This was exactly what (human) spies used during the cold war, so this is not a new, but very effective technique to achieve perfect secrecy behind enemy lines.
Didn't your parents teach you there are things in life money can't buy?:)
NSA's highly confidential documents are encrypted using AES - symetric encryption with a key of at most 256 bits. 2^256 is a large enough key space to eliminate any kind of brute force attack - no matter if you have billions of dollars to spend. Consider now that 2^4096 is 2^3840 times larger than 2^256. Get the point ?
Destroying the key may or may not be any easier that destroying the data depending on how it is stored.
The key is only a couple of KB at most while the contents of the hard drive several hundreds GB. Getting rid of the first should always be easier than getting rid of the second. Even if the key is stored on the hard drive, writing random stuff over it 10.000 times is doable.
How sure are you that your enemy hasn't found a way to break your encryption or somehow obtained a copy of the key?
You use AES with a 256 bit key length, randomly generated, stored on the disk and NEVER reused. NSA uses AES for it's highly confidential documents so breaking it is highly unlikely (didn't want to use impossible, although it looks like it; but who knows what will happen 10 years from now). Never reusing the key makes it impossible for someone to obtain a duplicate, by the simple reason that there is no duplicate.
1.0, the first public release, was in October of 2003
This is exactly what I was saying. How many other open source projects you know which started numbering from 1.0? 1.0 usually comes after years of work. Consider that Linux is 2.6 after 15 years and Apache is still 2.2, while very many people are still using Linux 2.4 or Apache 1.3. At the same time Xen started with 1.0 and is 3.0 after only 3 years. Isn't this different?
but would cause them to sink to RIAA levels of unpopularity with pretty much everybody else
So the impact would still be negative for everybody, including their shareholders. So no, they have nobody to sue and they are in fact not planning to sue. Just FUD.
the corporation has a duty to it's shareholders to enforce the patents
I wonder who are the moderators that could mod you Insightful. I would have moderated you Troll. Do you really know what would happen if Microsoft would be stupid enough to sue Linux for patent infringement? IBM and these guys will immediatly sue them back for every patent they hold and Microsoft is using. How will this be a good thing for Microsoft's shareholders? So no, Microsoft is not planning to sue Linux. They are just trying to spread FUD to slow down the adoption of Linux and you are the only one who does not get it.
This is just an echo then... if not a dupe. The beta for Google Pages and the Google Page Creator has been around for exactly one month now. Cannot read the article (slashdotted) but I don't think there is anything new to say about it. And even if there was, the place to search for it should would be this: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/
Very inacurate slashdot title
on
Sun Grid DOS'd
·
· Score: 1
... it claims that the Sun grid was DDOSed. But what the article says is:
The attacks didn't disturb the regular grid, Sun said. "There was no degradation to performance for users inside the Sun Grid," spokesman Brett Smith said.
So they atacked the server hosting text-to-speech translation service, NOT THE SUN GRID!
RedHat has been known and is still (via Fedora) the "bleeding edge" distro.
And is this a good thing for the Fedora users / beta testers? Most of them don't even know they are using a "bleeding edge" distro, and this does more harm than good to the image of free software. Now all those users will think that free software is as buggy as Fedora is.
Outdated or not, I really like Slackware, but I have to mention I never tried Gentoo, so yes I will give it a try one of these days. Thanks for the advice:)
Slashdot Mirror
X-Wing?!
This was exactly what (human) spies used during the cold war, so this is not a new, but very effective technique to achieve perfect secrecy behind enemy lines.
A lot more volatile than a hard drive?
Didn't your parents teach you there are things in life money can't buy? :)
NSA's highly confidential documents are encrypted using AES - symetric encryption with a key of at most 256 bits. 2^256 is a large enough key space to eliminate any kind of brute force attack - no matter if you have billions of dollars to spend. Consider now that 2^4096 is 2^3840 times larger than 2^256. Get the point ?
Destroying the key may or may not be any easier that destroying the data depending on how it is stored.
The key is only a couple of KB at most while the contents of the hard drive several hundreds GB. Getting rid of the first should always be easier than getting rid of the second. Even if the key is stored on the hard drive, writing random stuff over it 10.000 times is doable.
How sure are you that your enemy hasn't found a way to break your encryption or somehow obtained a copy of the key?
You use AES with a 256 bit key length, randomly generated, stored on the disk and NEVER reused. NSA uses AES for it's highly confidential documents so breaking it is highly unlikely (didn't want to use impossible, although it looks like it; but who knows what will happen 10 years from now). Never reusing the key makes it impossible for someone to obtain a duplicate, by the simple reason that there is no duplicate.
I liked it a lot.
1.0, the first public release, was in October of 2003
This is exactly what I was saying. How many other open source projects you know which started numbering from 1.0? 1.0 usually comes after years of work. Consider that Linux is 2.6 after 15 years and Apache is still 2.2, while very many people are still using Linux 2.4 or Apache 1.3. At the same time Xen started with 1.0 and is 3.0 after only 3 years. Isn't this different?
I wonder what numbering scheme alowed Xen to reach version 3 so fast. Certainly not the same one used by most open source projects.
I don't see any negative points except for the effort required...
Unless you are lazy this shouldn't be a problem either.
Don't think I was born then. What did it mean?
Not only that, but they were running native code. Think on how much slower this simulation will be.
Who is going to stop it? How?
Microsoft is trying to patent the double click. Duh!
but would cause them to sink to RIAA levels of unpopularity with pretty much everybody else
So the impact would still be negative for everybody, including their shareholders. So no, they have nobody to sue and they are in fact not planning to sue. Just FUD.
the corporation has a duty to it's shareholders to enforce the patents
I wonder who are the moderators that could mod you Insightful. I would have moderated you Troll. Do you really know what would happen if Microsoft would be stupid enough to sue Linux for patent infringement? IBM and these guys will immediatly sue them back for every patent they hold and Microsoft is using. How will this be a good thing for Microsoft's shareholders? So no, Microsoft is not planning to sue Linux. They are just trying to spread FUD to slow down the adoption of Linux and you are the only one who does not get it.
Sad thing indeed. But I think that it would be even worse if they actually payed for them.
I don't think that they are breaking the Sony patent on rootkits. But, well ... who knows?
This is just an echo then ... if not a dupe. The beta for Google Pages and the Google Page Creator has been around for exactly one month now. Cannot read the article (slashdotted) but I don't think there is anything new to say about it. And even if there was, the place to search for it should would be this: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/
... it claims that the Sun grid was DDOSed. But what the article says is:
The attacks didn't disturb the regular grid, Sun said. "There was no degradation to performance for users inside the Sun Grid," spokesman Brett Smith said.
So they atacked the server hosting text-to-speech translation service, NOT THE SUN GRID!
RedHat has been known and is still (via Fedora) the "bleeding edge" distro.
And is this a good thing for the Fedora users / beta testers? Most of them don't even know they are using a "bleeding edge" distro, and this does more harm than good to the image of free software. Now all those users will think that free software is as buggy as Fedora is.
And why are you complaining to us and not to THEM?
Does that mean you can pay prostitutes this way?
The latest stable version of the Linux kernel is: 2.6.16
</quote>
Any information/speculation on when will Slackware 11 be released?
Outdated or not, I really like Slackware, but I have to mention I never tried Gentoo, so yes I will give it a try one of these days. Thanks for the advice :)