It's your type of thinking that caused Netscape to fail.

True, it had a terrible codebase. This was from trying to add features at a rapid pace in order to compete with IE at the time of the browser wars.

However, at some point a genius like the parent AC came along and decided that the entire codebase had to be rewritten.

This left them in the dust, with IE claiming nearly 100% marketshare.

What they should have done was rewrite code a bit at a time. The code could slowly improve, and they would still remain competitive. This is the course that has been chosen for Firefox.

Just a correction: Regardless of who developed this (there seems to be some disagreement), nobody turned it over to the public domain. Read the license agreement: it says that you are not allowed to even create derivative works, nor redistribute the program to multiple sources, nor use it for commercial purposes.

I think that Windows will eventually (not soon, but eventually) fail for a similar reason to Amiga.

The problem is that technological (hardware) breakthroughs are accelerating (think Moore's law). In order to keep up, proprietary companies must continue to pour more and more resources into research and development in order to keep up. Open source has no such problem since anyone can contribute to research and development at no monetary cost.

If you don't believe me, just look here. USB3.0 is already being developed for Linux, whereas it doesn't look like Windows 7 will even have support for it when it is finally released. While the latter fact may change (AFAIK it may already have changed), it does seem indicative of similar trends in the future as the rate that technology improves increases even more.

Why would that matter ? The attacker still knows the state of the hash just prior to inserting the SEED, so what do we gain from this ?

You're right. I hadn't thought of it that way. I suppose that the only real solution to this would be to double the message, such that every part of the message has a chance to affect the resultant state after every other part of the message has been hashed, ie:

hash(n+SEED+n+SEED) or hash((n+SEED)*2) depending on your personal preferences for pseudocode.

I will now assume that a truly secure hash algorithm does this automatically and move on.

hash(n+previous_hash) is also totally unacceptable. Each new hash value has a 1/(2^hashlength) chance of colliding with another sequence created using an arbitrarily chosen SEED. Again, I invoke the birthday paradox. After 2^(1/2*hashlength)==sqrt(2^hashlength) new numbers there will be a 50% probability of the two sequences colliding and being the same sequence thereafter.

I suppose you probably already understood this to some degree, as you put a "?-)" after your question, but I decided to answer seriously anyway.

By the way, IANACE (I am not a cryptology expert), but I have read some books on it and taken a course at CTY, and have also done some of my own research online and theoretically (ie, thought experiments having to do with ideal systems AND practical systems).

The problem with this, of course, is that due to the Birthday Paradox, you will start creating a loop after (on average) sqrt(NUMBER_OF_POSSIBLE_HASH_OUTPUTS). For short messages, this is usually okay, but for long streams of "random" bytes, this is totally unacceptable.

On the other hand, you could use a stream based on the following:

hash("1"+SEED)+
hash("2"+SEED)+
hash("3"+SEED)+
hash("4"+SEED)+ ...
hash("1231142"+SEED)+
hash("1231143"+SEED)+ ...

assuming that your hash has a distribution indistinguishable from a random distribution.

By the way, the reason you put the SEED after the consecutive strings is that if two different seeds result in the same hash state, it will not matter since they are editing the state instead of creating it initially. Assuming a secure hash, hash(A)==hash(B) does not imply that hash(C+A)==hash(C+B) although in all modern hashes that I know of, it usually implies that hash(A+C)==hash(B+C) since new data edits the old state, and old data has no chance of editing the new state.

I hope my explanation makes sense, but if it doesn't, ask questions and I'd be happy to elaborate.

That's what calculus is for. It's so that the people selling the software/music/media/stuff/whatever can graph the people willing to pay against the price. Then they plot their expected profits for each price against that in order to find the optimal price.

People like you and me and anyone else who thinks the products are overpriced are not going to buy them. Either the companies making the products will be forced to lower the price to a more optimal one, or they will be able to keep it at the same price.

The problem is that they are claiming loss of sales for piracy done by people who never would have bought the game in the first place since the price is not right.

Granted, I am not a gamer and don't even bother to download these things since I don't have the time to play them, so take my gaming specific claims with a grain of salt.

GP meant that the US Congress doesn't have jurisdiction over other international crime rings.

They also called it "CAN-SPAM" which implies...

Just sayin'

I wonder who comes up with these acronyms?

The laws about sexual assault and things like that are compared state by state here. Overall, consensus seems to be on age differences of more than three years being a problem, but specific age restrictions vary from state to state, as do charges.