Notices by Steve Bellovin (stevebellovin@mastodon.lawprofs.org), page 3

I've been having trouble with my cell phone 5G reception, so I followed the FCC's advice and got another Covid booster. Sorry, I meant the CDC. Anyway, my arm hurts, so I suspect that the nanobots are building some new antennas in my shoulder. That should help with signal strength, right?

@oclsc But I have two arms.

@mattblaze “An unregulated memory model, being necessary for the creation of powerful systems, the right to bear pointers shall not be infringed.”

@cstross Not just crimes, but also SIGINT. Worked example: in 2015, the NSA released William Friedman's papers. He retired in 1955 and died in 1969—but some of his papers were still withheld and others were redacted. And he filed a patent application in 1933 that for security reasons wasn't issued until 2003 (https://patents.google.com/patent/US6097812).

This is why the House voted to impeach Mayorkas today: https://journa.host/@w7voa/111927705532743127

@HalvarFlake A Solari board! I didn't think there were any left! (A video of one at Newark Penn Station I posted to the Old Site was one of my most popular posts there.)

We've reached a state where pre-schoolers need to understand spreadsheets…

An insightful comment by the chair of the National Transportation Safety Board.

Was not expecting to encounter Knuth in this article about a couple with a large collection of mechanical puzzles: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/29/science/puzzles-mechanical-miller.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

@20002ist @HopelessDemigod Is that simply a monoalphabetic substitution or is the movement really funky?
Of course, there's also this clock, in Prague. For those who don't know Hebrew, the א (the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet), is often used to denote 1, the second letter, which is 2, is ב, up through 10 (י), 11 (יא), and 12 (יב). In other words, the hands on the clock move counterclockwise…

But how many years ago did Rudy Giuliani file for moral bankruptcy?

@blakereid @fgbjr Anyone who knows your Mastodon handle can read your posts by going to the proper URL.

I just got this on a website. In 2023. Somehow, I suspect that their website isn't up to date…

Tom Lehrer: "Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize."

From The NY Times, quoting Kissinger: “The illegal we do immediately,” he quipped more than once. “The unconstitutional takes a little longer.”

@lanodan @jpgoldberg @feld @cendyne @drwho It absolutely is related. Assume something like signed Diffie-Hellman to establish a session key. DH, including ECDH, can be cracked by a quantum computer; rotating the signing keys doesn't help. Changing DH moduli more frequently might increase the cost to the attacker, since they can no longer precompute stuff for a fixed modulus, but they can still crack the new one. And there is stuff that is kept classified for decades—I've seen the redactions.

@jpgoldberg @lanodan @feld @cendyne @drwho The issue, especially for national security-related traffic, is recorded traffic.

Here’s a lovely sign at a street corner near Columbia. The concept is fine—but there’s no braille on the sign or any way for a blind person to know of its existence or location.

We all have a limited amount of time in this world. I'm going to use mine wisely by not bothering to read that latest Andreessen rant.

@danmcd @letoams @mattblaze @marabou Btw: while I was working on IPsec I also wrote one of my favorite papers: Probable Plaintext Cryptanalysis, https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/probtxt.pdf. (Some folks at AT&T wondered if we should patent it. I pointed out that a) the NSA would be the major user, and we'd never know if they infringed or indeed if they already had it, and b) much of the concept, especially the two-packet variant, was likely anticipated by the attacks on Enigma…)