Around 400BC Socrates quipped:
Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.

And I think we have found some cuneiform tablets from Sumer with exasperated teacher comments way older than that:)

USS Pueblo?
USS Liberty?
Vietnam listening posts?
And many other places they have gathered intelligence...

Actually, rereading the abstract, it seems that GP was spot on:P

Interesting idea, I wonder if that's ever been tried? I guess the feasibility depends on what the angular motions of these objects are.

In this case though, they "simply" take a lot of short-exposure images of the same region and add them together. From the abstract:

How is this in principle different from the known plaintext attacks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Known-plaintext_attack)?

These assume that the attacker knows both the encrypted version of the text and the original it was based on, and tries to glean information from their correlation.

Modern ciphers are made resistant even to chosen plaintext attacks, where the analyst knows the key and can tailor-make pairs of plain- and ciphertext.

On the other hand ANCHORY is an actual NSA system (http://www.fas.org/irp/program/disseminate/anchory.htm)

I guess they use both COTS and in-house developed software at NSA too...

They're claiming it will be ice free _by_ 2050, not spontaneously in that year! You can verify their claim every summer up to that year.

If their model says the trend is linear and they are right, half the ice is gone in 2032 (they'll probably have some feedback, so check their trend prediction).

Not true. The probability that the next letter in the OTP is (say) an A is always 1/26 when you have no prior knowledge about how the cipher clerk selected it. This is the optimal case, and any changes in how it is selected will only reduce the entropy of the pad.

*or did I just hear a whoosh over my head?*

But voters could see this (for all good it did them). With a closed computer system recognizing fraud is much more difficult.

The corrupted blood incident is actually better described as emergent behavior in a complex system.

The Blizzard developers didn't make a mistake, they just didn't think about all the consequences that debuff would cause in a world-like environment. And researchers had a field day studying the CB spread of the epidemic:)