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Tech at Night: Amazon Taxes march on, FCC colludes with Marxist activists

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  June 4th, 2011 at 03:30 AM  | 

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Tech at Night

I am so sick of California. While it’s good that the “privacy” bill didn’t make it out of the Senate, it’s not so good that the Amazon tax is going on to the Senate. Texas: Don’t be like us. Defeat your Amazon tax in SB 1.

And the hacks go on: Anonymous attacks.. Iran?, its apparent offshoot lulzsec attacked PBS and Sony, but leaves itself open to law enforcement action? And yet, somehow, our elected officials think the victims are the people to be grilling. I can’t think of a metaphor that doesn’t overstate the situation some, so I’ll be direct: finding fault with the victims is what we need to do only after we’ve exhausted our options related to frogmarching the attackers.

One question though: Why isn’t the House talking to RSA, after the breakin it suffered not too long ago? Is SecurID broken wider open than the Congress wants known publicly?

I’ve been talking a lot about OSI/George Soros front group Public Knowledge, thanks to their leading role in the unholy alliance against AT&T and T-Mobile. That story continues to develop, as well. See my comments in the Daily Caller on a recent push poll against the planned mergers.

However while Public Knowledge is getting the attention, committed Marxist Robert McChesney’s Free Press (whose funding is secret, hiding suspected Soros/OSI funding) is getting scrutiny lately. As it turns out, the Free Press/FCC discussions went beyond the lengthy series of closed-door meetings I covered at the time. Through FOIA releases we now find that Free Press was coordinating a media campaign with the left wing of the FCC, and in particularly Michael Copps, the man I’d already named Free Press’s pet commissioner. Mike Wendy at Media Freedom calls them “recidivist hypocrites”, while Marsha Blackburn is “deeply disturbed”. She should be.

Getting back to Sprint versus AT&T and T-Mobile, I have to wonder whether Sprint is giving up on getting to use the government to get its way, and force T-Mobile to sell out to Sprint. When Sprint is committing billions to LightSquared to build and use its 4G network, continuing the strategy it’s already used with Clearwire, I don’t see a company ready to expand its own network.

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  • Dave_in_Fla

    As additional security, algorithms are often kept out of the public domain, however the algorithm is considered the weakest of the items that could be compromised. Loss of the keys or the nonce are of significantly more danger.

    The real danger of an algorithm being exposed is that it allows analysis for cryptologic attacks, exploiting algorithm weaknesses. This was the fatal flaw of the original WiFi security scheme, it wasn’t the small key size but an algorithm flaw that allows it to be broken in 15 seconds.

    This is the big reason for the rise of AES and ECC algorithms, they have been in the public domain long enough to have been thoroughly analyzed without flaws being detected (with the exception of AES Codebook mode).

    If the SecurID algorithm doesn’t have flaws, then its public release is likely irrelevant.

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    There’s more to a complete security protocol than just a cryptographic algorithm.

    That’s something people forget. You can use 3DES, AES, whatever, implement insane key lengths, but make basic mistakes that render your system easily breakable.

  • Dave_in_Fla

    Ok, maybe not. I wasn’t trying to get into a lecture.

    SecurID (and very importantly the operational implementation) is a system. Exposure of the algorithm is not necessarily a vulnerability, if the algorithm is inherently robust.

    Maybe a better example is Type 1 algorithms. They are classified and protected as well as possible, however systems implemented using them are designed on the assumption that the algorithm has been compromised.

    Generally, the biggest vulnerability is always the key management in all crypto systems. For example, Cisco routers use a robust AES implementation, but use a single shared pre-placed key between all of the routers in the management domain.