As a pen collector and afficionado, I feel obligated to tell you that the Fisher Space Pen is awesome! The cartrigde is of ridiculous quality. If I'm not writing with a fountain pen (most often I write using a large Pelikan fountain pen), I almost always use either a Fisher space pen cartridge or a gel cartridge from Parker. You got to know your pens, people!
So you're saying that....ehmmm....we should break virtually all links on the internet, displace 60% of all domains, essentially plunging the internet into complete chaos, and, not unlikely, heavily damage the world economy in the process so that....ehmmm....we wouldn't have an argument over.xxx? All that, plus we'd lose all of the great context top level domains.
You are just fucking with me right? I mean, you can't in any way be serious! I am going to get a "YHBT. YHL. HAND." soon right? Otherwise, I guess it answers my question: I am in the Twilight Zone! God damnit, it's scary here....
Huh. There you go. Never happened to me though. You would hope that an intra-office email at a US Senator office would take shorter time, but with this guy running it, I'd probably trust the pony express more.
Yes, obviously his constituents. I realise that, I'm not an idiot;) I meant more like "what kind of people votes for these guys"
Stevens is one of the biggest pigs at the public spending trough, despite being a Republican*. He gets votes because he brings home the bacon.
Some one should hit his voters with a mallet with the words "Greater good" ingrained on it.
*There used to be a time once when Republicans were the fiscally responsible party. Seriously.
Exactly! I'm no fan of the small government doctrine (I'm more of a welfare-state kind-of-a-guy) so I wouldn't vote repulican either way, but atleast back in the day you could respect their ideologies! To paraphrase John Goodman as Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski - "Fat Cats! Fuck me. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of a conservative fiscal policy, Dude, at least it's an ethos!"
Hey, how cool would it be if someone implemented ethernet protocols over pneumatic tubes!!! It'd have to be switched ofcourse, otherwise one would have to copy each tube so that everyone on the Ethertube got a copy. And then you'd have to implement that cool wait-a-random-interval collision detection thing so that the tubes don't smash into eachother. My god, that would be awesome!
Maybe it's just by childish naivete, but I would hope that voters would recognize that, even if it might be slightly negative for themselves, giving a few bucks to people who have lost their homes and their livelyhoods and are living in tents is, you know, the right thing to do.
And also, by "an internet was sent by my staff" I assume he means an email. Since when does it take days for an email to arrive? It's nutters! I'll say it again, who the fuck votes for these guys????
Most likely, he is influenced by da big bucks from telcos that would love nothing more than to see Net Neutrality get struck down. I mean, it's the only explanation.
This is the same guy the threatened to quit the senate if funds for building a brige that led to nowhere in alaska was used for relief after hurricane Katrina. He is mindbogginly isnane, he is. Who the fuck votes for these guys?
But...but...but....why????? Why would we do this crazy, insane thing of eliminating general tlds? It makes no sense!!! Where would we put www.un.org? Are you against people being able to register domains? I thought it was a good thing that anyone could get a.com domain without any hassle. You know, so there exists stuff on the internet!!!
And how exactly would restricting people to use national top level domains promote free markets?
Am I in the Twilight Zone? Are these comments actually real, or am I dreaming that someone is actually saying these things?
How can people misunderstand the internet so much?!? The internet is not confined to any national borders! The internet is no more American than it is French, or Finnish or Swahilian! It is an international network of connected computers that is confined to no national borders! Comments like "Each country could essentially create their own internet if they don't want to be part of The Internet" are ignorant and make no rational sense whatsoever. Please stop making them.
This has to be one of the wierdest comments I've ever seen on/. I don't understand, why would we want that? So that people can be restricted to only surf in their own countries? Or are you saying that being international is "stupid", that it's "silly" not to automatically associate a company with a specific nation?
Let's take a concrete example: wikipedia. It's hosted by a US foundation and most of the servers reside in Florida. This would put it squarely in the.us category, right? But what about the foreign language wikipedias? I doubt there is less than 20 people in the entire US who would be interested in the Norwegian wikipedia. So by what crazy logic should the people of norway be forced to access a site completly in norwegian, for norwegians, by norwegians (btw, is that how you spell norwegian?) be forced to access no.wikipedia.us? It's insane! It would also be extremely difficult for the wikimedia foundation to purchuse all the top level domains it would need (there are what, 180 different language wikipedias?) not only because of the administrative pains but also because it would cost way, way more than wikimedia could ever pay. Remember, they're a non-profit, the wikipedia servers are hanging on by a thread as it is! Wikipedia also has extra servers in other countries (I believe they're located in Amsterdam and Hong Kong, but I'm probaly wrong). Should pages going through them have their respective nations top level domains?
These speeches arn't any huge feats of oratory. I don't mean to be disrespectful, but a talented writer could probably crank out these kind of speeches without much difficulty. They're fairly short, they contain not much original thought, they are filled with platitudes (like "Mankind is led into the darkness beyond our world by the inspiration of discovery and the longing to understand", what does this even mean?) and some fairly meaningless but deep-sounding religious truisms ("The same Creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today").
If you have genuine writing talent, as presidential speechwriters do, these things are no great feat. Hell, go to any funeral and hear the priest speak, you will hear similar rhetoric. If you wish to see something which is genuinely great, look at something like Dr. King or the Checkers speech (maybe except the "I hate communists"-part). I loathe Nixon as much as the next guy, but when I first saw that speech I was ready to go volunteer for the Eisenhower/Nixon campaign. Well, I would have, had I been, you know, alive back then.
I would imagine that such a speach is relatively easy to write: "Great tradgedy....yada yada....American heroes....yada yada....hold hands in prayer....etc". It's a fairly standard general eulogy. If you have the talent to write, a short, 5-10 minute adress shouldn't take a good speechwriter more than an hour or so to compose. I don't imagine the speech part would be a big issue in case such a tradgedy strikes.
PS. I'm gonna feel awful if something does happen, and I've just been making sarcastic comments about the presidents speech. Please, mods, don't mod me funny, that would make my shame permanently engraved in the slashdot servers.
This is exactly my point (maybe I wasn't very clear;). If you want to break the encryptions, you don't do it using cryptanalysis. The only way is exploiting the human factors. The ciphers themselves are solid. That's why I said "using the correct implementation and a good key" all the time. If you encrypt something with a tool like TrueCrypt which uses a rock solid, completly bulletproof implementation with a good password (and, ofcourse, assuming that no one has hacked your system) you will be completly safe from any potential snoopers.
I really can't say enough good things about TrueCrypt. Every step of the process is done 100% right. What it does is that it it mounts a virtual drive on your system that is encrypted to a file on your harddrive. There is no trace in the files themselves that they are encrypted, they are completly idestinguisable to random noise. You can even hide a hidden drive inside a volume (so if someone forces you to reveal your password, you can still hide a bunch of files inside a volume). It is completly impossible to know whether a hidden drive even exists within a virtual drive if you don't have the password (for the hidden drive that is, which should be different from your standard drive password). It also includes tons of other features, you can choose any cipher you like, from Blowfish to 3-DES (although I have no idea why you wouldn't just go with 256 bit AES), you can backup the fileheaders if someone loses their password, you can use keyfiles in addition to your passwords, you can create "travel disks" so you can take your encrypted stuff on the road an not have to install TrueCrypt on every computer you wish to use, and any other feature you could possibly want if you want to encrypt data. If you don't want to bother with PGP, you could even make a tiny drive, add your files to it, and email it to someone! It's also fast as hell, as I said, you could watch Hi-Def movies from an encrypted drive and it will decrypt it on the fly and you wont notice a thing. All that, and it's open source! I really encourage anyone to use it that has a need to encrypt data.
Ahh, yes, now I see, I read his comment wrong. Sorry 'bout that. My point still stands though, there is no reason not to use 256 bit AES instead of 128 bit.
There are a few things I wish to clarify about your post
If you don't want normal people to access the project, a standard encryption like 128bit AES is enough to feel safe.
First off, right now 128 bit AES is virtually unbreakable. I mean, the US government has approved 128 bit AES for use in encrypting classifed documents. That should tell you alot. It's true, maybe in 10 years or so, one might be able to crack 128 bit AES in a few weeks or so, which is kinda bad for a modern cipher. But you can rest assured, if you use 128 bit AES (correctly implemented, and with a good password), there isn't a force on earth that could crack it (right now, that is).
By normal people I mean bored people with only little computing power.
This statement makes no sense at all. Do you have any idea how fast AES is? On my puny, 2 year old, cheap crap Dell computer, I just benchmarked 256 bit AES, it can encrypt 55.3 MB/s. Fifty-five megabytes per second! That's fast as hell! By little computing power, are you reffering to ENIAC? 'Cause I bet even that transistor-less monster can crank out a few kbs per seconds, AES is that fast. I routinely watch Hi-Def movies on a drive encrypted by TrueCrypt. That means that the movie is decrypted on the fly, while I'm watching it!
And even that will probably not be enough against black-ops a la your-favorite-secret-agent-franchise...
I HATE IT when people say "Well, I'm sure that NSA could crack any cipher, their so secrative and so cool!" NO THEY COULDN'T. No one can crack a 256 bit AES with a correct implementation (and a good key). It's just not doable. I refer you to an earlier post of mine, where I got really pissed and did a few calculations. You cannot crack 256 bit AES. It's. Not. Possible.
The mistake you seem to be making in your post is that you assume that most encrypted material get cracked because they used a weak cipher. That is not true. 99.9999% of all modern codes that are cracked are cracked because of a poor implementation. Some-one selects a bad password, maybe someone gets your PGP key from your computer, maybe a secret agent beat the crap out the poor IT guy and got in. Whatever. It's simply not feasable to crack modern ciphers by cryptanalysis. It's virtually impossible, and there are so many easier ways to do it.
In conclusion: If you want your material safe, it's fine to use 128 bit AES, but there's no reason not to use 256 bit, so you could just as well use that. Just make damn sure that you use a good password and keep it safe. And no, a quote from Napoleon Dynamite is NOT a good password.
Requiring to be polygraphed for a job is fucked up, but it is also not the point. What they did was illegal, the fact that they got away with it is unfortunate, but it does not reflect an error in the system.
It is a completely different situation when it comes to law enforcement. If you say no to a polygraph, there is not shit they can do about it. They can't use the fact that you said no to a polygraph as evidence, so it really has no consequence whether you said no or not. It might throw some suspicion your way, it might make their job a little harder, but if they wish to take you to court they need solid evidence. Solid evidence which, in all probability wont be there if you are innocent.
That's not too say that no innocent people ever gets convicted of a crime. Obviously they do, but people don't do time because of failed polygraphs, or their refusal to take one.
if eve is at the beginning, and captures the initial DHK request to be setup, then wouldn't eve be able to follow the exchanges? and this is the reason, because, if parties that have no prior knowledge of each other want [added by me] to jointly establish a shared secret key over an insecure communications channel, then they have to communicate the initial SYN-ACK that says that they want to talk and then they have to establish that they want to utilize cryptography to communicate.
Even if we assume that Eve is listening from the very start, there is not much she can do about it. She could probably guess that we will, at some point, exchange a password and username (since we are connecting to a FON server/router), but she will have no idea whatsoever what is contained in the traffic after the initial key exhange. She will have no idea what key is, even if she sees everything. The only way to beat a correctly applied Diffie-Hellman is by being a man in the middle.
A man in the middle works like this: Assuming all messages passed from Alice to Bob must go through Eve. Alice and Bob wishes to start a key-exchange. Alice and Bob first agrees on (in wikipedias notation) p and g. Eve forwards the numbers between Alice and Bob (she has no reason not too). Alice then proceeds to pick a number a, and Bob picks a number b. What they don't know is that Eve also picks a number, the number e (not e as in 2.1718...., but a random integer). Alice then sends g^a mod p to Eve, thinking that she is sending something to Bob. Eve responds with g^e mod p, which Alice thinks is g^b mod p (ie. she thinks it's Bob sending the information). Eve does the same thing to Bob, she sends him g^e mod p, which he thinks is g^a mod p, and he responds with his g^b mod p. Then when Alice decides to send Bob a message, she encrypts it with what she thinks is hers and Bobs key, but really is Alices and Eves key. Eve decrypts the message, reads it, and then passes it along to Bob with what he thinks is his and Alices key, but really is his and Eves key.
That's the only way to break Diffie-Hellman, and it is easily averted: If Bob signs part of the conversation with his public key Alice can verify that it is indeed he who is sending the information. If Eve then tries to modify it by substituting her own key (like she did in the previous paragraph), Alice will see that someone has been messing with her communications. Digital signing details can also be found at wikipedia if you're interested (very simply: a digital signature is when you encrypt a message, or hash of a message, with the private part of a public/private key pair. Since you are the only one who has that key, no one other than you will be able to do it, but since everyone can decrypt your message using your public key, anyone can verify that it is, infact, you who sent it.)
For popular files, with, let's say, an original batch 20-30 seeders that seed at 5mbit or more, bittorrent is MINDNUMBINGLY fast. If you don't max out your up-speed (which would lover your downspeed, since the SYN-ACK packets can't get trough), but limit it to 80% or so, it's basically the fastest way of downloading content, in the world, ever. Assuming that Warner Brothers can put up a 20*50mbit seeders (=1 gbit) plus there are, at any given time, 750+peers, it will take no time at all to download a movie if you have broadband.
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As a pen collector and afficionado, I feel obligated to tell you that the Fisher Space Pen is awesome! The cartrigde is of ridiculous quality. If I'm not writing with a fountain pen (most often I write using a large Pelikan fountain pen), I almost always use either a Fisher space pen cartridge or a gel cartridge from Parker. You got to know your pens, people!
See, this is an ideology I can respect! I disagree, but atleast it's a sound opinion.
So you're saying that....ehmmm....we should break virtually all links on the internet, displace 60% of all domains, essentially plunging the internet into complete chaos, and, not unlikely, heavily damage the world economy in the process so that....ehmmm....we wouldn't have an argument over .xxx? All that, plus we'd lose all of the great context top level domains.
You are just fucking with me right? I mean, you can't in any way be serious! I am going to get a "YHBT. YHL. HAND." soon right? Otherwise, I guess it answers my question: I am in the Twilight Zone! God damnit, it's scary here....
Huh. There you go. Never happened to me though. You would hope that an intra-office email at a US Senator office would take shorter time, but with this guy running it, I'd probably trust the pony express more.
Yes, obviously his constituents. I realise that, I'm not an idiot ;) I meant more like "what kind of people votes for these guys"
Some one should hit his voters with a mallet with the words "Greater good" ingrained on it.
Exactly! I'm no fan of the small government doctrine (I'm more of a welfare-state kind-of-a-guy) so I wouldn't vote repulican either way, but atleast back in the day you could respect their ideologies! To paraphrase John Goodman as Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski - "Fat Cats! Fuck me. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of a conservative fiscal policy, Dude, at least it's an ethos!"
Hey, how cool would it be if someone implemented ethernet protocols over pneumatic tubes!!! It'd have to be switched ofcourse, otherwise one would have to copy each tube so that everyone on the Ethertube got a copy. And then you'd have to implement that cool wait-a-random-interval collision detection thing so that the tubes don't smash into eachother. My god, that would be awesome!
Maybe it's just by childish naivete, but I would hope that voters would recognize that, even if it might be slightly negative for themselves, giving a few bucks to people who have lost their homes and their livelyhoods and are living in tents is, you know, the right thing to do.
I'm guessing he was drunk at the time. I mean, come on, he couldn't form full sentances!
And also, by "an internet was sent by my staff" I assume he means an email. Since when does it take days for an email to arrive? It's nutters! I'll say it again, who the fuck votes for these guys????
Most likely, he is influenced by da big bucks from telcos that would love nothing more than to see Net Neutrality get struck down. I mean, it's the only explanation.
This is the same guy the threatened to quit the senate if funds for building a brige that led to nowhere in alaska was used for relief after hurricane Katrina. He is mindbogginly isnane, he is. Who the fuck votes for these guys?
But...but...but....why????? Why would we do this crazy, insane thing of eliminating general tlds? It makes no sense!!! Where would we put www.un.org? Are you against people being able to register domains? I thought it was a good thing that anyone could get a .com domain without any hassle. You know, so there exists stuff on the internet!!!
And how exactly would restricting people to use national top level domains promote free markets?
Am I in the Twilight Zone? Are these comments actually real, or am I dreaming that someone is actually saying these things?
Correction: The wikipedia servers are located in Florida, Amsterdam, Paris and Seoul, not Hong Kong. I apologise for the error.
How can people misunderstand the internet so much?!? The internet is not confined to any national borders! The internet is no more American than it is French, or Finnish or Swahilian! It is an international network of connected computers that is confined to no national borders! Comments like "Each country could essentially create their own internet if they don't want to be part of The Internet" are ignorant and make no rational sense whatsoever. Please stop making them.
This has to be one of the wierdest comments I've ever seen on /. I don't understand, why would we want that? So that people can be restricted to only surf in their own countries? Or are you saying that being international is "stupid", that it's "silly" not to automatically associate a company with a specific nation?
Let's take a concrete example: wikipedia. It's hosted by a US foundation and most of the servers reside in Florida. This would put it squarely in the .us category, right? But what about the foreign language wikipedias? I doubt there is less than 20 people in the entire US who would be interested in the Norwegian wikipedia. So by what crazy logic should the people of norway be forced to access a site completly in norwegian, for norwegians, by norwegians (btw, is that how you spell norwegian?) be forced to access no.wikipedia.us? It's insane! It would also be extremely difficult for the wikimedia foundation to purchuse all the top level domains it would need (there are what, 180 different language wikipedias?) not only because of the administrative pains but also because it would cost way, way more than wikimedia could ever pay. Remember, they're a non-profit, the wikipedia servers are hanging on by a thread as it is! Wikipedia also has extra servers in other countries (I believe they're located in Amsterdam and Hong Kong, but I'm probaly wrong). Should pages going through them have their respective nations top level domains?
I can't believe you got modded to 4.
These speeches arn't any huge feats of oratory. I don't mean to be disrespectful, but a talented writer could probably crank out these kind of speeches without much difficulty. They're fairly short, they contain not much original thought, they are filled with platitudes (like "Mankind is led into the darkness beyond our world by the inspiration of discovery and the longing to understand", what does this even mean?) and some fairly meaningless but deep-sounding religious truisms ("The same Creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today").
If you have genuine writing talent, as presidential speechwriters do, these things are no great feat. Hell, go to any funeral and hear the priest speak, you will hear similar rhetoric. If you wish to see something which is genuinely great, look at something like Dr. King or the Checkers speech (maybe except the "I hate communists"-part). I loathe Nixon as much as the next guy, but when I first saw that speech I was ready to go volunteer for the Eisenhower/Nixon campaign. Well, I would have, had I been, you know, alive back then.
I would imagine that such a speach is relatively easy to write: "Great tradgedy....yada yada....American heroes....yada yada....hold hands in prayer....etc". It's a fairly standard general eulogy. If you have the talent to write, a short, 5-10 minute adress shouldn't take a good speechwriter more than an hour or so to compose. I don't imagine the speech part would be a big issue in case such a tradgedy strikes.
PS. I'm gonna feel awful if something does happen, and I've just been making sarcastic comments about the presidents speech. Please, mods, don't mod me funny, that would make my shame permanently engraved in the slashdot servers.
This is exactly my point (maybe I wasn't very clear ;). If you want to break the encryptions, you don't do it using cryptanalysis. The only way is exploiting the human factors. The ciphers themselves are solid. That's why I said "using the correct implementation and a good key" all the time. If you encrypt something with a tool like TrueCrypt which uses a rock solid, completly bulletproof implementation with a good password (and, ofcourse, assuming that no one has hacked your system) you will be completly safe from any potential snoopers.
I really can't say enough good things about TrueCrypt. Every step of the process is done 100% right. What it does is that it it mounts a virtual drive on your system that is encrypted to a file on your harddrive. There is no trace in the files themselves that they are encrypted, they are completly idestinguisable to random noise. You can even hide a hidden drive inside a volume (so if someone forces you to reveal your password, you can still hide a bunch of files inside a volume). It is completly impossible to know whether a hidden drive even exists within a virtual drive if you don't have the password (for the hidden drive that is, which should be different from your standard drive password). It also includes tons of other features, you can choose any cipher you like, from Blowfish to 3-DES (although I have no idea why you wouldn't just go with 256 bit AES), you can backup the fileheaders if someone loses their password, you can use keyfiles in addition to your passwords, you can create "travel disks" so you can take your encrypted stuff on the road an not have to install TrueCrypt on every computer you wish to use, and any other feature you could possibly want if you want to encrypt data. If you don't want to bother with PGP, you could even make a tiny drive, add your files to it, and email it to someone! It's also fast as hell, as I said, you could watch Hi-Def movies from an encrypted drive and it will decrypt it on the fly and you wont notice a thing. All that, and it's open source! I really encourage anyone to use it that has a need to encrypt data.
Ahh, yes, now I see, I read his comment wrong. Sorry 'bout that. My point still stands though, there is no reason not to use 256 bit AES instead of 128 bit.
There are a few things I wish to clarify about your post
First off, right now 128 bit AES is virtually unbreakable. I mean, the US government has approved 128 bit AES for use in encrypting classifed documents. That should tell you alot. It's true, maybe in 10 years or so, one might be able to crack 128 bit AES in a few weeks or so, which is kinda bad for a modern cipher. But you can rest assured, if you use 128 bit AES (correctly implemented, and with a good password), there isn't a force on earth that could crack it (right now, that is).
This statement makes no sense at all. Do you have any idea how fast AES is? On my puny, 2 year old, cheap crap Dell computer, I just benchmarked 256 bit AES, it can encrypt 55.3 MB/s. Fifty-five megabytes per second! That's fast as hell! By little computing power, are you reffering to ENIAC? 'Cause I bet even that transistor-less monster can crank out a few kbs per seconds, AES is that fast. I routinely watch Hi-Def movies on a drive encrypted by TrueCrypt. That means that the movie is decrypted on the fly, while I'm watching it!
I HATE IT when people say "Well, I'm sure that NSA could crack any cipher, their so secrative and so cool!" NO THEY COULDN'T. No one can crack a 256 bit AES with a correct implementation (and a good key). It's just not doable. I refer you to an earlier post of mine, where I got really pissed and did a few calculations. You cannot crack 256 bit AES. It's. Not. Possible.
The mistake you seem to be making in your post is that you assume that most encrypted material get cracked because they used a weak cipher. That is not true. 99.9999% of all modern codes that are cracked are cracked because of a poor implementation. Some-one selects a bad password, maybe someone gets your PGP key from your computer, maybe a secret agent beat the crap out the poor IT guy and got in. Whatever. It's simply not feasable to crack modern ciphers by cryptanalysis. It's virtually impossible, and there are so many easier ways to do it.
In conclusion: If you want your material safe, it's fine to use 128 bit AES, but there's no reason not to use 256 bit, so you could just as well use that. Just make damn sure that you use a good password and keep it safe. And no, a quote from Napoleon Dynamite is NOT a good password.
Requiring to be polygraphed for a job is fucked up, but it is also not the point. What they did was illegal, the fact that they got away with it is unfortunate, but it does not reflect an error in the system.
It is a completely different situation when it comes to law enforcement. If you say no to a polygraph, there is not shit they can do about it. They can't use the fact that you said no to a polygraph as evidence, so it really has no consequence whether you said no or not. It might throw some suspicion your way, it might make their job a little harder, but if they wish to take you to court they need solid evidence. Solid evidence which, in all probability wont be there if you are innocent.
That's not too say that no innocent people ever gets convicted of a crime. Obviously they do, but people don't do time because of failed polygraphs, or their refusal to take one.
Even if we assume that Eve is listening from the very start, there is not much she can do about it. She could probably guess that we will, at some point, exchange a password and username (since we are connecting to a FON server/router), but she will have no idea whatsoever what is contained in the traffic after the initial key exhange. She will have no idea what key is, even if she sees everything. The only way to beat a correctly applied Diffie-Hellman is by being a man in the middle.
A man in the middle works like this: Assuming all messages passed from Alice to Bob must go through Eve. Alice and Bob wishes to start a key-exchange. Alice and Bob first agrees on (in wikipedias notation) p and g. Eve forwards the numbers between Alice and Bob (she has no reason not too). Alice then proceeds to pick a number a, and Bob picks a number b. What they don't know is that Eve also picks a number, the number e (not e as in 2.1718...., but a random integer). Alice then sends g^a mod p to Eve, thinking that she is sending something to Bob. Eve responds with g^e mod p, which Alice thinks is g^b mod p (ie. she thinks it's Bob sending the information). Eve does the same thing to Bob, she sends him g^e mod p, which he thinks is g^a mod p, and he responds with his g^b mod p. Then when Alice decides to send Bob a message, she encrypts it with what she thinks is hers and Bobs key, but really is Alices and Eves key. Eve decrypts the message, reads it, and then passes it along to Bob with what he thinks is his and Alices key, but really is his and Eves key.
That's the only way to break Diffie-Hellman, and it is easily averted: If Bob signs part of the conversation with his public key Alice can verify that it is indeed he who is sending the information. If Eve then tries to modify it by substituting her own key (like she did in the previous paragraph), Alice will see that someone has been messing with her communications. Digital signing details can also be found at wikipedia if you're interested (very simply: a digital signature is when you encrypt a message, or hash of a message, with the private part of a public/private key pair. Since you are the only one who has that key, no one other than you will be able to do it, but since everyone can decrypt your message using your public key, anyone can verify that it is, infact, you who sent it.)
For popular files, with, let's say, an original batch 20-30 seeders that seed at 5mbit or more, bittorrent is MINDNUMBINGLY fast. If you don't max out your up-speed (which would lover your downspeed, since the SYN-ACK packets can't get trough), but limit it to 80% or so, it's basically the fastest way of downloading content, in the world, ever. Assuming that Warner Brothers can put up a 20*50mbit seeders (=1 gbit) plus there are, at any given time, 750+peers, it will take no time at all to download a movie if you have broadband.