They're patenting a method of exchanging the keys to use for that cipher, and claiming using SSL/TLS to exchange the keys to use for RC4 violates their patent.

Not precisely. Here is Claim 1 of the patent:

providing a seed value to both said transmitter and receiver,
generating a first sequence of pseudo-random key values based on said seed value at said transmitter, each new key value in said sequence being produced at a time dependent upon a predetermined characteristic of the data being transmitted over said link,
encrypting the data sent over said link at said transmitter in accordance with said first sequence,
generating a second sequence of pseudo-random key values based on said seed value at said receiver, each new key value in said sequence being produced at a time dependent upon said predetermined characteristic of said data transmitted over said link such that said first and second sequences are identical to one another a new one of said key values in said first and said second sequences being produced each time a predetermined number of said blocks are transmitted over said link, and
decrypting the data sent over said link at said receiver in accordance with said second sequence.

So note that the keys are already provided (exchanged) in the first limitation. Then there's the issue of deriving the receiver and transmitter keys. This could refer to the pseudo-random function (PRF) used to generate session keys in TLS, but my understanding is that they're only asserting this against RC4 configurations.

That last clue is what makes me think that the "first sequence of pseudo-random key values" is RC4 output, and "encrypting" is XORing the plaintext with those values.

Nevermind that the patent was actually filed in 1989, long before the World Wide Web was even invented.

The problem here is not that the patent was filed before SSL was invented (about 1995) -- that could be fine, if SSL was using a patented technology that pre-dated its own invention.

The problem here is that the attorneys are accusing the practice of 'sending network records over a wire and encrypting them with a stream cipher', where in this case the cipher is (I believe RC4). However RC4 was invented in the 1980s and should pre-date this patent. I'm certain that somebody used it to encrypt network traffic in an almost identical manner, so there should be prior art.

Moreover, stream ciphers in general have been around for much longer than that. Someone somewhere has published/deployed this idea before. It should not be a live patent. Note that the case has never been tested by a court.

This post gives a high-level summary of the attack:

http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2012/10/attack-of-week-cross-vm-timing-attacks.html

(I previously posted this as AC, but it vanished.)

50% of faculty would be transferred to other engineering departments (ECE, ISE, and BME)

Just to clarify: The other 50% of faculty will move to better Universities. All of the good ones anyway.

My University is already treating this as a huge hiring opportunity.

Keeps developers from getting tunnel vision, giving them a larger view of the whole ecosystem.

Or it could be because Apple pays somewhat lower salaries than other Silicon Valley companies, and is consequently less able to get its hands on talent. Who knows.

written for MacOS and somehow been run through a translation layer that converts MacOS system calls to Windows system calls.

If that's the case, then the Mac version is converting MacOS system calls to Windows calls and then back again. In short: the problem is iTunes, not the Windows version.

Set-up a separate team of programmers. One working on the original iTunes for one final release (11), and a new one rewriting the whole thing to produce a better cleaner iTunes (12).

And here's where you run into the real problem: Apple never devotes enough coding resources to do this sort of stuff. This is why it took a year+ to get copy/paste on the iPhone, and it's also why iCloud doesn't feel 'quite there yet'.

I'm not at Apple, but people who are tell me that there's basically an A-team of good coders, and they get shifted around to whatever project makes the most sense at the time. Apple probably has the cash to fix this, but they don't seem to want to.

As a more general complaint, why isn't iOS PC-free yet? iCloud cost Apple a fortune and it almost lets me do everything without iTunes -- yet try to put a video on my phone, suddenly I'm looking for my USB cable and trying to figure out which computer has my iTunes library on it (because god forbid I sync with the wrong one, I'll wipe my phone).

So how, then, do they detect the breach, which is usually far more difficult than protecting the stuff in the first place.

A common approach is to insert 'canaries' into the datasets. These are wholly-invented users whose credentials should never show up in any system, anywhere. If they do start showing up in significant numbers, you have a breach. By measuring which, and how many of these fake users turn up, you get a read on how many records you lost.

Not that this necessarily has anything to do with this case. It's also possible that the thieves were openly advertising their haul on the 'net, and some law enforcement agent happened to be listening in.

Note that I agree with everything the GP poster said, but his comments do have an inkling of truth. We are experiencing an economic change in the United States, and may have been experiencing it for 20 years -- masked only by the 90s stock boom and real-estate bubbles. The change is characterized by lower-than-expected growth, and a difference in the way that growth has been distributed. Much of the growth is occurring overseas, and while Americans are profiting off of it, the profits aren't being equally distributed.

This may or may not have something to do with increasing world population, but in the longer term, we do face real population pressures. Not the Stand-on-Zanzibar strawman, where the country literally gets too crowded. Rather, we're facing huge resource pressures. There's reason to believe that our economy is already being constrained by energy resource limitations (read: oil), and not so much because the world population is increasing (though it is) but because large swaths of it have decided not to live in poverty anymore. There are 2.5 billion people expected to come out of poverty in the next few decades, and nobody has a clue how that's going to work. You could live in the middle of the Mojave desert and still be affected by that. And it's not just oil -- look up 'peak potassium' if you want another reason to be concerned. And of course, there's nuclear proliferation and climate change, which appears likely to happen whether or not you believe that humans are involved.

Many of these concerns can probably be addressed, but not by the economic system we're currently operating. So while I don't think that the Occupy protestors are explicitly looking three to four decades into the future, I hope that they're successful because the only way I see our way of life lasting 50 years is if we all make some dramatic changes to the way our government and economic elites behave. It's going to be a bumpy ride, and our current arrangement is like locking 90% of the population into steerage and driving the ship with abandon through a field of icebergs.

there is truth to the point that many of the people at the protests didn't even know why they were there. Literally, when asked on camera, they couldn't give an answer. They just wanted to be part of an anti-authority movement.

Preserving and defending the right to peaceably assemble, all by itself is a good enough justification for doing it from time to time. I bet a lot of protestors initially who initially had no, or no good reason, to protest eventually found one when the cops teargassed them or otherwise used excessive force. They also probably learned a lot about our democracy.

And yes, every protest is going to have some bad apples. Welcome to reality. If this is unacceptable to you, maybe we should abandon our constitutional right to do it in the first place.

It's not just bad corporate policies. It's the entire commercial security industry as well:

http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2012/03/why-antisec-matters.html

Yes. But you're making it as if Apple were Monsanto lying about 3 headed babies because their mothers ate corn in the 3rd trimester.

What I'm saying is that Apple collected a profit by lying to its customers, they should be liable for some or all of that profit.

Has our culture degraded to the point where this thought is shocking? If so, please kill me.

I don't necessarily think that this is a huge legal issue

Actually, screw that (yes, I'm replying to my own post). It is a legal issue.

If Apple had been forthright about the technical issue -- and had been honest about the fact that they were designing a 'fixed' version of the phone -- then I think they would have been blameless. People would have been properly informed and thus could have made the correct decision in deciding whether or not to return the device.

But instead Apple lied. They lied because they knew if they downplayed the issue, a lot of people would take them at their word and hold onto phones that they knew were defective. Moreover, they didn't acknowledge that they were fixing the issue -- since they didn't really acknowledge the issue in the first place (remember when it was going to fixed via a software update?) So people didn't know that they could return the phone and buy a better one a few weeks/months later.

I think that really forms the core of their legal culpability. I wish that their damages exceeded the $$ they probably made by sticking people with those defective phones, but I really doubt that it does. No doubt the shareholders are toasting the ghost of Steve Jobs right now.

Of course, in reality, the antenna was only marginal in signal areas beyond that of the 3GS it replaced, so the majority of people never saw the issue. Antennas are susceptible to detuning; that's physics for you

Or for god's sake, this post completely misrepresents the issue. I notice you've posted essentially the same comments twice in this thread -- shill much?

For the record, the problem was not limited to marginal signal areas, unless you define 'marginal' as being any area not directly beneath a cell tower. And this isn't just a question of the antenna 'detuning' more (but similarly to) other phones. The unique design characteristic of the iPhone 4 was the decision to place two antennae on the exterior of the phone with no insulation over them. This made it possible to bridge the antennae and essentially swamp them both with noise. This wasn't something that happened 'some of the time'. It was pretty easy to repeat, and it happened in real usage.

Moreover Apple knew it was a serious problem. If you ignore the PR and look at Apple's technical actions, you see a company moving heaven and earth to rectify a catastrophic engineering screwup and repair the antenna as quickly as possible. The only evidence for the idea that 'this wasn't a big deal' came from Apple's public statements.

I don't necessarily think that this is a huge legal issue -- Apple eventually gave out cases so that people with defective phones could use them. And they offered full refunds. But from a customer-relations point of view it was sickening. They basically lied to their early adopters -- people who had enthusiastically lined up to purchase a defective phone -- and agreed to do nothing but send them a bandaid -- while quietly acknowledging the problem and re-engineering the phone so it wouldn't be broken for their next round of customers.

The second problem is the way that agricultural water subsidies work. Since farms can obtain water at vastly below-market rates (and can't resell it), there's little incentive to manage it carefully. Hence the pipeline infrastructure is incredible leaky. I don't recall the statistics offhand, but simply repairing the pipeline leaks could save as much water as is used by one or more large cities.

The proper solution is to either (a) allow these interests to resell their subsidized water for human consumption (not terribly appealing), or to (b) offer them cash subsidies for water used, rather than subsidizing the cost of the water itself. Either solution would create an incentive for agribusinesses to upgrade their delivery infrastructure, and would cut out an enormous amount of wastage.