Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward 26130 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Dec 2009
GCHQ discovered the maths behind the possibility of public-key encryption - that does not give them the ability to decipher it.
The actual encryption scheme chosen is independant of the idea behind public key. You can use any scheme you want, it just so happens that IE uses RSA with a failry short key length which can be broken
There is a reasonable definition of "can't be decrypted" if brute forcing it takes > million years.
There is some evidence that the NSA exploits weakness in RSA which is used by some SSL implementations - but mostly they don't need to because they can simply ask Google/Facebook/etc for the certificates which allow them to decode the keys anyway
> you can be honest about former employees
So long as you are really sure you are being honest.
Can you prove that your records are correct?
Can you prove that the statements weren't motivated by personal feelings?
Can you demonstrate that there was no discrimination against the person?
Remember in a libel case you have to prove that the allegations you made were true - the person allegedly libeled doesn't have to prove they weren't.
Is it worth the risk to your business or should you just say nothing ?
Because somebody in the US would have been bribed/blackmailed into handing it over to criminal gangs - and so billions would be being stolen from online bank accounts.
Or the Russians/Chinese would also have cracked it and everyone in the world would have boxes that decrypted American military communications leading to defeat at the hands of apparently insignificant 3rd world forces.
The army would then have turned up at NSA headquarters with a bunch of tanks asking why the NSA had let their soldiers die by not telling the army that their codes were crap.
And the person in front of the gates telling you which one to use.
... oh the empty one which has just been vacated by the last user ?
.... thank you very much I would never have figured that one at on my own...
Except in Manchester where they stand there to stop you using the gates - just be a minute - just rebooting them - just give it 5 minutes
So it was a total coincidence that soon after nice friendly eco-aware native Americans arrived on the continent all the big slow defenseless meaty animals suddenly disappeared?
Looks like we will have to rename "head smashed in buffalo jump" heritage site to "caring for the poor endangered species impacted by climate change buffalo jump"
Suppose somewhere in the Nokia patent portfolio there is one on saying the word "hello" on a mobile phone or something similarly ridiculous - that Microsoft can use to threaten all the other makers.
Remember they already make about 4x as much from patents on Android phones as they do on their own winPho.
Half is tricky when "what you have" is a major interest in a currently operating public company.
If half of his shares in Google and half his votes on the board were suddenly owned by somebody who hated his guts - exactly what would the company be then worth?
You don't think the point of the certs might have been to drive customers to use MSFT products in the knowledge that they could hire somebody who had proven that they actually knew what they were talking about?
If the point is just to make a profit on the certs - they could just put them all on ebay
Why does there need to be a groundswell of development for mips?
I don't care what CPU is in my phone so long as the apps work, and they are written in Java
I have a Pi but I really don't ae if it has an ARM or Atom CPU - I couldn't even tell you if it was 32 or 64bit without checking /proc/cpu - I just care that is is a little Linux machine and has python.
What will make this a success is a customer using it rather than an ARM in sufficiently large numbers.
Still it will be nice if ARM had some competition - look at what a monopoly did to Intel
The battling business units are MSFTs big problem - and the reason Win8 failed.
When your main app, MS-Office doesn't use any of the features of your new OS because they had their own release schedule and your main dev tool doesn't make it easy (or even possible) to write apps using your new interface because their manager doesn't like the other manager - you are screwed.
You can't picture this happening under Jobs - imagine iPhone not working with iTunes because of a sulking minion !
it's not the shipping cost so much as time and predictability.
If a typhoon delays a ship or a longshoreman strike in one of a dozen cities ties up the inventory of a vital component you end up missing a christmas release ...
Corning, makers of Gorilla glass, moved their plant to next door to Foxconn because it takes 6 weeks to ship from New York state, which means they have to over produce to handle any unforseen increase in orders and pay for the 6weeks of inventory sitting in a container. They also have to tell their customer's design guru to lock out any design changes 6 weeks earlier than a local competitor.
