He was suspected of carrying sensitive material, which apparently couldn't be found. The search and interviews apparently lasted 9 hours to the minute according to reports and his detention wasn't extended.
In my book: if there would have been something, they would have made it stick. Now they couldn't and apparently out of spite they detained him for 9 hours to the minute while grilling him about the actions of his partner.
John Bull and Uncle Sam have got another blackish eye publicitywise from this affair. There may be a lot of frustration about this Snowden fall-out in Intel circles, but really, let it rest for a while. Sit still while you're being shorn, as any PR person can tell you.
IMHO an alpha engineer should do one of two things:
1) Architect the application and divide the detail programming in enough well-defined subtasks that lesser gods can start working on these subtasks while the alpha starts engineering further. Well-defined subtasks need relatively little communication, and economies of scale are used.
2) Add the brilliance to an existing framework built by beta engineers (Like Rembrandt painting the lace on the painting of an apprentice).
It basically depends on where a product is in the life cycle which of the two strategies is most effective.
I would be highly surprised if mails (even spam) wouldn't be scanned for steganographically hidden messages (no insider knowledge though). Hell, I would even want this for my own antivirus functionality.
I would be surprised if your stegospam wouldn't have a red flag raised by any scanner which utilizes advanced heuristics. Especially since your stegospam utilizes a form of steganography which is already described into great detail by e.g. David Kahn in The Code Breakers (nice crypto history book).
Yes, I think you might be correct and I do note that my approach is not to be trusted prominently ;-)
I am interested to know what attacks would be possible.
My guess is that you'd look for known sentences -- which you can mitigate by using a custom corpus.
Or you do some sort of statistical analysis on the length of sentences, which is mitigated by distributing the sentence lengths along a standard distribution.
Or you do a statistical analysis for word lengths themselves. But if the data you are hiding is GPGed then this information is not obviously vulnerable to statistical analysis of this type because the character distribution ought to be even (ish).
I suppose you would mitigate against attacks on the length of the messages by splitting your message and sending from multiple accounts.
Are there other attacks that I've missed? I'd love to know.
And I'll check out Kahn's book, thanks for the suggestion.
Lefthanders like me need an inverse Colemak to remain effective, given that many of the most used letters are on a QWERTY keyboard on my left hand (while with Colemak e.g. the E has moved to the right). Does an inverse Colemak exist?
I don't think this exists. Using the keyboard layout analyzer [1], it looks like your perceived hand usage might not match up with actual usage. At least for typing out Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Qwerty slightly favors the right hand (52% vs 48%). Colemak is only slightly worse for a lefty (56% vs 44%). Dvorak greatly favors the right hand (65% vs 35%).
Despite not being a US citizen, I fully support this petition since in a capitalistic society it isn´t up to the government to determine the way goods and services are delivered to customers. Government has only a role in policing this process for misuse and fraud.
I don't know about that. My model of Taleb has him pointing out the many dangers of entrepreneurship, and the myriad biases which lead people to underestimate the risks of starting a business--survivorship bias et all.
Actually, I'm kind of wrong -- but kind of right. Pg. 80 says "You are the source of our anti-fragility" in regards to entrepreneurs. Basically it's lots of small fragililities which tend to create anti-fragility - hundreds of entrepreneurs trying to create businesses and failing over and over again, causes economic growth.
If you are able to live cheaply, and learn a lot doing something risky, you are being anti-fragile.
Having watched the first few minutes of the above, I think he means his "antifragility" to be an attribute of economic and political systems, not of individual jobs or even whole occupations. E.g., he says that, in order for the restaurant business to be at least robust and maybe even antifragile, individual restaurants must be allowed to be fragile. It gets more interesting when he turns to the banking business ...
