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Comment Re:Unnecessary (Score 1) 528

Okay, I'll grant you, science has gotten it wrong many times...however, you will note that we have newer, more accurate theories supplanting old ones when the evidence does not square with the theory. This is healthy and good, it is growth. The thing to take away from this is that science discarded those incorrect theories when we found that evidence did not support them. That is the reason why science has progressed. Denying new information that conflicts with pre-established worldviews on the other hand is stagnation, no growth is possible without change.

Comment Re:The stupid is strong with these people... (Score 2) 528

Yep, and for roughly the same reasons. An ignorant populace is far easier to manage and control from the top. Look at North Korea for a live example of this. With no external facts or even a method to determine if a particular "fact" is grounded in reality, you can insert whatever you like and ignorant people will swallow it wholesale simply because they literally do not know any better. (an aside, the latin root for the word science was scientia, knowledge, very telling in this context)

TL;DR - Orwell said it best, control the present and you control the past; control the past and you control the future. The most effective way to do that is through control of information

Comment Re:In the clear? SRSLY? (Score 1) 353

Files generally are not encrypted on a one-off basis, instead they are saved within an encrypted "container". This encrypted contain could contain other arbitrary files and will likely use a unique seed value to start encryption, both of which will ensure that you will not be able to find a reproducible file hash for bad images. What you are describing is basically a known-ciphertext attack and is well understood within encryption.

Comment Re:You show me yours, I'll show you mine (Score 2) 649

null hypothesis --> there is no god or he/she/it/they do not interact with the observable universe in any meaningfully detectable way.
your hypothesis --> there is a god and he/she/it/they do interact with the observable universe in a repeatable detectable manner.

The null hypothesis is the default in science. Proving something is not due to random chance is how science works. That's why we have confidence limits, these limits may be very small but there is still always the chance that it the null hypothesis is correct. This caveat, that a scientific theory must always be falsifiable, is the core of the scientific method; the thought that whatever phenomena we are measuring could still be due to blind luck is why science works as well as it does because it means that we only accept something only after rigorous testing.

Also, as an aside, saying that life evolved from simpler organisms into more complex forms as opposed to fully formed ex nihilo does not automatically preclude the existence of a god. Deism is perfectly compatible with evolution for example.

Comment Re:MITM needs to be designed around (Score 2) 217

Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange allows you to securely share a secret key over an insecure medium. Combining this with asymmetric cryptography to identify parties is how modern handshake protocols work.

The problem here how to trust Bob's asymmetric key really came from Bob and not Eve.

You are correct in that the ideal solution would be to talk to Bob over a different medium (like phone) and ask him if that is his key but there are ways to do this over the wire. As an example, several Linux distros sign their LiveCD images with cryptographic keys and post the keys' fingerprints on their web page. Can these be spoofed? Sure, hack the server hosting the files. That requires additional effort (and risk) though which would dissuade most cyber-criminals from attempting it.

Is this perfect security? No, but there is no such thing short of chucking whatever you want secured into a black hole.

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