611–620 of 649 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
1 million miles per day is an insane figure
You do it every day! The Earth itself moves faster than Voyager -- 1.6 million miles per day.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. Hash functions can be used outside of symmetric encryption. Which is the wording I used. In any case, the overall point remains. Short of the one time pad you can’t build a provably flawless scheme.
They can be used outside symmetric encryption, e.g. in signature schemes, but the hashing primitives are part of symmetric cryptography.
One of my favorite facts ever is that Voyager 1 contains something called the Voyager Golden Record [1]. It has the following quote written: This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. I get chills everytime I think about this. I hope we can recover from this ev…
I don't understand the Golden Record. Even assuming other advanced civilizations, "there’s an infinitesimally small chance that the Golden Record will be picked up."[0] So, at some (considerable?) cost and time, something meaningless and ineffective (from the perspective of its ostensible purpose, communicating with alien civilizations) was undertaken. So what was the point? Why was it done? Note, I'm not questioning…
You could ask this about any piece of art. Additionally, you could say these questions are, partially, also the function of art.
It's not just the contents that display humanity, it's the fact of sending it that says "we're human". Ultimately, this is more important than gathering data or anything of the sort with a clear, functional purpose.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Placing no time constraints, my gut tells me it’s almost inevitable those breakthroughs will eventually come. Either in mathematics or quantum computing. Or both. Namely I’d ask when not if. My opinion is that short of the one time pad, we won’t come up with provably unbreakable schemes.
> Namely I’d ask when not if. The big assumption of cryptography is that, there exists some problems that are not provably unsolvable but difficult enough for almost any practical purposes. To engineers, no assumption can be more reasonable than that. Given unlimited time, it's a provable fact that any (brand new) processor with asynchronous input signal will malfunction due to metastability in digital circuits, it's…
Agreed. My overall / initial point was that I can’t say the time to crack = the time to brute force and start talking about the age of the universe. Even if we had to wait 10,000 years for cryptanalysis to break AES, it’s a blink of an eye in sideral timescale.
> quantum cryptography
Quantum cryptography is helpful in detecting eavesdropping (due to the no clone theorem). Ie quantum cryptography is helpful in avoiding asymmetric encryption for key exchange when communicating with symmetric encryption. Eg BB84. And given asymmetric encryption is most vulnerable to quantum attacks (compared to symmetric), quantum cryptography improves today’s state of the art. BUT, I insist that none of this gives provably uncrackable schemes.
AND it might be that we never build such a scheme. After all we have Godel’s incompleteness theorem lying around.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't follow. The wallet is the private key, along with some other info.
The wallet could be encrypted with a strong password and thus inaccessible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I need an eink display on my office wall showing the current location/status. I always get a tremendous sense of wonder and wellbeing thinking about these probes/achievements, maybe it'd help keep me centered before the daily onslaught.
the current status is that we do not know where it has fared to, according to the title
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We don't even have a world government yet! It's very disorganized still at home to receive guests, I agree.
Have you noticed this correlation that all the governments people find desirable are of tiny little populations? And that the larger a governed population becomes the more of a mixture of dysfunctional, corrupt, and/or authoritarian the government seems to become? I don't really think it's a correlation. It's tough for any given entity to truly represent 10 people, let alone 10 million. And by the time you start spea…
When it's you and a village, it's still relatively easy to enforce things because you have families and relationships. There's some inefficiency and some corruption from individuals but you can still try and monitor everything.
When it's you and a hundred million people, you could never even meet everyone let alone know them. So you need a thousand steps between. And every step and every system can have corruption and inefficiency. Unless you have some sort of central mandate like religion, it's very hard to motivate people because everyone is so separated. Even if you do, you still get corruption like in china.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> even though there was no computer on Earth at the time fast enough to decode it I'm not sure what is meant by that. Not fast enough to decode in real time? There is/was no need to do that. The transmissions would have gone to tape in any case. Here is a link describing how to decode such a tape : https://destevez.net/2021/09/decoding-voyager-1/
I called it a legend deliberately. One of the things I love about this anecdote is that it makes less sense the older and more experienced I get. It was told to me 12 years ago as a young, starry-eyed junior developer by my supervisor who had a PhD in RF research, while we were working on what we considered to be a world-changing wireless technology at a startup in San Francisco (it wasn't). Who knows how many of the…
One of my favorite tech legends is that apparently Voyager 1 launched with a Viterbi encoder, even though there was no computer on Earth at the time fast enough to decode it. After a number of years Moore's Law caught up and they remotely switched over to Viterbi for more efficient transmissions.