Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • September 17, 2012 4:55 AM

@ Nick P,

Ross Anderson’s blog posted new attack info on Chip & PIN (EMV)

Err did Bruce bruce blog on this on 9/11/2012?

@ Petr Kadlec,

A new side-channel attack on TLS called CRIME

Yes both @Paeniteo and myself talked about it briefly last week,

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/09/friday_squid_bl_342.html#c872406

The question is has it answered the “Why CRIME” question 😉

Clive Robinson • September 18, 2012 2:25 AM

@ Terry Cloth, nobodyspecial,

Mexico is a bit of a problem…

How do you improve their economy without having a detrimental effect on the US home economy…

However there is another issue getting in the way, Mexico is not exactly poor and the big problem with their economy is not the lack of wealth or resources but crime and corruption. Because of this it is often refered to as a “hollowed out country” where the entire governmental legislature, judicial and executave structure is fundamentally corrupt. Solving the crime and corruption would probably improve the base economy in Mexico without any other effort required.

One of the problems we see in Europe at the moment is the “Industrial North -v- Agrarian South”. This causes a significant issue to do with a single currancy where there is no central control.

What the South want’s is the quality of life they see in the North but do not have the Industrial infrastructure to support. However whilst the North has the Industrial infrastructure it does not have the ability to feed it’s workers…

Looked at one way the standard of living in a country is based on the size of the population and the amount of wealth produced per square foot of land. Industry and services can be very productive per unit of land area but can also be “stacked” many layers deep on each unit of land thus making it vastly more productive. Agrigulture however is apart from a handfull of plants (think drugs and certain rare spices etc) not very productive per unit of land area, and unlike industry and services cannot be “stacked”.

One potential solution would be to make the land in the south produce more wealth. There are many ways this can be done, One way would be to rise the price of food (not wise). Another is to tax the north and pay a subsidy to the farmers (See the EU CAP as to where this goes wrong). Another is to reduce the population in the South (As seen in the Americas this tendss to happen anyway as job oportunities are perceived as being better in the north).

But it’s not just raw wealth that’s an issue it’s the cost of social infrastructures as well. In the north due to a high population density things like education and health care are more cost effective due to the Distance/Cost and Distanc/time metrics being much much smaller.

There is also the question of why the north is industrialized and the south not. Before industrialisation the south was rich and the north poor as the agricultural production of the land in the south is generaly better due to having more sunlight per unit of land and consiquent longer growing seasons etc. However the limit on population density was not just to the prooductivity of the land but also due to disease. The only safe things to drink in general were alcohol based. The south had wine which involved little in the way of effort, skill, etc to make. Beer on the otherhand requires considerable energy and skill to make effectivly. This encoraged towns to develop due to the economy of scale of beer making this encoraged commerce and surplus wealth could and did encorage patronage of fine arts etc which gave rise to metal smithing etc and eventualy industrialisation.

So the question becomes how can we reverse the productivity differential between the north and the south in a non artificial (wealth diverting via taxation / subsidy) way. And importantly without “beggering thy neighbours”.

And it is this latter issue that is the cause of contention with US / Mexico, setting up a Co-prosperity area will cause work for the masses to move where labour is cheapest or subsidy is highest as the Distance/Cost and Distance/Time metrics reduce. This creates a massive taxation shift, which unfortunatly due to Mexico’s corruption will not benifit the general populace, just encorage more criminal activity.

As we know the artificial way of maintaining the Distance/Cost and Distance/ Time metrics has been by “import control” in various forms, many of which are (supposadly) designed to rebalance the tax issues. One such is China’s “export tariffs” on certain raw resources. They are deliberatly putting significant export restrictions on things like rare earth metals in order to get manufacturing to move from the industrialised West to their mainly agrarian society.

On a historical note when agriculture was the primary source of wealth, the most important resource to control was water, and for most of recorded history there have been “water wars”. Well the equivalent of water for industry is energy, and we are already seeing “energy wars” to control the access to chemicals that store “energy”.

As noted as you move south in the northern hemisphere you get more sunlight hours and with greater intensity. If this energy could be “bottled” and cheaply transported then the wealth of the south would improve significantly. One way to do this is with very fast growing organisms that can then be harvested cheaply and easily into high energy content fuels. It might be that in a few years Mexico’s most significant export to the US is not bone muscle and gristle of workers but organic hydrocarbons…

Clive Robinson • September 18, 2012 9:51 AM

OFF Topic:

Smart meters are as we know a bit of a disaster waiting to happen in many ways…

Well in the UK even after being given a RED light that should have killed it stone dead they are carrying on with not just the biggest invasion of privacy but also a compleate and utter financial disaster.

Ross Anderson at Cambridge Labs has a paper on it that was presented to the UK Cabinet Office,

http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2012/09/17/the-perils-of-smart-metering/

Clive Robinson • September 21, 2012 7:17 AM

@ Nick P,

Don’ trust any new safety- or security-critical technology until science and industry has evaluated it for at east 10 years

Nagh that takes way to long,

Clive’s first rule of evaluation of anothers design,

If on seeing the system diagram you cannot work out three ways to break the system in five minutes then it’s not practical to build.

Clive’s Second rule of evalutation of anothers design,

If you can’t see a way to break the system then in all probability it either won’t work or won’t be secure.

Clive’s Third rule of evaluation of another design,

If it work’s and you still cannt see a way to break it then it’s time to retire.