Not that bad. Somewhat useful antidepressant if you aren’t entirely careless with it. Beware of phototoxicity, for example, and of interactions with other stuff.
Math denialism is a really great description. You see the media trotting out polls where they called up a bunch of people with landlines, but if you polled people who had the faintest idea about the underlying technology (say, assume most computer programmers and mathematicians have at least an educated layman’s understanding of the issues involved, and use that as a proxy, not to say that they’re the only ones who get it, by any means) you would see more like 90% of them siding with apple. A few would go the other way just because their instinctive authoritarian suck-up reflex would win out even though they should know better.
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But the issues with backdoors are not technological they are political. If we really could trust the government not to use the backdoor on anything other than a single iphone 5c then it would mathematically and technologically work fine. Just like nuclear power can technically be made safe and everyone wants that, but politics always gets in the way and shortcuts get taken that reduce safety. Sure it’s possible to build a safe nuclear power plant, but it’s not possible to build a goverment that can safely handle nuclear power. Similar with backdoors; no technical reason they can’t work, but no political will to make them work.
They can not work because they are impossible, full stop. There isn’t a safe one, political will or not. It’s another vector for attack, one that will be broken. One single mistake, and everything falls. How hard do you think bad actors will hit that back door, from attacks on it to attacks on the infrastructure?
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Mathematically, only the one with a signed copy of FBiOS can attack it. Nobody else. That’s how strong crypto works. You can’t break it even if someone else has. Everything else is politics. Important politics.
is a primary symptom of open mindedness when someone is in agreement with you?
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It’s probably easier to redefine safe than it is to do either of those.
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If you are properly researching the alternative medicine then there isn’t a problem, but by proper research I mean Cochrane reviews, not whatever the Daily Mail and Daily Express says won’t kill you with cancer this week.
www.informationisbeautiful.net have made [Snake Oil Supplements](http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/snake-oil-supplements/) and Snake Oil Superfoods which are a good start if you aren’t up for reading medical trials, You can still overdose on them though, no matter how strong the evidence is for them doing good, you can still get side effects with them and they can still interact with each other.
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There is, in fact, a technical reason they can’t work. Security of an encryption system is binary. It’s either secure against everybody, or it’s secure against nobody. There is, literally, no way to break encryption so that (your preferred) government can access it, without breaking it so anyone can access it.
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You’re assuming a secure implementation, which would need to be demonstrated. Never mind secure choice of algorithm, and assuming that there’s never going to be an attack on the algorithm.
Not gonna happen.
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Or that dude who took weird silver supplements and turned into Papa Smurf.
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What? You’re serious?
The potentially lethal mixture is being touted as a cure for autism, cancer, HIV, malaria and Alzheimer’s by the US-based Genesis II Church.
The organisation, which describes itself as “non-religious church of health and healing”, claims MMS is no different from giving sacrament in church services. Medical experts have rubbished the healing claims made for the product.
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By that logic my accounts are not secure if only I have access. No, security is all about granting a limited number of people access.
That was pretty much my reaction, too.
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This is a classic example of what I was referring to. You’re missing one very important point. Security is about only granting access to people chosen by the owner of the data. If you can think of a way to give access to one party not chosen by the owner, without also giving it to anyone else, well, you either know more than every specialist in the field or you’re suffering from dunning-kruger syndrome.
If you think this is possible, please be specific about describing the algorithm that you think will do this. This algorithm had also better not have a step that reads “trust the competence or the intentions of the people who are asking for it,” since you’re a fool, and ignorant of both current events and history, if you would trust either.
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I thought “Gee, it’s available, so I’ll just go grab this book from my local library” and it got real, fast. After a stop at pro wrestling and reality television, the author plunges into hardcore pornography as he examines how illusion has supplanted reality in American culture.
Just a note of warning in case the direct mentions on the back and flaps weren’t enough. If I had picked this up around the time it came out before I’d ironed out some of my own seams, I would have had a bad time. That said, halfway through I think it has important things to say.
Thanks, longbelly
There’s some weirdness going on with the new DRM on Ultra HD Blu-Ray as well:
Hopefully there will be some support for the VLC player soon-ish. And for all sorts of linux-based media centers.
Death to DRM. With extreme prejudice.
I wish Doctorow would define what he means by a backdoor. Not every technique that can be used to break encryption is a backdoor (e.g. rubber hose cryptanalysis).
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