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I spin around and my blade bites through his suit. And spine. He drops to his knees, letting one of his blades go. With another swing back around, I finish this and lop his head off. Weird...this fight felt really long and really short at the same time. No hostages, either. Guess there never was any in the first place. If the massacre at dinner said anything it was that these scumbags aren't into taking hostages anyway. I look down at one of my opponent's blades and pick it up. I look at it and then my my own blade. This guy came down here with laser-sharpened blades. Like he was...prepared to fight me. Seriously, who are these guys?..
JD: "Hey I finished up upstairs and I thought you might need a hand so--the fuck is that? The fuck are they?"
LT: "That's SWAT, He's militia, and this is one of his laser-sharpened blades he attacked me with."
JD: "Hold up, laser sharpened? Like--"
LT: "Ours, yeah."
JD: "....how the fuck?...."
LT: "Been wondering the same thing."
JD: "First hip-fired M2s and now this shit? It's like they're...they're..."
LT: "Set up to take us on...."
*TAAAAAAAAKE OOOOOOON MEEEEEEE (Take on me) I'LLLLLLL BEEEEE GOOOOONNEE---*
JD: "Oh shit, that's Arnie calling."
LT: "I.....just put him on speaker."
*BEEP*
JD: "Howdy."
AP: "Hey there lovebirds. I did some digging and--"
LT: "Yeahcool, you wouldn't have happened to sell any laser sharpeners lately? Like the ones you used on ours?"
AP: "....uh....not like the one for yours, but yeah. Thousands. Why?"
JD: "L ran into some fuckface swinging two blades around sharpened like ours. I can see some brick and steel piping he just sliced clean through."
AP: "Huh....That's....that's not good."
LT: "Really? Sounds just fan-fucking-tastic to me."
JD: "You sure you didn't sell one of those sharpeners?"
AP: 'Swear on my father's grave that I dance on every other Sunday."
LT: "*sigh* fine. What did you find? Why are you calling?"
AP: "I had the whole city scanned for any strange radio feeds and I found one that's got some heavy encryption behind it. The only way in that my people found is by pretty much finding one of their walkie-talkies and rip the encryption codes from it. As soon as you do that I can wire a feed right into your phone."
LT: "Done and done. Ryu Hayabusa here has one."
AP: "Good. Rip it open and look for some SD card-looking thing and stick it into your phone."
LT: ".....and it's in. Anything?"
AP: "Yep, that's it, everything's downloading. This'll take a bit, but I'll tell you something: police chatter talked about a convoy of military vehicles moving through the outskirts of the city, heading for the New Trigate bridge. The vehicles were described as being blue and gray...."
JD: "Like these militia dickbags...."
AP: "Yep. ETA is about 30 minutes, so you should get going, I'll even have a surprise for the lady waiting there to help you both. Let's call it an early Christmas present...."
They Type VIII, or Tigershark, is the Meermacht's first practical attack submarine since the dawn of the submarine warfare age in the Great War of the 1920's. The Type VII is much larger and more powerful than previous u-boat designs, but a tad slow compared to its contemporaries. This is made up for by a healthy armament as well as perhaps the world's most unbreakable cipher for radio transmissions, based on the Maian hieroglyphic script (which itself IRL took literally hundreds of years to decipher). To anyone who captures a V-boat and tries to decipher its encryption devices, I say to you, good luck.
Thanks to Wolfie for the hull, Nightmaresquid for the conning tower, and Brian Fitzsimmons for the bulge on the side of the hull.
PERKS & QUIRKS:
Gun: 88mm (+0)
Torpedoes: 14-16 (+0)
AA Guns: 2 (+0)
Speed: 18kn/9kn (+1)
Great Codes: +1
Our "Green Team" dolly for the "For The Love of Blythe" project has arrived here! She already has an amazing re-root in Mystic Brown Thermal Saran by Sherri/Shershe. Here she's just a stock dolly, but I wanted to show her at the very beginning of her journey ... in a place and setting that also corresponds to her story. Grab a cuppa and take a journey with us! Thank you for visiting!
Genesis (gen·e·sis: noun \ˈje-nə-səs\ : the origin or coming into being of something.)
Her story:
Genesis bit her lip thoughtfully as she entered the last of the encryption code. It was the last step in a years-long process that she hoped would make herself, and her world, whole again.
The future is not a bleak place ... it can be populated with dreams of exploration, growing families, beauty and fulfillment. But the future Genesis lived in was in dire need of help. Her world was dying, societies fractured by a desperate need for resources, children growing up in large group homes because their parents could not afford to care for them.
Genesis had come through this system, yet against all odds she had retained her tenacity and belief in her destiny. She somehow understood in the deepest points of her being that a solution lay in the distant past, where a secret government experiment had set everything in motion. She knew her lineage, that it could be traced back to Dr. Franklin Genesis Martin, her distant ancestor and a brilliant scientist who developed a new mining technology in the late 1800's. Aware even then that minerals and fuel held the key to the future, the secret was carefully held and put into motion at the turn of the century, over the next two hundred years resulting in vast riches for the country and great power. What no one foresaw was that this technology would eventually lead to the gradual breakdown of both the earth and the very resources it was set to glean. As events spun out of control in the late 2200's, governments went to war, people starved, and society became a frayed mass.
Genesis had spent years in tireless research ... with her sweet and persistent charm she wrangled a rare vintage iBook from a teacher in the children’s home when she was 13. With her piercing intelligence she began searching the online archives, a project reaching back into the world’s volumes as far as the mid 1800’s. There she found the one thing Dr. Martin had missed in his deft calculations ... and now her goal was to travel back in time.
Genesis had a daring plan. She would travel to the year 1900 and clothe herself as a girl of that era. Pretending to be the daughter of Dr. Martin’s estranged brother, Genesis would present herself as a willing friend and helper to the family. She knew that her keen mind would encourage Dr. Martin to befriend her and eventually invite her into his laboratory. There, with the benefit of future knowledge, she could delicately merge her carefully derived algorithm into her ancestor’s calculations and the future breakdown could be averted. The other prong of her two-fold plan was to encourage Dr. Martin and his powerful benefactors that this knowledge must be shared among the countries of the earth ... that for one country to control this wealth and technology led only to fighting and despair as others sought to gain some part of it for their own people.
Genesis knew she had to try. One thing disturbed her, an answer she had not found. Once she arrived in the past, she could correct the problems for all the future people of the earth ... but she could not return to her time without help. Her only hope was that someone, eventually, would discover her records, her stories, her photographs ... and be willing to take the steps necessary to bring her back.
The Cryptography of Nature and Spiritual Expropriation by Daniel Arrhakis (2026)
Cryptography of Nature and Spiritual Expropriation
Cryptography of Nature
Cryptography, in the classical sense, is a security process that transforms readable information (plaintext) into incomprehensible codes (ciphertext), through algorithms and cryptographic keys.
In this text, however, "cryptography" is also a metaphor for the human tendency to quantify, control, and convert ecosystems into data, technological processes, or economic assets. When this movement is articulated with corporate interests (sometimes instrumentalizing the climate crisis), a profound debate opens up about the commodification of life.
1. The Logic of Cryptography
In this logic, nature ceases to be perceived as a living and interdependent organism and begins to be treated as a data system: something susceptible to optimization, programming, and management.
Digital biodiversity: creation of digital twins of forests and oceans to simulate environmental impacts.
Predictive algorithms: mathematical models that seek to manage the climate (e.g., precipitation models) and anticipate natural disasters.
2. Forms of sequestration and manipulation
The attempt at control manifests itself through direct and structural interventions, with different scales and consequences.
Geoengineering: large-scale projects to manipulate the Earth's climate, such as injecting aerosols into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight or artificially increasing the alkalinity of the oceans.
Synthetic biology and genetic engineering: modification of the genetic code of species (e.g., laboratory-modified mosquitoes) to control pests, or the creation of bacteria designed to "eat" pollution and microplastics.
Erosion of biodiversity and threat to livelihoods:
The end of the seed cycle: traditionally, farmers saved seeds from one harvest to the next. The transition to genetically modified seeds (GMOs) can create technological and economic dependence, profoundly altering life in the countryside and increasing risks of indebtedness, cross-contamination, and food insecurity. Carbon commodification and ecosystem services: converting forests and wetlands into “carbon credits,” transforming natural processes (such as photosynthesis) into tradable financial assets.
3. Risks and controversies
The idea that nature can be “patched up” or replaced by technology raises severe criticism.
Unpredictable side effects: intervening in a complex ecosystem can generate chain reactions, as natural systems are not linear.
Illusion of control: the promotion of geoengineering can divert attention and resources from the core problem: the drastic reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.
Appropriation and inequality: the technological “encryption” of nature tends to concentrate in large corporations, potentially leading to the expropriation of resources from local communities and indigenous peoples.
The Spiritual Expropriation of Nature
By “cryptography and spiritual expropriation” we understand the way in which nature is treated as an exclusively technical or economic resource, losing its sacred meaning and its profound connection with human experience.
Here, “cryptography” is not computer science: it is a process of concealment through technicality.
Reduction to data: nature ceases to be a living ecosystem and becomes seen as a set of metrics, carbon credits, or resources to be exploited.
Technical barrier: knowledge about the land is “encrypted” in complex legal and scientific languages, distancing the average citizen from their natural heritage.
Concealment of subjects: land management models can conceal real subjects through simulacra; this analytical reduction prolongs a historical trend of subjugating objectification, with violation of fundamental rights.
Spiritual expropriation (or dispossession)
This term describes the loss of the “soul” or intrinsic value that human beings attribute to the natural world.
Uprooting: the individual ceases to feel part of the earth and becomes merely a consumer or user.
Mechanization of being: the worldview becomes purely mechanical. The book *Wisdom of the Vines* points out how Western cosmology sometimes sees nature as "mute" or "empty," ignoring voices and spirits that ancestral cultures respect.
Impact on livelihoods: when a liberal vision, centered on private property and free enterprise, is applied absolutely to nature, the material sustenance and spiritual heritage of communities are jeopardized.
If scientific knowledge does not emancipate itself from a logic of objectification and purely analytical and statistical reduction of nature, the economic-scientific complex could transform the Earth into a geophysical and spiritual desert.
Combating this cryptography and objectification requires a "decryption" of administrative models and a humanistic and ethical rapprochement with the environment, including with its spiritual and sacred dimension.
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A Encriptação da Natureza e a Expropriação Espiritual
A encriptação da natureza
A encriptação, no sentido clássico, é um processo de segurança que transforma informações legíveis (texto simples) em códigos incompreensíveis (texto cifrado), por meio de algoritmos e chaves criptográficas.
Neste texto, porém, “encriptação” é também uma metáfora para a tendência humana de quantificar, controlar e converter ecossistemas em dados, processos tecnológicos ou ativos económicos. Quando esse movimento se articula com interesses corporativos (por vezes instrumentalizando a crise climática), abre-se um debate profundo sobre a mercantilização da vida.
1. A lógica da encriptação
Nesta lógica, a natureza deixa de ser percebida como um organismo vivo e interdependente e passa a ser tratada como um sistema de dados: algo passível de otimização, programação e gestão.
Biodiversidade digital: criação de gémeos digitais de florestas e oceanos para simular impactos ambientais.
Algoritmos preditivos: modelos matemáticos que procuram gerir o clima (por exemplo, modelos de precipitação) e antecipar catástrofes naturais.
2. Formas de sequestro e manipulação
A tentativa de controlo manifesta-se por intervenções diretas e estruturais, com diferentes escalas e consequências.
Geoengenharia: projetos em larga escala para manipular o clima terrestre, como a injeção de aerossóis na estratosfera para refletir luz solar ou o aumento artificial da alcalinidade dos oceanos.
Biologia sintética e engenharia genética: modificação do código genético de espécies (por exemplo, mosquitos modificados em laboratório) para controlar pragas, ou criação de bactérias desenhadas para “comer” poluição e microplásticos.
Erosão da biodiversidade e ameaça à subsistência:
O fim do ciclo das sementes: tradicionalmente, agricultores guardavam sementes de uma colheita para a seguinte. A transição para sementes geneticamente modificadas (OGM) pode criar dependência tecnológica e económica, alterando profundamente a vida no campo e ampliando riscos de endividamento, contaminação cruzada e insegurança alimentar.
Mercantilização do carbono e dos serviços ecossistémicos: conversão de florestas e zonas húmidas em “créditos de carbono”, transformando processos naturais (como a fotossíntese) em ativos financeiros transacionáveis.
3. Riscos e controvérsias
A ideia de que a natureza pode ser “remendada” ou substituída por tecnologia suscita críticas severas.
Efeitos secundários imprevisíveis: intervir num ecossistema complexo pode gerar reações em cadeia, pois sistemas naturais não são lineares.
Ilusão de controlo: a promoção da geoengenharia pode desviar atenção e recursos do núcleo do problema: a redução drástica das emissões de gases com efeito de estufa.
Apropriação e desigualdade: a “encriptação” tecnológica da natureza tende a concentrar-se em grandes corporações, podendo levar à expropriação de recursos de comunidades locais e povos indígenas.
A expropriação espiritual da natureza
Por “encriptação e expropriação espiritual” entende-se a forma como a natureza é tratada como um recurso exclusivamente técnico ou económico, perdendo o seu significado sagrado e a sua ligação profunda com a experiência humana.
Aqui, “encriptação” não é informática: é um processo de ocultação por tecnicismo.
Redução a dados: a natureza deixa de ser um ecossistema vivo e passa a ser vista como um conjunto de métricas, créditos de carbono ou recursos a explorar.
Barreira técnica: o conhecimento sobre a terra é “encriptado” em linguagens jurídicas e científicas complexas, afastando o cidadão comum da sua herança natural.
Ocultação de sujeitos: modelos de gestão do território podem ocultar os sujeitos reais através de simulacros; esta redução analítica prolonga uma tendência histórica de objetivação subjugadora, com violação de direitos fundamentais.
A expropriação (ou desapropriação) espiritual
Este termo descreve a perda da “alma” ou do valor intrínseco que o ser humano atribui ao mundo natural.
Desenraizamento: o indivíduo deixa de se sentir parte da terra e passa a ser apenas consumidor ou utilizador.
Mecanização do ser: a visão do mundo torna-se puramente mecânica. O livro Sabedoria dos Cipós aponta como a cosmologia ocidental, por vezes, vê a natureza como “muda” ou “vazia”, ignorando vozes e espíritos que culturas ancestrais respeitam.
Impacto no sustento: quando uma visão liberal, centrada na propriedade privada e na livre iniciativa, é aplicada de forma absoluta sobre a natureza, colocam-se em risco o sustento material e a herança espiritual das comunidades.
Se o conhecimento científico não se emancipar de uma lógica de objetivação e redução puramente analítica e estatística da natureza, o complexo económico-científico poderá transformar a Terra num deserto geofísico e espiritual.
Combater esta encriptação e objetivação exige uma “desencriptação” dos modelos administrativos e uma reaproximação humanista e ética com o meio ambiente, incluindo com a sua dimensão espiritual e sagrada.
My son has become fascinated with bitcoins, and so I had to get him a tangible one for Xmas. The public key is imprinted visibly on the tamper-evident holographic film, and the private key lies underneath. (Casascius)
I too was fascinated by digital cash back in college, and more specifically by the asymmetric mathematical transforms underlying public-key crypto and digital blind signatures.
I remembered a technical paper I wrote, but could not find it. A desktop search revealed an essay that I completely forgot, something that I had recovered from my archives of floppy discs (while I still could).
It is an article I wrote for the school newspaper in 1994. Ironically, Microsoft Word could not open this ancient Microsoft Word file format, but the free text editors could.
What a fun time capsule, below, with some choice naivetés…
I am trying to reconstruct what I was thinking. I was arguing that a bulletproof framework for digital cash (and what better testing ground) could be used to secure a digital container for executable code on a rental basis. So the expression of an idea — the specific code, or runtime service — is locked in a secure container. The idea would be to prevent copying instead of punishing after the fact.
Micro-currency and micro-code seem like similar exercises in regulating the single use of an issued number.
Now that the Bitcoin experiment is underway, do you know of anyone writing about it as an alternative framework for intellectual property (from digital art to code to governance tokens)?
IP and Digital Cash
@NORMAL:
Digital Cash and the “Intellectual Property” Oxymoron
By Steve Jurvetson
Many of us will soon be working in the information services or technology industries which are currently tangled in a bramble patch of intellectual property law. As the law struggles to find coherency and an internally-consistent logic for intellectual property (IP) protection, digital encryption technologies may provide a better solution — from the perspective of reducing litigation, exploiting the inherent benefits of an information-based business model, and preserving a free economy of ideas.
Bullet-proof digital cash technology, which is now emerging, can provide a protected “cryptographic container” for intellectual expressions, thereby preserving traditional notions of intellectual property that protect specific instantiations of an idea rather than the idea itself. For example, it seems reasonable that Intuit should be able to protect against the widespread duplication of their Quicken software (the expression of an idea), but they should not be able to patent the underlying idea of single-entry bookkeeping. There are strong economic incentives for digital cash to develop and for those techniques to be adapted for IP protection — to create a protected container or expression of an idea. The rapid march of information technology has strained the evolution of IP law, but rather than patching the law, information technology itself may provide a more coherent solution.
Information Wants To Be Free
Currently, IP law is enigmatic because it is expanding to a domain for which it was not initially intended. In developing the U.S. Constitution, Thomas Jefferson argued that ideas should freely transverse the globe, and that ideas were fundamentally different from material goods. He concluded that “Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.” The issues surrounding IP come into sharp focus as we shift to being more of an information-based economy.
The use of e-mail and local TV footage helps disseminate information around the globe and can be a force for democracy — as seen in the TV footage from Chechen, the use of modems in Prague during the Velvet Revolution, and the e-mail and TV from Tianammen Square. Even Gorbachev used a video camera to show what was happening after he was kidnapped. What appears to be an inherent force for democracy runs into problems when it becomes the subject of property.
As higher-level programming languages become more like natural languages, it will become increasingly difficult to distinguish the idea from the code. Language precedes thought, as Jean-Louis Gassée is fond of saying, and our language is the framework for the formulation and expression of our ideas. Restricting software will increasingly be indistinguishable from restricting freedom of speech.
An economy of ideas and human attention depends on the continuous and free exchange of ideas. Because of the associative nature of memory processes, no idea is detached from others. This begs the question, is intellectual property an oxymoron?
Intellectual Property Law is a Patch
John Perry Barlow, former Grateful Dead lyricist and co-founder (with Mitch Kapor) of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, argues that “Intellectual property law cannot be patched, retrofitted or expanded to contain digitized expression... Faith in law will not be an effective strategy for high-tech companies. Law adapts by continuous increments and at a pace second only to geology. Technology advances in lunging jerks. Real-world conditions will continue to change at a blinding pace, and the law will lag further behind, more profoundly confused. This mismatch may prove impossible to overcome.”
From its origins in the Industrial Revolution where the invention of tools took on a new importance, patent and copyright law has protected the physical conveyance of an idea, and not the idea itself. The physical expression is like a container for an idea. But with the emerging information superhighway, the “container” is becoming more ethereal, and it is disappearing altogether. Whether it’s e-mail today, or the future goods of the Information Age, the “expressions” of ideas will be voltage conditions darting around the net, very much like thoughts. The fleeting copy of an image in RAM is not very different that the fleeting image on the retina.
The digitization of all forms of information — from books to songs to images to multimedia — detaches information from the physical plane where IP law has always found definition and precedent. Patents cannot be granted for abstract ideas or algorithms, yet courts have recently upheld the patentability of software as long as it is operating a physical machine or causing a physical result. Copyright law is even more of a patch. The U.S. Copyright Act of 1976 requires that works be fixed in a durable medium, and where an idea and its expression are inseparable, the merger doctrine dictates that the expression cannot be copyrighted. E-mail is not currently copyrightable because it is not a reduction to tangible form. So of course, there is a proposal to amend these copyright provisions. In recent rulings, Lotus won its case that Borland’s Quattro Pro spreadsheet copied elements of Lotus 123’s look and feel, yet Apple lost a similar case versus Microsoft and HP. As Professor Bagley points out in her new text, “It is difficult to reconcile under the total concept and feel test the results in the Apple and Lotus cases.” Given the inconsistencies and economic significance of these issues, it is no surprise that swarms of lawyers are studying to practice in the IP arena.
Back in the early days of Microsoft, Bill Gates wrote an inflammatory “Open Letter to Hobbyists” in which he alleged that “most of you steal your software ... and should be kicked out of any club meeting you show up at.” He presented the economic argument that piracy prevents proper profit streams and “prevents good software from being written.” Now we have Windows.
But seriously, if we continue to believe that the value of information is based on scarcity, as it is with physical objects, we will continue to patch laws that are contrary to the nature of information, which in many cases increases in value with distribution. Small, fast moving companies (like Netscape and Id) protect their ideas by getting to the marketplace quicker than their larger competitors who base their protection on fear and litigation.
The patent office is woefully understaffed and unable to judge the nuances of software. Comptons was initially granted a patent that covered virtually all multimedia technology. When they tried to collect royalties, Microsoft pushed the Patent Office to overturn the patent. In 1992, Software Advertising Corp received a patent for “displaying and integrating commercial advertisements with computer software.” That’s like patenting the concept of a radio commercial. In 1993, a DEC engineer received a patent on just two lines of machine code commonly used in object-oriented programming. CompuServe announced this month that they plan to collect royalties on the widely used GIF file format for images.
The Patent Office has issued well over 12,000 software patents, and a programmer can unknowingly be in violation of any them. Microsoft had to pay $120MM to STAC in February 1994 for violating their patent on data compression. The penalties can be costly, but so can a patent search. Many of the software patents don’t have the words “computer,” “software,” “program,” or “algorithm” in their abstracts. “Software patents turn every decision you make while writing a program into a legal risk,” says Richard Stallman, founder of the League for Programming Freedom. “They make writing a large program like crossing a minefield. Each step has a small chance of stepping on a patent and blowing you up.” The very notion of seventeen years of patent protection in the fast moving software industry seems absurd. MS-DOS did not exist seventeen years ago.
IP law faces the additional wrinkle of jurisdictional issues. Where has an Internet crime taken place? In the country or state in which the computer server resides? Many nations do not have the same intellectual property laws as the U.S. Even within the U.S., the law can be tough to enforce; for example, a group of music publishers sued CompuServe for the digital distribution of copyrighted music. A complication is that CompuServe has no knowledge of the activity since it occurs in the flood of bits transferring between its subscribers
The tension seen in making digital copies revolves around the issue of property. But unlike the theft of material goods, copying does not deprive the owner of their possessions. With digital piracy, it is less a clear ethical issue of theft, and more an abstract notion that you are undermining the business model of an artist or software developer. The distinction between ethics and laws often revolves around their enforceability. Before copy machines, it was hard to make a book, and so it was obvious and visible if someone was copying your work. In the digital age, copying is lightning fast and difficult to detect. Given ethical ambiguity, convenience, and anonymity, it is no wonder we see a cultural shift with regard to digital ethics.
Piracy, Plagiarism and Pilfering
We copy music. We are seldom diligent with our footnotes. We wonder where we’ve seen Strat-man’s PIE and the four slices before. We forward e-mail that may contain text from a copyrighted news publication. The SCBA estimates that 51% of satellite dishes have illegal descramblers. John Perry Barlow estimates that 90% of personal hard drives have some pirated software on them.
Or as last month’s Red Herring editorial points out, “this atmosphere of electronic piracy seems to have in turn spawned a freer attitude than ever toward good old-fashioned plagiarism.” Articles from major publications and WSJ columns appear and circulate widely on the Internet. Computer Pictures magazine replicated a complete article on multimedia databases from New Media magazine, and then publicly apologized.
Music and voice samples are an increasingly common art form, from 2 Live Crew to Negativland to local bands like Voice Farm and Consolidated. Peter Gabriel embraces the shift to repositioned content; “Traditionally, the artist has been the final arbiter of his work. He delivered it and it stood on its own. In the interactive world, artists will also be the suppliers of information and collage material, which people can either accept as is, or manipulate to create their own art. It’s part of the shift from skill-based work to decision-making and editing work.”
But many traditionalists resist the change. Museums are hesitant to embrace digital art because it is impossible to distinguish the original from a copy; according to a curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, “The art world is scared to death of this stuff.” The Digital Audio Tape debate also illustrated the paranoia; the music industry first insisted that these DAT recorders had to purposely introduce static into the digital copies they made, and then they settled for an embedded code that limited the number of successive copies that could be made from the a master source.
For a healthier reaction, look at the phenomenally successful business models of Mosaic/Netscape and Id Software, the twisted creator of Doom. Just as McAfee built a business on shareware, Netscape and Id encourage widespread free distribution of their product. But once you want support from Netscape, or the higher levels of the Doom game, then you have to pay. For industries with strong demand-side economies of scale, such as Netscape web browsers or Safe-TCL intelligent agents, the creators have exploited the economies of information distribution. Software products are especially susceptible to increasing returns with scale, as are networking products and most of the information technology industries.
Yet, the Software Publishers Association reports that 1993 worldwide losses to piracy of business application software totaled $7.45 billion. They also estimated that 89% of software units in Korea were counterfeit. And China has 29 factories, some state-owned, that press 75 million pirated CDs per year, largely for export. GATT will impose the U.S. notions of intellectual property on a world that sees the issue very differently.
Clearly there are strong economic incentives to protect intellectual property, and reasonable arguments can be made for software patents and digital copyright, but the complexities of legal enforcement will be outrun and potentially obviated by the relatively rapid developments of another technology, digital cash and cryptography.
Digital Cash and the IP Lock
Digital cash is in some ways an extreme example of digital “property” -- since it cannot be copied, it is possessed by one entity at a time, and it is static and non-perishable. If the techniques for protecting against pilferage and piracy work in the domain of cash, then they can be used to “protect” other properties by being embedded in them. If I wanted to copy-protect an “original” work of digital art, digital cash techniques can be used as the “container” to protect intellectual property in the old style. A bullet-proof digital cash scheme would inevitably be adapted by those who stand to gain from the current system. Such as Bill Gates.
Several companies are developing technologies for electronic commerce. On January 12, several High-Tech Club members attended the Cybermania conference on electronic commerce with the CEOs of Intuit, CyberCash, Enter TV and The Lightspan Partnership. According to Scott Cook, CEO of Intuit, the motivations for digital cash are anonymity and efficient small-transaction Internet commerce. Anonymity preserves our privacy in the age of increasingly intrusive “database marketing” based on credit card purchase patterns and other personal information. Of course, it also has tax-evasion implications. For Internet commerce, cash is more efficient and easier to use than a credit card for small transactions.
“A lot of people will spend nickels on the Internet,” says Dan Lynch of CyberCash. Banks will soon exchange your current cash for cyber-tokens, or a “bag of bits” which you can spend freely on the Internet. A competitor based in the Netherlands called DigiCash has a Web page with numerous articles on electronic money and fully functional demo of their technology. You can get some free cash from them and spend it at some of their allied vendors.
Digital cash is a compelling technology. Wired magazine calls it the “killer application for electronic networks which will change the global economy.” Handling and fraud costs for the paper money system are growing as digital color copiers and ATMs proliferate. Donald Gleason, President of the Smart Card Enterprise unit of Electronic Payment Services argues that “Cash is a nightmare. It costs money handlers in the U.S. alone approximately $60 billion a year to move the stuff... Bills and coinage will increasingly be replaced by some sort of electronic equivalent.” Even a Citibank VP, Sholom Rosen, agrees that “There are going to be winners and losers, but everybody is going to play.”
The digital cash schemes use a blind digital signature and a central repository to protect against piracy and privacy violations. On the privacy issue, the techniques used have been mathematically proven to be protected against privacy violations. The bank cannot trace how the cash is being used or who is using it. Embedded in these schemes are powerful digital cryptography techniques which have recently been spread in the commercial domain (RSA Data Security is a leader in this field and will be speaking to the High Tech Club on January 19).
To protect against piracy requires some extra work. As soon as I have a digital $5 bill on my Mac hard drive, I will want to make a copy, and I can. (Many companies have busted their picks trying to copy protect files from hackers. It will never work.). The difference is that I can only spend the $5 bill once. The copy is worthless. This is possible because every bill has a unique encrypted identifier. In spending the bill, my computer checks with the centralized repository which verifies that my particular $5 bill is still unspent. Once I spend it, it cannot be spent again. As with many electronic transactions today, the safety of the system depends on the integrity of a centralized computer, or what Dan Lynch calls “the big database in the sky.”
One of the most important limitations of the digital cash techniques is that they are tethered to a transaction between at least three parties — a buyer, seller and central repository. So, to use such a scheme to protect intellectual property, would require networked computers and “live” files that have to dial up and check in with the repository to be operational. There are many compelling applications for this, including voter registration, voting tabulation, and the registration of digital artwork originals.
When I asked Dan Lynch about the use of his technology for intellectual property protection, he agreed that the bits that now represent a $5 bill could be used for any number of things, from medical records to photographs. A digital photograph could hide a digital signature in its low-order bits, and it would be imperceptible to the user. But those bits could be used with a registry of proper image owners, and could be used to prove misappropriation or sampling of the image by others.
Technology author Steven Levy has been researching cryptography for Wired magazine, and he responded to my e-mail questions with the reply “You are on the right track in thinking that crypto can preserve IP. I know of several attempts to forward plans to do so.” Digital cash may provide a “crypto-container” to preserve traditional notions of intellectual property.
The transaction tether limits the short-term applicability of these schemes for software copy protection. They won’t work on an isolated computer. This certainly would slow its adoption for mobile computers since the wireless networking infrastructure is so nascent. But with Windows ’95 bundling network connectivity, soon most computers will be network-ready — at least for the Microsoft network. And now that Bill Gates is acquiring Intuit, instead of dollar bills, we will have Bill dollars.
The transaction tether is also a logistical headache with current slow networks, which may hinder its adoption for mass-market applications. For example, if someone forwards a copyrighted e-mail, the recipient may have to have their computer do the repository check before they could see the text of the e-mail. E-mail is slow enough today, but in the near future, these techniques of verifying IP permissions and paying appropriate royalties in digital cash could be background processes on a preemptive multitasking computer (Windows ’95 or Mac OS System 8). The digital cash schemes are consistent with other trends in software distribution and development — specifically software rental and object-oriented “applets” with nested royalty payments. They are also consistent with the document-centric vision of Open Doc and OLE.
The user of the future would start working on their stationary. When it’s clear they are doing some text entry, the word processor would be downloaded and rented for its current usage. Digital pennies would trickle back to the people who wrote or inspired the various portions of the core program. As you use other software applets, such as a spell-checker, it would be downloaded as needed. By renting applets, or potentially finer-grained software objects, the licensing royalties would be automatically tabulated and exchanged, and software piracy would require heroic efforts. Intellectual property would become precisely that — property in a market economy, under lock by its “creator,” and Bill Gates’ 1975 lament over software piracy may now be addressed 20 years later.
--------end of paper-----------
2013 & 2021 update: On further reflection, I was focused on executable code (where the runtime requires a cloud connect to authenticate, given the third party element of Digicash. (The blockchain fixed this). Verification has been a pain, but perhaps it's seamless in a web-services future. Cloud apps and digital cash depend on it, so why not the code itself.
It could verify the official owner of any unique bundle of pixels, in the sense that you can "own" a sufficiently large number, but not the essence of a work of art or derivative works (what we call NFTs today). Frankly, I'm not sure about non-interactive content in general, like pure video playback. "Fixing" software IP alone would be a big enough accomplishment.
I posted the same description that's on the previous photo, but I've changed the numbers, since the other version has 200 more photos than this one.
"A thermocline (sometimes metalimnion in lakes) is a thin but distinct layer in a large body of fluid (e.g. water, such as an ocean or lake, or air, such as an atmosphere) in which temperature changes more rapidly with depth than it does in the layers above or below."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermocline
I was taught about this when learning to scuba dive. The strong warm/cool split of this image made me think of it. And then my mind wandered to how strange it is that I can dig up this tiny tidbit of information I heard years ago (and haven't thought much since then) but I can't remember where I put my keys two minutes ago, or the chords to that song I wrote the other day. I think our brains could use a less destructive encryption method and more hard drive space. Hurry up Science, my clock is ticking!
I made this image from 348 photos. I stacked the first 228 using the ultra streaks present in this script, advancedstacker.com and the last 320 photos were stacked "normally" with the lighten layer blending mode. (also automated with the advanced stacker script)
I took this photo of the latest hot lot of processor chips of various sizes at the spook shop summit (InQTel CEO Summit). Pretty shiny bling.
I am in the D-Wave board meeting now, and we just got a peek of next week's TIME Magazine cover (below). And it made the Charlie Rose show.
Here are some excerpts:
"The Quantum Quest for a Revolutionary Computer
The D-Wave Two is an unusual computer, and D-Wave is an unusual company. It's small, just 114 people, and its location puts it well outside the swim of Silicon Valley. But its investors include the storied Menlo Park, Calif., venture-capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, which funded Skype and Tesla Motors. It's also backed by famously prescient Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and an outfit called In-Q-Tel, better known as the high-tech investment arm of the CIA. Likewise, D-Wave has very few customers, but they're blue-chip: they include the defense contractor Lockheed Martin; a computing lab that's hosted by NASA and largely funded by Google; and a U.S. intelligence agency that D-Wave executives decline to name.
The reason D-Wave has so few customers is that it makes a new type of computer called a quantum computer that's so radical and strange, people are still trying to figure out what it's for and how to use it. It could represent an enormous new source of computing power--it has the potential to solve problems that would take conventional computers centuries, with revolutionary consequences for fields ranging from cryptography to nanotechnology, pharmaceuticals to artificial intelligence.
That's the theory, anyway. Some critics, many of them bearing Ph.D.s and significant academic reputations, think D-Wave's machines aren't quantum computers at all. But D-Wave's customers buy them anyway, for around $10 million a pop, because if they're the real deal they could be the biggest leap forward since the invention of the microprocessor. …
Physicist David Deutsch once described quantum computing as "the first technology that allows useful tasks to be performed in collaboration between parallel universes." Not only is this excitingly weird, it's also incredibly useful. If a single quantum bit (or as they're inevitably called, qubits, pronounced cubits) can be in two states at the same time, it can perform two calculations at the same time. Two quantum bits could perform four simultaneous calculations; three quantum bits could perform eight; and so on. The power grows exponentially.
The supercooled niobium chip at the heart of the D-Wave Two has 512 qubits and therefore could in theory perform 2^512 operations simultaneously. That's more calculations than there are atoms in the universe, by many orders of magnitude. "This is not just a quantitative change," says Colin Williams, D-Wave's director of business development and strategic partnerships, who has a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence and once worked as Stephen Hawking's research assistant at Cambridge. "The kind of physical effects that our machine has access to are simply not available to supercomputers, no matter how big you make them. We're tapping into the fabric of reality in a fundamentally new way, to make a kind of computer that the world has never seen."
Naturally, a lot of people want one. This is the age of Big Data, and we're burying ourselves in information-- search queries, genomes, credit-card purchases, phone records, retail transactions, social media, geological surveys, climate data, surveillance videos, movie recommendations--and D-Wave just happens to be selling a very shiny new shovel. "Who knows what hedge-fund managers would do with one of these and the black-swan event that that might entail?" says Steve Jurvetson, one of the managing directors of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. "For many of the computational traders, it's an arms race."
One of the documents leaked by Edward Snowden, published last month, revealed that the NSA has an $80 million quantum-computing project suggestively code-named Penetrating Hard Targets. Here's why: much of the encryption used online is based on the fact that it can take conventional computers years to find the factors of a number that is the product of two large primes. A quantum computer could do it so fast that it would render a lot of encryption obsolete overnight. You can see why the NSA would take an interest. …
For its first five years, the company existed as a think tank focused on research. Draper Fisher Jurvetson got onboard in 2003, viewing the business as a very sexy but very long shot. "I would put it in the same bucket as SpaceX and Tesla Motors," Jurvetson says, "where even the CEO Elon Musk will tell you that failure was the most likely outcome." By then Rose was ready to go from thinking about quantum computers to trying to build them--"we switched from a patent, IP, science aggregator to an engineering company," he says. Rose wasn't interested in expensive, fragile laboratory experiments; he wanted to build machines big enough to handle significant computing tasks and cheap and robust enough to be manufactured commercially. With that in mind, he and his colleagues made an important and still controversial decision.
Up until then, most quantum computers followed something called the gate-model approach, which is roughly analogous to the way conventional computers work, if you substitute qubits for transistors. But one of the things Rose had figured out in those early years was that building a gate-model quantum computer of any useful size just wasn't going to be feasible anytime soon. …
Adiabatic quantum computing may be technically simpler than the gate-model kind, but it comes with trade-offs. An adiabatic quantum computer can really solve only one class of problems, called discrete combinatorial optimization problems, which involve finding the best--the shortest, or the fastest, or the cheapest, or the most efficient--way of doing a given task.
This is great if you have a really hard discrete combinatorial optimization problem to solve. Not everybody does. But once you start looking for optimization problems, or at least problems that can be twisted around to look like optimization problems, you find them all over the place: in software design, tumor treatments, logistical planning, the stock market, airline schedules, the search for Earth-like planets in other solar systems, and in particular in machine learning.
Google and NASA, along with the Universities Space Research Association, jointly run something called the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, or QuAIL, based at NASA Ames, which is the proud owner of a D-Wave Two. "If you're trying to do planning and scheduling for how you navigate the Curiosity rover on Mars or how you schedule the activities of astronauts on the station, these are clearly problems where a quantum computer--a computer that can optimally solve optimization problems--would be useful," says Rupak Biswas, deputy director of the Exploration Technology Directorate at NASA Ames. Google has been using its D-Wave to, among other things, write software that helps Google Glass tell the difference between when you're blinking and when you're winking.
Lockheed Martin turned out to have some optimization problems too. It produces a colossal amount of computer code, all of which has to be verified and validated for all possible scenarios, lest your F-35 spontaneously decide to reboot itself in midair. "It's very difficult to exhaustively test all of the possible conditions that can occur in the life of a system," says Ray Johnson, Lockheed Martin's chief technology officer. "Because of the ability to handle multiple conditions at one time through superposition, you're able to much more rapidly--orders of magnitude more rapidly--exhaustively test the conditions in that software." The company re-upped for a D-Wave Two last year.
Another challenge Rose and company face is that there is a small but nonzero number of academic physicists and computer scientists who think that they are partly or completely full of sh-t. Ever since D-Wave's first demo in 2007, snide humor, polite skepticism, impolite skepticism and outright debunkings have been lobbed at the company from any number of ivory towers. "There are many who in Round 1 of this started trash-talking D-Wave before they'd ever met the company," Jurvetson says. "Just the mere notion that someone is going to be building and shipping a quantum computer--they said, 'They are lying, and it's smoke and mirrors.'"
Seven years and many demos and papers later, the company isn't any less controversial. Any blog post or news story about D-Wave instantly grows a shaggy beard of vehement comments, both pro- and anti-. …
But where quantum computing is concerned, there always seems to be room for disagreement. Hartmut Neven, the director of engineering who runs Google's quantum-computing project, argues that the tests weren't a failure at all--that in one class of problem, the D-Wave Two outperformed the classical computers in a way that suggests quantum effects were in play. "There you see essentially what we were after," he says. "There you see an exponentially widening gap between simulated annealing and quantum annealing ... That's great news, but so far nobody has paid attention to it." Meanwhile, two other papers published in January make the case that a) D-Wave's chip does demonstrate entanglement and b) the test used the wrong kind of problem and was therefore meaningless anyway. For now pretty much everybody at least agrees that it's impressive that a chip as radically new as D-Wave's could even achieve parity with conventional hardware.
The attitude in D-Wave's C-suite toward all this back-and-forth is, unsurprisingly, dismissive. "The people that really understand what we're doing aren't skeptical," says Brownell. Rose is equally calm about it; all that wrestling must have left him with a thick skin. "Unfortunately," he says, "like all discourse on the Internet, it tends to be driven by a small number of people that are both vocal and not necessarily the most informed." He's content to let the products prove themselves, or not. "It's fine," he says. "It's good. Science progresses by rocking the ship. Things like this are a necessary component of forward progress."
Are D-Wave's machines quantum computers?
For now the answer is itself suspended, aptly enough, in a state of superposition, somewhere between yes and no. If the machines can do anything like what D-Wave is predicting, they won't leave many fields untouched. "I think we'll look back on the first time a quantum computer outperformed classical computing as a historic milestone," Brownell says. "It's a little grand, but we're kind of like Intel and Microsoft in 1977, at the dawn of a new computing era."
The Navajo nation has its headquarters in Window Rock, Arizona. We were spending the night in Gallup, New Mexico, which is just a few miles away. Late in the afternoon we decided to drive to Window Rock and maybe get a good sunset photo.
I wasn’t aware of the monument there to the Navajo code talkers. These men were recruited during WWII by the US Marines to operate the radios that were used for tactical communications on the battlefield. Because these were the days before voice encryption, the enemy could hear these transmissions. Transmitting in code words would be time consuming and error-prone, but something had to be done to guarantee secure communications.
Someone pointed out that the Navajo language is distinctively different from other Native American languages, and that almost all of the Navajo speakers in the world lived on the reservation. A group of Navajos was tasked with setting up a school to create modern words for military terms that weren’t in the Navajo language, and then they trained successive classes of Navajos for duty.
The project succeeded, and Navajos served in military units throughout WWII. None of their transmissions were ever deciphered by opposing troops. By now, only a few of these code talkers are still alive. This monument is a fine tribute to their service to their country.
Alan Turing (1912-54) was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and computer scientist. He was highly influential in the development of computer science and is widely considered to be the father of both computer science and artificial intelligence. He was also the man who, with his team, broke the code of the highly complex Enigma and Lorenz cipher machines, which kept German military and strategic communications secret during the Second World War.
This is a detail from an outstanding life-size sculpture created from half a million pieces of slate by Stephen Kettle. It's to be found in the Block B museum at Bletchley Park, near Milton Keynes.
I’ve gone into a little more detail about Alan Turing here. It’s a tragic, yet inspirational, story.
Alan Turing (1912-54) was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and computer scientist of dazzling ability. He was highly influential in the development of computer science and is widely considered to be the father of both computer science and artificial intelligence.
More than that, perhaps, during the Second World War he and his team broke the code of the highly complex Enigma and Lorenz cipher machines, which kept German military and strategic communications secret. This meticulous, painstaking work was done at Bletchley Park, Britain’s code-breaking centre. After the war he worked at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, where he created one of the first designs for a stored-program computer, the ACE.
Alan Turing was gay, and was prosecuted in 1952, when homosexual acts (even between adults in private, as in his case) were illegal in the UK. This conviction resulted in his security clearance being removed, and despite his acknowledged brilliance he was barred from continuing with his cryptographic work for GCHQ. He committed suicide in 1954 at the age of 41. Fifty-five years later, in 2009, the British government formally apologised for the way in which he was treated after the war; and in 2013 he received a long overdue royal pardon.
This is a detail from an outstanding life-size sculpture in half a million pieces of slate by Stephen Kettle. It's to be found in the Block B museum at Bletchley Park, near Milton Keynes. Oh, and that's a portrait of Alan Turing in the background. Two heroes for the price of one.
View on black - it looks good.
Computers! Don't you love them?! I can't begin to tell you how much fun I'm having with mine at the moment. I keep my photos and lightroom catalogue on an external hard drive so that I can easily use it between systems. Last week I was running out of space so I ordered a larger drive and when it arrived went to copy everything across and it wouldn't. I've now been fighting with it for over a week and I may finally be close to some sort of success. I've lost some images, but nothing crucial I hope. All my images are still on the drive I just can't get it to copy them off. Like everyone I don't back up enough and my last backup was 3 months ago so if worse comes to worst I've only lost 3 months but it's annoying. I havent' totally figured out the problem. I use an encrypted partition and thought it was something to do with the encryption, then I thought it was bad sectors on the drive but now I think it is the drive controller itself. Wish me luck, I've been slowly salvaging folders in between crashes and I think I'm almost there now. Hopefully going to successfully rebuild everything tonight. :o)
I don't get much opportunity for photography and last weekend was one of my rare opportunities. As usual the clouds saw me coming and scooted off but to be honest I quite like nice sunny days and clear skies and it turned into a beautiful autumnal weekend with some of the best weather I've seen in Scotland for a long time.
I think I missed a trick with this shot because afterwards I realised it would probably have made a great vertorama.
Since cash is obsolete, we must reduce its carbon footprint! We must transition to a green economy! The dialectic tears down and recycles. It’s currently tearing down capitalism and recycling it into stakeholder capitalism (stakeholder [public–private partnership] fascism). There’s a blitzkrieg coming!
(IMF) International Monetary Fascism: Careful decisions must also ensure that new forms of digital money are environmentally sustainable—that the energy they require is kept in check. The path to digital money adoption must be guided by a clear and responsible vision of tomorrow’s broader payment, financial, economic, and environmental landscape.
(UN) United Nazis: Through the adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, world leaders have given humanity a universal plan to transform our world for the better. Our task is to stay true to these agreements and take action on their implementation.
(WEF) World Economic Fascism: You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy.
Russia agrees to chair BRICS in 2024. BRICS represents 45% of the world’s population. BRICS produces 43% of the world’s oil. BRICS countries occupy 29% of the world’s land surface. 30 countries are prepared to Join BRICS in 2024. In 2023 about 20% of oil was bought with currencies other than the US dollar. America: Who cares about oil, we’re going green (broke). Chip…chip…chip away…the US dollar can only hold its position as the world’s reserve currency for so long.
130 countries are exploring CBDCs. These countries produce 98% of the world’s GDP. 64 of these countries are in the advanced stages of developing CBDCs. The United Arab Emirates and China have already made a cross-border payment using the Digital Dirham.
Roll in the Central Bank Digital Currencies! Roll in the deposit tokens! Good-bye cash! Good-bye freedom! See-ya later, Bitcoin! We will kill the middle class. We will kill small businesses. We will build back better with corrupt governments, intelligence agencies, multinational corporations, and centralized banking. As for the European farmer protests: Centralized corporate farms are the way of the future, so is starvation…eat ze bugz! Indeed, we will bankrupt everyone into authoritarianism. One day you will wake up in a fascist world order, where you will be enslaved by the state and corporate powers. We call it friendly fascism…fascism with a smile:)
Big Brother and AI will shape your reality. We will issue an internet ID. We will establish a United Nations regulatory body to oversee AI and the internet. End encryption! End privacy! We can’t have free speech in the new authoritarian world order.
Sidenote: Elon Musk bought X, so that he can data mine its users for his new artificial intelligence company xAI. But who cares about data mining if I can talk to Grok, Elon’s AI chat bot. Digital wokeness: We must understand reality through false reality. Ouch, that hurt my brain-computer interface! Indeed, Elon Musk is a grifter.
These Central Bank Digital Currencies will only be temporary. They will be further centralized into a one world currency. With the breakthrough of on-skin and under-skin computing technology, we will now tie a person’s digital ID and digital wallet to an AI-chip tattoo. Without this new on-skin and under-skin transhuman surveillance chip, you will not be able to be a part of this new one world monetary system. This microchip system will be implanted in the hand or the forehead of every human…changing their being.
Join the techno-evolution and become a part of the new Aryan techno-race. Join the techno-revolution and become a part of the new techno-transhuman race. Join the digital woke cult: You are trapped in the wrong body; therefore, you must become a born again transhuman. Then you must go out and preach the gospel of the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Diversity, equity, inclusion, and sustainability. Like a hoe, you can ride the seven-headed beast of linguistics (false doctrines) until your language is turned to Babel. Thank God, the Fourth Reich will not prevail!
Daniel 7:23 “He gave me this explanation: ‘The fourth beast is a fourth kingdom that will appear on earth. It will be different from all the other kingdoms and will devour the whole earth, trampling it down and crushing it.’”
Daniel 12:10 “Many will be purified, made spotless and refined, but the wicked will continue to be wicked. None of the wicked will understand, but those who are wise will understand.”
"Encryption Is More Important, and Easier, Than Ever" by VINDU GOEL via NYT t.co/e3xszFw3Ei (via Twitter twitter.com/felipemassone/status/654398552370716672)
Disassembled an old hard drive that had failed. Always wanted to shoot the platters and head stack. These things have a nearly perfect mirrored surface, of course, which allows for some possibilities.
The real original is 18 megapixels (not uploaded here on Flickr), but it's still cool larger.
©2010 David C. Pearson, M.D.
IBM quantum processor internals on display at #MakerFaire 2018 San Mateo, California.
It's a #SignOfTheTimes that this type of processing has the potential to solve currently unsolvable problems at far lower than current power consumption and could render current encryption algorithms obsolete in less than a decade.
The actual processor is in the silver cylinder at the bottom marked with a "Q". In operation it would be in a container chilled to liquid helium temperatures around 4 degrees above absolute zero - much too warm for the processor. The various stages from top to bottom provide additional levels of cooling to bring the processor down to around 0.01 degrees above absolute zero, colder than deep space.
The tubes and rigid coax are part of the cooling system and guides that relay the microwave signals to and from the processor.
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Location: Srilanka
"Careful when loading that cannister. It might be small, but it has enough explosive power to evaporate this entire hangar."
"Yes sir."
"And don't forget to activate the stasis field once it's in place."
"Oh–"
"You forgot didn't you? Each year you rookies get– Nevermind."
"Sorry sir. I'll fix it right away sir."
"Do you know what happens when you try to fire the charge without the stasis field?Let me tell you about the battle in sector 75 just outside Saturn's gravity well. Our boys got the encryption codes to disable the stasis fields on the enemy munitions just as they were starting their bombing run– now that was a good firework show!"
Vivienne and Mirelle Part 9: Closure Is a Blade
Some things aren’t buried. They’re sheathed.
The packet she had received from Seraine contained manifest logs. Port Romanov transit data. Surveillance. A timestamp. A name:
Eliron Vex
Not a legend. Not even a ghost. Just a man who thought Vivienne owed him something.
He’d been the nephew of her first lieutenant—a connection Vivienne had once respected.
When a business deal with her soured, he decided he’d been wronged.
He was never sharp enough to understand why the terms turned the way they did—but loud enough to make himself a problem.
At first, his outbursts were petty: intercepted messages, poisoned rumors, low-level disruptions that didn’t touch her directly.
Then they got dangerous.
His aunt, seeing the direction he was headed, sent him off-world—a soft exile disguised as opportunity. A logistics contract on the edge of the Drift. Quiet. Far. Low stakes.
He didn’t stay there.
Vex came back with scars he probably paid someone else to give him, stories no one could verify, and a list of names that shouldn’t have included hers
He was back. In her port. In her airspace.
Testing the line he thought she wouldn’t cross.
She reached beneath her chair and unlocked the panel almost no one knew existed.
Inside: a blade. Familiar weight. The one she carried the night Mirelle—not yet Seraine—had bandaged her side in silence, after Vex came too close with a coward’s strike.
Vivienne stood. Unhurried. Certain.
She sent one message to her lieutenant:
“If I’m not back by dawn, lock down the sky.”
Then she slipped the knife into her coat.
Took one last glance at the vanishing message.
And said softly, with neither hate nor heat:
“You were never worth this much attention, Vex. But now you’ve earned it.”
And then she disappeared into the underbelly of Sky Port Bury.
Not to punish.
To finish.
Addendum to Part 9
What they say happened that night. No footage. No witnesses. Just echoes.
1. The Dockhand at Ring 12
“I heard shouting. But not loud. That kind that’s controlled—like someone angry enough to kill but too elegant to raise her voice.
“Then nothing. Just this heavy silence. Like the whole port was holding its breath. Next thing I know, there’s blood on the loading ramp and no one asking questions.”
2. A Crimson Alcove Girl
“Vex? I thought he was dead. Then again, so’s everyone who crosses Vivienne—eventually.
“Someone said she dragged him through the rain ducts. Alive. Just long enough for him to hear her say why.
“I hope it’s true. Bastard earned it.”
3. Guild Comms Technician (off the record)
“We caught a burst on a dead channel—some old Ravenwood fallback frequency. No encryption, just raw analog. Definitely her voice.
She said: ‘Vex. If you’re hearing this, you already lost.’
Then… a sound like metal dragging across metal. Slow. Heavy.
Cut off mid-transmission. Signal terminated from inside the ring vents.
We scrubbed the file. Some things aren’t meant to be documented.”
4. Bartender at Club Argent
“She walked into Club Argent alone.
No guards. No announcement. Just presence.
Sat at the bar. Ordered nothing.
Didn’t speak. Didn’t look at anyone.
Just watched the room like it owed her something.
We counted—seven minutes.
No one approached. No one dared.
At minute seven, she stood. Left without a word.
Later, someone asked what it meant. I didn’t answer.
But I haven’t let anyone sit on that stool since.”
5. One of the Girls Who Talks Too Much
“They say Vex was torn open from throat to thigh. Precision work. No mess.
They say Vivienne left a single token on his chest—an old coin. Something from New Victoria Township.
They say it means closure.
They’re wrong. It means warning.”
6. Omalley Dakota (in a private moment, to no one in particular)
“I never asked what happened. Never needed to.
But the next time I passed by the Ravenwood, I noticed a new flower on her balcony.
White. Delicate. From a planet that doesn’t exist anymore.
She’s not mourning. She’s marking territory.”
7. Seraine, Somewhere in the Drift
No words. Just a brief flicker on an off-grid signal.
A smile. Then gone again
The End
this strange mark appeared on my hand tonight... wish i knew what it meant :-P
photo replaced 8/18 with cropped version that appears in Scientific American magazine, September 2007 issue, p30
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Social Media: www.seywut.com/Chris
The Enigma Machine played a key role in World War II. The German military depended on the Enigma Machine to encrypt communications, but the Allies invested a tremendous amount of effort in decryption and achieved significant success. This provided the Allies a large advantage.
I believe this is a German Wehrmacht (military) Enigma (please let me know if that is not correct). Near the top are the keys pressed by the operator, entering the characters to be encrypted. Beyond the keyboard is the lampboard. As the operator pressed a key, the encrypted version of that letter would light on the lampboard. At the bottom of the photo is the plugboard. Routine wires in different ways on the plugboard contributed to the encryption of characters.
Seen at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana.
"A thermocline (sometimes metalimnion in lakes) is a thin but distinct layer in a large body of fluid (e.g. water, such as an ocean or lake, or air, such as an atmosphere) in which temperature changes more rapidly with depth than it does in the layers above or below."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermocline
I was taught about this when learning to scuba dive. The strong warm/cool split of this image made me think of it. And then my mind wandered to how strange it is that I can dig up this tiny tidbit of information I heard years ago (and haven't thought much since then) but I can't remember where I put my keys two minutes ago, or the chords to that song I wrote the other day. I think our brains could use a less destructive encryption method and more hard drive space. Hurry up Science, my clock is ticking!
I made this image from 548 photos. I stacked the first 228 using the ultra streaks present in this script, advancedstacker.com and the last 320 photos were stacked "normally" with the lighten layer blending mode. (also automated with the advanced stacker script)
Keith Little, one of the last living Navajo Code Talkers, passed away on Tuesday, January 3rd, 2011. His friend, Chester Nez, died last Wednesday, June 4, 2014, and was the last of the Code Talkers. I bumped into Keith and eleven of his fellow Code Talkers on New York's Fifth Avenue located toward the end of the City's 2011 Veteran's Day parade (all I was trying to do was to get across Fifth Avenue to meet friends). I first read about them in the book, "With the Old Breed," by Eugene Sledge. Keith recalls being a young Navajo boy at a reservation school and being reprimanded for speaking his native language. And yet it was this skill -- and his dignity in the face of such prejudice -- that made him and his fellow Code Talkers so exceptional. I feel as if we have lost a special link. He was recruited as a very young man in 1943 to join 420 Navajos in a special encryption unit of the US Marines. The Code Talkers transmitted and received messages in their native Navajo language. They were assigned to all Marine Units and were in the front lines of all of the Pacific battlefields of World War II (Keith was a member of the 4th Marine Division). The code proved unbreakable given its uniqueness and the fact that it was an unwritten language that depended on the tone of a word for its meaning -- so complex that it really needed to be learned in childhood. The specific code eventually grew to include 411 Navajo words.
The Encryption Cold War: Government VS Internet t.co/BIcWyGg8VZ (via Twitter twitter.com/SvensMichael/status/808001529739378688)
Star Trek, First Contact (Paramount, 1996).
youtu.be/wxyZQR2d6yw Trailer
Star Trek - 'Beyond First Contact' The Borg - Making The Movie.
Starring Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner, LeVar Burton, Michael Dorn, Gates McFadden, Marina Sirtis, Alfre Woodard, James Cromwell, Alice Krige, Neal McDonough, Robert Picardo, and Dwight Schultz. Directed by Jonathan Frakes.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard awakens from a nightmare about his Borg assimilation experience to an incoming message from Admiral Hayes. Hayes informs Picard that Deep Space Five reported that a colony has been destroyed. Completing the Admiral's sentence, Picard realizes who destroyed the colony — the Borg.
Picard calls a meeting and informs his senior officers that their ship has been instructed to patrol the Neutral Zone. Their orders are to protect the area from any possible Romulan uprising during a Borg attack. Despite protests from his officers, Picard remains faithful to his orders and the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC 1701-E begins to patrol the area. Later, Picard regretfully tells Riker that it is his own fault they are stuck in the Neutral Zone. Starfleet believes Picard to be too emotionally involved with the Borg because of his previous assimilation to tactically complete a mission against them.
The men return to the bridge to learn that Starfleet has engaged in combat with the Borg. Intercepting messages between the starships, the crew learns that the Federation is losing. Picard, with his Borg experience, knows he can help the fleet. He informs his staff that he will make a decision directly in opposition to Starfleet commands. With no objections from his crew, Captain Picard gives the order and the starship Enterprise sets a course for Earth and the attacking Borg cube.
A massive battle ensues and it appears that the Federation will lose the fight. Despite serious structural damage to the Borg cube, their strength does not weaken. Even the U.S.S. Defiant, commanded by Worf, does not appear to be able to turn the tides of the battle. As the starship Defiant is about to ram the Borg ship on a suicide run, the U.S.S. Enterprise beams aboard its crew, including Worf. Picard, having an inside perspective of the Borg and their vessel, focuses the firepower of the fleet on coordinates he knows to be critical. Just as the main ship is destroyed, a spherical escape pod flies out. The sphere creates a temporal vortex, catching the starship Enterprise in its wake. Immune to the paradoxes created by the time travel, the starship's crew learns that Earth at the present time appears to be inhabited entirely by the Borg. The commanding officers realize that the Borg have gone into the past and assimilated Earth, so they follow them back in time to repair the damage the Borg have done.
On Earth, over three centuries earlier, a somber Lily Sloane accompanies a stumbling, drunk Zefram Cochrane out of a bar after a night of revelry. Then, Lily notices a fast moving light. She hardly has time to ask what the object is, when the Borg vessel attacks. Back aboard the Enterprise, Picard demands that Data tell him the exact date and location the Borg ship is attacking. The location: central Montana. The date: April 4, 2063 — the day before First Contact. Realizing that the Borg have come to prevent first contact between alien life forms and humans, the crew knows they must stop the Borg and facilitate this exchange. They destroy the Borg sphere, and Dr. Crusher, Captain Picard, Commander Data, Commander Riker, Counselor Troi and other U.S.S. Enterprise crew transport down to Earth to survey the damage.
At the Borg attack site in Montana, the crew finds destruction and chaos. They split into groups to search for Cochrane. Data and Picard hunt for Cochrane's warp ship, the Phoenix. There they encounter a very angry and confused Lily, who believes Data and Picard to be members of a coalition that broke the cease-fire after World War III. She shoots at them in a rage, but impervious to bullets, Data approaches Lily. Overcome by fear and radiation, she falls to the ground. Dr. Crusher diagnoses Lily with radiation sickness caused by the damaged Phoenix, and inoculates the entire crew. Against Picard's better judgment, Crusher takes Lily to sickbay. Geordi is called to help repair the warp vessel and Picard becomes intrigued by its historical significance. In this vessel began the future as the world would know it, and the past as Picard remembers it. He reaches out to touch the ship. Data, curious about the human need for tactile reinforcement, attempts to create the same feelings he observes in Picard, but is unsuccessful in duplicating this aspect of humanity.
Aboard the ship, two crewmembers are sent to examine unexplained maintenance problems, and both disappear. Picard is called to the ship and discovers that the survivors from the Borg sphere have transported onto the ship and are taking over Deck 16. While Picard arranges teams to fight them, the Borg manipulate the climate of the deck to suit their needs and begin to spread throughout the ship. When the Borg attack sickbay, Crusher, her staff, and Lily escape through a Jeffries tube, thanks to a distraction by the ship's Emergency Medical Hologram. While Crusher leads the group down the passageway, Lily steals away in a different direction.
On Earth, Riker finds Troi and Cochrane drunk in a bar. Troi justifies that the only way she could get Cochrane to talk to her was by shooting Tequila with him. Denying her drunken state, Troi offers her professional opinion on Cochrane. She explains, "He's nuts."
Picard and his team are tracking the Borg through the starship. As Crusher and her staff find Worf's team, Picard's team encounters the Borg, who have begun to assimilate U.S.S. Enterprise crewmembers. Worf's team engages the Borg in combat, but the enemies adapt to the crew's weapons too quickly to make any difference. The teams are ordered to regroup on Deck 15, but Data is captured. Picard cannot save him, so he quickly crawls into a Jeffries tube to escape. Face to face with Picard, Lily steals his phaser and demands an explanation and escape route. Picard agrees.
Geordi shows Cochrane the starship Enterprise through a large telescope on Earth and tries to convince him to launch his vessel the next morning. Geordi glorifies Cochrane by explaining that his ship will make first contact with alien life forms. Humanity will be saved if Cochrane launches his ship. Still drunk, Cochrane agrees.
Aboard the ship, the Borg Queen introduces herself to a bound Data, claiming that she is the Collective. Reactivating Data's emotion chip, the Borg begin to graph organic, human skin onto the android's arm. As Data is overcome by this new human sensation of touch, something he never thought possible, the Borg continue their work.
Lily and Picard wander through the service deck as the captain attempts to explain what has happened between Lily's time and his own. She begins to calm down until they suddenly run into a Borg-infested area. Quickly escaping in the Holodeck, Picard activates a Dixon Hill program. At a dance, he and Lily try to blend in without being noticed by the Borg. Following the Holodeck's story, Picard searches for Nicky the Nose and takes his machine gun. Killing the Borg with the gun, Picard retrieves the memory chip that contains all of the information the Borg has received. Lily then notices that the two dead Borg were once crewmembers of the U.S.S. Enterprise.
Back on Earth, Cochrane keeps hearing what an amazing historical figure he is and begins to question whether or not he wants to go through with the launch. He doubts his own nobility and flees the launch site. Geordi and Riker attempt to catch up with Cochrane in the woods and are forced to stun him with a phaser to return him to the Phoenix.
Lily and Picard join the rest of the surviving crew and discover that the Borg are outside of the ship. The retrieved memory chip reveals that they are reconfiguring the main deflector in order to contact the Borg of this century, calling them to Earth to assimilate the planet. Picard, Worf and Lieutenant Hawk put on space suits and venture onto the surface of the starship to stop the Borg.
Aware of Data's desire to become human, the Borg Queen offers him the chance to be entirely covered in human flesh and join the Borg, in an attempt to get the encryption codes from Data so she can obtain total control over the U.S.S. Enterprise. Outside the Enterprise, Hawk, Worf and Picard attempt to unlock the deflector dish. Attacked by a Borg, Worf's suit begins to depressurize. Two Borg are killed and Hawk is attacked. As the dish is released, a now-assimilated Hawk attempts to kill Picard. Worf saves the captain, but Hawk is killed. Picard and Worf then destroy the free-floating deflector dish.
On Earth, Cochrane explains to Riker that his only motivation for inventing warp travel was money. He never expected to save mankind, become a hero, or be instrumental in the founding of a new civilization. He simply wanted to retire in peace.
An argument ensues aboard the Enterprise as the majority of the senior officers believe that they should evacuate the ship, destroying it and the Borg. Picard won't give up, and insists they stay. Challenged by Worf, Picard orders him off the Bridge. Lily follows Picard into his ready room and demands that he explain his obsession with fighting the Borg. Picard declares he won't sacrifice the starship, and swears to finally make the Borg pay for all they've done. Lily quietly and calmly compares Picard to Captain Ahab, forever fighting his white whale — the Borg. Realizing that this fight could only destroy himself and his crew, Picard decides to evacuate the ship. Worf, Picard and Crusher activate the ship's self-destruct sequence. The countdown begins, and the crew leaves in escape pods. Picard surveys his ship and prepares to leave when he hears Data calling him.
Meanwhile , the earth-bound crew and Cochrane begin takeoff. Cochrane, Geordi and Riker take off in the Phoenix, and with music blaring, the three men launch successfully into orbit.
On the ship, Lily and Picard say good-bye and the captain goes to save Data. Entering Engineering, Picard confronts the Borg Queen, whom he knows from his experience with the Borg. The queen reminds Picard that it was not enough that he was assimilated, but that he needed to give himself freely to the Borg — she wished him to stand by her side as an equal to further the power of the Collective. Picard offers himself in exchange for Data, but the android does not comply. He refuses to leave, and at the queen's command, disarms the self-destruct sequence. He quickly enters the encryption codes, offering full control of the Enterprise to the Borg.
As Cochrane's ship nears warp, Data arms the U.S.S Enterprise's weapons and aims them at the defenseless Phoenix. At the Borg Queen's order, Data fires, but the missiles fail to hit the Phoenix. His deception of the Borg complete, Data smashes a conduit, releasing a gas that floods engineering, killing all organic material. As the Borg are destroyed, Picard climbs to safety and the Borg Queen falls into the deadly gas. With the Borg threat gone, Cochrane safely completes humanity's first warp flight.
Celebrating the flight back on Earth that night, Cochrane and the Enterprise crew see an alien ship land nearby. The doors open, and Zefram Cochrane makes Earth's first contact with an alien race — the Vulcans. Picard and his crew beam out, having witnessed this historic event, and the U.S.S Enterprise NCC 1701-E returns to the 24th century.
Hebern Electric Code
This is the first encryption machine patented (1912) by Edward Hugh Hebern. Mr Hebern developed this while serving time as a horse thief.
SEC 280 Final Exam
Purchase here
chosecourses.com/index.php?route=product/category&pat...
Product Description
Product Description
SEC 280 Final Exam
(TCO 2) What is XKMS?
Key Management Specification, which defines services to manage PKI operations within the Extensible Markup Language (XML) environment
An XML standard for e-mail encryption
An XML standard that is used for wireless data exchange
A primary XML standard that is for application development
(TCO 2) All of the following are techniques used by a social engineer EXCEPT for which one?
An attacker replaces a blank deposit slip in a bank lobby with one containing his own account number
An attacker calls up the IT department posing as an employee and requests a password reset
An attacker runs a brute-force attack on a password
An attacker sends a forged e-mail with a link to a bogus website that has been set to obtain personal information
(TCO 2) Attackers need a certain amount of information before launching their attack. One common place to find information is to go through the trash of the target to find information that could be useful to the attacker. This process of going through a target’s trash is known in the community as _____
Trash rummaging
Garbage surfing
Piggy diving
Dumpster diving
(TCO 2) What are the SSL and TLS used for?
A means of securing application programs on the system
To secure communication over the Internet
A method to change from one form of PKI infrastructure to another
A secure way to reduce the amount of SPAM a system receives
(TCO 2) What are the security risks of installing games on an organization’s system?
There are no significant risks
Users can’t always be sure where the software came from and it may have hidden software inside of it.
The users may play during work hours instead of during breaks
The games may take up too much memory on the computer and slow down processing, making it difficult to work
(TCO 2) What is the ISO 17799?
A standard for creating and implementing security policies
A standard for international encryption of e-mail
A document used to develop physical security for a building
A document describing the details of wireless encryption
(TCO 3) A(n) _____ is a network typically smaller in terms of size and geographic coverage, and consists of two or more connected devices. Home or office networks are typically classified as this type of network
Local-area network
Office-area network
Wide-area network
(TCO 3) What is the main difference between TCP and UDP packets?
UDP packets are a more widely used protocol
TCP packets are smaller and thus more efficient to use
TCP packets are connection oriented, whereas UPD packets are connectionless
UDP is considered to be more reliable because it performs error checking
Internal-area network
(TCO 3) Unfortunately, hackers abuse the ICMP protocol by using it to _____.
Send Internet worms
Launch denial-of-service (DoS) attacks
Steal passwords and credit card numbers
Send spam
(TCO 3) Which transport layer protocol is connectionless?
UDP
TCP
IP
ICMP
(TCO 3) Which of the following is a benefit provided by Network Address Translation (NAT)?
Compensates for the lack of IP addresses
Allows devices using two different protocols to communicate
Creates a DMZ
Translates MAC addresses to IP addresses
(TCO 3) Which transport layer protocol is connection oriented?
UDP
RCP
IS
ICMP
(TCO 3) Which of the following is an example of a MAC address?
00:07:H9:c8:ff:00
00:39:c8:ff:00
00:07:e9:c8:ff:00
00:07:59:c8:ff:00:e8
(TCO 4) All of the following statements sum up the characteristics and requirements of proper private key use EXCEPT which one?
The key should be stored securely
The key should be shared only with others whom you trust
Authentication should be required before the key can be used
The key should be transported securely
(TCO 4) It is easier to implement, back up, and recover keys in a _____.
Centralized infrastructure
Decentralized infrastructure
Hybrid infrastructure
Peer-to-peer infrastructure
(TCO 4) When a message sent by a user is digitally signed with a private key, the person will not be able to deny sending the message. This application of encryption is an example of _____.
Authentication
Nonrepudiation
Confidentiality
Auditing
(TCO 4) Outsourced CAs are different from public CAs in what way?
Outsourced services can be used by hundreds of companies
Outsourced services provide dedicated services and equipment to individual companies
Outsourced services do not maintain specific servers and infrastructures for individual companies
Outsourced services are different in name only. They are essentially the same thing
(TCO 4) Cryptographic algorithms are used for all of the following EXCEPT _____.
Confidentiality
Integrity
Availability
Authentication
(TCO 6) A hub operates at which of the following?
Layer 1, the physical layer
Layer 2, the data-link layer
Layer 2, the MAC layer
Layer 3, the network layer
(TCO 6) Alice sends an e-mail that she encrypts with a shared key, which only she and Bob have. Upon receipt, Bob decrypts the e-mail and reads it. This application of encryption is an example of _____.
Confidentiality
Integrity
Authentication
Nonrepudiation
(TCO 6) The following are steps in securing a workstation EXCEPT _____.
Install NetBIOS and IPX
Install antivirus
Remove unnecessary software
Disable unnecessary user accounts
(TCO 8) Which of the following is a characteristic of the Patriot Act?
Extends the tap-and-trace provisions of existing wiretap statutes to the Internet, and mandates certain technological modifications at ISPs to facilitate electronic wiretaps on the Internet
A major piece of legislation affecting the financial industry, and also one with significant privacy provisions for individuals
Makes it a violation of federal law to knowingly use another’s identity
Implements the principle that a signature, contract, or other record may not be deleted
Denies legal effect, validity, or enforceability solely because it is electronic form
(TCO 8) The Wassenaar Arrangement can be described as which of the following?
An international arrangement on export controls for conventional arms as well as dual-use goods and technologies
An international arrangement on import controls
A rule governing import of encryption in the United States
A rule governing export of encryption in the United States
(TCO 8) What is the Convention on Cybercrime?
A convention of black hats who trade hacking secrets
The first international treaty on crimes committed via the Internet and other computer networks
A convention of white hats who trade hacker prevention knowledge
A treaty regulating international conventions
(TCO 8) The electronic signatures in the Global and National Commerce Act _____.
Implement the principle that a signature, contract, or other record may not be denied legal effect, validity, or enforceability solely because it is electronic form
Address a myriad of legal privacy issues resulting from the increased use of computers and other technology specific to telecommunications
Make it a violation of federal law to knowingly use another’s identity
Are a major piece of legislation affecting the financial industry, and contains significant privacy provisions for individuals
(TCO 2) Give an example of a hoax and how it might actually be destructive
(TCO 2) What are the various ways a backup can be conducted and stored?
Backups should include the organization’s critical data, and…
(TCO 2) List at least five types of disasters that can damage or destroy the information of an organization
(TCO 2) List the four ways backups are conducted and stored.
Full back up, differential backup,…
(TCO 2) List at least five types of disasters that can damage or destroy the information of an organization.
Flood, chemical spill…
(TCO 2) Your boss wants you to give him some suggestions for a policy stating what the individual user responsibilities for information security should be. Create a bulleted list of those responsibilities.
Do not divulge sensitive information to individuals…
(TCO 3) What is the difference between TCP and UDP?
UDP is known as a connectionless protocol, as it has very few…
(TCO 3) List three kinds of information contained in an IP packet header
A unique identifier, distinguishing this packet from other packets…
(TCO 4) What are the laws that govern encryption and digital rights management?
Encryption technology is used to protect digital…
(TCO 5) Describe the laws that govern digital signatures
Digital signatures have the same…
(TCO 6) What are some of the security issues associated with web applications and plug-ins?
Web browsers have mechanisms to enable…
(TCO 6) What are the four common methods for connecting equipment at the physical layer?
Coaxial cable, twisted-pair…
(TCO 6) Describe the functioning of the SSL/TLS suite
SSL and TLS use a combination of symmetric and…
(TCO 6) Explain a simple way to combat boot disks
Disable them or… them in the…
(TCO 7) What are some ethical issues associated with information security?
Ethics is the social-moral environment in which a person makes…
(TCO 9) What are password and domain password policies?
Password complexity policies are designed to deter brute force attacks by increasing the number of possible passwords…
WWII Code Machine, German Secret Service (Abwehr). Bletchley Park Museum, Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, UK,
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The SZ-40 was an electro-mechanical wheel-based cipher machine for teleprinter signals (telex). It was developed by Lorenz and used during WWII by the German Army for communication at the highest level. The machine was improved twice (SZ-42a and SZ-42b) and was broken during WWII by the codebreakers at Bletchley Park (UK) with the aid of Colossus, the first electronic digital computer. The SZ-40/42 was codenamed TUNNY by the codebreakers at Bletchley Park.
During WWII, the German Army used a variety of cipher machines, of which the Enigma machine is probably known best. For secure teleprinter communication (telex) they used the Siemens T-52 Geheimschreiber, the Lorenz SZ-40, and later the Siemens T-43 one-time pad machine.
The Lorenz SZ-40/42 was used by the German Army High Command (Oberst-Kommando der Wehrmacht, or OKW) for communication at the highest level, between Hitler and his Generals. The machine was called Schlüsselzusatz (SZ) which means Encryption Add-on. It was connected between a teleprinter and the line, and was suitable for both online and offline use.
Only a small number of SZ-40 and SZ-42 units were ever built. The image above shows one of the very few machines that have survived. It was found in Germany and is now on public display in the museum at Bletchley Park.
Please note that the Lorenz SZ-40/42 is often mistakenly called Geheimschreiber, for example in the 2012 BBC Documentary The Lost Heroes of Bletchley Park. The name Geheimschreiber was used for the Siemens T-52 and not for the SZ-42. Although the two machines use a similar principle, they are not identical and should not be confused. The T-52 was mostly used on landlines (telex) rather than via radio, making interception far more difficult. Nevertheless it was broken occasionally by Bletchley Park and, on a larger scale, by Swedish codebreakers.
One-time pads (OTP) are used to encode/decode agent communications. They are issued in matching sets of two: one for the encoder and one for the decoder, and no two pages are alike. Each sheet contains a random key in the form of five-digit groups. Once a sheet has been used to encode a message, it is torn off the pad and destroyed. If used as designed, encryption by OTP is virtually unbreakable.
For more information on CIA history and this artifact please visit www.cia.gov
Star Trek, First Contact (Paramount, 1996).
youtu.be/wxyZQR2d6yw Trailer
Star Trek - 'Beyond First Contact' The Borg - Making The Movie.
Starring Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner, LeVar Burton, Michael Dorn, Gates McFadden, Marina Sirtis, Alfre Woodard, James Cromwell, Alice Krige, Neal McDonough, Robert Picardo, and Dwight Schultz. Directed by Jonathan Frakes.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard awakens from a nightmare about his Borg assimilation experience to an incoming message from Admiral Hayes. Hayes informs Picard that Deep Space Five reported that a colony has been destroyed. Completing the Admiral's sentence, Picard realizes who destroyed the colony — the Borg.
Picard calls a meeting and informs his senior officers that their ship has been instructed to patrol the Neutral Zone. Their orders are to protect the area from any possible Romulan uprising during a Borg attack. Despite protests from his officers, Picard remains faithful to his orders and the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC 1701-E begins to patrol the area. Later, Picard regretfully tells Riker that it is his own fault they are stuck in the Neutral Zone. Starfleet believes Picard to be too emotionally involved with the Borg because of his previous assimilation to tactically complete a mission against them.
The men return to the bridge to learn that Starfleet has engaged in combat with the Borg. Intercepting messages between the starships, the crew learns that the Federation is losing. Picard, with his Borg experience, knows he can help the fleet. He informs his staff that he will make a decision directly in opposition to Starfleet commands. With no objections from his crew, Captain Picard gives the order and the starship Enterprise sets a course for Earth and the attacking Borg cube.
A massive battle ensues and it appears that the Federation will lose the fight. Despite serious structural damage to the Borg cube, their strength does not weaken. Even the U.S.S. Defiant, commanded by Worf, does not appear to be able to turn the tides of the battle. As the starship Defiant is about to ram the Borg ship on a suicide run, the U.S.S. Enterprise beams aboard its crew, including Worf. Picard, having an inside perspective of the Borg and their vessel, focuses the firepower of the fleet on coordinates he knows to be critical. Just as the main ship is destroyed, a spherical escape pod flies out. The sphere creates a temporal vortex, catching the starship Enterprise in its wake. Immune to the paradoxes created by the time travel, the starship's crew learns that Earth at the present time appears to be inhabited entirely by the Borg. The commanding officers realize that the Borg have gone into the past and assimilated Earth, so they follow them back in time to repair the damage the Borg have done.
On Earth, over three centuries earlier, a somber Lily Sloane accompanies a stumbling, drunk Zefram Cochrane out of a bar after a night of revelry. Then, Lily notices a fast moving light. She hardly has time to ask what the object is, when the Borg vessel attacks. Back aboard the Enterprise, Picard demands that Data tell him the exact date and location the Borg ship is attacking. The location: central Montana. The date: April 4, 2063 — the day before First Contact. Realizing that the Borg have come to prevent first contact between alien life forms and humans, the crew knows they must stop the Borg and facilitate this exchange. They destroy the Borg sphere, and Dr. Crusher, Captain Picard, Commander Data, Commander Riker, Counselor Troi and other U.S.S. Enterprise crew transport down to Earth to survey the damage.
At the Borg attack site in Montana, the crew finds destruction and chaos. They split into groups to search for Cochrane. Data and Picard hunt for Cochrane's warp ship, the Phoenix. There they encounter a very angry and confused Lily, who believes Data and Picard to be members of a coalition that broke the cease-fire after World War III. She shoots at them in a rage, but impervious to bullets, Data approaches Lily. Overcome by fear and radiation, she falls to the ground. Dr. Crusher diagnoses Lily with radiation sickness caused by the damaged Phoenix, and inoculates the entire crew. Against Picard's better judgment, Crusher takes Lily to sickbay. Geordi is called to help repair the warp vessel and Picard becomes intrigued by its historical significance. In this vessel began the future as the world would know it, and the past as Picard remembers it. He reaches out to touch the ship. Data, curious about the human need for tactile reinforcement, attempts to create the same feelings he observes in Picard, but is unsuccessful in duplicating this aspect of humanity.
Aboard the ship, two crewmembers are sent to examine unexplained maintenance problems, and both disappear. Picard is called to the ship and discovers that the survivors from the Borg sphere have transported onto the ship and are taking over Deck 16. While Picard arranges teams to fight them, the Borg manipulate the climate of the deck to suit their needs and begin to spread throughout the ship. When the Borg attack sickbay, Crusher, her staff, and Lily escape through a Jeffries tube, thanks to a distraction by the ship's Emergency Medical Hologram. While Crusher leads the group down the passageway, Lily steals away in a different direction.
On Earth, Riker finds Troi and Cochrane drunk in a bar. Troi justifies that the only way she could get Cochrane to talk to her was by shooting Tequila with him. Denying her drunken state, Troi offers her professional opinion on Cochrane. She explains, "He's nuts."
Picard and his team are tracking the Borg through the starship. As Crusher and her staff find Worf's team, Picard's team encounters the Borg, who have begun to assimilate U.S.S. Enterprise crewmembers. Worf's team engages the Borg in combat, but the enemies adapt to the crew's weapons too quickly to make any difference. The teams are ordered to regroup on Deck 15, but Data is captured. Picard cannot save him, so he quickly crawls into a Jeffries tube to escape. Face to face with Picard, Lily steals his phaser and demands an explanation and escape route. Picard agrees.
Geordi shows Cochrane the starship Enterprise through a large telescope on Earth and tries to convince him to launch his vessel the next morning. Geordi glorifies Cochrane by explaining that his ship will make first contact with alien life forms. Humanity will be saved if Cochrane launches his ship. Still drunk, Cochrane agrees.
Aboard the ship, the Borg Queen introduces herself to a bound Data, claiming that she is the Collective. Reactivating Data's emotion chip, the Borg begin to graph organic, human skin onto the android's arm. As Data is overcome by this new human sensation of touch, something he never thought possible, the Borg continue their work.
Lily and Picard wander through the service deck as the captain attempts to explain what has happened between Lily's time and his own. She begins to calm down until they suddenly run into a Borg-infested area. Quickly escaping in the Holodeck, Picard activates a Dixon Hill program. At a dance, he and Lily try to blend in without being noticed by the Borg. Following the Holodeck's story, Picard searches for Nicky the Nose and takes his machine gun. Killing the Borg with the gun, Picard retrieves the memory chip that contains all of the information the Borg has received. Lily then notices that the two dead Borg were once crewmembers of the U.S.S. Enterprise.
Back on Earth, Cochrane keeps hearing what an amazing historical figure he is and begins to question whether or not he wants to go through with the launch. He doubts his own nobility and flees the launch site. Geordi and Riker attempt to catch up with Cochrane in the woods and are forced to stun him with a phaser to return him to the Phoenix.
Lily and Picard join the rest of the surviving crew and discover that the Borg are outside of the ship. The retrieved memory chip reveals that they are reconfiguring the main deflector in order to contact the Borg of this century, calling them to Earth to assimilate the planet. Picard, Worf and Lieutenant Hawk put on space suits and venture onto the surface of the starship to stop the Borg.
Aware of Data's desire to become human, the Borg Queen offers him the chance to be entirely covered in human flesh and join the Borg, in an attempt to get the encryption codes from Data so she can obtain total control over the U.S.S. Enterprise. Outside the Enterprise, Hawk, Worf and Picard attempt to unlock the deflector dish. Attacked by a Borg, Worf's suit begins to depressurize. Two Borg are killed and Hawk is attacked. As the dish is released, a now-assimilated Hawk attempts to kill Picard. Worf saves the captain, but Hawk is killed. Picard and Worf then destroy the free-floating deflector dish.
On Earth, Cochrane explains to Riker that his only motivation for inventing warp travel was money. He never expected to save mankind, become a hero, or be instrumental in the founding of a new civilization. He simply wanted to retire in peace.
An argument ensues aboard the Enterprise as the majority of the senior officers believe that they should evacuate the ship, destroying it and the Borg. Picard won't give up, and insists they stay. Challenged by Worf, Picard orders him off the Bridge. Lily follows Picard into his ready room and demands that he explain his obsession with fighting the Borg. Picard declares he won't sacrifice the starship, and swears to finally make the Borg pay for all they've done. Lily quietly and calmly compares Picard to Captain Ahab, forever fighting his white whale — the Borg. Realizing that this fight could only destroy himself and his crew, Picard decides to evacuate the ship. Worf, Picard and Crusher activate the ship's self-destruct sequence. The countdown begins, and the crew leaves in escape pods. Picard surveys his ship and prepares to leave when he hears Data calling him.
Meanwhile , the earth-bound crew and Cochrane begin takeoff. Cochrane, Geordi and Riker take off in the Phoenix, and with music blaring, the three men launch successfully into orbit.
On the ship, Lily and Picard say good-bye and the captain goes to save Data. Entering Engineering, Picard confronts the Borg Queen, whom he knows from his experience with the Borg. The queen reminds Picard that it was not enough that he was assimilated, but that he needed to give himself freely to the Borg — she wished him to stand by her side as an equal to further the power of the Collective. Picard offers himself in exchange for Data, but the android does not comply. He refuses to leave, and at the queen's command, disarms the self-destruct sequence. He quickly enters the encryption codes, offering full control of the Enterprise to the Borg.
As Cochrane's ship nears warp, Data arms the U.S.S Enterprise's weapons and aims them at the defenseless Phoenix. At the Borg Queen's order, Data fires, but the missiles fail to hit the Phoenix. His deception of the Borg complete, Data smashes a conduit, releasing a gas that floods engineering, killing all organic material. As the Borg are destroyed, Picard climbs to safety and the Borg Queen falls into the deadly gas. With the Borg threat gone, Cochrane safely completes humanity's first warp flight.
Celebrating the flight back on Earth that night, Cochrane and the Enterprise crew see an alien ship land nearby. The doors open, and Zefram Cochrane makes Earth's first contact with an alien race — the Vulcans. Picard and his crew beam out, having witnessed this historic event, and the U.S.S Enterprise NCC 1701-E returns to the 24th century.