Fabled in song and story they are.

I cannot recall the last time that I noticed things being slower internet-wide (indicating a bottleneck relatively nearby as opposed to at a peering node), but I'm certain that it happens in areas that are more densely populated and/or more tech savvy.

So long as the ISPs are turning "record profits" (not that they said comcast is, but the cell companies are) then this problem is one they created for themselves. Don't maintinan a level of service to customers that they expect despite having ability to pay for the needed upgrades (or some, at least)? Expect to loose customers.

I'm not against paying for my bandwidth. I'm against being charged more than a fair price for my bandwidth. If that means they low balled themselves and want to charge more, then ok. So long as it is fair. I know that the dollar per gigabyte or more that they charge for overages is WELL past the raw cost of bandwidth.

I hope I make it clear that I don't want them to be screwed and I don't want to be screwed either. I think that if they make this move they will drive their own profits are our expense and to the detriment of the Internet. Perhaps not, but cell phone plans are a good indicator. Let them charge by the byte, but make them charge fairly. Too much to ask?

Last thought: most ISPs are monopolies or duopolies (sp?), so they have to be watched like hawks so we don't suffer.

I agree, here is why. First lets look at the part of the summary that really sums this up:

The argument there is that they want to make more profits. More money. More for the sake of... more? There was a comment above stating that cable companies need the money to innovate, and I respect that. I also respect the fact that profit for profits sake screws over people, stiffles anything that challenges it. The world abounds with examples, and the fact that some cable companies feel the need to take municipal fiber projects to court to stop them is evidence enough of that (even though that would free them from the burden of maintenence of the last mile and still allow them access to charge people money. They know they cannot compete or else they'd gladly hop on to the freely provided (to them) fiber line and continue on with business)

Another thing to point out is that electricity takes exactly a certain amount of effort to generate, and every joule used requires some fixed amount of fuel to be burned, uranium transmuted, etc etc (and even wind and solar have huge base costs and ongoing costs due to the fact that they are bursty in nature). It is much more complex than that with line losses and the like, but on the large scale average it is some fixed multiple number of Joules generated to every Joule used. No more, no less.

Now then, how much does it cost providers for their bandwidth? Well they do have to recoup the costs of installation, ongoing rate of technological advancement, and the ever growing price of labor (in theory / I wish). Once those costs have been covered there are still the settlement charges / peering agreements with other network providers. I don't know what those are.... but they aren't friggin $1/GB. Also with many of the largest services scaling out to dozens of sites across the nation / world so that they are closer to their customers (Akami, Amazon (and all their partners), etc) the number of hops that need be taken are small. 0, 1, or 2. Traceroutes to many popular sites indicate that (from comcast in MI at least) there is one last level hop to the other network very near to the destination and that is it.

So perhaps I did have this wrong, come to think of it. Perhaps there is a small variable cost to it all that varies with useage. Charge me some small fixed multiple of your settlement costs for the bandwidth on the exit nodes I use and some small fixed fee to aid in innovation and advancement of the network. Also, and lastly, if you want to compare yourselves to the utilities then you need to act like one. Not sure on all the laws, but I'm pretty sure that the laws regarding phone and electtricity are pretty inhibiting. Really don't think that they want that. They just want the profits. Careful with that bottle, I hear genies are hard to get back in.

That isn't a key, just the length of rotation.

I didn't forget about the mathematical crptoanalytic attacks, I just want it to be well understood that the length of the key isn't nearly as important as the math behind it.

Crap algorithms, or extremely good attacks against good algorithms are THE arms race, not computing power. That said I'm looking forward to having some algorithms within the next few generatiions that are well beyond our ability to crack. Also even, say, AES with increased rounds tends to break attacks. It is just that a balance between security and speed must be struck.

No, I'd not seen that. Very interesting. I eat that stuff up. Thanks.

=D Yes, yes I was. I meant to do things like read over the comment and check it for grammar and make that point, but lunch was already over. Such is life!

A few have pointed out that the keys are too large to brute force. I figure you out to know why that is: http://everything2.com/title/Thermodynamics+limits+on+cryptanalysis

That is a good little write up on the subject. Short, sweet, and easy to follow. It demonstrates that non quantum 256 bit keys are safe from brute force attacks for... ever.

Two wrenches (one esoteric, one practical): Reversable Computation and Quantum Computers.

First the "practical" one, Quantum Computers. The algorithm for searching an unsorted database for a key is Grover's Algorithm. This gives a speed up of O(N1/2) and a space complexity of O(log N). For a 256 bit key this gives a time complexity of 2**128 and a space complexity of 78. Now, that time complexity will kill you. Move to a 512 bit key and we are back to 2**256 time complexity (jsut like in the linked article). The space complexity goes to 155. It might not seem like a big deal, but adding another qbit to a quantum machine isn't trivial. In fact it is properly hard, and gets harder for every extra qbit. also that space complexity is a multiplier, not a count. you need log N * or something along that scale (Big O notation demonstrates the rate of growth as things go to infinity so small problems can be dominated by other factors till they "scale up"). Obviously even quantum computation isn't going to help crack a 256 bit key and a 512 bit key will restore the same level of security even IF they could be built large enough and numerous enough and fast enough for the 256 bit version (LOTS OF IFS and with an easy out. As pointed out increasing an encryption key's size is relatively trivial)

Now for the one that caused me some trouble, Reversable Computing. Fancy way of saying that the computation is reversable with no energy expended after being performed and reversed (actually arbitrarily little energy appraoching zero as closely as you care to come... kinda. Physical devices pose practical problems, but let us se that asside for a moment). This is a theory, and a good one. The problem is that you need to drive through all of the states. Let us assume that a computation takes one plank time on our perfect reversable computer (this is impossible, of course. It would be far higher even with a "perfect" device, but this is a lower bound given to us by nature). You need 1.4 * 10**16 time the current age of the universe (1.979 * 10**26 years) worth of computer time to go through all the states. Average is half that to find the correct key. Now you'll want to parallelize this computer to get to that (wholly impractical) time faster. How many can you build? How large are they? I'll leave it as an exerccise to the reader to determine how many you might be able to construct before they collapsed into a black hole. Also: 1 plank time is a few dozens of orders of magnitude smaller than any computation done with matter can achieve. It takes 4.48*10**20 plank times for a photon to pass an electron (if wolfram alpha is being nice to me, that is). Scale your time to be, say, the same as the time it takes a photon to cross your theoretical perfect reversable computer and then work out how many you need to complete the cracking of the key within a reasonable time. You'll get a black hole or incredible distances beyond the mortal ken.

Conclusion: Brute forcing any appreciably sized cryptographic key (512 bit or greater) will never, ever be possible no matter what happens with technology so long as computers are made of matter and compute in space. Period.
256 bit keys will remain equally unchallenged until we can create and power quantum computers the size of grains of sand trilions at a time.

Take that Moore's law

I've not read the paper yet, but it makes sense from a certain standpoint.

A single high dose causes massive widespread damge. Cells die, immune system ramps up, and rapairs get underway. A cell that might have become cancer dies in a scab, or fall off, or is cleaned up in some way amoung the countless others. Low level raditon damages just a tiny bit. Not enough to cause a reaction or massive cell death. This gives each cell that could become cancerous a better chance to live and become a problem.

Not sure if that is the mechanism (or if they een identified a mechanism yet) but it smacks of truth.

FTFA

This is utter and complete nonsense. There is hardly a shread of logic in making this argument.

It is an instruction set. You know, add register 1 to register 12 and store in register 1. Copy Register 1 to memory location 0xa3546f00. Things like that. In what world could an instruction set and basic outline for the architechure (which is the system built around the core instruction set. Memory interfaces, cache rules, chip to chip protocols, etc etc) be capable of a backdoor?

Built in blacklist of IP addresses? How does that work? Blacklist an entire subset of the 32 and 128 bit integers? Good luck running the system! I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to try and predict the failure mode of there. Some others later inthe thread are talking about this making it easier for black hats by way of making their code portable. Portable code does make their job easier, but that doesn't make the system built on the ISA identical. It also doesn't make the chips themselves identical. A flaw in one chip or one system built on this ISA does not affect the others. Flaws that are within the spec itself are harder to fix but are no more a risk than any other ISA.

There isn't a logical way for an ISA to be exploited for the kinds of things people are talking about. Even if they did, say, hide some nonvolitile storage on certain chips and try to identify AES being performed (for example) and store the keys away it would be trivial to obfuscate the AES code so it wasn't recognized. There are a near infinite number of ways to perform an arbitrary transformation on data, some are just used because they are faster and resistant to things like timing attacks.

To cut this short: anyone making arguments against a standardized ISA by way of invoking security concerns needs to really lay out their argument. I can't concieve of one good path of attack but I think I'm biased against the idea. If someone can provide a good and thought out example I'd be glad to hear it but I suspect that the security angle isn't a valid concern.

I'm sorry, but that isn't correct. Atheism is simply asserting that there is no god. Agnosticism is a harder one to define but it is (in VERY brief) the idea that though there could be something beyond the mortal ken the details of it aren't anything more than pure speculation.

There are many shades of Agnosticism but there is only one of Atheism and that is "There is nothing supernatural." There is nothing in that statement that attacks anyone. People just feel attacked by it. I don't claim to understand why.