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Comment: Re:The relationship between Google and Uncle Sam (Score 1) 248

by dmt0 (#44803115) Attached to: Google Speeding Up New Encryption Project After Latest Snowden Leaks

That's right, because they're working for US gov, not for Chinese gov.

Ah, that explains chillingeffects.org, their switch to RC4, SSL by default, and their strong support of the EFF, right?

For chillingeffects.org read the rest of my last post.

RC4, and SSL are irrelevant because the gov gets the data unencrypted. Encryption just makes your data unavailable to anyone other than the government, because the government hates competition. :)

EFF - publicity, "don't be evil", and the same old self-serving goals.

Comment: Re:The relationship between Google and Uncle Sam (Score 1) 248

by dmt0 (#44801265) Attached to: Google Speeding Up New Encryption Project After Latest Snowden Leaks

For instance, unlike Yahoo and MS, Google famously has repeatedly refused to work with the Chinese government when they request details on dissidents.

That's right, because they're working for US gov, not for Chinese gov.

Who besides google works closely with the EFF, particularly with the ChillingEffects site?

Google is against software patents, and are known to invest a lot in lobbying against them. Unlike the pharmaceutical and financial companies that are on the other side of the fence. ChillingEffects (as awesome as that resource may be) _from Google's perspective_ can be considered an astroturfing campaign.

Who besides google has shown the guts to say "get a warrant" to unofficial government requests?

Knowing that such requests are followed by FISA orders that you mention later in your post, the only purpose this "get a warrant" message serves is publicity and nothing else.

Comment: Re:Uh... okay (Score 1) 607

by dmt0 (#44769477) Attached to: NSA Foils Much Internet Encryption

No cracks in commonly used encryption, just a lot of computing power to brute force it. I remember 10 years ago there was speculation that for a few billion dollars you could build a machine capable of cracking common codes in a few months, and that the some countries probably had them already.

You don't crack commonly known encryption, you just design flaws right into it at the standard level:

Cryptographers have long suspected that the agency planted vulnerabilities in a standard adopted in 2006 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the United States’ encryption standards body, and later by the International Organization for Standardization, which has 163 countries as members.

Classified N.S.A. memos appear to confirm that the fatal weakness, discovered by two Microsoft cryptographers in 2007, was engineered by the agency. The N.S.A. wrote the standard and aggressively pushed it on the international group, privately calling the effort “a challenge in finesse.”

“Eventually, N.S.A. became the sole editor,” the memo says

Comment: So much for open source... (Score 1) 607

by dmt0 (#44769143) Attached to: NSA Foils Much Internet Encryption
"Cryptographers have long suspected that the agency planted vulnerabilities in a standard adopted in 2006 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the United States’ encryption standards body, and later by the International Organization for Standardization, which has 163 countries as members.
Classified N.S.A. memos appear to confirm that the fatal weakness, discovered by two Microsoft cryptographers in 2007, was engineered by the agency. The N.S.A. wrote the standard and aggressively pushed it on the international group, privately calling the effort “a challenge in finesse.”

So much for having your source open. It takes time to find bugs even in standards that guide the way software is written. How many people are out there who are qualified to find such issues in the code?

+ - GNOME 3 to remove EOG and Evince. Empathy should be replaced by Chat.->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "At Guadec 2013 Allan Day hold a speech that explains, that EOG and Evince should be removed from GNOME and that its functionalty should go inside Nautilus. Furthermore he also likes to have Empathys features being merged inside Chat. The Empathy developers decided to not become part of this. More to read at germans HEISE news."
Link to Original Source

+ - SPAM: First look at Windows 8.1 Build 9471

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Windows 8.1 Build 9471 leaked over the weekend and includes new changes like animated paralax desktop backgrounds, Skydrive integration and new Help Apps designed to ease the transition to this alien operating system. However, are all these improvements enough to keep Microsoft afloat or will Microsoft fail at its newest venture?"

+ - EFF Slams Google Fiber for Banning Servers On Its Network-> 3

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid (1002251) writes "Anyone who has tried to host their own website from home likely knows all-too-well the hassles that ISPs can cause. Simply put, ISPs generally don't want you to do that, preferring you to move up to a business package (aka: more expensive). Not surprisingly, the EFF doesn't like these rules, which seem to exist only to upsell you a product. The problem, though, is that all ISPs are deliberately vague about what qualifies as a "server". Admittedly, when I hear the word "server", I think of a Web server, one that delivers a webpage when accessed. The issue is that servers exist in many different forms, so to target specific servers "just because" is ridiculous (and really, it is). Torrent clients, for example, act as servers (and clients), sometimes resulting in a hundred or more connections being established between you and available peers. With a large number of connections like that being allowed, why would a Web server be classified any different? Those who torrent a lot are very likely to be using more ISP resources than those running websites from their home — yet for some reason, ISPs force you into a bigger package when that's the kind of server you want to run. We'll have to wait and see if EFF's movement will cause any ISP to change. Of all of them, you'd think it would have been Google to finally shake things up."
Link to Original Source

+ - The First "Practical" Jetpack May Be on Sale in Two Years-> 1

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey (2647775) writes "This week, New Zealand-based company Martin Aircraft became certified to take what it calls "the world's first practical jetpack" out for a series of manned test flights. If all goes well, the company plans to start selling a consumer version of the jetpack in 2015, starting at $150,000 to $200,000 and eventually dropping to $100,000. "For us it's a very important step because it moves it out of what I call a dream into something which I believe we're now in a position to commercialize and take forward very quickly," CEO Peter Coker told Agence France Presse ."
Link to Original Source

Comment: Re:I'll hold out (Score 1) 122

by dmt0 (#44544233) Attached to: Unlocked Firefox OS ZTE Open Is Now Available On eBay For For $80
Even if it's fully open, with 0 binary blobs. How many qualified specialists, with serious math background, do you think are out there looking through complex encryption functions checking through flaws in math? Ever heard of Obfuscated C Code Contests? Openness of the code does not guarantee absence of backdoors even if the code does get a lot of eyeballs looking at it.

I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning. -- Plato

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