What I said is that /dev/urandom is much more important to get right than /dev/random. Realistically, far more programs use /dev/urandom than use /dev/random. GPG uses /dev/random for long-term key generatiom, but in terms of generating certs, creating session keys, etc., /dev/urandom is far more important.

If you trust Intel not to have gimmicked RDRAND, by all means, feel free to use it. Please do it in open source, though, so I can fix said program not to, though.....

I want to high five the reporter that asked that question. Holy shit. A single question be a single reporter possibly changing the course of an entire war. Not every day you see that.

I think it's more likely that the RDRAND thing has been an ongoing argument/flamewar for a long time. See this thread for an example.

BTW Linus is right. According to what we know about randomness, even if RDRAND is hacked then mixing it with other entropy can't hurt - at worst, it merely is a no-op and achieves nothing. However, even if RDRAND is backdoored, the NSA is not the worlds only adversary. Given that when mixed with other randomness it doesn't hurt, it's still better to use it against all the other adversaries out there than not.

Linus' point is, exclusive reliance on RDRAND would be bad, but the kernel doesn't/shouldn't do that.

Which raises the question: will they still be willing to go die on Mars, after spending seven years turning their life around?

If you're a reporter, is there a small victimless crime you can commit in the process of accepting information from a source, such that you would be unable to reveal the identity of the source without simultaneously confessing to your own crime?

Two datacenters owned by the same company using MPC is a really dumb use case. That won't help at all. The point of Google encrypting cross-dc communications is a forcing manoeuvre - it forces intelligence agencies to go via Google Legal to get information where the request can be analyzed and pushed back on. Even in countries where the legal system is flimsy and corrupt, that's an issue that can be improved significantly just with a single act of Congress or Parliament, whereas undoing their wiretapping infrastructure will prove somewhat harder because there's no adversarial lawyer standing in the way.

A better example might be two datacenters owned by different companies, where they don't mutually trust each other. Or, to give an actual use case, the OTR chat encryption protocol uses MPC to authenticate connections. They call it the socialist millionaires protocol. The two parties agree on a secret word (typically by one user posing a question to the other), and then a variant of MPC is used to verify that both parties selected the same word. The word itself never transits the wire and it's only used for authentication, so it's relatively strong even if the secret word is short or predictable.

Now, for some background. The paper can be found here if you want to skip the million+1 links and registration crap.

The basic idea behind MPC is that you write your shared computation in the form of a boolean circuit, made up of logic gates as if you were making an electronic circuit. The inputs to the program are represented as if they were electronic signals (i.e. as one and zero bits on wires). Once done, there are two protocols you can follow. The original one is by a guy named Andrew Yao. Each wire in the circuit is assigned a pair of keys. The details I'll gloss over now, but basically given the circuit (program) as a template, lots of random keys are created by party A, then the entire "garbled circuit" is sent to party B who will run it. Party A also selects the keys for his input wires and sends them to party B, who doesn't know whether they represent 0 or 1, only party A knows that.

Now party B wants to run the program with his input, but he doesn't want party A to know what his input is. So they use a separate protocol called an oblivious transfer protocol to get party A to cough up the right keys for B's input wires, without A finding out what they were. Finally, party B can run the program by progressively decrypting the wires until the output is arrived at.

What I described above is Yao's protocol. There is also a slightly different protocol called BGV. In BGV you don't send the entire program all at once. Instead, as party B runs through the program, each time they encounter an AND gate they do an oblivious transfer with party A. XOR gates are "free" and don't require any interaction. I forgot what happens for other kinds of gates. Basically, BGV involves both parties interacting throughout the computation, however, it can result in much less network traffic being required if your OT protocol is cheap, because if your circuit is very wide and shallow then most of the garbled program never has to even get transferred at all.

From what I can tell, most of the best results in MPC these days are coming from BGV coupled with new, highly efficient OT protocols. SPDZ appears to work on yet another design, but the basic reliance on circuit form remains.

Eh, you realise that Google has lots of engineers who don't live in the USA, have no ties to the USA, even strongly dislike the US government, right? Some of them are even working in China or Russia.

The idea that every Google employee is a slave to the NSA is absurd. The vast majority wouldn't even qualify for basic security clearance.

How does the distribution of surpluses work?

Say the threshold is 100. (It is a small election.) Candidate A got 200 primary votes, of those 150 had B as second choice, 50 had C. Do they say 'half of A's votes are 'used up', so the surplus is distributed as 150 votes for B each with a weight of 1/2, and 50 votes for C, each with weight of 1/2'? (That would be sensible but horribly complex to calculate.)

Alternatively, they just take 100 of the voting papers which had A as primary, and say "these are the votes we're redistributing". This is simpler, keeps the number of votes integral, but means the outcome of the election is non-deterministic (and potentially biased, depending on how the votes to be redistributed are selected). Given the lack of fractional votes in the document you link to, I take it to be this second option.

I'd say more than half, if you slightly broaden the scope of your definition of a blow job.

As it was my first time in Australia for an election, I watched on TV. The coverage was completely about the lower house. By the time I quit watching (Rudd's concession speech) I don't think there had been so much as a mention of the fact that senators were being elected also. It was weird and puzzling.

( . Y . )

At least aspire to something with a decent cup size.

That's OK, the Coalitions Fraudband policy will sort out your pesky bandwidth issues. Oh wait!...

I prefer not to think of it as hoarding, but rather preserving it before some corporation decides to 'put it in the vault' like Disney does. Why should they control when I can watch something again?