vabmit

I think you're confusing complexity with difficulty. It may be 10^12 times more complex. But, if you're making your own FGPAs or chips and you can just use different word sizes or massively add more gates or processing cores. Or, even more specialized custom built super computers. The capabilities of what they're able to fabricate I think mitigate most of the protection provided by using 2048bit over 1024bit. It seems you need to be talking on the scale of at least 4096bit before the problem becomes intractable due to the limits of technology and the processing improvements that can be provided by custom hardware.

To put it in simple terms, doing operations with a 32bit numbers and a 64bit numbers have a calculable complexity gap. But, that gap means very different things in terms of difficulty on a 8bit microprocessor vrs a 32bit microprocessor vrs a 64bit microprocessor.

Lenstra et al performed the factorization you cite, again on CPUs. Lenstra said in 2007 that he expected with in 5 years to be able to do 1024bit number - again with CPUs. 2048bit is no where near 10^12 harder if you use GPUs with larger word/op/register sizes. That's especially so with FGPAs/custom hardware with custom sized words/registers/ops. With FGPAs and custom hardware you can also locate things physically in places to give a speed advantage. I really don't think you'd need a replacement for GNFS to do a 2048bit number.

This isn't directed at you, but I wish people would stop talking about how strong crypto is if they haven't written software to break it, don't understand the mathematics, and don't understand hardware design. I just facepalm and shake my head when people post publicly that you'd have to boil the oceans to factor a 1024bit number (break a 1024bit RSA openPGP key).

There's no need for a quantum computer. Everyone should be using at least 4096bit RSA.

1024bit RSA keys can be factored with conventional non-specialized hardware (read: CPU's, not even GPU's) with GNFS.

IMHO, 2048bit RSA keys can be factored by custom hardware that the NSA has developed. I posted my reasoning for this hypothesis in other hackernews threads. A very quick/terse run down of the main key points - 1) NSA is known to use customer hardware (they have their own chip fabs. You can extrapolate performance gain from things like GPUs, FGPAs, and Deepcrack 2. Al Qaeda uses 2048bit RSA for internal communications 3. Most corps, diplomats, criminals, and normal people use 2048bit RSA either directly (SSH keys, Website Certs, VPNs) or indirectly (CA's still use 2048bit RSA certs valid until 2020)

An interesting thing to note about 4096bit RSA openPGP keys, that's what Snowden was using. His PGP Key was a 4096bit RSA signing key with a 4096bit RSA encryption subkey.

The spike to 10+ sounds like it might be io blocking rather than CPU (which would be stuff like queries). If you look at your time wait (%wa) in top, and the output of iostat, you should be able to get an idea. If you're on VPS systems with older SATA drives that could be the bottle neck. If the Kernel is waiting for the disk(s) to be able to write more data to the storage bus/buffers it will block the storage process which will result in blocking for any application trying to access storage. As more and more processes block they'll go into poll/sleep loops and all those instructions will seem to spike the CPU load and make the CPU look busy even if the CPU is just sitting there saying "storage is still busy" over and over again. You probably have 1.00 to 2.00 true CPU load (queries, etc) which isn't that bad. But, you generally want to keep your CPU load below 1.00/per cpu. Otherwise, there is CPU level blocking. If you were swapping a lot (which you can also tell from top) that would aggravate and storage subsystem overloading. I would just post the output from top and iostat during one of the spikes here and see what people say rather than hiring an expensive consultant. You could probably find an experienced sysadmin to look at it as a favor, as well. They should be able to tell you quickly if you really need someone to look at your MySQL and app code to address this. Or, if you just need to add more nodes to your MySQL cluster (or look at something else like a NoSQL type setup).

> 1) A test to see how the journalist will react and to > flush out more information. I.e. force him to disclose > more information so they know what he has.

I think they already know through a post event review of MicroSoft's built in auditing logs. My understanding is that Snowden was a low level Windows admin that copied stuff that was either 1) in transit through a Microsoft Sharepoint server 2) anything he could find by roaming around the intranet. The NSA disclosed that he started grabbing documents when he was working as a contractor under Dell. They said he was aggressively exploring the limits of his network access and announced that 1) documents on their intranet would from now on be encrypted 2) that they would drastically reduce the number of system and network (as in Microsoft misuse of the term) administrators.

Plus, Wikileaks leaked an AES256 encrypted insurance file that presumably is everything that have from Snowden. Wikileaks has some of the shittiest OPSEC ever (as the Manning events showed). So, we know that they probably used openssl for the encryption and that the STK string is probably a sentence, or a few sentences, from a seminal published book about liberty/privacy. The NSA has probably already cracked the insurance file key. So, if they don't have the Manning portfolio from audit logs, they probably have it from Wikileaks.

There's an ex-NSA NWC guy that is putting out a lot of excellent information on this whole thing: 20committee

https://twitter.com/20committee

A number of start-ups have either already failed with a very similar business model or failed to go exponential growth. There was a good "Lessons Learned" post by one of them recently here on hacker news that got comments by both hiring managers and hackers. Why the rehash, again? What is this start-up really doing differently?

I personally wouldn't be motivated to use it either to find work or to hire. I think, when hiring, you really need to do a face to face interview. I've found resumes work well enough for pre-screening that it's not a pain point for me. And, it's not like there are so many candidates out there looking for work that it's impractical to do face to face, or at least telephone/skype, interviews with all the good candidates. I learned the lesson that face to face hiring is needed by hiring someone based on a co-worker's recommendation (even though he did badly in an interview, I looked passed it based on the recommendation). It's so costly and painful to make a hiring mistake that there's no way I would deviate from the current model and try a new method or service.

Interesting comment! Yes, I have been trying to avoid EC because some of the random walk stuff I read made me uncomfortable given standardized curves. I always thought that NSA vector register desire was strictly due to block size of ciphers (particularly Russian). This was definitely true when DES/3DES where in use. Then again, I thought Bluffdale was just to crack old Russian intercepts with GPU like custom hardware. BTW, a Cray hw engineer and I talked about how Cray was trying to pivot into Bioinformatics since the gov biz was no longer robust (in 2004, IIRC?).

Or, they have a better (probably non-Ring) factoring method. I can't conceptualize what that might be, though.

RNG/PRNG output quality and the internals of the algorithms.

As the size of a semiprime increases, the number of smooth numbers that can be discovered (the "yield") by the GNFS with polynomials selected with academically known optimal polynomial selection algorithms decreases. With a reduction in smooth candidates the GNFS sieve operation can be wholly unsuccessful. If a smooth barrier exists (such as a semiprime size where smooth yield becomes deficient) factoring time degenerates from the GNFS improved rate to old school factoring rates due to the need to pivot. Yield decay has been observed <2048bit. If 2048bit is easily factorable for the NSA, no barrier challenge is suggested.

Navy Seal Leak: _No_Easy_Day_ available from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/No-Easy-Day-Firsthand-ebook/dp/B008MG1... (Notice how he makes no mention of ISA even being there, or doing any SSE).

I don't recall the source of the Executive comment. It was kind of buried in a news piece with a broad focus that I read. I'll look for it. Unfortunately, I can't recall the exact language to do a good search and find it. Sorry.

But, here they are saying they have it, it's encrypted, and they can get it in "weeks or months" (despite the large number of drives/filesystems with presumably different keys): http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-31727_162-20059825-10391695.html

The Executive and Legislature couldn't keep something secret to save their lives. And, JSOC leaks like a fucking sieve. If I can't find that particular leak on the web, I'm sure there will be another one soon with the same info. Every guy likes to talk to pretty news reporters and seem important.

Claimed 75%+ success rate attacking Chinese systems: http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1260306/edward-sn...

Asrar al-Mujahideen (the Jihadi PGP fork w/ 2048bit RSA): http://www.rbijou.com/2013/03/18/an-overview-of-jihadist-enc...

The news coverage sucks something awful. The thing is having enough knowledge of mil/ir/tech/math to put all the leaks together.

I think so. Yes. IIRC, the first time I saw this leaked was a combo leak by a Navy Seal and a member of the Executive. The Seal leaked that they powered down Bin Laden's computers to take his hard drives after they shot him. The Executive member said that the drives were encrypted and it would take a few days to get the data. Jihadis are known to use a custom version of PGP with 2048bit RSA keys. They either used that, a COTS drive encryption program (unlikely), or reviewed and adapted an open source drive encryption program. In either of the likely scenarios they would have been using 2048bit RSA. Therefor, it is highly likely (due to the NSA having target motivation even if the drives weren't well encrypted) that the smooth barrier does not exist and the NSA can factor 2048bit RSA in a hours to days scale time frame.

Also, it was leaked that NSA TAO had a 70%+ success rate compromising Chinese systems. Even with the tech companies giving them secret zero days for an extended period of time, anyone that has been a blackhat knows they're not getting to a 70% success rate through exploits. Therefor, it's highly likely they can decrypt VPN/SSH (TLS) traffic encrypted with AES256/RC4-128/3DES and/or the RSA/EC public cryptography used. As you noted the leaked slide seems to indicate that.

>Still, you call for a Cambridge detective, the Secret Service also shows up, and that doesn't cause major head scratching?

No. If something similar happened in Boston and you called BPD, you'd probably get a BPD detective that does burglaries for the break in and a BPD detective that does computer crimes for the laptop - someone like my friend (who is a Boston PD detective that has an "extra" Secret Service credential by way of his assignment to the New England Electronic Crimes Task Force).

The New England Electronic Crimes Task Force is funded and run by the Secret Service. My understanding is that is primarily for jurisdictional reasons. But, it is also because way back in the day (300baud dail-up era) the majority of computer crime was related to the anti-counter fitting mandate that Secret Service has (like fake credit cards, fake vital documents, and fake currency). Computer crime was a new thing and most people didn't have PC's yet (or computer skills) so there wasn't an agency that was a great fit. The FBI didn't want it. So, in many places Secret Service got it.

Any computer crime in Mass is will almost always have Secret Service involved. New Hampshire and Maine are a little different. They have their own state level task forces/labs. So, any computer crime there will almost always have the State Police involved. The Secret Service involvement in Mass. is like the State Police involvement in those states. It's not an escalation. It's just a matter of where the resources (people with comp. forensic training and equipment) were developed and are located.

> The MITs neutrality apparently extends so far that they > don't even bother with what kind of police forces are > strolling around on campus.

Inter-agency task forces have become common in American law enforcement since 9/11. Many people have multiple affiliations. For example, I have a friend that is part of the New England Electronic Crimes Task Force. He's a Secret Service agent and does Secret Service details. But, he's a Boston police officer, works out of the Boston police headquarters, and overall is the exact same as any other Boston cop except where the funding line that allows Boston PD to cover his pay check comes from.

Right. They're just doing it to make a political statement and pull in donations/new members. Maybe they could get a religious organization that Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was a member of in Denver to join as a plaintive and argue that by killing citizen members of their group the government was interfering with the practice of their religion. But, I don't think that would even pass in US courts since you couldn't prove Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was under direct surveillance while on US soil and that it played a role in his killing. The American Intelligence Community is completely untouchable. Honestly, I don't even think Obama is powerful enough to stop the surveillance if he wanted to. It would just go "compartmental" in the organization or they'd get rid of Obama.

Having been on lkml before, I can tell you, nearly everyone does it. And, yes, that includes Sarah Sharp:

Date: Thu, 26 May 2011 00:04:50 -0700 From: Greg KH To: Sarah Sharp Cc: linux-usb@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: [RFC 0/3] xhci: Remove useless debugging

On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 04:28:51PM -0700, Sarah Sharp wrote: The xHCI driver is what, two years old now? It's high time it put on its big girl pants and stop crapping out useless debugging information.

    You now owe me a wet-wipe to clean my laptop up from the coffee I just
    snorted out my nose all over it.

From: https://www.linux.com/news/special-feature/linux-developers/...

The wind was probably blowing South East instead of North West or something on the day Sarah decided everyone needed to be more "professional".

Yes. But, it's worth adding that MIT also uses a Shibboleth implementation (locally called Touchstone). On many core sites Touchstone handles authentication to the specific web servers. Touchstone itself can be authenticated to with either the individual X509 client cert or their password. Many people use password authentication to with the Touchstone server even though MIT has a website that (usually successfully)auto generates and installs the certificate in the user's browser.

Well that quote may be a technically accurate statement. They don't "provide" data directly to the NSA with out a secret FISA order. But, the new leak article seems to suggest that they weaken their cryptography, perhaps turn over private keys, re-architect their topology, and adjust their technology to allow the NSA to trivially easily intercept/get the data of every single Microsoft technology user.

A little bird told me that Microsoft was the most "helpful" out of all the big tech companies. If this new article is accurate, I hope that statement also was. I'm rather pro-US/NSA. But, even I find this new leak very disturbing if it's accurate and true.

Being realistic, I bet all the other big American tech companies are doing similar things. For example, my thinking is still that FB gives law enforcement a "god view" of all information and communications (even if it is in a round about way, like Microsoft allegedly does).

I worked for two different Kelly Services offices in Florida (Largo/St. Pete and Pensacola (iirc)) in the 1990's and it was nothing like the article. I actually had a good experience. I worked similar jobs to the ones mentioned in the article (warehouse, plastics manufacturing, construction, moving furniture, etc.) I always transported my self to the job sites and never found no work when I got there. The pay was above minimum and I would specifically ask for 3rd shift work (because it paid a 50% premium).

There were some jobs that were always "temp" - like one time government construction contracts. But, usually the way the process worked at that time was that employers were basically using Kelly to "screen" workers. They'd bring you in as a temp. and after six months if you were still there they'd transition you to permanent position. If they didn't asked you to come back as a temp, Kelly would just send you somewhere else. Sometimes, you'd not get asked back due to an inability to do the job (I once wasn't because I was asked to hand paint the buttons for tv remotes and just didn't have the dexterity for that) but usually it was because of a chronic problem. As you can imagine with people working temp jobs many had "issues". Plenty of people missed work because they were arrested for DUI's or drug related crime the night before. Some had their probation violated. Several showed up drunk or high. One guy had a medical issue (epilepsy) and had a seizure on the factory floor while operating heavy machinery. Using temps let the companies easily handle those types of problems with out interrupting their business. Part of it was not having to involve HR in the "firing" process by just letting the shift supervisor and Kelly handle it. But, it was also that they could just easily get a different temp. There was no need to put an add in the paper and have a person interviewed and entered into the payroll system etc.

I guess it's possible that things have gotten much worse since I worked for Kelly. Or, that things may be different in poor US inner cities (which I make it a point to stay away from). But, it's probably just some sensationalism in the writing of the article and some exaggerated hearsay from the temps. Notice that there's no pictures or any other evidence like that of the articles' most egregious statements.

As much as I wanted to install their app, I never did because I didn't trust them. I clicked to the requested permissions screen a few times. But, I just couldn't get myself to go any further. Now, I feel vindicated for my paranoia. I'm sure they're doing many more nefarious things.

It's common for US immigration and border control agents (and Canadian agents) to do Google and other internet searches. This has been disclosed and acknowledged in the US media several times. While the messages were not likely Facebook "chat" messages, they could have been "friends only" posts (or even public posts that the woman considered "private" from a foreign government). My understanding is that US law enforcement has access to Facebook "God view" where they can see all your Facebook posts. They don't need a warrant because Facebook owns the data and is the one giving them permission to view it. It's a different class of data than a "chat/email" in that it's posted, not directly communicated, so there's no reasonable legal expectation of "privacy".

As for personal experience with this, I had a musician friend that posted on his website that he was going to be performing a series of shows in Canada. He was asked at the border if he planned to work while in Canada. He said no and did not have a visa that allows it. The border agent showed him his website, which was found with google, showing that he was planning to work. He was denied entry and banned from Canada for 1 year for lying to a border agent.

Google also does this if you proxy your requests through a cloud IP space. I proxy my Google searches through rackspace IPs and I was given a CAPTCHA on nearly every search.

I actually stopped using Google because of this (and privacy/creepiness issues). I switched to Bing. I have to say, Bing has gotten really good. When others saw me using it, they started using it too. Most of my office has switched now and people have stopped saying "google it" and started saying "bing it".

Link requires registration (or setting your user agent to Googlebot).

I don't know what request throttling solutions are available for nginx. But, for apache there are modules and scripts/code that can rate limit traffic and requests from specific IPs. Depending on the size of the botnet attacking, rate limiting requests by IP or network may have been a way to mitigate the DDoS effects. Again, depending on the specifics, you should be able to use iptables (if you're running Linux) to limit requests per source IP or IP range. The type of actions you can take with iptables are really quite robust.

I've had to deploy request rate limiting solutions in the past because of well meaning federated search mash-ups that included content from servers that I run.

Filtering by useragent seems to be a temporary solution. I think that's especially true since you've disclosed publicly that's what you're doing.

I haven't posted anything on Google+ is well over a year. I don't think people moving to Google+ from FB. And, I'm sure Google+ is not the next big social network.

The DoD is committing to Android as a platform in a massive way. Apps 4 Army is a key example. The push is so large and widespread that I think it will force the whole US Gov't along with it. Everyone from political leaders, to soldiers, to doctors at VA hospitals, to employees at defense contractors, will be required to use Android because of government security certifications and custom apps. There's a good chance that Android will become the very dominant winner in the mobile platform space because of this.

I've noticed this, too. I still log into FB often. But, my FB feed is dead. Only 1 of my 100+ friends still posts something regularly (every week or two). At first, I just thought people created filters that didn't include me (when that feature was introduced). But, they're just not using FB anymore. Thinking back, I almost totally stopped posting stuff around the time they did because the site just began to feel creepy (foto tagging, etc) and started feeling like a mostly empty room at the end of a party. FB feels today like lj and myspace felt right before they died.

I've been keeping an eye out for the next social site where everyone is going. But, there doesn't seem to be one this time. I think social might finally be over.

Less than 1% seems low to me. Also, we'd be talking about options or stock (likely RSUs) not cash. GOOG was trading around $390/sh 4 years ago. So, if 4 years ago you were offered $150K (which I still think is low) in RSUs @ $390/sh for your start-up equity with some small vesting tranches each year and a large full vesting at the end of 4 years (and you held onto it all), you'd have a little more than $310K today plus your GOOG salary and bonuses for those four years. Not bad for doing ~5 years as dev ops at a start-up like Wavii.

I'm sure it's situation dependent with execs. If you have a very mature company in a new vertical w/ significant revenue (like a YouTube) and they want you to continue to run the product that would be a very different situation than a small acquihire where the execs may just be essentially engineers or dev team leaders at Google. Of course, the execs likely organized their start-up governance in a way that gives them negotiating strength in the deal. I can't imagine a start-up where the engineers would be involved in the negotiation and decision making beyond their own transition/retention.