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Comment Re:You are wrong. (Score 4, Interesting) 299

Examples of snooping that lack the ability to do a MITM attack:

1. Listening to an encrypted wifi session, then breaking the encryption offline

2. Tapping into undersea fiber (the listening party is going to have a hard enough time exfiltrating the snooped bytes; setting up a "take over" command and associated equipment is prohibitive due to both the technical and political risks)

3. Listening device inside a government facility. China famously does this for example by using a small office-supply firm to get equipment into a US facility somewhere is Asia; the copy machine has a hard drive like any copy machine and there's nothing suspicious about that, right? And then you find the second, and the third, and the fourth hard drive hidden in places you would never look. The data is exfiltrated only when the machine is replaced as part of a regular service contract.
Need I go on?
Microsoft

The Empire In Decline? 488

An anonymous reader writes "Pundits continue to weigh in on Steve Sinofsky's sudden exit from Microsoft (as executive head of Windows Division, he oversaw the development and release of Windows 7 and 8). SemiAccurate's Charlie Demerjian sees Microsoft headed for a steep decline, with their habit of creating walled gardens deliberately incompatible with competitors' platforms finally catching up to them. Few PC users are upgrading to Windows 8 with its unwanted Touch UI, sales of the Surface tablet are disappointing, and few are buying Windows Phones. On the Sinofsky front, Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley is willing to take the Redmond insiders' word that the departure was more about Sinofsky's communication style and deficiencies as a team player than on unfavorable market prospects for Windows 8 and Surface. Meanwhile, anonymous blogger Mini-Microsoft had suspiciously little to say."

Comment Re:Encoded string (Score 3, Informative) 287

Ok, never mind about the AOAKN: http://www.ciphermysteries.com/2012/11/02/dead-pigeon-sparks-ww2-cipher-mystery

And decryption efforts are being coordinated here: http://en.reddit.com/r/cryptography/comments/12jipi/ww2_pigeon_carried_an_encrypted_text_here_it_is/.

(Thanks, by the way, for the info about all WWII German spies in the UK.)

Comment Re:Encoded string (Score 2) 287

http://www.bletchleypark.org/news/docview.rhtm/675670 says the red capsule attached to the pigeon is an Allied capsule, so if the code is German the message is from a German spy.

It's more likely the code is British. It has "AOAKN" twice - once at the start and once at the end, and from the digraph frequency (below), "AO" "FN" and "AK" stand out. I think that rules out any Enigma-based codes (e.g. the British TypeX), as well as the US SIGABA - the AOAKN would not be repeated at the beginning and end. I haven't found a description of BAMS yet.

Digraph frequency:
2 AR
2 DJ
2 GH
2 JR
2 ME
2 RZ
2 UA
2 OA, 2 AK, 2 KN (this is AOAKN twice)

3 AO
3 FN

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