RSA is a purposefully weak cipher? Citation needed!
I wasn't talking about RSA the cipher, I was talking about RSA the company, which used a weak SSL cipher in their product after being paid $10 million by the NSA. link
"Reuters reported in December that the NSA had paid RSA $10 million to make a now-discredited cryptography system the default in software used by a wide range of Internet and computer security programs."
As a former softie, all I can say is that i would trust bitlocker over pretty much any solution on the market and here are the reasons why:
1. Microsoft would not knowingly backdoor bitlocker. The NSA pressured the team leads, but management was adamantly opposed and declined to acquiesce.
That was then. Nowadays we have (unconstitutional) things like a National Security Letter where they can force you to put in a backdoor and prohibit you from telling anybody about it under penalty of imprisonment. If you are a little guy like Lavabit you can just go out of business rather than comply but if you are Microsoft you put the backdoor in, telling only the actual people that need to know and informing them they are going to federal PMITA prison if they tell anyone. Unless you were the guy who put the code in you wouldn't know anything about it.
2. Suppose bitlocker was knowingly backdoored, the amount of reputational harm that Microsoft would endure would literally be crippling. Crippling not with the OSS crowd, but enterprise customers. The only loser would be Microsoft and they would not recover.
With only binaries to analyze it is certainly possible that a NSA backdoor could go undetected in bitlocker. Particularly if the backdoor was in the form of an intentional error in an algorithm or a purposefully weak cipher (hello RSA!).
3. There simply not enough people involved in the Truecrypt project at the moment to make it a truly secure solution. This isn't the Linux Kernel. For FDE, I wouldn't trust an FOSS until more audits and testing has been done. The reason is not because of technicalities, but because of legal liability reasons. For an FDE solution I either would want a private company to back the product or I would want a strong and active community truly backing the continuing development of the FOSS.
That said, I'm really hoping the audits come back positive and that development continues.
I hope that development continues as well. More developers would be nice but on a mature project usually there is only low-glory bugfixing going on so a) less developers want to participate because there is less glory and bugfixes are boring and b) there doesn't need to be a lot of developers as there is less workload. Obviously an independant audit would be ideal but that generally means money and somebody has to pay.
FTFA:
Amazon indicates that it considers books to be like any other consumer good. They are not.
My rebuttal: Yes they are.
It's not about Google - they just happen to be named in this case. This is a decision that will affect any search engine, any index, anyone who offers links to publicly available material or provides any sort of aggregation service.
Those people who say "just direct them to the courts" are being shortsighted. A court case requires two sides. If Google (or whoever) tells someone "go to court", they will do so: by filing a lawsuit against Google (or whoever). The last thing any company needs is having to show up to millions of trivial little court cases.
Indeed, this isn't just limited to Google. On that note, does anybody know if (physical) newspaper archives are affected by this ruling? There has never been a "right to be forgotten" before, if you did something newsworthy it ended up in the archives for anyone to peruse. Same with arrest records or court records. Does this ruling give somebody the right to demand that the courts destroy any documents that mention them?
When I was younger, the Bay and SV appealed to me. Plenty to do every weekend, great weather, lots of like-minded people, plenty of night-life. Now that I am older, I have zero desire to live in the Bay/SV... traffic sucks, prices are crazy, I want a less hectic area to raise my children in, etc.
Sacramento could easily become a tech-hub for an older crowd of startup types.
Those older types are a lot more risk-averse because they have kids and an accustomed lifestyle. Startups, particularly tech startups, are predominantly started by younger people (with backing from older money) because they have less to lose when they go bankrupt.
when i worked for Symantec they had just bought
Seeing how the Veritas merger basically took over the company, what you said was plausible enough
They bought PGP which was in Draper and also had a lot of Utah employees from the Altiris acquisition. Verisign was based in Mountain View when the (partial) merger happened (the part that Symantec didn't buy is now based in Virginia).
Isn't every "high tech hub" an instance of this working? They weren't hubs from the very beginning after all.
Not really, Silicon Valley is only in California because William Shockley's mother lived in Palo Alto and had failing health. If Shockley didn't found his company in the Bay Area it is highly unlikely that it would have the technology presence it has today. Every place that touts itself as "The next Silicon Valley" overlooks the fact that Silicon Valley started by happenstance.
Text Messages USED to cost money. Now, nobody actually uses TXT, as we no longer have dumb phones. We use Hangouts, Skype, Twitter, Facebook, GoogleVoice, email
Txt was good when all you had was a feature phone.
Congrats on living in a major metropolitan area. The other 99% of the world still has to pay for texts.
I'll never get over peoples myopic view of the world.
99% of people (particularly people with cell phones) live outside of metropolitan areas? This page claims about half of the worlds people live in a city.
You know what's better than insane profits? More insane profits. And unlike data, there's no profit cap.
HOMER: Mr. Burns, you're the richest guy I know. Way richer than Lenny.
BURNS: Oh, yes. But I would trade it all for a little more.
Insane profits are NEVER enough to the kind of people who are making this policy. People who have a lot of money always want MORE! It seems unintuitive (what does 2 billion dollars buy you that 1 billion didn't?) but that seems to be the way at least some humans are programmed.
Nothing is static in this world. If voters complain, things will change. You just have to convince enough of them that you are correct. Too bad they won't have access to your website and social media to know about you.
Hahaha you still think the people have a voice in US politics? Well, I guess if the person is wealthy then the politicians might listen but if you aren't bribing^H^H^H^H^H^H^H giving campaign contributions to your "representative" you have no voice.
Range is the issue.
My commute is 40 miles each way. What EV do I buy that ensures me I can get to work and back home on a single charge, accounting for common traffic jams and problems that causes for actual range, and accomodates the lack of charging slots at work?
It would be OK if I paid less than a 30% premium over typical retail price, even better if I pay only a 50% premium over the typical price of a 5-year-old used vehicle, though I generally drive 10-year-old vehicles. I know, that rules out lots of vehicles.
Electric is still not for me.
Actually, electric cars are a lot more efficient in traffic jams, you will get a lot better range going 30 MPH vs. 70 MPH. The Nissan Leaf seems to fit the bill (reasonably priced, at least 80 miles range), with associated tax credits it costs about the same as a similarly equipped ICE car.
It means nothing, because the properties of an element and a compound containing it don't necessarily bear any resemblance to each other.
Where do you think commercial hydrogen comes from? The majority comes from cracking natural gas, a hydrocarbon.
If a business wants to get "fast lane" access among specific providers, why no co-locate servers at one of that provider's data centers or central offices?
That's exactly what they do. It benefits the ISP because it reduces the data that has to flow across their interconnects, it benefits the provider as they don't need to pay for transit across the internet and it obviously benefits the consumer. The problem Netflix has is that Comcast realizes that it benefits Netflix (plus, they are competing with Netflix) so Comcast said "Yeah, we'll allow you to place caching servers on our network, provided you pay us several million dollars per month". Netflix doesn't really have a choice, Comcast is about half of the US residential internet subscribers.
Comcast's business has long been about selling access to their customers. They sell the service to the customers then they sell the customers to advertisers. They now want to sell their internet customers to providers as well. This is blatant abuse of their monopoly position but since the political system in the US is designed to reward those with the most money nothing all all will come of this, other than the FCC asking Comcast if they should apply lube to the public before Comcast reams them (the answer is "No!").
I just don't get why every fscking channel seems to migrate towards "reality" or "contest" tv.
Because it is fucking CHEAP. The cheaper a show is to produce, the more money the producer will make (assuming the same ratings). Why would they produce quality scripted television when they can film some attention whores and make 10x the money?
That would be the case if population and size of patrol areas wasn't increasing. Almost all cities are growing, increased population, increased density and increased size. Inflation only counts on increases in costs, not growth.
Yeah, it should be cheaper to police such a situation. If density is increasing you are still policing the same area, there are just more people in it. The increased population bring greater sales tax and property tax revenues. Maybe cities in the middle of nowhere are increasing in size but most existing cities don't have anywhere to expand to, they are already surrounded by other cities.
It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.
