21–30 of 409 posts
This is an honest question: did she mean to say "infiltrated", or is this usage of "interpolated" a valid one that I just don't understand? I expected a [sic] or an edit from the article.
Who persuades politicians it’s a good idea for the security services to be able to scan all their messages? I am absolutely certain that the politicians have absolutely no clue what they’re being asked to implement.
Governments seem to want to have it both ways. As new technologies are introduced they assume that capabilities and practices available to analogous predecessors must remain available to them (e.g. wire-tapping phones => undermining cryptography) but they don’t feel the same way about public benefits or rights associated with other technology that is being replaced (anonymous cash transactions => ???) It also seems l…
Of course. It's a class war. When you say the words "class war" far too few people think about the isomorphism to "actual, real" war, but it's there. Sure, the government isn't dropping bombs on London, but the ends are the same.
Governments seem to want to have it both ways. As new technologies are introduced they assume that capabilities and practices available to analogous predecessors must remain available to them (e.g. wire-tapping phones => undermining cryptography) but they don’t feel the same way about public benefits or rights associated with other technology that is being replaced (anonymous cash transactions => ???) It also seems l…
Of course. It's a class war. When you say the words "class war" far too few people think about the isomorphism to "actual, real" war, but it's there. Sure, the government isn't dropping bombs on London, but the ends are the same.
They're very much not. Wat a complete nonsense.
Governments seem to want to have it both ways. As new technologies are introduced they assume that capabilities and practices available to analogous predecessors must remain available to them (e.g. wire-tapping phones => undermining cryptography) but they don’t feel the same way about public benefits or rights associated with other technology that is being replaced (anonymous cash transactions => ???) It also seems l…
When the government creates a law within recorded history — something like a wiretapping law — then the spirit of the law is well-known at time of creation. Usually, that "spirit" is that it's created to explicitly grant a capability to the government to do a thing for the benefit of the public under a certain circumstance. So if technology changes, the spirit that the original law was defined under is expected to be upheld by the court when interpreting the law to suit cases outside its original scope.
The problem with "legacy" common law — things like "being able to transact anonymously using cash" — is that there is no clear "institutional memory" of the spirit that created the law. The people who invented "using gold coins as a common exchange for barter" weren't thinking about anonymity — and so it's not clear whether anonymity is a necessary or desirable part of the spirit of cash transactions, something the public would desire to be preserved in a replacement system; or whether it's just an "implementation detail" of the way cash happened to need to work given technology, something that would make no sense to port over to the new system.
Related post from 10 days ago which goes into more depth on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36596610 TL;DR: UK government wants to degrade public's right to privacy / encryption under the guise of "but think of the children!"
Hah, then it's the usual scaremongering that recycles the same old excuses again and again.
Related post from 10 days ago which goes into more depth on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36596610 TL;DR: UK government wants to degrade public's right to privacy / encryption under the guise of "but think of the children!"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I assume the UK had some equivalent to the 90s crypto wars in the US where attempts to weaken and backdoor crypto by legal means were pretty decisively defeated. I'm thinking of the fact that GCHQ invented RSA in 1973, four years before Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman publicly described the same system, and only got around to declassifying this in 1997.
Did it really invent RSA, such that there was any actual capability of performing asymmetric encryption or signatures? I thought it was more like, one guy there had a pretty good idea that it was possible that he wrote about, but never developed it into anything practical. Am I mistaken, and the whole working system was described?
I would definitely say that Cocks and RSA both independently discovered what we refer to as the RSA algorithm. We should maybe call it the Cocks–RSA algorithm.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I assume the UK had some equivalent to the 90s crypto wars in the US where attempts to weaken and backdoor crypto by legal means were pretty decisively defeated. I'm thinking of the fact that GCHQ invented RSA in 1973, four years before Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman publicly described the same system, and only got around to declassifying this in 1997.
For the record, GCHQ created RSA in 1973 and then DH in 1974: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography#Histor... DH qua DH was invented in 1976, and RSA qua RSA in 1977.
