Quantum Encryption Implementation Broken 133
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Professor Johannes Skaar's Quantum Hacking group at NTNU have found a new way to break quantum encryption. Even though quantum encryption is theoretically perfect, real hardware isn't, and they exploit these flaws. Their technique relies on a particular way of blinding the single photon detectors so that they're able to perform an intercept-resend attack and get a copy of the secret key without giving away the fact that someone is listening. This attack is not merely theoretical, either. They have built an eavesdropping device and successfully attacked their own quantum encryption hardware. More details can be found in their conference presentation."
Re:I've heard this before (Score:1, Interesting)
>>And Communism works, IN THEORY.
>No it doesn't
Agreed, and for yet another reason: even if humans are all saints
and DO happily sacrifice for society, the problem of coordinating
dispersed knowledge can't be solved. For details, google
"calculation debate".
Re:I've heard this before (Score:2, Interesting)
No, actually, it doesn't. Like democracy (which it is, in a sense, an analog of, addressing economic rights instead of political rights) it relies on the idea that humans will work for the betterment of themselves, individually, so that widely and equally distributing power among the population will result in the broadest possible benefit. As with democracy, one of the places that communism breaks down in practice (and, in fact, is "broken by design" in all real-world attempts to implement anything called "Communism", which are based not directly on Marx and Engels work, but on Lenin's adaptation which introduce the idea of a priviledged self-selected elite working -- in Leninist theory -- on behalf of the masses, because it was intended to work in places that hadn't met the prerequisites Marx had identified for a Communist revolution. This replacement of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" with what amounted to a dictatorship on behalf of the proletariat was pretty contrary to the whole idea of Communism, and in theory as well as in practice is very similar to fascist corporatism.)
The critique of capitalism at the center of Marx's communism relies, in part, on that fact; it is particularly central to the idea that the "alienation of labor" is a social problem as well as a personal problem for workers. It is true that it is a common criticism (from very early times -- the criticism is specifically addressed in the Communist Manifesto) that Communism would do away with personal incentive because it would abolish property. But, while the Manifesto talks about eliminating "bourgeois property", it specifically draws an analogy to the destruction of feudal property with the creation of "bourgeois property". The Manifesto, on its own, lays out some of how Communists sought to transform the model of property -- particularly, Communists sought an end to private ownership of land in favor of renting from the State, and to end the heritability of wealth; just as what Communists refer to as "bourgeois" property involved the transition to entailments and other encumbered forms of ownership as the norm for property rights -- particularly in land -- the Communist model of property was essentially and end to fee simple ownership and other permanent rights as the dominant norm in favor of life or (particularly in the case of real property) term interests. The Manifesto clearly sees the mode of property it adopts as providing personal economic incentives -- and actually providing personal economic incentives that are better at promoting economic progress than those produced by "borgeois" property just as the "bourgeois" property model was seen as doing compared to feudal property. One can certainly argue that the Communist model is wrong about how the personal incentives would work out in the environment its programs proposed, but it is clearly wrong to say that the theory of Communism failed to recognize that personal economic incentives are a primary driver of human behavior, since that observation is at the center of Communist theory.
Re:I've heard this before (Score:3, Interesting)
You defend the idea of Communism, yet hint at exactly why it doesn't work. Pure Communism cannot and will not ever work for the same reasons that pure Democracy cannot and will not work - natural cooperation breaks down when the group size becomes so large that individuals do not know every other member of the group on a personal level. Our congress would not function if it got much larger than it is. If it grew to over 1,000 members our government would almost certainly collapse, as there would be no way to prevent the tyranny of the masses.
Incidentally, Capitalism doesn't get it right either, but it much better accounts for human nature than Communism does on a large scale. Pure Capitalism misses the mark because it assumes we are completely self-serving, seeking only for our own best advantage. This is not the case - there is altruism within us, and while not as prevalent as our self-serving nature, it tends to screw up the Capitalist ideal if not taken account for. Incidentally this altruistic streak really screws with Game Theory, making it completely unreliable. In any case, Capitalism does not correct the wealth disparity between the rich and the poor, however it does improve -everyone's- position, making a poor capitalist much richer than a poor communist.
Regarding Carl Marx, I commit a conscious logical fallacy with any of his ideas ever since I did a research paper on the man in junior high. He was a serious piece of shit human being who would rather bemoan his status in the world than get off his ass and work to provide food for his starving family. I have absolutely no respect for him or any of his ideas, and you will never convince me of the value his concepts while invoking his name. When I read about him, all I really wanted to do was kick his whiny little ass. Incidentally, I feel the same way about-able bodied people who make excuses about why they cannot work or need support when I see for-hire signs not a half a block down from where they panhandle. That Carl Marx was able to gain world wide notariety and respect probably for a number of centuries while being a piece of shit human being just pisses me off even more.
Re:Successfully broken before anybody was using it (Score:3, Interesting)
I raise you a Vigenere - used by the Confederates after it was successfully broken by Babbage.
(Also, apparently they changed the password twice during the course of the war.)