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Code that helped end Apartheid
111–120 of 240 posts
Re: Code that helped end Apartheid
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
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No, it‘s not complicated. It’s straight and clear. Every human rights org says so, the UN says so, HR scholars say so. It is apartheid.
Ugh, no matter whose side you're on, if the Israel-Palestine situation is not complicated, I'm not sure what is.
Re: Code that helped end Apartheid
#113Re: Code that helped end Apartheid
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is the IDF dropping bombs on apartment buildings in Beirut "terrorism"?
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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 civilian casualties in future wars that with be disastrous for everyone.
Re: Code that helped end Apartheid
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
At the time PRNG was probably good enough. I wouldn't want to go up against the NSA today using the same entropy source but against South Africa decades ago it was probably good enough. Even knowing what PRNG source the original noise came from it'd take a hell of a lot of guess and check with cribs to come close to guessing the seed for the PRNG. That would be my first crack at breaking a OTP I knew was generated wi…
If the PRNG is good enough then shipping floppies full of PRNG output is very much unnecessary. Simply send the seeds used to initialize the PRNG thereby fitting many (~180k of them on a 720kb floppy) seeds on one floppy and save your couriers a lot of risk.
You can already fit huge amounts of text onto a single floppy. Uncompressed it's around 1.4 million characters.
That is a method though and it's basically what stream ciphers are doing, translating a key into a random stream that's then applies to the plaintext. One benefit of the true OTP though is you don't have to transfer the software and ensure it's generating the same key stream on both ends.
Re: Code that helped end Apartheid
#116[flagged]
>branding freedom fighters as terrorists I mean bombing government buildings (which is what landed Mandela in prison) is definitely what most people would consider terrorism, or treason, or similar things. Now you can argue that Mandela's actions were justified because Apartheid was evil (and I agree that it was evil) but that's entirely different than arguing that he was just a poor victim of the racist SA governmen…
>So they pretend like Mandela and his party were perfect angels practicing non-violent resistance like MLK
They were far from it, then again, the ANC campaign killed less than 100 people (excluding their sorta-civil-war with Zulu which isn't what people think about) and ultimately played no role in their victory.
Re: Code that helped end Apartheid
#117Interesting how the PKZIP password-protected compressed file is now easily decrypted in We could have had a very different history if they'd used DES or RC2 for encryption!
South Africa did buy at least some of Crypto AGs backdoored products, not sure when though.
Re: Code that helped end Apartheid
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
As I said, I don't want this to become a flame war, and to that end would have preferred not to name the apartheid state in question. But since you insist, nobody is just 'making it so by saying it' - indeed, saying it's not happening, in spite of the abundance of evidence, does not mean it's not! I've Norwegian friends who have seen it first hand and we're aghast, but of course that's just a personal anecdote that j…
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> Because my personal operating definition is where you have one single country that has a different set of laws for different groups of people living in that country based on their ethnicity or skin colour.
“ Walk around Hebron, look at the streets. Streets where Arabs are no longer allowed to go on, only Jews.” - says Amiram Levin, former head of the Israeli army’s Northern Command.
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-08-13/ty-article/ex....
That’s within the internationally recognized boundaries of Israel. A separate issue is that Israel enjoys full control over 60% of the West Bank (Area C), which is ever expanding, and various degrees of defects control over the rest of it. Within the West Bank Israeli settlers have more freedom of movement and less restrictions on their day to day lives. So any characterization of the West Bank as an independent country or polity is completely missing the point.
Re: Code that helped end Apartheid
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
“ as they are right now in a similar context” You can be more direct about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians! All it takes for evil to succeed ….
There's no similar context because the Apartheid system that existed in South Africa has no resemblance to today's Israel. In particular: - There's no racial segregation laws; an Arab-Israeli can travel anywhere a Jewish-Israeli can. In fact, Arabic is an officially recognized language by the state of Israel, and throughout the country, every public service has signs in Arabic alongside Hebrew. - Jews are not a minor…
> 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
Re: Code that helped end Apartheid
#120Earlier 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…