Quantum Computers Aren’t Magic Either

Let me it shown that “super intelligent” talk does occur on gun forums. And by “super intelligent” I mean buzz word laden talk about theoretical topics that really have no bearing on modern society yet. In the computer science world quantum computers are the big next thing buzz word. They are based on a technology few have any understanding of (quantum theory) and therefore are perfect devices to make insane claims. One of these insane claims is that quantum computers will instantly destroy all modern cryptography methods and instantly make the entire security structure of the universe collapse causing the world to end.

Case in point Secure Socket Layer (SSL) is a security scheme used by most finical institutes to prevent prying eyes from seeing what you’re doing while on your banks web site. More or less it just sends normal Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) data through an encrypted tunnel which should be impossible for an outside person to see. In actuality this isn’t the case and there are functional attacks against SSL but they involve vulnerabilities in the protocol itself not the encryption being used. The perviously mentioned end of the world claims would be direct attacks again the encryption itself.

Well like most over the top fear mongering done about poorly understood theoretical technology, the fear that quantum computers will make modern encryption scheme useless is far from factual. An article I found via Bruce Scheier’s blog does the math for us and shows that quantum computers aren’t anything to fear.

Quantum computers could in fact speed up the time it takes to decrypt modern encryption schemes but there are two major things to note. First of all quantum computers are in their pre-infancy, meaning they are still in the extremely experimental stages. The post I liked to in Scheier’s blog is about how they were able to finally factor the number 15 using a quantum computer. Note the number 15 was chosen because it is a special case and can be represented by a specific form (discussed in the Emergent Chaos article I linked to). Factoring the primes of any number is not currently feasible with quantum computers.

The second thing to note about quantum computers is that they will start out slow and have to build up speed so to speak. The first quantum computers will be extraordinary slow at performing the tasks given to them just like modern semi-conductor computers once were. They will have to be developed over time and make them faster and better suited to perform the tasks put before them.

Currently RSA keys of 4096-bits in length are the largest supported by most software programs. According to the linked Emergent Chaos article if everything advanced as quickly in the quantum computer field as it has in the semi-conductor field 4096-bit RSA keys wouldn’t be broken until 2053. Assuming quantum computers advanced much quick these keys would still be viable for 25 years.

Likewise with current computing technology 4096-bit RSA keys are calculated to be safe until 2060. That means if quantum computers advance as quickly as current computers they would be able to break 4096-bit RSA keys only 7 years ahead of modern computers. This demonstrated that getting our knickers all in a bunch over emerging technologies is once again premature at best. Computers are not magical machines capable of any feat put before them, they are machines based on the reality they have been built in meaning they can only do tasks in the realm of their capabilities. The sooner people realize this the better.

When States are Poor it’s a Tax Dodge

OK I’m not a fan of Microsoft’s business practices in general but I’m becoming less of a fan of this whole desire to clamp down on so-called tax dodges. See it’s only in a time of economic downturn does the government start to consider legal business practices tax dodges. Let’s take Microsoft for instance.

Microsoft’s main headquarter is in Redmond, Washington. This is the location a majority of their development work is done. But development work isn’t their money maker, licensing their developed software is. Washington state charges a .484% software royalty tax, meanwhile Nevada charges no such tax. Microsoft, being a large business who knows how to handle tax codes, built their license center in Nevada. The license center is the arm of Microsoft that actually deals with licensing the software which is considered the sale.

This is how the United States works, if you don’t like one state you go to another. Washington knew they could generate revenue by establishing a software royalty tax since they had the worlds largest software company in their state. This means the state created an environment hostile to its largest company to make some more money. Microsoft realizing they are getting a bad deal moved their software sales department somewhere less hostile to their business.

Well some guy has decided that the way to fix Washington’s current budget problems is to charge Microsoft the software royalty tax anyways. These are the types of ideas that really piss me off honestly. The writer proclaims Microsoft is getting preferential treatment and is dodging taxes. I’ll be totally honest if I owned a business and after some time the state enacted a tax aim specifically to make money off of my company I’d have done the same thing as Microsoft. It’s probably not feasible to move the entire company due to having to move all the employees but if it were feasible I’d move the entire operation.

I’m not a fan of Microsoft, in fact they really don’t make any products beyond the XBox 360 that I like. But I get pissed off when somebody who doesn’t like a company decides that we should attack it via labeling them with some arbitrary title. In this case that title would be tax dodger, which as we know is becoming the boogeyman label given by our government.

1984 Just Gets Closer Every Year

OK I understand parents wanting to keep track of their kids but there really has to be a limit. I think that limit is crossed once you strap GPS tracking devices to your children and follow their every move. Well a company called Lok8u has a device called the num8 for those overly paranoid parents. It’s a wrist watch that lets you track your child’s every move because that’s better for their development or something I guess. Here’s their excuse:

Speaking to the Daily Mail, Steve Salmon, from Lok8u, said: “Losing your child, if only for a brief moment, leads to a state of panic and makes parents feel powerless. The overriding aim of num8 is to give children their freedom and parents peace of mind.”

Yeah so your saying that if parents lose track of their kid for even a moment it leads to panic? I wonder what was wrong with my parents because they did become paranoid every time I left the house to go do something. And this device doesn’t give children freedom beyond being able to roam where mom and dad say.

Of course people will bring up the whole “if you child is kidnapped you can find them” argument which is bullshit as well. See being this is a wrist watch you can just pull it off a child. For that matter a child can just pull it off, put it somewhere they are supposed to be, and go do what they want. Seriously this surveillance society thing needs to be put to death now.

I don’t see how a child can develop independence while be tracked everywhere they go. You need to let your children get out and explore on their own otherwise they’ll never develop that good old exploratory desire.

Wow Windows Vista Really Failed

I never liked Windows Vista but it just dawned on me how big of a failure it was. There is a story on Slashdot about how Microsoft wasn’t going to back port a patch made in Vista and Server 2003 to XP. My first reaction was to complain how they won’t support their operating system even though their new one isn’t out yet.

Yeah I totally forgot there was a version between Windows XP and Windows 7 called Windows Vista. Yup it was so bad I suppressed the memory of it’s existence.

Awesome Gmail Feature

Yeah I’m probably behind the times as I’m a pretty vanilla e-mail user but I just discovered an awesome feature in Google’s Gmail.

If you want to sign up for an account or any other thing that you don’t want to receive e-mail from simple enter your Gmail address with a plus sign and extra junk at the end of the name. For example if my e-mail address was fakeaddress@gmail.com I could sign up for a web site using fakeaddress+anygibberish@gmail.com and the confirmation e-mail from the site would reach my fakeaddress@gmail.com inbox.

You can than block all mail sent to fakeaddress+anygibberish@gmail.com so it all gets sent straight to the spam folder. Many Google thinks up some amazing features.

Movement to Get Britain to Apologize for Persecution of Turing

If you’re in the computer science circle you will know the name Alan Turing. Mr. Turing is considered by many to be the father of computer science. His claims to fame are laying the ground work for computing in general, helping defeat the Nazi enigma cipher scheme, and coming up with a scientific method to determine if machines can think (call the Turing test).

But he was gay and back in the era of World War II that wasn’t considered acceptable. After helping win World War II this is how he was treated:

In 1952 Turing was prosecuted under the gross indecency act after admitting to a sexual relationship with a man. Two years later he killed himself.

Of course when there is prosecution there is punishment:

Alan Turing was given experimental chemical castration as a “treatment” and his security privileges were removed, meaning he could not continue work for the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

Well there is now a movement to get the British government to apologize for their persecution. I don’t know if it will go through but I’d like to see those British royals have to apologize for treating a war hero this way.

And yes I call him a war hero even though he didn’t fight on the front lines. He was paramount in breaking the Nazi communication cipher scheme. Breaking this scheme ultimately helped us win the war since we were able to decipher and read their communications. An apology by the British government for persecuting somebody who helped saved their little island is the least they could bestow upon Mr. Turin.

This Case Won’t Die

Seriously this is getting ridiculous, when you think the SCO vs. IBM lawsuit is dead it rises again from the dead. For those of you who don’t know SCO sued IBM back in 2003 for the sum of $1 billion because SCO thought they owned the rights to UNIX. See Linux killed their business and IBM was one of Linux’s largest supporters as well as a supporter with lots of money so they became target one. Well things became fortunate when a court ruling stated Novell owned the rights to UNIX and Novell was more than happy to let other people use it.

That ruling has now been overturned allowing what is left of SCO to continue going after IBM. The worst part is SCO never once provided proof that it owned the rights to UNIX nor that Linux contained any code from SCO’s UNIX. They also kept changing their claims and tactics which dragged the case one for many years while draining SCO’s small amount of money. Of course Microsoft, who Linux has been steadily chipping away at, eventually floated SCO some money to keep the lawsuit going. Even that money wasn’t enough because after it was ruled Novell owned the rights to UNIX SCO had to file Chapter 11.

Sadly it seems as though this case will rise from the dead. Cripes!

Trust No One, Especially if They Produce Your Cell Phone

It’s no secret I’m a geek. I work at a technology company, pay attention to technology news, get excited over new releases of Mac OS, Linux, and Windows and I have a smart phone. My smart phone is an old Palm Treo 755p running Palm OS (I still refuse to call it Garnet OS). By today’s standards, and even by the standards of the day I purchased it, it’s an outdated phone.

I’ve been looking at new phones but haven’t found one that suites me. The iPhone would be nice if it wasn’t on AT&T, and didn’t have draconian policies in place for it’s App Store. Android would be nice but it’s on T-Mobile which doesn’t get coverage in may places I travel to. Then there is the Palm Pre which I’ve had a slight love affair with due to the fact it’s from Palm and it’s on Sprint (I’m out of contract so I’m in no hurry to get into a contract with another carrier). I’ve been waiting for Palm to open the flood gates and allow third party applications to be installed on the Pre without using the special developer mode. Well I think the Pre may be off of my list.

Apparently the Palm Pre periodically reports you GPS coordinates back to Palm. I know what you’re thinking, since the cell phone providers can triangulate your position from your cell phone what does it matter if GPS coordinates are being transmitted? Well triangulating my position via my phone is simply a side effect of the technology and can be done with any radio based device. Also Palm is receiving these coordinates, and frankly they have no business having them. They have no need to know where I am when using their product, and they never mention that they are doing this. It’s slight of hand acts like this that really piss me off.

The link does have instructions on disabling this problem but it’s unknown if these changes will hold after a software update. But this is a good lesson on why you should trust no one with your security. This goes doubly so for closed source software vendors where you can’t know for certain that they aren’t doing something malicious under the hood. This goes triple for a company that produces a product that you carry around with you everywhere that has the ability to track you. Paranoia when it comes to personal security is a good thing.

Further Research


Palm’s terms and conditions that legally allow them to get away with this. (PDF)

Web Development Made Awesome

I’m doing some web development for work currently and have decided that there are two tools all web developers need to know. The first is Django…

http://www.djangoproject.com/

Django is an amazing web development framework. Think of it as Ruby on Rails but for Python. The Django framework allows you to do all you server side work in Python which to me make it an amazing tool. And get this unlike many development tools out there Django is very well documented. Their web page has a good tutorial for starting off to top off the documentation.

Then there is jQuery…

http://jquery.com/

jQuery is a JavaScript widget library. It let’s you “AJAXify” your site easily for buzzword compliance and make designing the page interface very easy. But I think the best part is that the data presented by jQuery will display if a visitor has disabled scripting. Granted the information won’t look nearly as pretty but it will display.

These two tools have made web development very easy on me.

Using Waste Water to Determine Drug Use

This is an interesting study…

http://eastoregonian.com/main.asp?SectionID=13&SubSectionID=48&ArticleID=95522&TM=41256.42

Researchers are testing untreated sewage for chemicals that are found in drugs. From the article…

Scientists from Oregon State University, the University of Washington and McGill University partnered with city workers in 96 communities, including Pendleton, Hermiston and Umatilla, to gather samples on one day, March 4, 2008. The scientists then tested the samples for evidence of methamphetamine, cocaine and ecstasy, or MDMA.

Just wait until all waste water leaving your home gets tested. If they find traces of anything illegal it will give the Drug Enforcement Agency probably cause to storm your home. Ah yes, progress.

Source: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/mapping_drug_us.html