.
Maybe some clever mathematician will be able to prove some properties about chess that might reduce the search space enough to make a brute force search feasible, but don't hold your breath.
At least in Australia, you can put up a sign that says "no hawkers" and if they do they can be prosecuted for trepassing if they do so.
If not, what are the key differences?