Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • February 5, 2022 3:36 AM

@ null clam, ALL,

It’s extraturtlestrial all the way down …

And there was me thinking it would be so much more fun if it was an “extracthulhulian”[1] experiment in planetary colonization =)

Think how happy all those practising Lovecraftians for the near last century would be 😉

Then of course on the more serious side Sir Fred Hoyle FRS creator of the term “Big Bang” would be delighted. He originated two quite related ideas,

1, Stellar nucleosynthesis[2].
2, Panspermia[3].

Stellar nucleosynthesis although Sir Fred’s idea, and now accepted widely got others Nobel Prizes (as I’ve mentioned before)…

As for Panspermia it was mainly rejected by the scientific community for a number of reasons. But in essence Panspermia is what this squid are extraterrestrial is all about…

Stellar nucleosynthesis, is about the origin and distribution of matter in the universe.

The idea that everything in the universe is made of atoms is long accepted but where did they come from? That was what Fred Hoyle came up with. That is with the exception of hydrogen atoms came from stars “burning” first hydrogen creating helium and so on. With lower mass stars ejecting out atoms continuously to for gas clouds or nebulae and heavy mass start ejecting out nearly everything when they go supernova. So the idea has three components,

1, An existing “seed” used,
2, By a “creation” mechanism,
3, And spread by a “distribution” mechanism.

In this way the atoms of the periodic table are fused together from hydrogen and distributed around the universe. Note importantlt that the theory does not account for the “seed material” hydrogen, just how things move forward from there.

Hoyle’s Panspermia idea when looked at, is in a way a very very similar idea to Stellar nucleosynthesis. In that there is a “seed”, “creation” and “distribution” involved. But Hoyle deals only with the distribution mechanism.

In essence it argues that the building blocks of life also get spread around the universe by all kinds of objects from space dust through spacecraft[4].

Back from the mid 1970’s Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe argued firstly this was probable due to the amount of carbon in space objects that Wickramasinghe later proved was correct. But they later further contended that life forms continue to enter the Earth’s atmosphere, and may be responsible for epidemic outbreaks, new diseases… A subject that is still very contentious today.

Before anyone asks, no I have absolutely no idea if Panspermia is viable or not as an idea. What I do know is that the basic laws of physics certainly alow such a mechanism to exist. But on the human nature side there are no alternatives with any more credability on the table.

But and this is the fun bit, that circumstantial evidence suggesting it might be possible is building and feathers are getting ruffled.

But the fun side continues, the arguments against Panspermia are not realy scientific arguments but human ones of ego hence ruffled feathers and such like. Hoyle only argues a distribution mechanism, not a creation mechanism or origin seed. The main argument against Hoyle’s idea is that he never came up with an origin seed argument, but then nobody has come up with any real idea for the origin of life, so in that respect Sir Fred had the majority on his side 😉

You almost get the feeling that humans especially scientists for ego reasons want Earth to figuratively be the “origin seed” of life thus the center of the universe in that respect. If anyone doubts that go look at the “bun fights” around the,

“Where are the Extraterrestrials?”

Question, there are very many noses with put out joints in them around that one.

My opinion is the ideas may or may not be true, as of yet we can not prove them, but also we can not disprove them, and importantly I don’t have any skin in the game. So figuratively I’m putting another bag of pop-corn in the microwave and adjusting the easy chair for comfort and will just sit back chill and watch the fun as egos not science get pitted, after all every one loves a good bun fight.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthulhu

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_nucleosynthesis

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia

[4] This is certainly true, it’s well known but not much tallked about, but in early space flight human waste was “ejected” into space with Fred Hayes making a joke about the “Constalation of Urine” on observing it twinkling in sun light. Subsequent tests on objects that have been retrieved from space shows that the human waste gets attracted to and coats objects in Earth orbit. Astronauts don’t talk about it much… But hey they don’t much talk about where the water they drink up there comes from either as it has that eh-ow factor, lets just say “re-cycling at it’s finest”.

Clive Robinson • February 5, 2022 5:37 PM

@ Freezing_in_Brazil,

Whatever the reality may be, the pricniple of caution dictates that it still too soon to rule panspermia out.

The reality is we know both ends of the journy although highly improbable are possible.

But the smaller the planets/moons the higher the possibility of success… But I suspect, the possibility of a first planet/moon is going to be small and retain a sufficient atmosphere for long enough for life to emerge is way to small.

Then how long would the journey take? My guess is a lot lot more than say the the duration of the first ice age.

Clive Robinson • February 6, 2022 4:30 AM

@ SpaceLifeForm, lurker, ALL,

May I commend to you,

“My Grandfather’s Clock”

The lyrics of which you will find here,

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Grandfather's_Clock

You might also note it was sung by a “Time Lord” aka “Dr Who” played by Jon Pertwee,

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Pertwee

Whilst many know him only as “the best Dr” he was actuall a consumate actor, comedian and singer of “ditties”[1],

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ybc4N0zOpDY

See the album “Songs for vulgar boatmen”,

https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_m4SLW3vzPHoPsiTm7EGWGWYRfMfD9vVMM

My father had this in his record collection, and as an “innocent young lad” I would sing along… Much to my morher’s disapproval. He also had such others as Tom Lehrer’s “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park”,

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yhuMLpdnOjY

Clive Robinson • February 7, 2022 4:26 AM

@ null clam, Ismar,

There is also the earlier book

Yes, R.A.Fisher’s statistics will produce second order differential equations IF and ONLY IF you select your limits and twiddle factors.

And that’s the rub they actually give meta-data on a known effect, they are not “predictive” in any manner. That is an amp meter will give you an integrated indication of the movment of a considerably large number of individual charges. It won’t tell you the individual paths or make a prediction from one point in time to another other than as a bulk effect and the observer fitting past data to a known curve of their choice. So it won’t tell you in advance when a switch will be thrown unless there is also a known determanistic algorithm for that.

Worse many at the time thought Frieden’s work was an atempt at more “man at the center of the universe” type theology or metaphysics. The reason for this is in part Frieden’s “extream locality” view point and that the observer has to be at the center. It was found his ideas broke down when you changed from Cartisian to Polar coordinate systems, which it realy should not. The “natural” viewpoint for such an observer is to use polar coordinates.

But the other issue, statistics does not tell you in advance –ie predict– if you are heading for a minima or a saddle, it can not (see later work on Chaos).

Which brings us to the issue of there is more signal if you make more measurments… We generally except that all measurments are imprecise for two reasons, they are “an average” of a “stochastic source”. Digging deeper with finer measurments does not remove the stochastic nature of the source. But even more measurments in time does not remove it either. The process of “curve fitting” is generally by piecewise aproximation, yes we get taught Newton’s infinitesimals but we can never know the true shape of the curve at any given point in time or location therefore we can not tell exactly where it is going thus at some level “Chaos Rules Supreme”. Because whilst the variables may not be hidden, they are obscured by the randomness of both source and measurement to the point that reliable prediction is not possible.

Take a ball rolling down a slope, your first measurment gives you a point, your second another, and you can draw a straight line between then or a near infinity of curves. You need a third measurment to tell if it’s a curve or not, but whilst the third point will enable you to “fix a circle” most curves are not circles but they are reducable to circles and their harmonics by the likes of Fourier Analysis. But even then their predictive function is limited by both the number of measured points and the windowing function necessarily used because the number of meaurments is not infinite nor can be.

But the other thing against Frieden’s system is we have moved on. There is an implicit assumption in Fisher’s statistics that things are continuous and not granular. Science now is coming around to the notion that things are fundamentally granular in nature. If true, and the universe is not highly ordered and uniform in structure –think crystalline– then you will not be able to predict where you are on the “step” your measurment “lands on”. So like the throwing of a switch in future time you need information that is unavailable to you.

Remember the average of random is still random just integrated over the past, not the future.

Clive Robinson • February 7, 2022 6:12 AM

@ Ismar, null clam,

With regards the Guardian review, you will find this little gem of nonsense,

“Before life exists, there cannot be any such thing as information.”

The writer is mistaking “knowledge” with “information”.

Information exists whenever there is more than one of something. Like the distance between two points. The information is implicit, the value we chose to give it and call it “knowledge” is based on our invented system of measurments that change with scale.

The ratio of the circumfrance of a circle and it’s diameter does not change with the measurments we use. All that would change is the value of what we chose to call Pi but not it’s implicit relationship.

Like the falling of a tree in a forest, not having an observer does not change it’s fate only our knowledge of the event.

With regards,

“you get two new two-headed worms, even though they have exactly the same DNA as the original one-headed worm.”

All this demonstrates is that there is something “more than our current knowledge”, it’s called epigenetics. Think of the cell as a reproductive interpreter, RNA as it’s instructions, DNA as a higher level language to frame the instructions in a short form, and epigenetics as in part the “library” that is linked, as well as things unknown to the developer to do with state.

Thus the actual behaviour of say printf() is defined in part by the library and in part by things the source code developer can not know such as the mapping of stdout in the OS/Drivers/Hardware. Such are the joys of “abstraction”.

As for the teleological issue, it’s back to a theological perspective and “free will”.

Simple objects have no agency, however put a number of simple objects together and the increase of complexity alows for “apparent” free will. A simple “micro-mouse” style robot can “apparently learn”. If you do not know how the internal complexity of an object works then it looks like the robot has agency, even though it is following instructions.

Now as with Conway’s “game of life” it can be seen that even very very very simple automata can exhibit highly complex behaviour. There is a branch of mathmatics that covers part of this, and deals with fully determanistic systems that are highly sensitive to their variables as input conditions, thus knowledge of them is no real predictor of future behaviour.

One thing that came out of Conway’s game of life, is that in a multicellular system, the order events happen in effects the outcome as the sensitivity and both feed-forward and later feed-back. Thus it can be seen that even simple components in sufficient number will produce behaviours that are unpredictable.

Evolution takes time but it is brutal in it’s selectivity. From time to time I mention the 2/3rds rule of thumb. It comes about as a “sweet spot” between two independent things one of which is chaotic in the short term.

For instance “food supply” is we know seasonal, but it is also sensitive to a large number of input conditions. So if you have a creature that does not store energy, the first lean time puts it’s feet in the air. So storing energy is desirable… But the more energy you store the greater your mass will be, it literally weighs you down, and other basic laws of nature come into play, which means that your ability to gather food is impared and your longevity impared.

So you need a balance between working weight and energy storage weight, the point is dependent on how you measure things, but even in diferent measures like Pi the ratio comes out close to ~2/3rds. It appears to be a fundemental rule because it also applies to fully determanistic systems with random inputs like “supply chains”.

So both over-optomisation and under-optomisation is detrimental to a “system” of parts, though the parts will have different optomisations such as light to energy conversion by photosynthesis.

So you have to “think in systems” and “agency” does “appear” to arise from very basic fundementals via the way of “complexity” and “sensitivity”.

But there is another asspect, that is most biological systems can above a certain level of complexity copy themselves. So if a random change causes even a fractional increase in either longevity or reproduction then it will be favoured. Hence the notion of “evoloution” being fundemental to what occurs.

The result is specialisation that gives advantage, starts to take become predominant… Untill it becomes less adventageous or another varient gains a different advantage.

We can see this in action in “real-time” currently with the varients of SARS, Delta got replaced by Omicron which in turn is being replaced with another varient of Omicron.

Eventually it’s “assumed” an effective symbiotic system will develop and SARS2 will become like the other common cold Corona Viruses that infect humans a background oppotunist. But will it? It’s followed a different tactic than the cold viruses in that it significantly gets reproduced before humans become symptomatic. Further where as in times past the symptoms such as “chills” attracted us to others thus aiding infections, modern societ shuns such behaviours. Thus at some point there will be an argument made that SARS2 reflects changes in society that are not more than half a century in existance.

Obviously this is not “agency” by the virus and definately not “free will”, but that is what it looks like…

Sensitivity in multicellular systems gives rise to complexity, which in turn gives rise to increasing complexity tempered by rules we see as “evolution” from unpredictable input. Is there actually a need for the notion of “free-will” or “theology”?

I’ll let others fight that one out, as to me it’s not that important in the short time we get.

Clive Robinson • February 7, 2022 8:41 AM

@ Winter, et al,

<

blockquote>The young people will simply infect everybody else.

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blockquote>

So I’ve little choice, I will get infected, as will all others that do not live in an issolated bubble.

So knowing that you have a choice to make,

1, Keep pushing the rock up hill which will eventually fail probably badly.
2, Go with the inevitable, whilst it is relatively benign for a fully vaccinated person.

But also as I’ve indicated the Medical profession believes my direct risk from the vaccine is way too high[1] to give me a booster shot. So little choice becomes no real choice.

1, Live in a bubble that will eventually fail, knowing that with each passing day my immunity is decreasing. So the longer I avoid the worse I will be for it. And the varient then might be considerably more pathogenic.
2, Go with the inevitable, whilst I still have some vaccination protection, and the current varient is relatively benign for a recently fully vaccinated person.

Denmark has lifted all restrictions based on what appears to be currently sensible scientific evidence.

Added to that when you have health care professionals with expertise in the area saying,

“Omicron is the vaccine we could not aford to make or distribute”

You have to ask what that realy means, not just on a societal but individual level.

No action people take is risk free, even not getting out of bed or shutting yourself away has significant health risks. Thus the question not just of “comparative risk” but “changing risk” arises.

At the moment I have some immunity from the vaccine, but this is waning. But also the current varient, though highly infectious, has low pathological risk for a fully vaccinated or previously infected person. That might not be true in a few weeks when a new varient inevitably arises, and may get a toe hold.

Imagine if you can the related MERS which is very pathogenic (~30% fatality rate) with the infectiousness of the latest Omicron. It’s easily possible with high infection rates.

[1] Back in July, well short of 28 days since getting my second vaccine injection, I was rushed into resuss (critical emergancy care) in danger of imminent death by blood clots in my lungs and heart. In the case of the latter a blood clot the size of the end of your thumb loose in the right atrium that was interupting blood flow so that my cardiac output was on average 5% or less on standing up or less than 20% when lying down resting.

Now… personally I do not believe in any way it was down to the vaccine, but a screw up over prescription medications that could have easily been avoided by an informed clinical review, rather thsn a “box checking” joke by the General Practice I was registered with.

But when I tried going forca booster thay went “Oh waily waily” and effectively said know by bureaucratic process.

Clive Robinson • February 7, 2022 5:39 PM

@ notyourmediocre,

but please keep in mind that there are few animals out there that have, and unfortunately still want to, hurt others

Please do not call them “animals”.

They are without any doubt part of our society and are found very much in politics and business managment where they do rather more damage than those few wgo are in terrorism.

Estimates vary from 5-20% of the Western population have this mental disorder, that they chose to inflict on others. So many in fact the “spectrum” argument has come up, with some saying “we are all on the spectrum”.

Both,

1, Calling them animals.
2, Saying all on spectrum.

Can and will be used by such people to hide behind. With the result they will be able to continue to terrorise the rest of society through “Politics” and “Corporations”.

With regards,

I hope I tickled your imagination a little bit as to what the AirTags might and will turn into, in the very near future, but unfortunately, time and time again, I keep being disappointed by the know-it-all wannabees here on this blog that cannot think or see outside the box.

Some of us are only too aware of this. But in the past others have complained when we mention such things and thus censorship builds up.

Some years ago now I pointed out that nearfield devices like those used in passports could be used to act as nationalised / personalised bomb triggers by not their data which is encrypted, but by their powerup turn on charecteristics.

I’ve also explained that if you virw the AirTag as a “leaf node” on a graph, identifing / finding specific iPhones is not just possible but relatively simple.

So you might be surprised at just how far “out of the box” some of what you call “wannabees” here have thought, in high probability further than you have and a lot longer ago.

We have to “message between the lines” on such prognostications, otherwise they can disapear. Which would certainly be the fate of this message, if I went into the full tchnical detail, which as I’ve said before is “well within an undergraduate” or even “high school” project.

I suspect that those in that University in Israel, are rather more than aware of this, so chose with care what they put in their “published” papers (which leaves open the fact of “classified” papers/reports of very limited circulation).

Clive Robinson • February 8, 2022 1:31 AM

@ null clam,

Nevertheless things do exist, so their existence would seem to have to be caused by something else (that had existence).

That is the “Turtles all the way down” / “fleas have lesser fleas” argument of infinite regression.

Or “every action is caused” so anything else must be “an action by an uncaused entity” that is a “God”. Or if you prefer “aliens outside our time and space bubble” we call the universe. And in part gives rise to “the many universes argument”.

But none of that asweres the basic question of “something from nothing” which worries various scientists as it should do.

So onwards and up the stack of turtles,

“Information” seems to be basically “number”, which is something in the mind that corresponds to an external physical thing.

Err no not “number” but “ratio” the first is dependent on your measurand the second is not. As Pi demonstrates when presented in any base or scale you chose the diameter to circumferance is a constant “ratio”.

A ratio is a fundemental entity numbers are just a way of measuring it. It can take a while to get your head around it and get comfortable but it is important.

Oh and have you noticed mathmatics as opposed to arithmetic is not about “numbers” either. But “ratios” as “constants” and the manipulation of symbols by logic and “set theory”.

Ratios are why I talk of information being “stored between two or more points”. Which leads on to what I call “Data shadows”. Take any two binary bit streams and use XOR on them and you get a third data stream. It’s the basic idea in secure cryptography the same applies to other operators and their inverses under certain conditions (bijection).

But you can think of it another way, however many points you use you can encode another new point different to those you already have. It’s a basic property of “spaces” that are multidimensional. Each point’s position in an N dimensional space is encoded from it’s position in the lesser dimensions. The implication of this is that there has to be consistancy. That is perform an operation in a lower dimension then the results in a higher dimension must be “consistant” in both behaviour and in any coordinate system you chose to use irrespective of the measurand scaling.

So now consider carefully,

“What is the physical form of a data shadow?”

Does it even have physical form? The answer is no it does not, it is the ratio of the arangment of points in a space that has no need to be physical.

Information can has three basic functions,

1, Stored
2, Communicated
3, Processed

None of which actually require direct physical agency. However remember only the “natural numbers” or “countable numbers” apply to the physical universe (and computers). The difference between negative and positive numbers is not magnitude but direction.

But humans, being of the physical universe, we can only interact by matter/energy under forces.

So we use information that has been “impressed” on matter/energy and thus must use forces to process it.

So where do matter and energy come from… Well some think they are just a side effect of multidimentional information.

It’s an intriguing notion, that actually gets around the “Turtles all the way down” argument of matter/energy.

Are we just an artifact of some unseeable entities celestial computer?

That sound you hear is of egos being bruised 😉

With regards,

When I tried to read Frieden this kept bothering me, the “thing” was needed before there could be “information”.

An important point to note, is his system does not maintain consistancy across coordinate systems… Which from my perspective makes it either incomplete or a total bust.

Clive Robinson • February 9, 2022 1:29 AM

@ SpaceLifeForm,

Because carries slow you down.

We’ve not made much progress on “Carry Look Ahead”(CLA) logic in adders this century…

That said the usual assumption from high school maths is that “full addition” is an integral part of multiplication at each partial step. Well whilst that appears to be true for higher bases binary is different as bit wise multiplication does not carry so the actuall multiplication (AND function) and addition function can be seperated and done as indipendent steps.

Further with addition you have carry in and carry out, but also the full range of output.

Statistically carry out is more local on multiplication as larger numbers are more sparse. Draw up a ten by ten multiplication table and put in two digit results and mark where carries do and do not happen, and write out a list of missing results in the 00…99 range.

You can feel that there is a pattern thus also structure, but can you gain a time advantage from it?

Even if you can is it actually worth it?

People have asked these questions in the past and yes trade offs have been found. The simplest is to use a lookup table to multiply, no carries are required. Further the fact half the outputs are missing can reduce the size of the stored elements.

But reducing the stored output increases the complexity of the decoding… So the next question is,

Is there a sweet spot?

Clive Robinson • February 9, 2022 3:04 AM

@ SpaceLifeForm, ALL,

Clearly, it is a conspiracy

Launching satellites is a little like throwing eggs up onto a high shelf.

The egg is more or less “safe” when at rest in your hand or on the shelf. Though it’s somewhat less safe in flight, your main concern is getting just enough energy into your throw so that the eggs motion is just over the hight of the shelf but with sufficient forward momentum to go onto the shelf.

This can be calculated quite precisely well in advance, but once the throw is made there is nothing you can do, the egg either gets on the shelf safely or you’ve got a clean up operation to perform. So any changes in the environment the egg passes through tends to favour the latter eventuality.

So with satellites they take a two step approach they aim to throw the satelite into a low fairly rapidly decaying orbit (in effect a requirement[1]). The idea being that around the highest point of the orbit the satellite uses it’s onboard systems to push it’s self into it’s final orbit.

If for some reason the push does not happen, then the satellite comes back towards earth and hit’s the exponentialy rising atmospheric density, and drag goes up and the orbit decays[2] more than a couple of times around and the chances are sufficient momentum has been bled off that it’s nolonger going to get to a hight were the satellite can still push up into it’s correct orbit, or not arive with a viable amount of fuel for lifetime station keeping and importantly end of life de-orbiting.

From the C-Net article it sounds like the launch success would have been known to be marginal[3] but they launched anyway.

What I’ve not yet seen is why things went wrong with the sats comming out of their safe mode. That is was their a communications loss –which does happen– or something else in the sats…

SpaceX are going to have to “up their game” in more than just launches as the current Solar Cycle develops to a peak over the next half decade.

[1] Such orbits tend to be quite elliptical to ensure rapid de-orbiting on failure. As I understand it SpaceX go for a 600kM perigee but just 10% lower gives a way low success rate due to the exponential increase in drag. We are heading into a new Solar Cycle, which is good for HF radio as the ionization in the upper atmosphere makes it behave like a mirror. But it is not good for satellites or satellite services like GPS your SatNav works with.

[2] There is a computer game called “Kerbal Space Program”(KSP) which enables you to design and build your own space craft and realistically launch them. A few years back somebody released the “SpaceX” mod,

https://www.curseforge.com/kerbal/ksp-mods/kerbalized-spacex

So you can play with launching etc without having a messy crash and burn clean up.

[3] SpaceX would have known prior to launch that a solar storm was heading to earth, as the “space weather” moves much more slowly than the speed of light, and the Sun generally gives sufficient indicators for four or five day forcasts. Look up the Space Weather Woman she provides frequent forcasts on her website and YouTube, but as I know you like “twitter”,

https://mobile.twitter.com/TamithaSkov/status/1491259271744745473

Clive Robinson • February 9, 2022 1:12 PM

@ name.withheld…, null clam,

The last leg has been restated in a fundamental way…

Normally History on looking back kind of assumes “rational behavior” by the players. Sadly modern living history tells us rationality is at best is in very short measure.

In the past, there had to be some recognisable rationality in leaders, because of human agency in those that were needed to support them as guard labour and the like.

With technology more than ably replacing vast swathes of gurd labour, rationality is of less importance as technology does not have agency by which to mutiny etc.

WB and MP both believed in divine right ahead of all else, which is extreamly scary and most definately not rational, even when you get to chose who becomes the usefull idiot as the puppet out front.

Clive Robinson • February 9, 2022 9:10 PM

@ SpaceLifeForm, ALL,

Re Musk’s Starlink Icarus event.

You may find this of interest,

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uY3TMaExHkg

“Storm Storm Comes & How Starlink Fell | Space Weather Briefing 02.09.2022”

From Tamitha Skov

From a security aspect next to nobody in ICTsec actually talks about Solar Storms, Cornal Mass Ejections etc.

Why is probably the famed “Ostrich Mode” of behaviour in progress.

Solar Storms primarily effect,

1, Wired Communications
2, Wireless Communications
3, Power Grids

Mostly negatively.

As we all should know by now 😉 computers run on electricity to provide mostly communications based functionality.

Ye are,at the very begining of the multiyear Solar Cycle, and the Storms are going to get worse and the chances of blackouts in North America, Canada and Northern Europe increased as well as other less populated places in the higher attitudes.

So the probability of failures is increasing, which has the side effect that the opportunities for attackers is likely to increase…

Clive Robinson • February 11, 2022 10:05 PM

@ null clam, MarkH, SpaceLifeForm,

With regards,

“Calculus on Manifolds”

I realised one morning that I was not cut out for a topological future…

When I found no matter how good my pullback was I could still tell the difference between a coffee cup and a donut.

Likewise my ladle and kitchen door key, my thinking had become torus and the ringing everywhere.

And still of the words I could make no sense,

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Bs8jjbJ6dLY

Clive Robinson • February 11, 2022 11:49 PM

@ MarkH, null clam, SpaceLifeForm

But did you spot the accidental jokes including the crypto one in “Les moulins de mon coeur”[1], where even @Bruce’s work gets mentioned all be it as childs play 😉

[1] The song was written before even DES existed, but the rewording in English in the mid 1960’s will give more ICTsec related stuff…

Clive Robinson • February 13, 2022 1:52 AM

Oh…

And just to prove that,

“But there is never “one last note” in theory”

Quip, how about,

“Chosen Ciphertext Attack”(CCA) secure ElGamal encryption over an integer group where ICDH assumption holds

https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/127.pdf

And so of to bed, it’s been a busier than expected night…

Clive Robinson • February 13, 2022 9:40 PM

@ John,

I wonder if I am the last person in the world using an IBM PC clone with dual 3.5″ floppies and a VGA monitor running as a working production tester.

Look up an Amstrad Portable computer…

I have one and it works and as I’ve mentioned before it spends much of it’s time locked up in an alarmed safe along with a dotmatrix printer and carbon copy fanfold I had printed up last century with individually serial numbered sheets.

It gets used maybe twice a year to print a couple of dozen sheets that then get put individually into sealed envelops that get hand carried and delivered by a secure delivery person to named individuals, who then take personal responsability for them, and hand carry on to their assigned places of work.

It’s dull and tedious but sometimes emergancy communications have to work the old fashioned way over HF radio and the like.

Clive Robinson • February 14, 2022 10:04 PM

@ SpaceLifeForm,

The lasers in CD-ROM drives eventually fail.

Some more than others IDE drives more so than SCSI, oh and the faster the drive the higher the diode current, hence heat and other undesirable junction effects.

Whilst you can get “replacment parts” often they are more expensive than just buying two new compleate DVD drives…

What has supprised me is the lack of takeup on BlueRay, the drives are expensive, many don’t support BD UHD and those that do appear to need USB 3.1… Oh and also some do not come with either writer software or Player software, that you then have to pay extra for.

One of the things that has always ticked me off with Android is it’s lack of support for mechanical drives and USB Network adapters.