Government snooping, backdoors and #necessaryhashtags - Page 6

Batalov · 2013-06-16, 08:23

It's a déjà vu all over again.

xilman · 2013-06-16, 09:30

Quote:

Originally Posted by Batalov

Yup.

Ernst is showing that he has Peter Cook for a mentor: "I have learned from my mistakes, and I am sure I can repeat them exactly".

CRGreathouse · 2013-06-16, 17:01

Compare: Torpenhow Hill.

ewmayer · 2013-06-16, 19:31

Quote:

Originally Posted by xilman

Also as it happens, hoi polloi, or some of the less couthful them at least, forget that "hoi polloi" is literally "the people" and doesn't take a preceding definitive article.

If you've ever used, e.g., "the alcohol" - and given your laudable love of potent potables I suspect you have - you have no right to whinge about definitive articles here.

I'll go with modern english usage of foreign-language loanwords for $1000, Alex:

Quote:

Some linguistic prescriptivists and students of ancient Greek argue that, given that hoi is a definite article, the phrase "the hoi polloi" is redundant, akin to saying "the the masses". Others argue that this is inconsistent with other English loanwords. The word "alcohol", for instance, derives from the Arabic al-kuhl, al being an article, yet "the alcohol" is universally accepted as good grammar; relevant differences, however, are that a) hoi polloi is transliterated but otherwise unmodified, whereas alcohol is altered in both pronunciation and associated spelling to form an independent word, and b) hoi polloi is left standing as a multiple-word phrase, with one word devoted exclusively to the function of the definite article, whereas in alcohol the grammatical particle serving as an article is assimilated into the (heavily modified) word.[10]

Even though hoi polloi is written in original 2-word fashion, my personal convention is to treat it as a "grouped loanword." Your convention clearly differs, but just as clearly this is not a settled issue of grammar.

A better example of Arabic "al" used both in non-contracted form and with a redundant "the" would be a phrase like the Al Qaeda splinter cell or the Al Arabiya offices. Paul, do you shout at the TV whenever you hear such a usage on the evening news?

(Don't even get me started on the common (mis)usage "an historical...", which only makes sense if you're a cockney and silence the 'h'. If one pronounces the 'h' to use 'an' here makes as much sense as to say, e.g. "I heard an hissing noise.")

-------------------------

Getting back on topic, I would love the crypto folks' take on this set of links - the first, How NSA access was built into Windows, dates all the way back to 1999. The last line of that wayback-piece is rather chilling:

According to one leading US cryptographer, the IT world should be thankful that the subversion of Windows by NSA has come to light before the arrival of CPUs that handles encrypted instruction sets. These would make the type of discoveries made this month impossible. "Had the next-generation CPU's with encrypted instruction sets already been deployed, we would have never found out about NSAKEY."

xilman · 2013-06-16, 21:12

Quote:

Originally Posted by ewmayer

If you've ever used, e.g., "the alcohol" - and given your laudable love of potent potables I suspect you have - you have no right to whinge about definitive articles here.

I will certainly use the phrase "the alcohol" when distinguishing between particular alcohols such as ethanol, methanol, 1-propanol, 2-propanol, and so forth.

You being of German speaking extraction will recognize that some words in English can legitimately be pluralized whereas in German they can not. Compare "sugars" with "Zuckersorten" for example.

As you state explicitly, words such as alcohol and alkali have been so modified and fused that the original definitive article is now part of the single word so in English it is natural, but perhaps regrettable, that an additional article is now conventional usage.

What really irritates me are the phrases "PIN number" and "LCD display". By far the worst, though, is someone (usually a member of the medical fraternity or sorority) asking "how are we today?", to which the response is usually along the lines of "I'm fine but I don't know about you."

ewmayer · 2013-06-16, 21:57

Quote:

Originally Posted by xilman

By far the worst, though, is someone (usually a member of the medical fraternity or sorority) asking "how are we today?", to which the response is usually along the lines of "I'm fine but I don't know about you."

I usually go with "you must have us confused with royalty." ;)

jasonp · 2013-06-16, 23:26

Encrypted computation is something of a grand challenge problem currently because of its cloud computing applications. Apparently the state of the art is perhaps 9 orders of magnitude slower than unencrypted computation. But NSAKEY was found because the authors left debug symbols inside a production release of the crypto library, not because anyone reverse engineered anything.

Edit: of course the key name could have just been an inside joke.

cheesehead · 2013-06-18, 22:19

Quote:

Originally Posted by garo

Though I am sure a certain individual would be here defending this latest outrage.

Please tell us who that certain individual is.

ewmayer · 2013-06-18, 22:56

Why, Dick Cheney, obviously.

Robert Holmes · 2013-06-18, 23:01

Quote:

Originally Posted by xilman

I first read that one a while back. Much more recently I was browsing around and came across a paper by Antoine Jouxin which a L(1/4) algorithm for solving the DLP in fields of small characteristic. A L(1/4) algorithm has markedly better asymptotic behaviour that the previous front-runners in index calculus attacks and the current front-runner in integer factorization which have L(1/3) behaviour.

This is quite off-topic, but an update: $L(1/4)$ has now been upgraded to the quasi-polynomial $O(q^{\log k / \log \log q})$ .

chappy · 2013-06-19, 00:11

Remember back in the good old days when the leaders of the CIA were so inept that they used unencrypted gmail drafts to communicate their affairs?

Maybe, we saw that all wrong and they knew their wasn't any point to hiding it.

I take some solace in the thought that some poor NSA minion is having to sort through all of Dubslow's Skrillex noise searching for message in the madness.

"Damn it! We've had another analyst go mad, this Dubslow kid must be an evil genius!"

2013-06-16, 23:26	#62
jasonp Tribal Bullet Oct 2004 3,541 Posts	Encrypted computation is something of a grand challenge problem currently because of its cloud computing applications. Apparently the state of the art is perhaps 9 orders of magnitude slower than unencrypted computation. But NSAKEY was found because the authors left debug symbols inside a production release of the crypto library, not because anyone reverse engineered anything. Edit: of course the key name could have just been an inside joke. Last fiddled with by jasonp on 2013-06-16 at 23:30

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2013-06-19, 00:11	#66
chappy "Jeff" Feb 2012 St. Louis, Missouri, USA 13×89 Posts	Remember back in the good old days when the leaders of the CIA were so inept that they used unencrypted gmail drafts to communicate their affairs? Maybe, we saw that all wrong and they knew their wasn't any point to hiding it. I take some solace in the thought that some poor NSA minion is having to sort through all of Dubslow's Skrillex noise searching for message in the madness. "Damn it! We've had another analyst go mad, this Dubslow kid must be an evil genius!"