Hard News: Thinking Digital
63 Responses
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
Steven Daedalus*?
Not James Joyce then?
More useless than Ulysses…
[snap: Lilith]
* (cunning worker)
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Rich of Observationz, in reply to
it's actually not likely they will crack public key encryption after all
With passwords on files, it's typically conventional encryption.
In current practice, it's feasible that future machines will be able to brute-force whatever p455w[]rD you've used. The key length is limited by memory and typing time. People might however have huge amounts of key material in a separate device (phone, dongle) if it became necessary. You could even envisage a one-time pad with enough material for all the documents one created in a career.
(The thing with one-time pads (keys of the same length as the document, never reused) is that although you *could* brute-force them with a suitable computer, you'd wind up with every possible document of the chosen length. So versions of your future decrypted email would include the phrases:
"John, get some milk on the way home"
and
"John, murder McCully after cabinet"and you wouldn't be able to tell which).
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merc,
Oh dear, T.S. Elliot, my bad, thanks for not shaming me.../door slams/
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Coulda been Yeats, though:
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
Well, there is an election soon...
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
Joyce? Franks? Key?
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun
Ah, Paula Bennett
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Wellington to be born? -
merc,
Richard:
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this son of York;
And all the clouds that low'r'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Richard The Third Act 1, scene 1, 1–4 -
BenWilson, in reply to
One time pads are ironically one of the oldest forms of encryption, and also the only kind that could never, ever be cracked. So long as you one-time the pad, of course.
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Curran asked Joyce directly “do you believe in convergence?”
“I fear those big words' Stephen said 'which make us so unhappy. I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.”
Joyce criticised Curran’s push for another look at the terms under which broadband is being provided. “We should get on and finish UFB,” he said. “Why would you want to stop the process. A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”
This stuff writes itself.
;-) -
Steve Barnes, in reply to
Oh dear, T.S. Elliot, my bad, thanks for not shaming me…
A simple mistake...
"The Waste Land" is notable for its seemingly disjointed structure, indicative of the Modernist style of James Joyce's Ulysses (which Eliot cited as an influence and which he read the same year that he was writing "The Waste Land").
[flounces off feeling all proud about his ability to use wikipedia]
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The Hollow Men…. and other brash writers
No shame: Eliot’s The Waste Land and Joyce’s Ulysses were contemporaneous (1922) classics of modernist literature – both championed by that renowned narcissistic quisling poet – Ezra PoundMetaphorlock tugging… an illuminating aside
Interestingly Pound also corresponded with another poet who liked Joyce and Eliot – James Jesus Angleton who went on to head the CIA’s Counterintelligence dept. He was also influenced by William Empson, author of Seven Types of Ambiguity and here someone has used it to address Angleton’s life & work…
…buried somewhere in this piece is this quote from Carl Sagan, that I hope brings this ramble back on-thread…"We’ve arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.” – Carl Sagan
[I also - flounce off feeling all proud about my ability to use wikipedia] ;- )
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merc,
I am flounce awed. The connections are great.
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Matthew Poole, in reply to
One time pads are ironically one of the oldest forms of encryption, and also the only kind that could never, ever be cracked. So long as you one-time the pad, of course.
They also pose distribution security challenges which, if surmounted adequately, indicate the existence of a distribution channel of sufficient security to make the use of the pads redundant. When you can send a one-time pad with perfect certainty that it cannot be compromised, you don’t need the pad :P
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Rich of Observationz, in reply to
Depends on your use case.
You have a file X and a one-time pad Y. You need X+Y to extract the information, so a laptop *and* a mobile phone.
Or Bill gives Loretta the pad, Bill travels to a distant place and later Bill sends Loretta a secure message over an insecure (but fast) medium.
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BenWilson, in reply to
They also pose distribution security challenges which, if surmounted adequately, indicate the existence of a distribution channel of sufficient security to make the use of the pads redundant. When you can send a one-time pad with perfect certainty that it cannot be compromised, you don’t need the pad :P
Not true at all. You can send an enormous pad with massive security in one go. Then you can make as many safe instantaneous communications as you like, with no fear whatsoever that it can be intercepted and read. I could give my friend a USB drive with the pad on it, and they could take it with them anywhere. Then they can communicate with me with uncrackable encryption, and if the pad "pages" are deleted as you go, it's gone forever. Doesn't matter if aliens have been listening with unimaginably powerful computers, they can never know what was passed.
But yes, it still requires the secure pad exchange, which can't be done ad hoc. So it has limited usefulness. Probably good for spies and terrorists and government agencies of the very most paranoid kind. Not much use otherwise. I believe that one was used between the White House and the Kremlin during the Cold War. Even if the data was intercepted, we will never, ever, know what it said using cryptanalysis.
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