Re: Proof of Work - atmospheric carbon
If POW tokens do become useful, and especially if they become money, machines will no longer sit idle. Users will expect their computers to be earning them money (assuming the reward is greater than the cost to operate). Computers are already designed to consume much less electricity when idle than when running full tilt. This trend will continue and extend; some modern chips throttle down to zero MHz and virtually zero watts at idle, waking automatically at the next interrupt. The last thing we need is to deploy a system designed to burn all available cycles, consuming electricity and generating carbon dioxide, all over the Internet, in order to produce small amounts of bitbux to get emails or spams through. Can't we just convert actual money in a bank account into bitbux -- cheaply and without a carbon tax? Please? John - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to majord...@metzdowd.com
Re: Obama's secure PDA
At 2:49 AM -0500 1/26/09, Ivan Krstiç wrote: There are still conflicting reports about whether the hardware is an altered RIM BlackBerry or a different device, though the most likely contender for the latter option appears to be the General Dynamics Sectéra Edge, which features a trusted [secondary] display and two buttons used to switch between classified and unclassified operation. Government Computer News says it is definitely not a BlackBerry. However, GCN's reporters aren't always as good as they should be (or even as good as the regular IT press) on getting their facts straight on security issues. http://gcn.com/articles/2009/01/23/obama-gets-super-secure-smartphone.aspx I too would like to hear more information on this, particularly the crypto that is known to be used on the Edge. --Paul Hoffman, Director --VPN Consortium - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to majord...@metzdowd.com
Re: Proof of Work - atmospheric carbon
Can't we just convert actual money in a bank account into bitbux -- cheaply and without a carbon tax? Please? If only. People have been saying for at least a decade that all we have to do to solve the spam problem is to charge a small fee for every message sent. Unfortunately, there's a variety of reasons that's never going to work. One of the larger reasons is that despite a lot of smart people working on micropayments, we have nothing approaching a system that will work for billions of tranactions per day, where 90% of the purported payments are bogus, along with the lack of any interface to the real world financial system that would scale and withstand the predictable attacks. My white paper could use a little updating, but the basic conclusions remain sound: http://www.taugh.com/epostage.pdf R's, John - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to majord...@metzdowd.com
Re: Obama's secure PDA
On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 02:49:31AM -0500, Ivan Krsti? wrote: Finally, any idea why the Sect?ra is certified up to Top Secret for voice but only up to Secret for e-mail? (That is, what are the differing requirements?) I know no specific details but strongly suspect the difference in requirements, and thus certifications, stems from the likelyhood that the device stores (even very briefly) email and cached web objects, but does not store voice communications. Thor - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to majord...@metzdowd.com
Re: Obama's secure PDA
On Jan 26, 2009, at 2:49 AM, Ivan Krstić wrote: [A]ny idea why the Sectéra is certified up to Top Secret for voice but only up to Secret for e-mail? (That is, what are the differing requirements?) I have no information, but a guess: Phone conversation encryption, at all levels, has been around for many years. Email is a relative newcomer. Further, the problem for voice is inherently simpler: A conversation is transient. It's not expected to be recorded, and I'm sure the devices are designed to make recording a conversation difficult even for someone with full access to the phone. So you're dealing with establishing a secure session, with nothing left after the fact. If you're talking email, on the other hand, you're inherently dealing with information at rest. That changes the whole game, introducing issues of key management, maintenance of security level of time - a conversation once completed is gone, so the question of how to declassify it or move it to another compartment or whatever cannot arise - how to deal with forwarding, and so on. All of this is inherent in a usable email system. An email system for the White House has the additional complication of the Presidential Records Act: Phone conversations don't have to be recorded, but mail messages do (and have to remain accessible). It makes one wonder if this is a Sectéra limitation, a Sectéra-for- the-President limitation, or whether there is no Top Secret email infrastructure at all -- Jerry - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to majord...@metzdowd.com
