GCC can definitely be considered the success story of the Free Software movement.
Agreed.
In terms of C++ standards compliance GCC is believed to be the first compiler to achieve full ISO compliance. No other compiler (commercial or otherwise) can make the same claim.
As others have pointed out, it's not. It's good, though. However, the following compilers are also pretty good, comparable to GCC 3.0: KAI C++: runs on everything from Linux/x86 to Crays (also has a kick-ass optimizer); MIPSPro C++ (ok it's actually a bit less good than GCC 3.0, but I'm not sure I'm comparing the most recent version here); Compaq's C++ compiler: very good. I was impressed by that one.
Sun's C++ compiler is the worst Unix-vendor C++ compiler I've used (haven't tried IBM's or HP's, though). And BTW, VC++ runs/ran on Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC. I have a CD of it.:)
ReiserFS, but comparison, has never failed me. I've used it extensively on production machines under 2.2 and 2.4, and been using knfsd since 2.4.6 was released.
Well, we had many problems here with ReiserFS/RAID0 and NFS, even after all the NFS and RAID problems were "fixed". Then we went back to ext2. Which works.
We're thinking about maybe going to ext3 (and not because Redhat told use to do so - we're using Mandrake, and maybe going to Debian sometime). But rather, because if something goes wrong we can do a simple fall back to ext2 and we're working again.
So, yeah, try what you think will work, be it ext2, ext3, XFS, JFS, ReiserFS, or FAT16; if it doesn't work, try something else.:)
and i'm not talking out of my ass here. i've run into situations at work a couple times when i couldn't find the full time admin and needed to get something done, so i used my sudo access to get a root shell. (of course i had been given permission to root our boxen in case of emergency)
Yeah, that's the problem with sudo. If you configure it so anyone can do any measure of useful work, then they can also crack root with it.
Of course that's just re-affirming the "golden rule of Unix", don't give root access of any sort unless someone needs it and can be trusted with it.
We use it here mostly as a nice convinience, so we don't have to su back and forth (we also set it up so we can use rpm through sudo without a password - again convinient, but not secure).
I don't know where to begin with this statement. Their whole idea is idiotic. There are maybe, what, literally maybe 1000 people in the US who would be willing and able to do this. But see below for an alternate explanation.
2. This is probably a beta test for their encryption scheme.
The problem being there is no concievable way this can be secure. The system clock is under your control. As is the network connection that the software might use to onnect to a server (tcpdump time!). The only thing I can imagine they're using this for is as some sort of source of FUD.
Consider that this is the entertainment industry we're dealing with here. People who study their markets inside and out trying to get what the most people want (or rather, will put up with) for the least price. But they don't know if people will want this? Yeah, right. They know. They plan on doing this, in some very weak crypto, whereupon people will (obviously) break it. So then they go to Congress and say "Look, we make our super-secure movie format, and still those nasty pirates got it. We need more protections! We need a suspension of civil rights in order to save our profits! We demand people using DivX be shot on sight! Etc." You're right, they're not stupid.
Its not like the encryption they use will be worth cracking. As soon as it is cracked they can change it and at best users can get a few copies of movies they didn't pay for... but that won't be so much of an issue at all if they change it regularly.
But during the, say 3 day window where it's cracked, people can get whatever movies they want (subject to the studio's whim as to what to put online), convert them to DivX or whatever, and put them online. If I was going to download 500 megs to see a movie, I might as well do a format that:
1) I can watch more than once
2) I can watch at all (on Linux)
I think 3 days is way smaller than what will actually happen in practice. People don't like to upgrade software. They might be able to get away with patching once a month.
Since this whole scheme presumes that everyone everywhere has insane amounts of bandwidth, P2P will work just as well (better, actually) as the "official" channels.
I wonder whether this will be cost effective?
No, of course not.
Perhaps it is merely an attempt to reduce piracy of movies rather than actually making profit.
Not that either, because (as I metion above), would you rather download a movie once (for free) or many many times (paying each time).
Or will AOL Time Warner be large enough to make sure that most of the bandwidth is free?
Even those guys don't have nearly enough money to subsidize the kind of bandwidth we're talking about here. Even on a 1.5 Mbit DSL line, 500 megs is about 45 minutes (assuming 100% effeciency, which never happens). Do that for, say, 10% of the US population? It would bankrupt them. And I'm just talking about infrastructure (wires, and probably buying Verizon and co. so they'll play along).
// not really.. i've built ever kernel since gcc 3.0 came out (i downloaded it the same day ^_^ installed right away to and every one has worked totaly super fine
Ok, I hadn't heard anything one way or another, and I was kind of scared to try. Thanks!
Isn't gcc 3 still unstable in certain respects too? Pretty much any software I've checked out so far tells you to use gcc 3 at your own risk.
It's unstable only in the sense that it hasn't been used much (so far). I haven't had any problems with it at all, and on the plus side it generates code that is often significantly faster than gcc 2.95.x.
Though as of now it doesn't build on certain machines, such as some 32-bit SPARC boxen (like mine, unfortunately). 3.0.1 is coming out tommorow (at least at last report it is), and should fix any problems people have run into so far.
The only program that are likely to have a problem with gcc 3.0 are:
*Kernels
*Libc
*Other things that need to know about how the compiler handles things at an intimate level (for example, certain interpreters).
*Non-ISO compliant C++ code, though gcc 2.95.3 was pretty decent.
I built 2.4.9 kernel tonight. I used egcs 1.1.2. I suppose I could have tried gcc 3.0 but I was a little scared.:)
From my perspective, distributing non-free software is coercion - it's coercing users *not* to help their friends. It's coercing them to avoid using and spreading generally useful technical information in many circumstances.
What's the difference between this, and my, as a competent programmer (play along here), simply refusing to program anything at all? Maybe I, if I put my mind to it, could write a GPLed clone of Windows 2000 within 1 year. But I'm not. I have no interest in doing so. So am I coercing someone to
Windows 2000, because I'm not doing something about it?
If you disagree with me, disagree with me that computer programs are technically useful information.
Programs do (sometimes), and so do lots of other things (books, papers, hardware). Are you suggesting that we should not have copyrights at all? Even GNU doesn't want that.
Um... the guy I was responding to? You know, where there was that little bit in italics (like these!), and it ended with "So what's the problem?" I think that's who said it. I could be wrong though.
'Eventually'... When is that? While I'm still alive?
Who knows? And anyway, who cares? Compiling glibc is a gigantic PITA. It takes hours even on a fast machine, and it's not really necessary for anyone except people doing distributions. Did you really need to compile glibc with gcc 3.0 right away? You can use glibc with gcc 3.0 just fine, you know.
Freedom of speech includes the freedom to complain loudly about other's speech. Freedom of speech includes the freedom to be as anal and vitrolic as you want. So what's the problem?
This is very silly. So you say it's a "problem" for people to complain about RMS's speech, but it's fine for RMS to complain about other people.
Well now I'm complaining about your complaining about other people complaining about RMS's complaining. And you say yourself that's part of my freedom of speech. So there!:)
is why can't gcc 3 be used to compile this new version of glibc?
Because glibc is very sensitive to changes in how the stack is laid out, etc. This is just one of those things, just like how 2.2 kernels could not be built with gcc 2.95. Eventually everyone will get their stuff straightened out, and that's that.
Umm...perhaps for you stability has not changed, but the release notes for the latest Mozilla build keep listing the bugs they fixed. For instance Mozilla 0.9.2 [mozilla.org] fixed 25 bugs over the previous version.
OK, I had that phrased badly. Let's say that I didn't see much stability difference between 0.9.1 and 0.9.3, because I found 0.9.1 to be quite stable.
(BTW, about the version number: I misread 0.8-7 as 0.8.7).
The Mozilla version shipping with Mandrake 8.0 is 0.8.7. While stability is pretty much unchanged since then, Mozilla has gotten noticably faster during the 0.9.x cycle. 0.9.1 is usable on a 350 Mhz Pentium II... sort of. 0.9.3, while still being slower than Navigator 4.77, isn't bad at all. It's finally fast enough that I can use it as my normal, day-to-day browser (I was using Nav 4.77, because while it was unstable as hell, at least I didn't have to wait 20 seconds for a page to load).
I imagine that simliar situations are true for at least one or two of the other browsers compared. Development on Mozilla, especially, is happening very fast and comparing something current 6 months ago is not, IMHO particularly meaningful.
you can't run it without gcc, g++, *libc*, binutils, bash, gzip, less, ncurses, readline, *shellutils*.
All gnu tools. They are vital to a linux system booting, apache is not.
Since when are gcc, g++, binutils, gzip, less, ncurses, or readline needed to boot a system?!?
OTOH, glibc, of course, yes, you need that. And the shellutils.
Of course, considering that at least one major glibc developer is most unhappy with GNU:
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=01/08/16 /2 228200&mode=thread
It was proprietary software that put him in prison, by a company exercising its power to distribute under their license of choice: a proprietary license.
[...]
So I think you'd best leave Sklyarov out of your argument, because the example demonstrates what can be the result when programmers get to choose whatever license they please.
How about DeCSS then? Most of the people getting sued into dust by the MPAA didn't even have anything to do with it's production, just it's distribution.
So don't try to claim Dimitri wouldn't have been arrested if he had released that thing under the GPL.
More and more I think that theories in physics are nothing more than successive approximations and we'll never know the true nature of existence.
I agree with this totally. Just read a book on medicine or science from 1890, or just a Popular Science from 1950. And then realize that at the time they though all of that utter garbage was correct, too. Though of course our approxomations are getting better, which is certainly nice. But saying "we know everything there is to know about {phyiscs,biology,chemistry,some sub-branch of any of the previous}, is like saying "this program does not have any bugs at all"
In the 1970's, all sorts of scientists were certain that we were heading into another ice age. Good thing all those SUVs came along and warmed up the planet for us, eh? (Note that I'm also skeptical about claims of global warming, but that is, perhaps, another story).
If you look at the latest worms, Red Hat's and MS's, they could BOTH be avoided by updating software.
But of course. However, it's quite rare that an update for a Unix system will break major functionality (NT 4.0 SP6 anyone?). A lot of people can't update their systems, because some major piece of functionality, which their business depends on, will break if they do.
There are lots of possible explanations for this... it could just be a hiccup. But the explanation our friend who authored the column provided is equally plausible.
Or the most likely cause, one or two large web serving companies moved from Solaris or FreeBSD or Linux or whatever to Windows (or maybe they moved from Apache on Windows to IIS on Windows). Based on previous netcraft surveys things like that are always the causes of the big shifts. Oh, hey, I'll just quote netcraft themselves:
"Primarily this is a result of two large US installations converting from Solaris."
The article does have some decent points, though at the same time I feel like I can't actually agree with any of them. It was a strange experienece. For example, what the hell is a "web service"? The only thing he mentions is about this is e-commerce. WTF? mod_ssl/PHP/Postgres does not count or something? Oh, whatever.
I'm just waiting for CR3 or whatever that will completely destroy half the IIS servers in the world. I won't particularly enjoy it (I'm sure the news media would drone endlessly about it to my great boredom), but I feel like I'm in a room full of chain smokers and loose sticks of dynamite. It's probably going to happen, soon. Hrm, I wonder if Code Red will have a visible effect in the next survey; all this publicity couldn't have seemed like good news to the higher-ups (or whoever decides this stuff).
If cities are going to emulate Portland, they should make a lot of noise about density, then sprawl like crazy anyway.
Yeah, it's really starting to suck out there; I hate seen vast tracks of what was once very nice farmland get rolled over by some particularly ugly housing developments. Though OTOH the core of the city is very nice as-is, I would hate to see a lot of it get torn down or whatever. But the growth out there is too high for the area to keep up, I think.
Even Baltimore (where I'm currently living) has higher density than Portland, and most of the buildings here are only 2 or 3 stories high.
you won't take the algorithms specified in other posts and toss them into a program, because it would almost certainly be insecure. Algorithms are fine, but strong block ciphers, public key encryption algorithms, and hash functions have been around for 10 years or more. OTOH, getting the key managemnet, random number generation, etc right is hard and takes a lot of experience and knowledge.
My call would be to use GnuPG. It uses strong algorithms, uses a well know and fairly intensivley studied format, open source, and the people who did it seem to know what they're doing pretty well. If you're feeling paranoid, use the TripleDES or Rijndael-256 options to encrypt, though personally I feel perfectly safe encrypting even very personal things with CAST5.
If you're actually interested in papers, etc, I would start it out with more practical-oriented things (for example, the specifications of Blowfish, MD5, SHA-1, and RSA - not what you find in Applied Crytography or whatever, but the original academic papers - with fairly minimal experience in programming you should be able to understand things like this fairly easily). From there, you can start to read the more involved papers, with complex algorithms and protocols, weird mathematical systems, etc.
Basicaly "in the know" people know that it's not encryption that breaks a secure system. It's the fact that your OS has a remote root hole (or equivalent), or the FBI put a keylogger in your keyboard, or there is a microphone planted in your room. It's much, much simpler to do any of those things than actually break modern encryption algorithms (consider that the FBI actually carried out my keylogging point in order to grab a PGP passphrase that some mob guy was using to encrypt his books). So unless you're sure that the FBI (or anyone else) can't do something like that, there is no point in using anything that might theoretically be more secure cryptographically speaking.
Slashdot Mirror
GCC can definitely be considered the success story of the Free Software movement.
:)
Agreed.
In terms of C++ standards compliance GCC is believed to be the first compiler to achieve full ISO compliance. No other compiler (commercial or otherwise) can make the same claim.
As others have pointed out, it's not. It's good, though. However, the following compilers are also pretty good, comparable to GCC 3.0: KAI C++: runs on everything from Linux/x86 to Crays (also has a kick-ass optimizer); MIPSPro C++ (ok it's actually a bit less good than GCC 3.0, but I'm not sure I'm comparing the most recent version here); Compaq's C++ compiler: very good. I was impressed by that one.
Sun's C++ compiler is the worst Unix-vendor C++ compiler I've used (haven't tried IBM's or HP's, though). And BTW, VC++ runs/ran on Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC. I have a CD of it.
ReiserFS, but comparison, has never failed me. I've used it extensively on production machines under 2.2 and 2.4, and been using knfsd since 2.4.6 was released.
:)
Well, we had many problems here with ReiserFS/RAID0 and NFS, even after all the NFS and RAID problems were "fixed". Then we went back to ext2. Which works.
We're thinking about maybe going to ext3 (and not because Redhat told use to do so - we're using Mandrake, and maybe going to Debian sometime). But rather, because if something goes wrong we can do a simple fall back to ext2 and we're working again.
So, yeah, try what you think will work, be it ext2, ext3, XFS, JFS, ReiserFS, or FAT16; if it doesn't work, try something else.
I even qualified my comment by stating my own bias. You're just looking to pick a fight, aren't you?
He he. If you're user ID wasn't so low, I would say "Welcome to the world of posting on slashdot!". ^_^
and i'm not talking out of my ass here. i've run into situations at work a couple times when i couldn't find the full time admin and needed to get something done, so i used my sudo access to get a root shell. (of course i had been given permission to root our boxen in case of emergency)
Yeah, that's the problem with sudo. If you configure it so anyone can do any measure of useful work, then they can also crack root with it.
Of course that's just re-affirming the "golden rule of Unix", don't give root access of any sort unless someone needs it and can be trusted with it.
We use it here mostly as a nice convinience, so we don't have to su back and forth (we also set it up so we can use rpm through sudo without a password - again convinient, but not secure).
1. they're not stupid
I don't know where to begin with this statement. Their whole idea is idiotic. There are maybe, what, literally maybe 1000 people in the US who would be willing and able to do this. But see below for an alternate explanation.
2. This is probably a beta test for their encryption scheme.
The problem being there is no concievable way this can be secure. The system clock is under your control. As is the network connection that the software might use to onnect to a server (tcpdump time!). The only thing I can imagine they're using this for is as some sort of source of FUD.
Consider that this is the entertainment industry we're dealing with here. People who study their markets inside and out trying to get what the most people want (or rather, will put up with) for the least price. But they don't know if people will want this? Yeah, right. They know. They plan on doing this, in some very weak crypto, whereupon people will (obviously) break it. So then they go to Congress and say "Look, we make our super-secure movie format, and still those nasty pirates got it. We need more protections! We need a suspension of civil rights in order to save our profits! We demand people using DivX be shot on sight! Etc." You're right, they're not stupid.
Its not like the encryption they use will be worth cracking. As soon as it is cracked they can change it and at best users can get a few copies of movies they didn't pay for... but that won't be so much of an issue at all if they change it regularly.
But during the, say 3 day window where it's cracked, people can get whatever movies they want (subject to the studio's whim as to what to put online), convert them to DivX or whatever, and put them online. If I was going to download 500 megs to see a movie, I might as well do a format that:
1) I can watch more than once
2) I can watch at all (on Linux)
I think 3 days is way smaller than what will actually happen in practice. People don't like to upgrade software. They might be able to get away with patching once a month.
Since this whole scheme presumes that everyone everywhere has insane amounts of bandwidth, P2P will work just as well (better, actually) as the "official" channels.
I wonder whether this will be cost effective?
No, of course not.
Perhaps it is merely an attempt to reduce piracy of movies rather than actually making profit.
Not that either, because (as I metion above), would you rather download a movie once (for free) or many many times (paying each time).
Or will AOL Time Warner be large enough to make sure that most of the bandwidth is free?
Even those guys don't have nearly enough money to subsidize the kind of bandwidth we're talking about here. Even on a 1.5 Mbit DSL line, 500 megs is about 45 minutes (assuming 100% effeciency, which never happens). Do that for, say, 10% of the US population? It would bankrupt them. And I'm just talking about infrastructure (wires, and probably buying Verizon and co. so they'll play along).
// not really.. i've built ever kernel since gcc 3.0 came out (i downloaded it the same day ^_^ installed right away to and every one has worked totaly super fine
Ok, I hadn't heard anything one way or another, and I was kind of scared to try. Thanks!
Isn't gcc 3 still unstable in certain respects too? Pretty much any software I've checked out so far tells you to use gcc 3 at your own risk.
:)
It's unstable only in the sense that it hasn't been used much (so far). I haven't had any problems with it at all, and on the plus side it generates code that is often significantly faster than gcc 2.95.x.
Though as of now it doesn't build on certain machines, such as some 32-bit SPARC boxen (like mine, unfortunately). 3.0.1 is coming out tommorow (at least at last report it is), and should fix any problems people have run into so far.
The only program that are likely to have a problem with gcc 3.0 are:
*Kernels
*Libc
*Other things that need to know about how the compiler handles things at an intimate level (for example, certain interpreters).
*Non-ISO compliant C++ code, though gcc 2.95.3 was pretty decent.
I built 2.4.9 kernel tonight. I used egcs 1.1.2. I suppose I could have tried gcc 3.0 but I was a little scared.
From my perspective, distributing non-free software is coercion - it's coercing users *not* to help their friends. It's coercing them to avoid using and spreading generally useful technical information in many circumstances.
What's the difference between this, and my, as a competent programmer (play along here), simply refusing to program anything at all? Maybe I, if I put my mind to it, could write a GPLed clone of Windows 2000 within 1 year. But I'm not. I have no interest in doing so. So am I coercing someone to
Windows 2000, because I'm not doing something about it?
If you disagree with me, disagree with me that computer programs are technically useful information.
Programs do (sometimes), and so do lots of other things (books, papers, hardware). Are you suggesting that we should not have copyrights at all? Even GNU doesn't want that.
Who exactly said it a "problem" to critcize RMS?
Um... the guy I was responding to? You know, where there was that little bit in italics (like these!), and it ended with "So what's the problem?" I think that's who said it. I could be wrong though.
'Eventually'... When is that? While I'm still alive?
Who knows? And anyway, who cares? Compiling glibc is a gigantic PITA. It takes hours even on a fast machine, and it's not really necessary for anyone except people doing distributions. Did you really need to compile glibc with gcc 3.0 right away? You can use glibc with gcc 3.0 just fine, you know.
And GCC 3.0.1 comes out tommorow.
Freedom of speech includes the freedom to complain loudly about other's speech. Freedom of speech includes the freedom to be as anal and vitrolic as you want. So what's the problem?
:)
This is very silly. So you say it's a "problem" for people to complain about RMS's speech, but it's fine for RMS to complain about other people.
Well now I'm complaining about your complaining about other people complaining about RMS's complaining. And you say yourself that's part of my freedom of speech. So there!
is why can't gcc 3 be used to compile this new version of glibc?
Because glibc is very sensitive to changes in how the stack is laid out, etc. This is just one of those things, just like how 2.2 kernels could not be built with gcc 2.95. Eventually everyone will get their stuff straightened out, and that's that.
OK, I had that phrased badly. Let's say that I didn't see much stability difference between 0.9.1 and 0.9.3, because I found 0.9.1 to be quite stable.
(BTW, about the version number: I misread 0.8-7 as 0.8.7).
0.8.7? There was 0.8, 0.8.1 and then straight to 0.9.
My bad. I read 0.8-7 (the RPM version) as 0.8.7.
The Mozilla version shipping with Mandrake 8.0 is 0.8.7. While stability is pretty much unchanged since then, Mozilla has gotten noticably faster during the 0.9.x cycle. 0.9.1 is usable on a 350 Mhz Pentium II... sort of. 0.9.3, while still being slower than Navigator 4.77, isn't bad at all. It's finally fast enough that I can use it as my normal, day-to-day browser (I was using Nav 4.77, because while it was unstable as hell, at least I didn't have to wait 20 seconds for a page to load).
I imagine that simliar situations are true for at least one or two of the other browsers compared. Development on Mozilla, especially, is happening very fast and comparing something current 6 months ago is not, IMHO particularly meaningful.
you can't run it without gcc, g++, *libc*, binutils, bash, gzip, less, ncurses, readline, *shellutils*.
6 /2 228200&mode=thread
All gnu tools. They are vital to a linux system booting, apache is not.
Since when are gcc, g++, binutils, gzip, less, ncurses, or readline needed to boot a system?!?
OTOH, glibc, of course, yes, you need that. And the shellutils.
Of course, considering that at least one major glibc developer is most unhappy with GNU:
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=01/08/1
And don't forget TeX and XFree86. I don't know what I would do without good 'ol TeX. :)
And those (L)GPL'ed GNOME and KDE projects wouldn't be to useful without X (and the non-GNU QT, in the case of KDE).
I am quite curious to see what the FSF's answer will be to ESR's question, though.
[...]
So I think you'd best leave Sklyarov out of your argument, because the example demonstrates what can be the result when programmers get to choose whatever license they please.
How about DeCSS then? Most of the people getting sued into dust by the MPAA didn't even have anything to do with it's production, just it's distribution.
So don't try to claim Dimitri wouldn't have been arrested if he had released that thing under the GPL.
i believe it's a matter of "cat 0 > /proc/sys/cpu/1/active" (Or something similar)
:)
You would probably want to use echo, not cat.
More info about it can be found here:
link to mail archive.
More and more I think that theories in physics are nothing more than successive approximations and we'll never know the true nature of existence.
I agree with this totally. Just read a book on medicine or science from 1890, or just a Popular Science from 1950. And then realize that at the time they though all of that utter garbage was correct, too. Though of course our approxomations are getting better, which is certainly nice. But saying "we know everything there is to know about {phyiscs,biology,chemistry,some sub-branch of any of the previous}, is like saying "this program does not have any bugs at all"
In the 1970's, all sorts of scientists were certain that we were heading into another ice age. Good thing all those SUVs came along and warmed up the planet for us, eh? (Note that I'm also skeptical about claims of global warming, but that is, perhaps, another story).
If you look at the latest worms, Red Hat's and MS's, they could BOTH be avoided by updating software.
But of course. However, it's quite rare that an update for a Unix system will break major functionality (NT 4.0 SP6 anyone?). A lot of people can't update their systems, because some major piece of functionality, which their business depends on, will break if they do.
Or the most likely cause, one or two large web serving companies moved from Solaris or FreeBSD or Linux or whatever to Windows (or maybe they moved from Apache on Windows to IIS on Windows). Based on previous netcraft surveys things like that are always the causes of the big shifts. Oh, hey, I'll just quote netcraft themselves:
"Primarily this is a result of two large US installations converting from Solaris."
The article does have some decent points, though at the same time I feel like I can't actually agree with any of them. It was a strange experienece. For example, what the hell is a "web service"? The only thing he mentions is about this is e-commerce. WTF? mod_ssl/PHP/Postgres does not count or something? Oh, whatever.
I'm just waiting for CR3 or whatever that will completely destroy half the IIS servers in the world. I won't particularly enjoy it (I'm sure the news media would drone endlessly about it to my great boredom), but I feel like I'm in a room full of chain smokers and loose sticks of dynamite. It's probably going to happen, soon. Hrm, I wonder if Code Red will have a visible effect in the next survey; all this publicity couldn't have seemed like good news to the higher-ups (or whoever decides this stuff).
Yeah, it's really starting to suck out there; I hate seen vast tracks of what was once very nice farmland get rolled over by some particularly ugly housing developments. Though OTOH the core of the city is very nice as-is, I would hate to see a lot of it get torn down or whatever. But the growth out there is too high for the area to keep up, I think.
Even Baltimore (where I'm currently living) has higher density than Portland, and most of the buildings here are only 2 or 3 stories high.
you won't take the algorithms specified in other posts and toss them into a program, because it would almost certainly be insecure. Algorithms are fine, but strong block ciphers, public key encryption algorithms, and hash functions have been around for 10 years or more. OTOH, getting the key managemnet, random number generation, etc right is hard and takes a lot of experience and knowledge.
My call would be to use GnuPG. It uses strong algorithms, uses a well know and fairly intensivley studied format, open source, and the people who did it seem to know what they're doing pretty well. If you're feeling paranoid, use the TripleDES or Rijndael-256 options to encrypt, though personally I feel perfectly safe encrypting even very personal things with CAST5.
If you're actually interested in papers, etc, I would start it out with more practical-oriented things (for example, the specifications of Blowfish, MD5, SHA-1, and RSA - not what you find in Applied Crytography or whatever, but the original academic papers - with fairly minimal experience in programming you should be able to understand things like this fairly easily). From there, you can start to read the more involved papers, with complex algorithms and protocols, weird mathematical systems, etc.
Basicaly "in the know" people know that it's not encryption that breaks a secure system. It's the fact that your OS has a remote root hole (or equivalent), or the FBI put a keylogger in your keyboard, or there is a microphone planted in your room. It's much, much simpler to do any of those things than actually break modern encryption algorithms (consider that the FBI actually carried out my keylogging point in order to grab a PGP passphrase that some mob guy was using to encrypt his books). So unless you're sure that the FBI (or anyone else) can't do something like that, there is no point in using anything that might theoretically be more secure cryptographically speaking.