Perhaps the only successful counterxample to "don't roll your own crypto!"
Code that helped end Apartheid
131–140 of 240 posts
Re: Code that helped end Apartheid
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny but also thought-provoking! When did the verb "encipher" give way to "encrypt," and why? I might enjoy reading a well-researched piece on that subject.
I don't know why but here's when: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=encipher%2Cenc...
An interesting data point is that Kahn's The codebreakers, from 1967, uses "encipher" everywhere except for various US goverment agency quotes, which use "encrypt."
Re: Code that helped end Apartheid
#133[flagged]
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Re: Code that helped end Apartheid
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
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That's not how collateral damage works. The moral and legal responsibility is on the one dropping the bombs. As horrible as the US wars were, when we decided to kill Bin Laden, we sent a special operations team at night instead of flattening entire villages in Pakistan. The indiscriminate killing that Israel is doing in Gaza and Lebanon is unprecedented since the second World War. Justifying it will normalize civilia…
>That's not how collateral damage works.
Not according to the Red Cross:
https://www.icrc.org/en/document/protection-hospitals-during...
Otherwise protected targets like hospitals lose their protected status if they're used as a base of military operations or for other similar purposes.
And the US didn't send a spec ops team to get Bin Laden because they were worried about the Geneva Conventions. They sent one because they wanted to make absolutely certain that they got their target (see Bin Laden's escape at Tora Bora in 2001 for an example of this) and because they were operating in Pakistan so showing up with a whole brigade or carpet bombing the compound wouldn't have gone over well with the Pakistani government. It already didn't go over well with just a surgical strike by spec ops, it would have been much worse if it was done by a larger show of force.
Re: Code that helped end Apartheid
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Okay, well then if government buildings house any members of the IDF or apartheid South Africa's military, then certainly they are also legitimate targets and it is not "terrorism" to destroy them with bombs? Or, conversely, the label must also be applied to IDF sorties?
>Okay, well then if government buildings house any members of the IDF or apartheid South Africa's military, then certainly they are also legitimate targets and it is not "terrorism" to destroy them with bombs?
Only if you ignore the distinctions between what was essentially a civil war fought by insurgents (like in Apartheid South Africa) and a war between two sovereign powers.
Re: Code that helped end Apartheid
#136So when he DM’d me to say that he had “a hell of a story”—promising “one-time pads! 8-bit computers! Flight attendants smuggling floppies full of random numbers into South Africa!”—I responded. Ha ha ha. Yes, that was literally my very short pitch to Steven about Tim Jenkin's story! The actual DM: "I think this has the makings of a hell of a story: https://blog.jgc.org/2024/09/cracking-old-zip-file-to-help-o... If yo…
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Re: Code that helped end Apartheid
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Arab-Israeli can travel anywhere … That is simply not true. E.g. The city of Hebron is segregated by religion - see https://youtu.be/Z42HhaywhGQ?si=bTBhEFi5lgBJQX9v
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How is it "Palestinian apartheid" when Israeli soldiers are the ones enforcing it?
Re: Code that helped end Apartheid
#138[flagged]
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Re: Code that helped end Apartheid
#139Why does a password-protected zip file reveal a list of the files within lol?
If I'm understanding this right, we'd have been hosed if the files had been TARd first?
Re: Code that helped end Apartheid
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay, well then if government buildings house any members of the IDF or apartheid South Africa's military, then certainly they are also legitimate targets and it is not "terrorism" to destroy them with bombs? Or, conversely, the label must also be applied to IDF sorties?
>Okay, well then if government buildings house any members of the IDF or apartheid South Africa's military, then certainly they are also legitimate targets and it is not "terrorism" to destroy them with bombs? Only if you ignore the distinctions between what was essentially a civil war fought by insurgents (like in Apartheid South Africa) and a war between two sovereign powers.
And how is that distinction relevant to whether a given act should be labeled "terrorism" or not?