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Comment Re:Welcome to the club (Score 1) 112

The odds are 1 in ({number of different symbols per character} to the power of {length of ciphertext}) - 1 of it being the plaintext.
If the OTP is truely random, then a ciphertext can be decoded to any possible permutation of the same length with equal probability.

Take for example the ciphertext TIGZIFZOMASDRVBTJFVTS:

With an OTP of ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTU it decodes to THEWEATHERISFINETODAY,
while an OTP of LPOIIXMGZUQDYDBGGCHNA yields ITSRAININGCATSANDDOGS.

Without knowing the original OTP you have no way of knowing which of these decodes (or all other legible) is the correct one.
Of course many decodes will result in gibberish as well (e.g. OTP 123456789012345678901).
In this case the probability that any given message is the correct one (without being able to decide that, of course) is 1 in 7,31e+43.
Its likelier to win the lottery and be struck by lightning on the same day.

To try it out for your self look here: http://www.braingle.com/braint...

Idle

iPhone 3G vs. Solar Death Ray 104

You'll note that after its destruction, the phone still plays music.

Comment OS source access is already blocked (Score 2, Informative) 51

Looks like Foundry27 is being canned:

Effective April 9th 2010, QNX Software Systems has updated its source code access policy. This FAQ has been prepared for customers, partners, and hobbyists and provides details on what has changed.
Q. What has changed under the new source code policy?

Under the new policy, QNX Software Systems will continue to make its proprietary OS and middleware source code available to qualified customers, partners, and educational institutions. However, some of this code will no longer be available to hobbyists or to the general public.

The new policy classifies proprietary QNX source code as either Open (available to anyone under an open source license), Accessible (available to customers, partners, educational institutions, and hobbyists under a new click-through agreement), or Restricted (available to customers and partners with an approved QNX Restricted Content Application).

For example, QNX Software Systems will:

* continue to provide board support packages (BSPs) as open source
* provide various libraries and utilities as Accessible source
* provide source code for the QNX microkernel as Restricted source

Does anyone have a torrent with the current source?

Space

Spectrum of Light Captured From Distant World 32

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Cosmos: "Astronomers have made the first direct capture of a spectrum of light from a planet outside the Solar System and are deciphering its composition. The light was snared from a giant planet that orbits a bright young star called HR 8799 about 130 light-years from Earth, said the European Southern Observatory (ESO). ... The find is important, because hidden within a light spectrum are clues about the relative amounts of different elements in the planet's atmosphere. 'The features observed in the spectrum are not compatible with current theoretical models,' said co-author Wolfgang Brandner. 'We need to take into account a more detailed description of the atmospheric dust clouds, or accept that the atmosphere has a different chemical composition from that previously assumed.' The result represents a milestone in the search for life elsewhere in the universe, said the ESO. Until now, astronomers have been able to get only an indirect light sample from an exoplanet, as worlds beyond our Solar System are called. They do this by measuring the spectrum of a star twice — while an orbiting exoplanet passes near to the front of it, and again while the planet is directly behind it. The planet's spectrum is thus calculated by subtracting one light sample from another."
Hardware

Wikileaks Releases Early Atomic Bomb Diagram 429

An anonymous reader writes "Wikileaks has released a diagram of the first atomic weapon, as used in the Trinity test and subsequently exploded over the Japanese city of Nagasaki, together with an extremely interesting scientific analysis. Wikileaks has not been able to fault the document or find reference to it elsewhere. Given the high quality of other Wikileaks submissions, the document may be what it purports to be, or it may be a sophisticated intelligence agency fraud, designed to mislead the atomic weapons development programs of countries like Iran. The neutron initiator is particularly novel. 'When polonium is crushed onto beryllium by explosion, reaction occurs between polonium alpha emissions and beryllium leading to Carbon-12 & 1 neutron. This, in practice, would lead to a predictable neutron flux, sufficient to set off device.'"
Education

Teachers Give ERP Implementations Failing Grades 169

theodp writes "Nine months after the Los Angeles Unified School District launched SAP HR and Payroll as part of a larger $132M ERP rollout, LAUSD employees are still being overpaid, underpaid or going unpaid. In June, about 30,000 paychecks were issued with errors, falling somewhat short of the Mission Statement 'to effectively deliver services to meet the payroll needs of all District employees serving our students.' Meanwhile, a $17M PeopleSoft-based payroll implementation has been making life miserable for Chicago Public Schools teachers and staff since last April, including June retirees who were stiffed for more than $35M. It's been a bad computer year for CPS staff, who also had to contend with a new $60M system that wasn't up to the task of taking attendance."
Mars

Terabytes of Mars Pictures Released to Public 137

Riding with Robots writes "The team that runs the high-rez camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has just released more than 1,200 Mars images to the Planetary Data System, NASA's mission data archive. The team has also released 1.7 Terabytes of data to a user-friendly site that allows users to quickly home in on each image, most of which are a gigabyte-sized files measuring 20,000 by 50,000 pixels. Not all the images have been thoroughly studied yet: in the announcement, the camera's lead scientist said, 'These images must contain hundreds of important discoveries about Mars. We just need time to realize what they are.'"
Google

Submission + - Google Deletes Rogue Ads, Dangers Persist

An anonymous reader writes: Google has removed ads that appear alongside Google search results that re-directed users to malicious sites. But, according to security experts, the fix is temporary and search engine users should not assume sponsored links are all trustworthy.

http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/004248 .html

"Search engines are just too easy a target for bad guys," says Roger Thompson of Exploit Security Labs. On April 25, Exploit Prevention Labs reported that malware distributors were using advertisements placed via Google's automated AdWords system to infect unsuspecting end-users with spyware designed to capture bank login user names and passwords.

Feed Viacom Promises To Be More Mindful Of Fair Use On YouTube (techdirt.com)

When Viacom took down 100,000 videos from YouTube claiming they were infringing, one problem was that there were a number of false positives where they forced videos offline that weren't infringing at all. In one case, the EFF and others sued over the removal of a parody of the Colbert report, and Viacom bizarrely claimed that it hadn't sent a takedown about it despite a ton of evidence that it had. Eventually Viacom admitted that it had, in fact, accidentally sent the takedown. In response, the company has convinced the EFF to drop the lawsuit after promising to manually review all videos before sending takedown notices, training those who review the videos to understand fair use and publicly stating that it has no problem with videos that are "creative, newsworthy or transformative" and are "a limited excerpt for non commercial purposes." In other words, it's basically everything the EFF wanted, and now we'll see if Viacom lives up to the promise.

Feed Infrascanner: the handheld NIR hematoma detector (engadget.com)

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, Handhelds

As technology continues to make doctors' lives a bit easier (not to mention saving a few in the process), we've got yet another device that can detect a potentially fatal problem long before mere humans can figure it out. The Indian-based Infrascanner is a "handheld, non-invasive, near-infrared (NIR) based mobile imaging device used to detect brain hematoma at the site of injury" within the most important stage of pre-analysis. The device could also aid in the decision to proceed with "other tests such as head Computed Tomography (CT) scans" when not "facilitating surgical intervention decisions." While the methods behind the scanning are quite sophisticated, the unit uses diffused optical tomography to convert the light differential data seen in the local concentrations of hemoglobin into "interpretative scientific results." Potentially best of all, however, is just how close this thing is to actually hitting hospital wards, as it's simply missing the oh-so-coveted FDA stamp of approval before it can see commercial use.

[Via MedGadget]

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