4/30/2003
I was making my rounds earlier today and noticed the Story of the Day at Robert Loch’s blog. It’s a 4-part interview with Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google.
Based on multiple news stories regarding several controversial moves on the part of Google, I’ve tried to maintain a healthy level of skepticism as to whether or not Google has any ulterior motives. I am more reassured now after reading all 3-parts and encourage others that might be skeptical to read the series as well (especially those at Google-Watch).
In part 1, Mr. Schmidt discusses the purchase of Blogger in February. While explaining the diffusion of information, this statement struck my fancy:
“When the Internet publicity began, I remember being struck by how much the world was not the way we thought it was, that there was infinite variation in how people viewed the world. People are amazingly surprised to find out that an awful lot of people think that they’re idiots, whether it is the Flat Earth Society or some other variant.”
In addition to showcasing fugly sites, SomethingAwful.com (and others) continually expose the: weird, half-baked, sensationalistic and unoriginal thoughts that are somehow created by a fellow human being.
In part 2, Mr. Schmidt mentions his own thoughts regarding privacy and free speech, stating:
“My view is that the cure to the problem of free speech is more free speech, not less. And Google exists in order to further that outcome, which is more communication.”
He then touches on the privacy issues several individuals have mentioned:
“In this case, which I’m familiar with, people get confused over what Google knows about people. We actually know very little. We don’t know anything about you. We know your IP address but your IP address can be shared. This is all disclosed in great detail as you read into our website.”
And the George Zimmer promise:
“And so we have a tremendous debate, because Google has the ability to do many things like what you described, and in every case we decided not to. Because we don’t think it would benefit our end-users. And I should be very clear: We will not do that. That’s a commitment.”
In part 3 he discusses the Google Appliance and the worldwide markets Google is involved with. Nothing very profound or earth shattering though, it could still be news to you however if you don’t follow the happenings at Google.
Lastly, if you don’t already, be sure to visit Dr. Elewyn Jenkins Microdoc News. It is continuously filled with well-written commentary regarding Google and blogging.
Addendum: Here is the 4th and final part of the Eric Schmidt interview, was just published today (May 5th) — he discusses the oft-quoted Moore’s Law.
Alrighty. You’ve heard various musicians moan and groan about how they have lost oodles of money (which may or may not be true). You’ve heard politicians and their cohorts, lobbyists, explain the need for harsh penalties and devastating lawsuits (billions of dollars in damages are claimed by the RIAA).
What you might not have heard is that Hilary Rosen, current chairman and CEO for the RIAA, will be the author for Iraq’s new copyright laws (the roof, the roof, the roof is on fire). In addition to not being impervious to bombings, it appears Iraqi artisans are not impervious to outsiders ’stealing’ their hard work (see: labor theory of value). Actually, the new copyright laws for Iraq are being created to punish people in Iraq that pirate anything which is copyrighted, previously:
Under Iraqi copyright legislation, passed by The Revolution Leadership Council in 1971, a copyright lapses 25 years after the death of the author, but no more then fifty years after the publication of the work. It’s shorter for private works, and there are several public interest exemptions.
Continuing,
Iraq does not have a reciprocal copyright agreement with the United States, which means that US works are not protected.
As you might have guessed, those sorts of exchange policies keep individuals like Mrs. Rosen up at night (I?m kept up by Google AdWords).
In addition to having a reciprocal copyright agreement with itself, Congress has increased the life of a copyright almost a dozen times in the past 40 years and passed yet another extension in October of 1998 called the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act which tacks on another 20 years to an artisans work — bringing the duration to 95 years (you can see why Rosen might want to modify the existing Iraqi law). Last year, Eric Eldred and several others lost the (in)famous Supreme Court case involving these extensions, in particular those of Disney.
In honor of the new found gumption, I’m pleased to present three pictures I Photoshopped. Feel free to ’steal’ them, just make sure you save it to your own server — they were inspired originally by this:
Stay in school. Don’t do drugs.
Back in highschool (how many times have I said that now?) I participated with Distributed.net, the first large-scale public effort at using distributed computing to crack an encrypted key. I actually only participated for about 2 years (from late ‘98 to mid ‘00 or so) and the initial project, RC5-64, was completed last summer.
I’ve decided to give it another try, this time with their new RC5-72 project (a 72-bit encrypted RSA key versus 64).
A quick histiography regarding modern encryption. After World War 2, an agency known as the National Security Agency (or No Such Agency) was formed specifically to break encrypted messages (from ‘bad’ guys) through various means (some of which, like ‘Echelon,’ have come under scrutiny).
What is digital encryption? It’s a way of coding data so that only those you want to understand it can. Actually, there are two parts to a crypotsystem. First, the encryption algorithm, which methodically scrambles data. Then there is the key which can ‘break’ (understand) what the message means. Throughout the centuries various individuals (generals, politicians, lovers, etc.) have used encryption methods to hide messages from prying eyes. What is equally as significant is the decrypting side (cryptanalysis) of the equation, which tries to find a schema, a method to its madness.
As you can imagine with the advent of computers that could process and calculate combinations of numbers faster than the quickest human, decrypting messages are made that much easier. In fact, some of the first digital computers devopled were designed to decipher codes from ‘the bad guys’ (like the German ‘Enigma‘). Some of the original uses for computers were for balistics in canons [ENIAC] or later with missles and rockets, especially the Apollo/Gemini Programs as discussed by Ceruzzi).
One of the more popular encryption schema’s used today was developed in 1977 by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman (take the first letter of each of their last names, that’s where RSA comes from). What is RSA encryption?
“The RSA algorithm works as follows: take two large prime numbers, p and q, and find their product n = pq; n is called the modulus. Choose a number, e, less than n and relatively prime to (p-1)(q-1), and find its inverse, d, mod (p-1)(q-1), which means that ed = 1 mod (p-1)(q-1); e and d are called the public and private exponents, respectively. The public key is the pair (n,e); the private key is d. The factors p and q must be kept secret, or destroyed. It is difficult (presumably) to obtain the private key d from the public key (n,e). If one could factor n into p and q, however, then one could obtain the private key d. Thus the entire security of RSA depends on the difficulty of factoring; an easy method for factoring products of large prime numbers would break RSA. ”
Originally, the NSA and other ‘intelligence agencies’ (like MI6) had the capability to crack nearly all encrypted messages and they wanted it to stay that way.
Then along comes a ‘troublemaker’ named Phil Zimmerman. You see, it is illegal under current U.S. law to export sophisticated encryption software (that’s one of the reasons OpenBSD is based in Canada). Mr. Zimmerman created an encryption program called Pretty Good Privacy (PGP). In 1991 he wrote PGP1.0 which implemented RSA encryption, combined with his own cipher called Bass-O-Matic (which was later replaced by IDEA which is from Ze Swiss). Both RSA (those 3 guys formed a company) and the State sue Mr. Zimmerman for: using unlicensed intellectual property (RSA) and for exporting the actual program outside America (he probably didn’t as he lent it to a bunch of friends who in turn gave it to a bunch of more people who posted it online… and we know what happens with that).
The lawsuits are later dropped and PGP became ubiquitous among the geek community. The goal of the RC5 Distributed.net project is to break an RSA encrypted key. The first one was 56-bit, the next was 64-bit and the new one is 72-bit. “The more bits used in a key, the stronger the encryption. But the increase is exponential, so that a 64-bit key is only marginally longer than a 56-bit key, but would take 256 times longer to break.” (source)
A couple of additional notes:
If you’ve seen Mercury Rising with Bruce Willis or Good Will Hunting with Matt Damon or even Sneakers - a few of the concepts discussed in those films involve encryption (in GWH they supposedly edited out the part where he actually breaks some codes).
It is reported that PGP could have been compromised (in more than one way), there is however an ‘open-source’ version called OpenPGP (GnuGP) which is gaining wide spread use as well (having a compromised key sort of defeats the whole purpose).
Okay, so that wasn’t very brief, but I learned some more stuff while digging up links (I didn’t know how to make a chalupa). If enough of you want to do the RC5 Project, I could create a team – the Movementarians? Let me know.
