Re:funny comparing to "high speed rail" elsewhere
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Amtrak Upgrades Wi-Fi
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· Score: 1
certainly I wouldn't want to do a transcontinental journey by train
Speaking as someone who has done exactly that...it is not really so bad, as long as you have time for it. The biggest problem was not with being on a train (it is far more pleasant to spend 4 days on a train than one hour on an airplane), but with delays caused by freight railroads prioritizing their traffic. If Amtrak were running on its own right-of-way rather than leasing, the journey would probably face far fewer delays, and the trains could run much faster (though not as fast as Japanese trains).
Re:funny comparing to "high speed rail" elsewhere
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Amtrak Upgrades Wi-Fi
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· Score: 2
It is hard to talk about what makes "economic sense" here, since the passenger rail business was killed by competition from heavily subsidized alternatives: the interstate highway system, and airplanes. Had no federal money been spent promoting cars and airplanes -- had the government instead allowed competition between businesses determine how Americans travel -- passenger railroads would probably remain a viable business (but I doubt we would see high speed rail, for the same reasons that private Internet services are slower than the government-run services in other countries).
Re:I believe I speak for a dozen people when I say
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Amtrak Upgrades Wi-Fi
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· Score: 3, Informative
then again, when does a program work out well that federal money supports
...just to name a few. I guess if you just ignore the successes of the US government (except for your personal favorite), though, federal money would seem to be wasted on failure.
If we make exceptions for the blind, our next step might to make exceptions for the deaf, for libraries, for schoolchildren, for the poor, and then one day the movie studios might have to actually adapt to new technologies instead of trying to kill them.
Opinions are not facts, so they cannot be "wrong." The view itself is not at all unprecendented or even unusual.
Or do you think that any straight marriage that produces no birth children should be annulled? That everyone should get divorced when their kids reach 18?
What I think is not really the issue here. My only point is that there are people who have no issue with homosexuality but who still oppose gay marriage.
It's just making up excuses to be anti-gay.
No, it is just a matter of defining the purpose of marriage. Just because you think marriage is only about love does not mean that everyone else does, nor that everyone else should.
In a way, I'd prefer it if people openly admitted that they were homophobic, at least then you'd know they were just stupid scum.
As we all know, calling people who disagree with you "scum" is a productive activity. You're really going to make strides in convincing people to support gay marriage with that approach -- keep up the good work!
How is that homophobic? It says nothing about homosexuals, it is a statement about marriage, a legal construct that is defined by the government. You do not have to be homophobic nor do you have to be a gay-basher to take issue with gay marriage, despite what the Republicans might want you to believe. Plenty of people believe that the purpose of marriage is to encourage procreation, rather than a way to formalize love with a commitment. It is likely that the Republicans shot themselves in the foot by conflating gay-bashing with opposition to gay marriage, which alienated a large number of potential supporters (and voters).
Yes, the Ender and Shadow series demonstrate some Mormon influence, which is hardly surprising given that they are written by a Mormon. Most novels communicate their authors' views and biases. If we refused to read novels because with disagree with the worldview of their authors', we would have to cut ourselves off from the majority of literature written before the 1960s. The overt racism in 19th century novels is shocking by today's standards, but we still consider those works to be "classics."
Earlier in my career as a PhD student I wrote a short paper about FHE and homomorphically evaluating block ciphers, and I wrote about that construction there. We tried to publish it but there was not really enough material, and since then I have been more focused on garbled circuits.
My point about function privacy was that the randomness might be "lost" in a sense. For example, in plaintext, 0 might be "0 xor 0" or "1 xor 1", and there is no additional information that can be used to distinguish those two cases. On the other hand, you might be able to distinguish the two cases if it was "A xor A" versus "B xor B," where A and B are ciphertexts for some FHE system. If I remember correctly, function privacy in FHE will guarantee that these two cases are indistinguishable.
this wouldn't work because the encryption would be deterministic
How is that? Wherever the encryption algorithm samples random numbers, the FHE evaluator would sample a random number and encode it using the encrypted "0" and "1".
The only tricky part to this is that it might not work if the FHE system does not have function privacy, though I am not sure that requirement is truly necessary.
Let's put it this way: you could do the same with any public key cryptosystem by using the public key to encrypt the dictionary you described. The reason that does not work is that there are many (exponentially many in the security parameter) possible encryptions of each plaintext.
The process for turning symmetric FHE input public-key FHE involves encoding the plaintext using the encrypted "0" and "1", then using FHE to evaluate the symmetric encryption algorithm using the encrypted key. Decryption requires two symmetric decryption operations, using both keys.
You are not actually operating on the data; rather, you are operating on some input ciphertext to compute an output ciphertext. The idea is that the output ciphertext can be decrypted to get the results.
A good example of what this means and why anyone cares is the problem of spam filtering on encrypted messages. Suppose a spammer decided to encrypt spam using your public key; how might your mail server perform a spam check (something which is generally considered to be desirable)? The solution with FHE is that the server will use the homomorphic operations to compute a ciphertext that encrypts a "spam or not spam" bit, which will be sent to you with the encrypted message. In theory, even Google's spam filtering approach, which is based on aggregating the spam classifications they receive from many users, would work: your email client would encrypt a "right or wrong" bit, and FHE would be used to train a classifier.
There are also some odd thing that happen with FHE. Suppose, for example, that you had a symmetric FHE system i.e. one that had no public encryption key. It turns out you can create a public key encryption system without any additional secure assumption, by creating two secret keys, using one to encrypt the other, and then publishing the encrypted secret key and an encryption of "0" and an encryption of "1." The public encryption process would amount to encoding the plaintext using the encrypted "0" and "1" as "bits," then homomorphically evaluating the decryption algorithm using the encrypted secret key -- this would output ciphertext that must decrypt the to plaintext under the second key.
FHE can also be used for function privacy e.g. if you have a function and I have input, you can compute the function on my input without me revealing the input to you and with a cryptographic guarantee that I cannot learn more about your function from the ciphertext you give me than I can from the plaintext I decrypt (remember that the ciphertext will have more information than the message itself; it also contains the randomness from encryption; it is possible that the randomness will be combined in some way by your function that would allow me to learn what your function is). The construction is somewhat technical, but in simple terms it involves homomorphically adding encryptions of "0" to the output ciphertext (which will not affect the output value).
there doesnt seem to be much more information out there
There are literally hundreds of scholarly articles, most of which can be downloaded from their authors' websites.
doesn't seem to me like it was decentralized any way or didnt need trusted third party
Numerous systems with "offline" payments -- i.e. where transfers of money did not require a third party -- have been presented, including several with rigorous security proofs. Many of those systems have the property that the issuer of the money cannot blacklist honest parties i.e. even though a central authority is used to identify people who double spend, that party does not have the power to frame people for double spending.
Its more than "no trusted third party needed", its designed to be government proof
Except that anyone who devotes sufficient computing power can selectively deny confirmations on transactions in Bitcoin. Do you really think that much computing power is out of reach for major world governments?
The problem with Bitcoin, since its very beginning, is the lack of rigor. There are no rigorous security definitions. The community just shrugs off polynomial time attacks. The high-level protocol is poorly documented and difficult to analyze. It is hard to even say whether or not Bitcoin is "government proof," even if we had a good definition for that, without a rigorous security definition.
Most creative workers are still not paid enough to live on, and must maintain "day jobs" just to make ends meet. Copyright has not and was never meant to solve that problem; copyright is about protecting business interests.
The point is that any argument against recording the police is equally applicable to recording the rest of us. There might be people who use videos of the police to do harm? There are police officers who will use videos of the public to do harm. The police might have valuable information that should not be made public? We have valuable information that we cannot trust the police with.
As always, the NYPD wants to have special privileges that the rest of NYC does not have.
Slashdot Mirror
certainly I wouldn't want to do a transcontinental journey by train
Speaking as someone who has done exactly that...it is not really so bad, as long as you have time for it. The biggest problem was not with being on a train (it is far more pleasant to spend 4 days on a train than one hour on an airplane), but with delays caused by freight railroads prioritizing their traffic. If Amtrak were running on its own right-of-way rather than leasing, the journey would probably face far fewer delays, and the trains could run much faster (though not as fast as Japanese trains).
It is hard to talk about what makes "economic sense" here, since the passenger rail business was killed by competition from heavily subsidized alternatives: the interstate highway system, and airplanes. Had no federal money been spent promoting cars and airplanes -- had the government instead allowed competition between businesses determine how Americans travel -- passenger railroads would probably remain a viable business (but I doubt we would see high speed rail, for the same reasons that private Internet services are slower than the government-run services in other countries).
then again, when does a program work out well that federal money supports
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_mission
...just to name a few. I guess if you just ignore the successes of the US government (except for your personal favorite), though, federal money would seem to be wasted on failure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_highway_system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_canal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_dam
If we make exceptions for the blind, our next step might to make exceptions for the deaf, for libraries, for schoolchildren, for the poor, and then one day the movie studios might have to actually adapt to new technologies instead of trying to kill them.
So what? They're wrong.
Opinions are not facts, so they cannot be "wrong." The view itself is not at all unprecendented or even unusual.
Or do you think that any straight marriage that produces no birth children should be annulled? That everyone should get divorced when their kids reach 18?
What I think is not really the issue here. My only point is that there are people who have no issue with homosexuality but who still oppose gay marriage.
It's just making up excuses to be anti-gay.
No, it is just a matter of defining the purpose of marriage. Just because you think marriage is only about love does not mean that everyone else does, nor that everyone else should.
In a way, I'd prefer it if people openly admitted that they were homophobic, at least then you'd know they were just stupid scum.
As we all know, calling people who disagree with you "scum" is a productive activity. You're really going to make strides in convincing people to support gay marriage with that approach -- keep up the good work!
How is that homophobic? It says nothing about homosexuals, it is a statement about marriage, a legal construct that is defined by the government. You do not have to be homophobic nor do you have to be a gay-basher to take issue with gay marriage, despite what the Republicans might want you to believe. Plenty of people believe that the purpose of marriage is to encourage procreation, rather than a way to formalize love with a commitment. It is likely that the Republicans shot themselves in the foot by conflating gay-bashing with opposition to gay marriage, which alienated a large number of potential supporters (and voters).
Yes, the Ender and Shadow series demonstrate some Mormon influence, which is hardly surprising given that they are written by a Mormon. Most novels communicate their authors' views and biases. If we refused to read novels because with disagree with the worldview of their authors', we would have to cut ourselves off from the majority of literature written before the 1960s. The overt racism in 19th century novels is shocking by today's standards, but we still consider those works to be "classics."
One cold year says nothing about the trend in the Earth's climate.
Earlier in my career as a PhD student I wrote a short paper about FHE and homomorphically evaluating block ciphers, and I wrote about that construction there. We tried to publish it but there was not really enough material, and since then I have been more focused on garbled circuits.
My point about function privacy was that the randomness might be "lost" in a sense. For example, in plaintext, 0 might be "0 xor 0" or "1 xor 1", and there is no additional information that can be used to distinguish those two cases. On the other hand, you might be able to distinguish the two cases if it was "A xor A" versus "B xor B," where A and B are ciphertexts for some FHE system. If I remember correctly, function privacy in FHE will guarantee that these two cases are indistinguishable.
Can I contact you off site? I am doing work in a related field.
this wouldn't work because the encryption would be deterministic
How is that? Wherever the encryption algorithm samples random numbers, the FHE evaluator would sample a random number and encode it using the encrypted "0" and "1".
The only tricky part to this is that it might not work if the FHE system does not have function privacy, though I am not sure that requirement is truly necessary.
Interestingly, there is some evidence that today's FHE systems are secure against quantum computing attacks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_security
Let's put it this way: you could do the same with any public key cryptosystem by using the public key to encrypt the dictionary you described. The reason that does not work is that there are many (exponentially many in the security parameter) possible encryptions of each plaintext.
The process for turning symmetric FHE input public-key FHE involves encoding the plaintext using the encrypted "0" and "1", then using FHE to evaluate the symmetric encryption algorithm using the encrypted key. Decryption requires two symmetric decryption operations, using both keys.
Television decrypts
I see a possible flaw in your DRM...
You are not actually operating on the data; rather, you are operating on some input ciphertext to compute an output ciphertext. The idea is that the output ciphertext can be decrypted to get the results.
A good example of what this means and why anyone cares is the problem of spam filtering on encrypted messages. Suppose a spammer decided to encrypt spam using your public key; how might your mail server perform a spam check (something which is generally considered to be desirable)? The solution with FHE is that the server will use the homomorphic operations to compute a ciphertext that encrypts a "spam or not spam" bit, which will be sent to you with the encrypted message. In theory, even Google's spam filtering approach, which is based on aggregating the spam classifications they receive from many users, would work: your email client would encrypt a "right or wrong" bit, and FHE would be used to train a classifier.
There are also some odd thing that happen with FHE. Suppose, for example, that you had a symmetric FHE system i.e. one that had no public encryption key. It turns out you can create a public key encryption system without any additional secure assumption, by creating two secret keys, using one to encrypt the other, and then publishing the encrypted secret key and an encryption of "0" and an encryption of "1." The public encryption process would amount to encoding the plaintext using the encrypted "0" and "1" as "bits," then homomorphically evaluating the decryption algorithm using the encrypted secret key -- this would output ciphertext that must decrypt the to plaintext under the second key.
FHE can also be used for function privacy e.g. if you have a function and I have input, you can compute the function on my input without me revealing the input to you and with a cryptographic guarantee that I cannot learn more about your function from the ciphertext you give me than I can from the plaintext I decrypt (remember that the ciphertext will have more information than the message itself; it also contains the randomness from encryption; it is possible that the randomness will be combined in some way by your function that would allow me to learn what your function is). The construction is somewhat technical, but in simple terms it involves homomorphically adding encryptions of "0" to the output ciphertext (which will not affect the output value).
So when you give someone USD, you have to call up the government and have them participate in the transaction?
there doesnt seem to be much more information out there
There are literally hundreds of scholarly articles, most of which can be downloaded from their authors' websites.
doesn't seem to me like it was decentralized any way or didnt need trusted third party
Numerous systems with "offline" payments -- i.e. where transfers of money did not require a third party -- have been presented, including several with rigorous security proofs. Many of those systems have the property that the issuer of the money cannot blacklist honest parties i.e. even though a central authority is used to identify people who double spend, that party does not have the power to frame people for double spending.
Its more than "no trusted third party needed", its designed to be government proof
Except that anyone who devotes sufficient computing power can selectively deny confirmations on transactions in Bitcoin. Do you really think that much computing power is out of reach for major world governments?
The problem with Bitcoin, since its very beginning, is the lack of rigor. There are no rigorous security definitions. The community just shrugs off polynomial time attacks. The high-level protocol is poorly documented and difficult to analyze. It is hard to even say whether or not Bitcoin is "government proof," even if we had a good definition for that, without a rigorous security definition.
You must not have been paying attention. There were many third party candidates who were not on the corporate payroll.
The person I was replying to claimed that Bitcoin was the first system that allowed money to be transferred without requiring a trusted party.
Sure, but Chaum's work on digital cash predates Bitcoin by more than 20 years.
Is that party involved in transferring the money?
Bitcoin is the first technology to make money transfer without trusted third party possible and will possibly remain an only one for a long time.
Really? Back in my day, we used this technology:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_money
Most creative workers are still not paid enough to live on, and must maintain "day jobs" just to make ends meet. Copyright has not and was never meant to solve that problem; copyright is about protecting business interests.
The point is that any argument against recording the police is equally applicable to recording the rest of us. There might be people who use videos of the police to do harm? There are police officers who will use videos of the public to do harm. The police might have valuable information that should not be made public? We have valuable information that we cannot trust the police with.
As always, the NYPD wants to have special privileges that the rest of NYC does not have.