- Capitalism and Alternatives -

...or a hurricane in the making.

Posted by: borg on October 15, 1999 at 16:41:10:

In Reply to: A fart on the breeze... posted by Farinata on October 06, 1999 at 15:51:01:

...

: - so you're effectively just trying to crack a 128-bit key if you're trying to intercept traffic. See an article in last week's Sunday Times - the Weizmann Institute recently cracked a 512-bit RSA key in 12 microseconds. 128-bit is no longer secure...

They're talking 128-bit SSL, synchronous encryption.
Much stronger than 128-bit asynchronous. There has been
no known cracking of this type of code.

See the real SSL story.

: - and what these people seem to have done is just lifted Hushmail, added encryption a bit stronger and passed it off as their own; obviously intellectual property isn't private in this new state...

There's no effective way to protect intellectual property when
it's put out in an anarchic environment.

: - also, the user's transactions will only be as secure as the computer they're doing it on. Given the average competence of most users vis-a-vis security, this is a great big hole; you would merely have to infect their computer with Back Orifice 2000 and you'd be able to see everything they typed into their web browser, regardless of the encryption during sending.

You're right about "average competence". What's new?

: (Everyone who uses a Microsoft OS (i.e. NT, Windows 95 or 98) is vulnerable to this one; since macro viruses can be written to send and autoinstall a BO2K payload using Outlook Express without alerting either the victim or carrier; another good reason to use a real operating system rather than one of Bill's abominations...

: (no corporate body has ever produced an operating system worth two beans; the only two reliable and secure OSes in existence (*nix/*BSD and GNU/Linux) are the result of open collaborative projects)

All very good points and good reasons not to use Windoze GUIs to do
the asynch encryption.

: Still, let these people do what they want, as long as they don't try and live in their paradise while sucking resources out of this one. And if it collapses, as it probably will, people will come to the realization that, well, maybe capitalism doesn't work.

"State Capitalism"--using the popular vernacular on this board--
will fail. Now we'll see if the free market will work, that
is, free from any restraints or support of any meatspace state.

I expect the minions of the state are very busy acting like
farts in a whirlwind on this one even as the hurricane builds
elsewhere.

McSpot has the dispersed server routine in place. So does LFC.




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