Posts by Kyle Matthews
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*But* there was no discussion for the voting form itself because it seemed superfluous, given that we already had one. We’ll change things a bit once Matt has some time, but for now it might be worth looking at the home of the site once a day.
I think I've looked at the public address home page about 4 times in the past four years, and I know I'm not the only one. It doesn't serve any purpose for me as pretty much everything can be reached from the system page. Might be worth keeping that in mind Russell in terms of reaching all of us (I don't think I ever saw the email, but that might be gmail's fault).
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Where was the voting announced? I saw people talking about voting, but can't recall ever seeing a link or an announcement, and I follow system reasonably fanatically.
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The loss of so much data makes the USA look fairly complacent in terms of security, I was amazed to hear there were three million people on their ‘share’ list.
That's really the weakness in the system, not the transmission period. If thousands of people have access to the texts, and dozens of those people are disgruntled, it only takes one to copy them off.
I'm more surprised that computers that have access to secret materials aren't more physically locked down. A PC desktop in an academic department at my work caused me a wee battle trying to open up the USB drives and CD drive to allow physical copying. The Department of State and Department of Defense would have big enough computing requirements that they could force companies to make special, more secure designs for them.
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**I wonder if the yanks realise that releasing a million or so transcripts with time stamps will give other countries who have been capturing and databasing encrypted streams of these communications, all the data they need to crack the encryption algorithms these western systems are using, matching streaming encryption with the real texts, shouldnt take too long I would think…**
I'm not sure how much of this would be encrypted, but the datastream wouldn't help you. The encryption wouldn't be sent serially, it would be packaged up. So capturing an entire stream would only help you decipher if exactly the same cable, including the meta data such as the time stamp was sent again, which is impossible.
If the algorithm wasn't very good you could pick up patterns, but the encryption probably picks up every nth character and puts them in a new order as part of the process, or similar so changing a couple of words in a cable would make it look pretty different, and you couldn't reverse engineer it even if you had an encrypted an unencrypted version - the encryption will be one way.
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Just as a side note, I saw Dawn Treader on Thursday night and thought it was particularly awful. I can't remember the original book, not having read it for about 25 years, but the movie adaption made very little sense and had some pretty bad acting in it.
HP7.1 was pretty good however, given it was only really half a story.
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I think the US is engaged in trying to deal with hugely complex issues mostly in a constructive way that advances human rights and democracy.
That sounds great. Can we live on a planet where the US has been doing that for the past 10.... 20.... 30 years?
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For the record I’m always grateful for mentions, links, recommendations, references in haiku or riddle form, song dedications and/or spontaneous offers of cheese.
There once was a dude called Giovanni.
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I got nuthin.
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Good on Grant for his speech. Impassioned, argumentative, backed up by some logic and principles.
Shame Calvert's speech apparently carried the day. How luke warm can you get?
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How much does the government know about you or me? What do government records really have to say about you or me? We don't know, or rather we didn't until Wikileaks came along.
You just have to write them a letter and request a copy of your file under the Privacy Act. But if that doesn't suit your thesis...
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But, this being the internet, the truth is still out there:
It's really impressive when the myth about the Moriori is the most accurate thing in a list of whackjob beliefs.
At last a chance for all those who were considered for Dancing With the Stars, but were rejected because they couldn’t dance.
I don't think you've actually watched Dancing with the Stars. Dancing ability not necessarily required - Rodney Hide for example.
While there are many downsides to the name “Test Test”, you do receive a copy of almost every mailing and trial product ever sent.
And you get to feel special when the roadie does sound check.