I didn't mean to imply that VB had invented the rocket (heck, Edison didn't event much any of the things he's famous for-- god bless those smarty-pants Europeans for beating him to the punch.) I meant that VB and Edison are analogous in that VB is the rocket guy much as Edison is the lightbulb & electricity guy.
considering that the first rocket engines (super high quality German suckers designed by none othe rthan the Edision of rocketry, Wernher von Braun) were built by concentration camp slave labor. It was certainly the best product of its kind availible, so . ..
This kid isn't asking us to do his work, he's asking for our help in getting pointed the right direction. Maybe you never needed a leg up (taught yourself to walk, learned to read by act of will alone, figured out how to drive by reading the owner's manual, etc.) but the rest of us have. It's unethical to horde knowledge (esp. knowledge on research techniques.) Share, for chrissakes!
For Plasmoid: the RSA FAQ us a really good place to start, esp. if you've heard a lot of crypto-talk, but gotten lost among the alphebet-soup anagrams and what-means-what. Also, although you've probably been told this a cazillion times already, Schneier's Applied Cryptography is a helluva book-- comprehensive and well written-- worth every penny. He also writes a newsletter, The Crypto-Gram. Backissues are availible at the Counterpane website. You also might want to check out newsgroups like sci.crypt.
That's all I gots for you, kidd-o. Good luck on the prog.
What I think Katz was getting at with this comment (have we wasted enough time on this sentence, yet?) was that a whole lot of nifty tech developments have occured, and MS doesn't seem to have made an attempt to develop products for these burgeoning markets. What you seem to be saying is that SINCE SupComp OS and progs wouldn't be super-profitiable right now, THEN why should MS bother with R & D in that direction. How many people owned personal computers when MS started? And yet, that's the tack they took and where they made their killing.
(Alert: I lost half my brain-mass in a car accident which left my skull a dented, bloody mess. Please forgive my being a blathering moron.Caveat Emptor)
I know that it's the hip thing around here to slam on Katz no matter what he says, but to insert a little reason: Most of the tech Katz named (open source,nano-technology, AI, hand-held and wireless computing,supercomputers) are software things. Open Source is a software thing, SuperComps and handhelds are light-blinkers without an OS and proggies. AI is classically a matter of software + specialized hardware (at least all attempts so far) and nanotech, once it gets going, will need software in order to do anything worthwhile. Buy their very nature, all tech-things (these days, at least) are, in part or whole, software things, too.
(Alert: I'm not, nor do I claim to be, lord-high science guy. My knwoledge of AI and nano-tech is entirely limited to what I've read in science mags and web sites. Caveat Emptor)
I think Special K's big point is that MS sort of rested on their laurels-- especially considering that they had the stated aim of worldwide domination. (They did take a stab at the PDA thing, I guess, but it was a pretty pitiful stab, wasn't it?) If you want your OS on every desktop in the world, then you have to be ready to put your proggies onto whatever damn thing people decide they're going to work on.
Not to rain on this weird, misogynistic parade, but this AC never states that s/he is a woman. What, like there's never been a gay coder? Poor ole Turing is spinning in his grave, no doubt.
You don't understand 'tolerance.' Tolerance is a live-and-let-live attitude. If it were a matter of 'oh, I don't like my neighbor's nice new car, I wish it were gone,' it would be a matter of simple resentment. If I don't like my neighbor's sexual practices or hobbies or skin color, that's intolerance. But that's not the problem.
I'm afraid that this has lost me a little-- I'm failing to see how disliking how a community member chooses to spend his/her money is any different than who a comm. member chooses to associate with, or how he/she chooses to worship or whatever trite comparission you care to walk around the block. Destroying folk's property (i.e. slashing tires or burning crosses or what have you) doesn't sound tollerant-- although both certainly express resentment (and how!)
Also, I didn't want to sound like I didn't understand the hostility. I totally understand why any set community dislikes an interlopper-- people don't like change. That's fine. But it's interesting (which isn't to say significant) that the same excuses ("they're screwing up our community's values, messing with our property values, edging us out, taking our rightful places from us") are trotted out by old white suburbanites and younger, hipper artsy San Franciscans.
Just food for thought. Don't dismiss this out of hand, please.
there was a campaign encouraging locals to vandalize SUVs and luxury cars, partially out of vengeance and partially to scare away the rich arrivers, who are pushing up the cost of living. (It was called the Mission Yuppie Eradication Project.)
There were campaigns like this in the suburbs of Detroit and Chicago in the 60's, too. But, those were to keep African-Americans and "foreigners" from moving in or staying. Isn't this a sort of distressing reaction to a shift in population demographic? Isn't SF supposed to be an almost mystical land of community tolerance and acceptation? If "artists" (you know, the voice of culture, those who spend every day slaving to prove that human beings are at least a notch above rabid dogs) are stooping (or, god forbid, gladly taking up) subtle (and not-so-subtle) terror tactics, isn't the art scene already dead?
As for BlowItOutYourMonkeysButt.com (or whatever the hell it's called,) some of the material is funny (in a sort of AIRTOONS kinda way), but it seems to me that the whole campaign is just howling-at-the-moon brand rage: futile not only in its tacit attempt (stickers will kill this dot-com bullshit about as quickly as a water hose will put out the sun) but also in its execution (by setting yourself up as not-A [we hate them dot-com coloninc services!], you basically guarantee that every time you impress your message on someone[look, honey: those artists really hate e-colonics], you're also passing on the much-loathed message you're trying to resist [honey, do you think we should get ourselves colonically irrigated online?]. )
While it is true that CSS does not prevent a bit-for-bit copy of the DVD, which would be indistinguishable from the original (and thus playable in any player), the average home user does not have the ability to do this.
Let's face it, the "average" computer user is running Win95 on a PC and cannot define any of the following terms: "compile," "DeCSS," "source code" or, for that matter, "MPAA." Even with the DeCSS source freely availible, printed on t-shirts, broadcast on Oz TV and tattooed on Emmanuel Goldstein's supple pink butt, the "average" computer user is exactly where he/she started.
CSS was never about stopping the average joe from copying squat-- it was about making the average joe, jose and jinku buy DVDs where, when and for how much the Motion Picture Industry chooses.
A friend pointed out the other night that the best way to protest Amazon.com is to buy from them, rather than boycott. They are losing money on every sale, after all. If we buy enough books, we'll suck the bastards dry!
My girlfriend was in a Women's Studies program at a major midwestern University for a few semesters. She recalls one lecture when a prof-- a fairly well-known feminist theorist who'd done a lot of work on porn-- stopped mid lecture to relate this anecdote. She (the feminist prof) had been lecturing on "facial cum shots" in porn videos and photography, talking about what the act of ejaculating on a woman signified. Apparently (and this highlights one of those "academia in a vacuum" sort of problems) she'd researched this sort of material for years, always referring to them as cum shots (pronounced "koom," Latin for "with") She had a classical education (including Latin and Greek) and couldn't for the life of her figure out why the Adult Entertainment Industry (not usually a bastion of the classically educated) chose to give such images a latinate name. And what did they mean by "cum"? A "with" shot? With what? Ejaculate, she assumed, but the name was still something of a mystery. It was years later, midway through delivering a speech at a symposium, when she had the sudden revelation that this cum was pronounced come not koom and had nothing to do with latin prepositions.
(I know, it's miles off-topic, but still a good story.)
Hell, this guy is even providing a clear link to openssh.com, just in case folks come to his site looking for them. He's clearly not trying to cash in on confusion-- he isn't even running adds on the openssh.org page. I think that it's pretty clear that some of the implcations in the letter (such as indicating that this guy is setting people up to confuse him for them and thus gather data on security-minded individuals) is unfounded and alarmist. Nothing at openssh.org seems in any way intended to make anyone believe that it is the official website of OpenSSH devel.
And, isn't an unconditional boycott a pretty good way to prevent people from actually looking at the site and deciding for themselves if it was set-up with bad intention?
Scientists warn we shouldn't rev ourselves into a tizzy over this. Any life on Europa, they assure us, is of the single-celled variety, at best. Of course, such a declaration is clearly just a smokescreen to prevent us from reaching the obvious conclusion: At this very moment, super-intelligent giant squid have their siege-rockets poised beneath Europa?s half-mile ice shell, ready to launch their imperialist onslaught. These sub-mariner beasts intend to take control of our peace-loving planet and mine us for the rich iron supplies stored in our hemoglobin. Yes, the jovian devil-fish plan to render our blood for precious structural iron, needed to build more of their planet-hoppers. Their ultimate plan: To flood the canals of Mars as a space-squid vacation resort.
At night I can hear the transmissions from their communications satellites resonating in my fillings; the hideous, scheming clacking of their beaks has rendered sleep an unattainable fantasy. They intend to devour our dogs whole and use our sports-utility vehicles as punch-bowls for their post-conquest banquet. They monitor our radio transmissions, love our mariachi music, and yet despise our hip-hop. These are truly monsters.
How long will the scientific community continue to feign ignorance of this exo-cephalopodic threat looming under Europa?s dark plutonian shores? And how long will it be until our own squid-- trusted friend and snack-- turn on us? As the first earth-dweller to fully recognize the very real threat of worldwide Europan conquest, I enjoin you: We must take up arms against this sea of troubles, and by opposing, end it.
Hashes are not good for this... I have 2 passwords at home that crypt to the same thing. Hashes at least one ways... is there another kind?)can have collissions. I would hate to have my word.exe be replaced with a porn.gif
I think that the poster meant "hash" as in "associative array" where one key maps to one value (at least, in perl these are called "hashes" now.) You're talking about a "hash", like as in a one-way crypt of some data.
Of course, it's entirely possible that I'm out of my gourd on this, and everyone is talking about scrambled data, at which time I have NO clue as to how this would work WRT this symbolic linking scheme.
Funny story about that (maybe it's apocryphal, but it's still nifty):
I guess when "BladeRunner" originally came out, Gibson was immediately intrigued, but refused to see it. When he finally broke down and went, it drove him nuts to watch the film because it was EXACTLY the thing that he wished he'd done-- like as though Dick/Scott had mined the ideas and images directly from his brain.
Karl Jung would have said that this was a synchronicity and claimed that the situation was just more evidence to support the existence of a mass subconscious. Guess that just goes to show what an asshole Jung was.
I registered through dotster at the beginning of February in order to take advantage of the $15 rate. My 2-cents: I had a few questions after registering, e-mailed them, and had a response in less than 6 hours. In my experience, good customer service-- esp. a good, fast response time-- is a very good indicator for a company's overall quality. Also, it's very easy to update/change account info (name-servers, for example) with dotster.
This is pretty much apropo of nuthin' (sorry), but it thought might interests folks: the oldest etext availible through Proj Gut is a version of Milton's Paradise Lost. It was originally converted to ASCII in 1964 or 65, and had to be input using IBM punch cards-- something like 100,000 of them. Ah, to be young again, manually punching bits out of cardboard with a sharp stick.
Just wanted to make sure that I'm on the same page as everyone else: By "false positive" we mean "a text which appears to be the original plaintext really but is not"? So a "false positive" (in the sense we're using here) would be, for example, if I encrypted my plans to buy all of the choco-donuts and, when my nefarious enemy attempted to decrypt the plans, he ended up holding what looked like a transcript of a radio morning show out of Fargo? Is this the sort of situation we're talking about? What are the odds of this, really? I respect that doing thing A, B or C can make this more likely to occur, but how likely is it to begin with?
I'm a little confused by some of the assertions made above:
1) There seems to be an assumption that part of Echelon is the ability to compromise a 128-bit key in a negligible amount of time (i.e. instantly.) Now, I'm not super-duper-hardcore up to date on my Echelon readings, but I haven't seen any indication that anyone actually has the capability to brute force a 128 bit key in real-time. If I've just been living in a cave (not far from the truth) and simply failed to hear about this advance, someone please post a link/reference, or e-mail me (above address, minus the DELETME), or something-- I'd be really interested in such news.
2)PGP/GPG uses RSA to encrypt a secret key, but uses a simple secret cypher to encrypt the message itself, using that secret key.
Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but it sounds like you're saying that PGP/GPG use a proprietary algo for their symmetrical crypto. At least with PGP, this is not the case. PGP (I think) currently uses IDEA, and used to use DES. While the latter is somewhat shady, these are hardly secret, and aren't that simple, either.
3) In the above set-up (with the PGP/GPG system which randomly selects the private-key algo to be used on a message-by-message basis) how do you securely communicate this to the recipient? Is the selected algo package with the key inside the public-key encrypted portion of the transmission, or do they just guess? (Not that having them just guess is such a bad idea-- it's sorta like those first versions of Public Key systems, the ones that used numeric puzzles for the keys. If the recipient just has the key, it'll take a more-or-less negligible amount of time for her to decrypt the message under each algo and see which version isn't gibberish.) Still, I'm not seeing the need for this, as per #1 I mean, if they can brute-force a 128-bit key in more-or-less no time, is making this time 16X longer gonna put that much of a knot in their britches? If 128-bit keys aren't secure, then this sort of arrangement is just a Band-Aid.
Again, it's possible that I'm just totally mis-reading the above. Sorry if all of this is out-of-left-field.
Re:dogs are better than the internet :)
on
LonelyNet
·
· Score: 2
Also, if push comes to shove, you can eat your dog.
"Sorry, old boy, but it's mighty cold and it's either you or the Dell-- And I don't got a recipe for Dell-gravy."
On behalf of the International Jewish Conspiracy, I regret to inform you that there will be no more Yahoo, no more Amazon, no more E*Trade and no more Christmas. Give that to your huddled masses yearning to be free, Buck-o.
I'm fairly sure that I heard on the radio news-- either late last night or early this morn'-- that NorthWest had backed down on this and voluntarily decided not to search employees computers.
The whole deal is sorta blurry though (coming down with flu and haven't had very good sleep.) Does anyone have further data confirming/denying that NW stepped away from this PR nightmare?
Not to continue the OT fest, here, but I agree 100%. You're all acting like folks who throw a hissy fit in the restaurant because the cook has thrown a little parsley or kale on the edge of your plate. Just ignore the damned kale and go on with your meal. If the garnish really deserves this much attention, then maybe you should eat elsewhere-- 'cause it's pretty clear that the food here isn't doin' it for ya.
(Besides, I sorta liked playing around with the little car-- it was a nice distraction from my distraction from work. But I eat the parsley too, so go figure.)
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't mean to imply that VB had invented the rocket (heck, Edison didn't event much any of the things he's famous for-- god bless those smarty-pants Europeans for beating him to the punch.) I meant that VB and Edison are analogous in that VB is the rocket guy much as Edison is the lightbulb & electricity guy.
considering that the first rocket engines (super high quality German suckers designed by none othe rthan the Edision of rocketry, Wernher von Braun) were built by concentration camp slave labor. It was certainly the best product of its kind availible, so . . .
For Plasmoid: the RSA FAQ us a really good place to start, esp. if you've heard a lot of crypto-talk, but gotten lost among the alphebet-soup anagrams and what-means-what. Also, although you've probably been told this a cazillion times already, Schneier's Applied Cryptography is a helluva book-- comprehensive and well written-- worth every penny. He also writes a newsletter, The Crypto-Gram. Backissues are availible at the Counterpane website. You also might want to check out newsgroups like sci.crypt.
That's all I gots for you, kidd-o. Good luck on the prog.
What I think Katz was getting at with this comment (have we wasted enough time on this sentence, yet?) was that a whole lot of nifty tech developments have occured, and MS doesn't seem to have made an attempt to develop products for these burgeoning markets. What you seem to be saying is that SINCE SupComp OS and progs wouldn't be super-profitiable right now, THEN why should MS bother with R & D in that direction. How many people owned personal computers when MS started? And yet, that's the tack they took and where they made their killing.
(Alert: I lost half my brain-mass in a car accident which left my skull a dented, bloody mess. Please forgive my being a blathering moron.Caveat Emptor)
(Alert: I'm not, nor do I claim to be, lord-high science guy. My knwoledge of AI and nano-tech is entirely limited to what I've read in science mags and web sites. Caveat Emptor)
I think Special K's big point is that MS sort of rested on their laurels-- especially considering that they had the stated aim of worldwide domination. (They did take a stab at the PDA thing, I guess, but it was a pretty pitiful stab, wasn't it?) If you want your OS on every desktop in the world, then you have to be ready to put your proggies onto whatever damn thing people decide they're going to work on.
Not to rain on this weird, misogynistic parade, but this AC never states that s/he is a woman. What, like there's never been a gay coder? Poor ole Turing is spinning in his grave, no doubt.
I'm afraid that this has lost me a little-- I'm failing to see how disliking how a community member chooses to spend his/her money is any different than who a comm. member chooses to associate with, or how he/she chooses to worship or whatever trite comparission you care to walk around the block. Destroying folk's property (i.e. slashing tires or burning crosses or what have you) doesn't sound tollerant-- although both certainly express resentment (and how!)
Also, I didn't want to sound like I didn't understand the hostility. I totally understand why any set community dislikes an interlopper-- people don't like change. That's fine. But it's interesting (which isn't to say significant) that the same excuses ("they're screwing up our community's values, messing with our property values, edging us out, taking our rightful places from us") are trotted out by old white suburbanites and younger, hipper artsy San Franciscans.
Just food for thought. Don't dismiss this out of hand, please.
There were campaigns like this in the suburbs of Detroit and Chicago in the 60's, too. But, those were to keep African-Americans and "foreigners" from moving in or staying. Isn't this a sort of distressing reaction to a shift in population demographic? Isn't SF supposed to be an almost mystical land of community tolerance and acceptation? If "artists" (you know, the voice of culture, those who spend every day slaving to prove that human beings are at least a notch above rabid dogs) are stooping (or, god forbid, gladly taking up) subtle (and not-so-subtle) terror tactics, isn't the art scene already dead?
As for BlowItOutYourMonkeysButt.com (or whatever the hell it's called,) some of the material is funny (in a sort of AIRTOONS kinda way), but it seems to me that the whole campaign is just howling-at-the-moon brand rage: futile not only in its tacit attempt (stickers will kill this dot-com bullshit about as quickly as a water hose will put out the sun) but also in its execution (by setting yourself up as not-A [we hate them dot-com coloninc services!], you basically guarantee that every time you impress your message on someone[look, honey: those artists really hate e-colonics], you're also passing on the much-loathed message you're trying to resist [honey, do you think we should get ourselves colonically irrigated online?]. )
Oh, crap; does any of this make sense?
Let's face it, the "average" computer user is running Win95 on a PC and cannot define any of the following terms: "compile," "DeCSS," "source code" or, for that matter, "MPAA." Even with the DeCSS source freely availible, printed on t-shirts, broadcast on Oz TV and tattooed on Emmanuel Goldstein's supple pink butt, the "average" computer user is exactly where he/she started.
CSS was never about stopping the average joe from copying squat-- it was about making the average joe, jose and jinku buy DVDs where, when and for how much the Motion Picture Industry chooses.
A friend pointed out the other night that the best way to protest Amazon.com is to buy from them, rather than boycott. They are losing money on every sale, after all. If we buy enough books, we'll suck the bastards dry!
(I know, it's miles off-topic, but still a good story.)
And, isn't an unconditional boycott a pretty good way to prevent people from actually looking at the site and deciding for themselves if it was set-up with bad intention?
At night I can hear the transmissions from their communications satellites resonating in my fillings; the hideous, scheming clacking of their beaks has rendered sleep an unattainable fantasy. They intend to devour our dogs whole and use our sports-utility vehicles as punch-bowls for their post-conquest banquet. They monitor our radio transmissions, love our mariachi music, and yet despise our hip-hop. These are truly monsters.
How long will the scientific community continue to feign ignorance of this exo-cephalopodic threat looming under Europa?s dark plutonian shores? And how long will it be until our own squid-- trusted friend and snack-- turn on us? As the first earth-dweller to fully recognize the very real threat of worldwide Europan conquest, I enjoin you: We must take up arms against this sea of troubles, and by opposing, end it.
Who's with me?
I think that the poster meant "hash" as in "associative array" where one key maps to one value (at least, in perl these are called "hashes" now.) You're talking about a "hash", like as in a one-way crypt of some data.
Of course, it's entirely possible that I'm out of my gourd on this, and everyone is talking about scrambled data, at which time I have NO clue as to how this would work WRT this symbolic linking scheme.
Corrections? Additions? Clarifications? Comments?
I guess when "BladeRunner" originally came out, Gibson was immediately intrigued, but refused to see it. When he finally broke down and went, it drove him nuts to watch the film because it was EXACTLY the thing that he wished he'd done-- like as though Dick/Scott had mined the ideas and images directly from his brain.
Karl Jung would have said that this was a synchronicity and claimed that the situation was just more evidence to support the existence of a mass subconscious. Guess that just goes to show what an asshole Jung was.
(note to self: always use Preview button)
Handy reference: Universal Currency Converter
I registered through dotster at the beginning of February in order to take advantage of the $15 rate. My 2-cents: I had a few questions after registering, e-mailed them, and had a response in less than 6 hours. In my experience, good customer service-- esp. a good, fast response time-- is a very good indicator for a company's overall quality. Also, it's very easy to update/change account info (name-servers, for example) with dotster.
This is pretty much apropo of nuthin' (sorry), but it thought might interests folks: the oldest etext availible through Proj Gut is a version of Milton's Paradise Lost. It was originally converted to ASCII in 1964 or 65, and had to be input using IBM punch cards-- something like 100,000 of them. Ah, to be young again, manually punching bits out of cardboard with a sharp stick.
Just wanted to make sure that I'm on the same page as everyone else: By "false positive" we mean "a text which appears to be the original plaintext really but is not"? So a "false positive" (in the sense we're using here) would be, for example, if I encrypted my plans to buy all of the choco-donuts and, when my nefarious enemy attempted to decrypt the plans, he ended up holding what looked like a transcript of a radio morning show out of Fargo? Is this the sort of situation we're talking about? What are the odds of this, really? I respect that doing thing A, B or C can make this more likely to occur, but how likely is it to begin with?
1) There seems to be an assumption that part of Echelon is the ability to compromise a 128-bit key in a negligible amount of time (i.e. instantly.) Now, I'm not super-duper-hardcore up to date on my Echelon readings, but I haven't seen any indication that anyone actually has the capability to brute force a 128 bit key in real-time. If I've just been living in a cave (not far from the truth) and simply failed to hear about this advance, someone please post a link/reference, or e-mail me (above address, minus the DELETME), or something-- I'd be really interested in such news.
2)PGP/GPG uses RSA to encrypt a secret key, but uses a simple secret cypher to encrypt the message itself, using that secret key.
Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but it sounds like you're saying that PGP/GPG use a proprietary algo for their symmetrical crypto. At least with PGP, this is not the case. PGP (I think) currently uses IDEA, and used to use DES. While the latter is somewhat shady, these are hardly secret, and aren't that simple, either.
3) In the above set-up (with the PGP/GPG system which randomly selects the private-key algo to be used on a message-by-message basis) how do you securely communicate this to the recipient? Is the selected algo package with the key inside the public-key encrypted portion of the transmission, or do they just guess? (Not that having them just guess is such a bad idea-- it's sorta like those first versions of Public Key systems, the ones that used numeric puzzles for the keys. If the recipient just has the key, it'll take a more-or-less negligible amount of time for her to decrypt the message under each algo and see which version isn't gibberish.) Still, I'm not seeing the need for this, as per #1 I mean, if they can brute-force a 128-bit key in more-or-less no time, is making this time 16X longer gonna put that much of a knot in their britches? If 128-bit keys aren't secure, then this sort of arrangement is just a Band-Aid.
Again, it's possible that I'm just totally mis-reading the above. Sorry if all of this is out-of-left-field.
"Sorry, old boy, but it's mighty cold and it's either you or the Dell-- And I don't got a recipe for Dell-gravy."
On behalf of the International Jewish Conspiracy, I regret to inform you that there will be no more Yahoo, no more Amazon, no more E*Trade and no more Christmas. Give that to your huddled masses yearning to be free, Buck-o.
The whole deal is sorta blurry though (coming down with flu and haven't had very good sleep.) Does anyone have further data confirming/denying that NW stepped away from this PR nightmare?
(Besides, I sorta liked playing around with the little car-- it was a nice distraction from my distraction from work. But I eat the parsley too, so go figure.)