[ILUG] Echelon exists..so says EU report

[John McCormac]

Rick Moen wrote:
> 
> begin John McCormac quotation:
> 
> > It only takes one of them to come up with some completely new way of
> > looking at the problem.
> 
> <shrug>
> 
> Advances on fundamental mathematical problems seldom emerge like Athena
> from the head of Zeus.  Historically, what occurs to one mathematician
> tends to occur to others within a short time span, because the
> overwhelming bulk of the knowledge base from which they work is shared
> and public.
> 
> But sure, that could happen.

True, but with crypto it is sometimes the application of some hitherto
unconnected area of mathematics or technology to a problem that is
responsible for a breakthrough. [1] The bulk of the knowledge base may
be public but some parts, the parts necessary for a particular
breakthrough may not, in this case, be public. This is getting to be
like the clearly defined areas of uncertainty argument in Hitch Hiker's
Guide To The Galaxy. :-)

Regards...jmcc
[1] The first hack on Sky VideoCrypt was achieved by applying the theory
of tapping phone conversations to tapping the card-decoder traffic and
using it spoof other decoders that they had the same card in the slot.
This actually rendered most smartcard based systems and even
non-smartcard based systems insecure. What it required was a fast
widescale interconnecting method. Ten years or so later, technology
caught up with the theory. The same theory was recently used in
Canada/US to implement a Linux based solution for DirecTv using the
internet to connect the genuine card to the spoofed card decoders.
-- 
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