Adi Shamir, Al Jazeera , Bhutan, Hadoop, Iraq

ADI Shamir

the increasing complexity of modern microprocessor chips is almost certain to lead to undetected errors.
... A subtle math error would make it possible for an attacker to break ... public key cryptography.

Adi ( the S in RSA) is the guy that Murdoch turned to after Sky TV's subscriber cards were regularly hacked. Since Adi's encryption, Sky's signals are now no longer hacked.

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Blogroll.
... Head over to the "Tags" section on the settings page, make one of the tags you use for subscriptions public, and click on "add a blogroll to your site." ... I would but I'm a feared of making the slightest change... blogspot has gone XML , they tolerate my old CSS but the slightest change and I flip to vanilla XML
all that effort I put into my CSS gets trashed, and I need months of study of the new XML ... problem is I don't have a cushy salary like last year, and who wants to do that shit on their own time?
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Happy Birthday english.aljazeera.net
aljazeera

Since it launched a year ago, Al Jazeera has reported from across the globe on the stories often untouched by other broadcasters.

Can it be just a year??
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nytimes
net-zero potato chips.
As factories and residences go off-grid, central control weakens. Anarchy loosed upon the world?
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lost books
google spreadsheets
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Tiggy in Bhutan

Tiggy on flickr



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Since Yahoo bought flickr, you now need a yahoo ID to log on. However if you choose a separate id, it becomes difficult to switch tags to your yahoo email.
Yahoo evidently desire to own your entire existence within a single ID. You may prefer aliases.
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I.B.M. is packaging in its cloud offering ... called Hadoop, running on the Linux operating system. Hadoop is based on an open-source search project called Nutch, and an open-source version of Google’s MapReduce software for spreading complex computer tasks across clusters of machines.

Since 'Storm Worm' became the worlds biggest supercomputer, we all await its commands. Storm is apparently unstoppable, but so far it seems to be used chiefly to spread via.gra erect.ile disf.unction spam.
gizmodo

Rather recently the USA was trying to ban the export of 64bit computers, for fear that rogues would simulate nuclear weapons?
Then in the 90's
Weta computers in Miramar NZ became the world's biggest Intel farm, to simulate orcs and elves in battle.
Celera became the biggest Alpha farm to match DNA sequences.
A volunteer global shared-cycles PC community cracked a 512 bit RSA composite.

The horse has bolted.

I maintain that there is no limit to the amount of computing resources that will be required for simulation. Long after the human population has crashed and stabilised,
we will inhabit an earth where the global crust will be converted to computers, and we will need to lose the waste heat. This, rather than CO2, will drive the need for solar shields (sulphates above the troposphere?). Hopefully some kind of low energy quantum computers will help. It has been proven that there is a minimum energy required to compute. Actually the energy is required to erase memory. Maybe we will kill our biosphere by our escalating need to forget.

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Iraq: In 2003 I actually believed
1. there would be a brief period of boobytraps (IEDs)
2. the Iraqi people would sullenly submit within a few months to the USA/corporate takeover of their oil.

How marvelous that the Iraqi people resisted for 4 years. That alone leaves a stirling signal for future victims of USanian aggression, for generations to come.

Now that the USA is about to declare victory in Iraq, lets not despair. Four years of resistance is a great benchmark.

Victory in this instance means:

USA aerial bombs the shit out of any the neighbourhood origin of resistance. Keeps its troop patrols down to keep casualties low.
Only 50 death-squad victims bodies found in a day, considered satisfactory, since there were formerly hundreds.

This is a variant of the Roman Empire method of maintaining Empire.

1. Rather few troops in situ, Sadistic local rulers empowered by death squads.
2. At any local resistance, kill random large numbers of the population to terrorize them into submission.

Re the sadistic local rulers: USA seems to have trouble with them (Noriega, Saddam). [was Noriaga sadistic?]
re 2. The USA doesn't need to kill people with spears and crucifixions, it uses 200kg bombs and anti-personnel cluster bombs. Terror-at-a distance. The ultimate to this trend is fragmentation bombs launched from robot planes.

I sadly accept this USA victory, but I have hope that it is temporary, not stable, and the people of the world, in Nigeria, Java, and Mesopotamia, have a chance to soon overthrow the vicious corporate overlords.

My predictions on 12 Sep 2001 have proven more accurate. I predicted
1. The USA would bomb the shit out of somewhere, regardless of any association with the event.
2. Human rights would take a major dive in the USA.

Adi Shamir, Al Jazeera , Bhutan, Hadoop, Iraq