N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-internet-encryption.html <comment><USER4> This is really damaging.

Not only will this cause other countries to put up barriers against US (and UK) services and products, it's going to affect uptake of standards developed here.

On the lighter side, a treasure hunt was just announced. Can you find one of these vulnerabilities, or evidence of the NSA having attacked a particular system to steal keys?

\----

[Edit 1] Some speculation:

By careful hardware design -- and lots of it -- the NSA may be able to find keys large enough that we would be mildly surprised but not shocked. It's not well known that searching for _many_ keys in parallel amortizes well -- it's much cheaper than finding all the keys individually. DJB has a great paper about this:

[http://cr.yp.to/snuffle/bruteforce-20050425.pdf](http://cr.yp.to/snuffle/bruteforce-20050425.pdf)

If I were looking for subverted hardware, I'd be really interested in reverse engineering Ethernet chips and BMCs. The CPU would be an obvious choice as well -- could there be some sequence of instructions that enables privilege escalation?

On protocols, the best sort of vulnerability for the NSA would be the kind that is still somewhat difficult and expensive to exploit. They want the security lowered just far enough that they can get the plaintext, but not so far that our adversaries can.

There is some history with not taking timing attacks seriously enough. Perhaps careful timing observation, which the NSA is well positioned to do, could give more of an edge than we suspect. Or perhaps you could push vendors to make their products susceptible to this kind of attack, secure in the belief that it may be difficult for others to detect.

[Edit 2]

I gave a talk that discussed what I think we as engineers should do here:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7oK59DZwR4#t=1m46s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7oK59DZwR4#t=1m46s)

And Phil Zimmermann and I discussed a number of these issues in a Q&A session:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W42i8zCEizI#t=49m55s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W42i8zCEizI#t=49m55s)

<comment><USER5> I think we know very well which encryption has been foiled by the NSA. This is not speculation, but quasi-certainty: 1024-bit RSA.

\- Crytographers all acknowledge 1024-bit RSA is dead [1].

\- Attack cost 10 years ago was estimated to be a few million USD to build a device able to crack a 1024-bit key every 12 months [2].

\- "Much of" the "secure" HTTPS websites use such weak key sizes [3].

\- NSA had a budget of 10.8 billion USD in 2013.

Drawing a conclusion is not very hard.

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/05/researchers-307...](http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/05/researchers-307-digit- key-crack-endangers-1024-bit-rsa/) [2] [http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~tromer/twirl/](http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~tromer/twirl/) [3] [https://www.eff.org/pages/howto-using-ssl-observatory- cloud](https://www.eff.org/pages/howto-using-ssl-observatory-cloud)

<comment><USER6> I am confused. When I see HN or facebook certs they show 128 bit encryption in the browser box. 128 bit seems pretty low.

<comment><USER7> This is the size of the AES key. AES is a symmetric algorithm and 128 bit are still considered solid there, although the trend is moving towards 256 bit. What we're talking about here is the key size of RSA, which is an asymmetric algorithm. If you don't know the difference, go find a basic crypto tutorial. As you can read above, 1024 bit RSA is probably borken. I wouldn't trust 2048 bit too much as well. Also, progress in breaking RSA is happening a lot faster than with AES.

In the context of SSL, an assymetric algorithm like RSA is used to exchange symmetrc keys, which are used afterwards.

<comment><USER8> That said, 256-bit isn't really that much of an improvement for AES - <USER2> favored since that's the US standard for Top Secret classification, but in practice any attack which brings down AES-128 will almost certainly get AES-256 as well. I've switched most of my SSH servers over to default to 128-bit AES ciphers since the difference in difficulty seems small enough that it won't matter if someone actually tries targeting it and can succeed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> You can't have read Applied Cryptography from the mid-90s and not understand this to have been NSA's M.O. from the jump. Bruce Scheier, who was quoted in the Guardian piece about the same story, is America's foremost popularizer of the notion of NSA as crypto's global passive adversary. People who build real cryptosystems have never, ever been allowed to rely on the goodwill of the NSA not to cryptanalyze their systems.

Entire crypto schemes, from the RIPEMD hash to the specific parameter generation mechanism in DSA, are premised on the idea that USG-sponsored crypto concepts aren't inherently trustworthy. Similarly, all of Applied Cryptography was premised on the idea that NSA was decades ahead of commercial and academic crypto.

Of the revelations about NSA, this has to be the least revelatory (it's up/down there with the "revelation" that NSA employs teams of people whose job it is to break into Windows computers); it essentially restates something we were already supposed to have taken for granted.

That's not to say this isn't a fascinating story. It is; just keep it in context. Things to remember:

* You really want to know whether NSA is directly attacking cryptographic primitives or whether they're subverting endpoints. I think if you talk to cryptographers, you'll get a slight bias towards the belief that it's the latter: that there are implementation weaknesses at play here more than fundamental breaks in crypto.

* You want to keep in mind that breaks in cryptosystems represent _new knowledge_ , and that the enterprise of breaking cryptosystems is an issue distinct from the public policy concern of where NSA is allowed to deploy those breaks.

* Bear in mind that in the legacy TLS security model, before things like pinning and TACK, NSA would only require a viable attack on a small subset of CAs to gain (along with pervasive network taps) massive capabilities. The payoff for these kinds of capabilities is radically degraded by the anti-surveillance mechanisms of modern browsers like Chrome, which is something you probably want to be thanking people like Adam Langley, Trevor Perrin, and Moxie Marlinspike for pushing so hard to implement.

<comment><USER10> Can you expand a bit on chrome's anti-surveilance capabilities?

<comment><USER9> They pin certificates, so that a CA compromise that would enable MITM attack by the global passive adversary would be detectable (and in fact that mechanism has already been used to detect CA compromises.)

<comment><USER11> Why do you say "passive adversary"? I wouldn't call an MITM with a fake cert "passive".

<comment><USER9> I wouldn't call a MITM with a fake cert an effective global attack in 2013.

<comment><USER12> As we've already seen, NSA and other such agencies already have direct connections into the under-sea cables that connect countries across the globe. MITM is exactly what they do ALL THE TIME. To not see it as effective is to miss the point of Total Information Awareness.

<comment><USER9> This is parody, right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am so glad I resisted pressure from engineers working at Intel to let /dev/random in Linux rely blindly on the output of the RDRAND instructure. Relying solely on an implementation sealed inside a chip and which is impossible to audit is a _BAD_ idea. Quoting from the article...

"By this year, the Sigint Enabling Project had found ways inside some of the encryption chips that scramble information for businesses and governments, either by working with chipmakers to insert back doors..."

<comment><USER14> Was that really a seriously considered plan? I don't see how that would ever be a suitable /dev/random replacement. Obviously it works for /dev/urandom, but it should be added to the entropy pool for /dev/random at most.

<comment><USER15> Matt Mackall, the former maintainer of /dev/random, actually stepped down over this issue, because Linus overrode Matt and applied Intel's patch that used their hardware random number generator directly:

[http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.security.cryptography.r...](http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.security.cryptography.randombit/4689)

> It's worth noting that the maintainer of record (me) for the Linux RNG quit > the project about two years ago precisely because Linus decided to include a > patch from Intel to allow their unauditable RdRand to bypass the entropy > pool over my strenuous objections.

> From a quick skim of current sources, much of that has recently been rolled > back (/dev/random, notably) but kernel-internal entropy users like sequence > numbers and address-space randomization appear to still be exposed to raw > RdRand output.

Ted Ts'o later reverted this, separating out Intel's hardware random number generation into a separate function that could be used to seed the entropy pool but wouldn't be trusted directly as the main kernel source of random numbers:

[http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.g...](http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=c2557a303ab6712bb6e09447df828c557c710ac9)

<comment><USER13> If Matt protested, he did so quietly/privately. I wasn't aware of the fact that he had stepped down until the authors of the paper described in [http://factorable.net](http://factorable.net) showed up and pointed out we had a really bad problem for embedded devices on the internet. I had always assumed he had gotten too busy and distracted on other interests, since I do follow LKML, and I didn't see any kind of public debate/controversy about the change to the random driver described above.

If I had to guess what happened, some intel people pushed this as a feature, probably pushing it via one of the x86 git trees, and Linus either (a) didn't notice, or (b) didn't understand the implications, and then Matt quit in a huff --- by just stopping to do work, and not even updating the entry in the MAINTAINERS file. (That didn't happen until I took over the random driver again.)

<comment><USER15> Ah, here's the thread I was looking for:

[http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1173350/focus=117...](http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1173350/focus=1173517)

It doesn't really look like he had NAKed it on paranoia grounds, but more on design grounds; others brought up the paranoia arguments. You were even involved in that thread, so you should have seen his stepping down, although he didn't submit a patch to MAINTAINERS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> _Because strong encryption can be so effective, classified N.S.A. documents make clear, the agency's success depends on working with Internet companies — by getting their voluntary collaboration, forcing their cooperation with court orders or surreptitiously stealing their encryption keys or altering their software or hardware._

That's the money quote there- the NSA hasn't cracked encryption. They've just put back doors in.

And we can't even be that angry at the (e.g.) Microsoft execs that authorise the back doors- they potentially face jail time if they resist NSA requests. All the while presumably not able to talk about the requests publicly.

EDIT: and the really fun part - did you know the former head of the NSA serves on the board of directors for Motorola Solutions? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Hayden_(general)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Hayden_\(general\))

<comment><USER17> > That's the money quote there- the NSA hasn't cracked encryption. They've > just put back doors in.

It's not like they've just gotten secret keys. They've specifically gotten chip manufacturers to add backdoors to hardware, as well as significantly influenced actual cryptography standards themselves:

> "The N.S.A. wrote the standard and aggressively pushed it on the > international group, privately calling the effort "a challenge in finesse."

> "Eventually, N.S.A. became the sole editor," the memo says.

<comment><USER14> Presumably that's DRBGs[1]? Does anyone actually use them in that form?

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > _the Bullrun program, the successor to one called Manassas — both names of > American Civil War battles. A parallel GCHQ counterencryption program is > called Edgehill, named for the first battle of the English Civil War of the > 17th century._

Spying on your own citizens codenamed as civil war. How nice.

> _Only a small cadre of trusted contractors were allowed to join Bullrun. It > does not appear that Mr. Snowden was among them, but he nonetheless managed > to obtain dozens of classified documents referring to the program's > capabilities, methods and sources._

Once again, the people spying on everyone suck at keeping their own secrets. How many others have taken the information with them and sold it off instead of leaking it?

> _In one case, after the government learned that a foreign intelligence > target had ordered new computer hardware, the American manufacturer agreed > to insert a back door into the product before it was shipped,_

If you're a non-US company how can you keep trusting US IT vendors? I wouldn't want to be one of these companies' reps at Airbus for example.

<comment> brown9-2 _Spying on your own citizens codenamed as civil war. How nice._

Nowhere in the article does it state that these methods can be used against US persons separate from other protections against surveillance on US persons, nor does it give the impression that this is special to US persons:

 _The agency's success in defeating many of the privacy protections offered by encryption does not change the rules that prohibit the deliberate targeting of Americans' e-mails or phone calls without a warrant._

Let's keep in mind the fact that an intelligence agency is built to gather intelligence on other governments/organizations and that often involves breaking other jurisdiction's rules.

<comment><USER19> You must have been living under a rock for the past few months. Welcome to September, where we now know that to not be the case.

<comment><USER20> I know we're not supposed to make these kinds of comments in HN, but yours made me laugh.

Welcome to September, where the NSA can keep any data it accidentally collected about US persons for five years if its plaintext. And if that data is encrypted, it can keep data on US persons forever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What's truly frightening is this line from the Guardian's article on the topic:

> The NSA describes strong decryption programs as the "price of admission for > the US to maintain unrestricted access to and use of cyberspace".

What does that even mean? That statement is at the same time paranoid, arrogant, and subtly threatening. It's as if to say that without the ability to decrypt interesting traffic, the NSA would be forced to take stronger measures to curtail internet traffic.

<comment><USER22> Look at what's happening in the UK, in Australia, in France, in Italy, in Spain... the Chinese model is winning hearts and minds of politicians everywhere, and how could it not? If you're into politics, you likely want to reach a Platonic ideal of harmonic society, where nobody is offended, nobody is threatened, and all laws are perfectly respected and enacted. You can't have that on a fully-open network. How can you keep your people from enduring child porn and Islamic propaganda, without censorship?

So most states are slowly moving towards implementing their own little firewalls. The only notable absence? The US. Despite occasional campaigns from religious nutters of various sizes and shapes and continuous pressures from commercial telcos, subsequent US administrations repeatedly affirmed that fundamental Net freedoms would not be curtailed.

This document states that such a position is not coming from idealism or even commercial convenience: it's a way to persuade the rest of the world to do business over networks and protocols that the NSA can tap at will. Should this capability be forcefully contained, there wouldn't be a political incentive to keep the Net flowing freely through US routers.

It's a perfectly reasonable and plausible position, and that's why it's so terrifying.

<comment><USER23> Completely off-base. The US has, by longstanding tradition, had a more expansive attitude towards free speech than Europe. Consider blasphemy laws in the UK, which were only abolished in 2008 but would never have been constitutional in the US. Consider laws against Holocaust denial or displaying Nazi symbols in continental Europe that would be unconstitutional in the US. In Germany you can be arrested for displaying a swastika. In the United States, the courts (in National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie) allowed a Nazi group to march through a neighborhood populated largely by Jewish Holocaust survivors. None of these have to do with controlling networks. They have to do with the first amendment and with both jurisprudence and attitudes towards freedom of speech that are different in the US than in many other countries.

<comment><USER24> > The US has, by longstanding tradition, had a more expansive attitude towards > free speech than Europe...Consider laws against Holocaust denial or > displaying Nazi symbols in continental Europe that would be unconstitutional > in the US. In Germany you can be arrested for displaying a swastika.

These laws were included in the German constitution following the "denazification" of Germany by the USA, where Nazi symbols were banned and literature burned.

The laws against Holocaust denial and Nazi symbols were pretty much _forced_ by the USA. It's extremely ironic how often they're mentioned as an illustration of the USA's devotion to free speech.

<comment><USER25> > The laws against Holocaust denial and Nazi symbols were pretty much forced > by the USA.

So why doesn't German remove the laws now that they've served their wartime reconstruction purpose?

And that _is_ why they were put in, the same reason that even in the U.S. free speech was curtailed in many areas during the American Civil War.

<comment><USER24> Are you asking why a German politician doesn't start a campaign seeking to alter the German constitution in favour of allowing Nazism?

I think you know the answer to that one ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Up until very recently, the received wisdom was: the crypto wars are over, we fought the law and the law gave up, the NSA has quit trying to crack encryption, they have decided the USA is best strengthened by having a reliable internet which business rival nations can't just read like the morning's news. The NSA knows the problems in crypto and their suggestions make it stronger against attacks we don't know. Trust the NSA.

Would that it were true! It would make sense. This makes no damn sense. Just recently I would have ruled out huge conspiracies as implausible because they inevitably leak (roll save against ethics how many times?). The joke's on me, folks. The NSA has no sense. And the conspiracy leaked.

So now every single decision that was taken with help from the NSA (SELinux, TLS, elliptic curves, etc) needs unpicking and running by a cryptographer who isn't a shill. What a damn drag. And meanwhile, the aftershocks will run for years trashing trust in the networked economy.

Fuckin' brilliant, NSA. You screwed the pooch. You accidentally the whole internet.

<comment><USER11>
        So now every single decision that was taken with help
        from the NSA (SELinux, TLS, elliptic curves, etc) needs
        unpicking and running by a cryptographer who isn't a
        shill.

Cryptographers have already been looking very carefully at everything that comes out of the NSA. Lots of security researchers, in and out of the US, would love to find NSA-introduced flaws.

<comment><USER25> It would even be ironic if people's aversion to things like SELinux caused them to use software which is even less secure, and correspondingly easier for NSA to break. They know the long game too...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Reminds me of this: [http://marc.info/?l=openbsd- tech&m=129236621626462&w=2](http://marc.info/?l=openbsd- tech&m=129236621626462&w=2)

As someone who has been following the NSA and government monitoring of online activity for close to 15 years the Snowden leaks just keep taking the wind out of me. It's like everything that we thought might be going on was actually going on. When Theo de Raadt wrote the above mail I, like many at the time, assumed it was tinfoil hat territory. I was clearly wrong.

<comment><USER28> In that particular instance you weren't wrong[1], but that's the problem when stories like this come out, is that it makes it much harder to know what's a crazy conspiracy theory and what's real.

[1] Those claims made by Greg are completely untrue. I ran the professional services group for that company and will happily attest to whomever asks that at no time did we insert a backdoor (or anything that could even be construed as such) into IPSEC.

<comment><USER29> >Those claims made by Greg are completely untrue. I ran the professional services group for that company and will happily attest to whomever asks that at no time did we insert a backdoor (or anything that could even be construed as such) into IPSEC.

Somehow I doubt if you did that you could tell us. You might even have to _lie_ to be able to comment on that letter at all.

<comment><USER28> I'm still unclear on the government's ability to compel falsehoods (even the discussions around National Security Letters seem to indicate that they prevent disclosure, but can't require lying), but I don't think I can convince you of that.

When all the hullabaloo around the alleged IPSEC backdoor occurred, it was frustrating to not be able to be as open about it as I wanted (not because of any government/security issues, but because at the time I still worked for the company and we were advised against talking about it).

You are free to assume that even right now as I type this, a shadowy figure in an ill-fitting Brooks Brothers suit is standing over me dictating my responses, and then chastising me for spending my time on HackerNews.

<comment><USER27> The effect of all of this is mistrust and suspicion of nearly everything. Which, compared to the alternative of implicitly trusting nearly everything, may not be a bad thing.

I'm hoping open development models(open source, peer production, peer review) end up providing the correct institutional incentives for us to innovate away the mistrust.

To misquote Linus: "given enough eyeballs, all backdoors are shallow."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Normal people don't need 256-bit symmetric encryption. That's assault encryption and should only be used on the battlefield. 40-bits is enough and anything over that should be banned.

I'm only joking, but the same argument is used against other technologies that governments seek to control/dominate.

Edit: Skipjack was 80-bits I think. It was used in Clipper Phones: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skipjack_(cipher)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skipjack_\(cipher\))

<comment><USER31> People don't take a 256-bit cryptoalgorithm into a middle school and kill kids with it, so I don't think the analogy works exactly. Maybe if you print it out on paper, or use a floppy disk or CD, you could cut a few people.

<comment><USER32> People who intend to enter a middle school and kill kids can hide their plans and communications using 256-bit encryption.

Edit: Devil's advocate.

<comment><USER33> Or they could be loners or they could meet and communicate face to face.

<comment><USER34> You're right. That's why I'm introducing a bill to make it illegal to have a conversation without a certified government agent (or authorized private contractor) present. To improve citizen's security, a rider on the bill will also make it illegal to talk about, write about, or represent in interpretive dance the existence of those agents.

:-/

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> "In one case, after the government learned that a foreign intelligence target had ordered new computer hardware, the American manufacturer agreed to insert a back door into the product before it was shipped, someone familiar with the request told The Times."

Wow.... this really puts all the furor over Huawei contracts in the US in context.

<comment><USER36> All that furore over Huawei contracts in the US was just projection wasn't it? You're might be _more_ secure buying your network kit from Huawei than from a US manufacturer.

<comment><USER37> Sounds like it was justified really, the NSA know since they've done similar things themselves that it's possible, so it's not a stretch to assume China is doing the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> So at this rate are there any encryption methods that we're pretty sure that the NSA cannot crack?

      By introducing such back doors, the N.S.A. has
      surreptitiously accomplished what it had failed
      to do in the open. Two decades ago, officials
      grew concerned about the spread of strong
      encryption software like Pretty Good Privacy,
      or P.G.P., designed by a programmer named Phil
      Zimmermann. The Clinton administration fought
      back by proposing the Clipper Chip, which
      would have effectively neutered digital
      encryption by ensuring that the N.S.A. always
      had the key.

Link to Paragraph w/ highlighting: [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa- foils-much-internet...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much- internet-encryption.html?pagewanted=all#p\[Eapdst\],h\[Bisaht,3\])

Should I bother to read up on PGP?

</comment><comment><USER39> _The N.S.A. hacked into target computers to snare messages before they were encrypted. And the agency used its influence as the world's most experienced code maker to covertly introduce weaknesses into the encryption standards followed by hardware and software developers around the world._

This is mostly a confirmation of what has been supposed: No magic, mostly bribed and coerced cooperation from the people who should be keeping our communications secure.

And while it doesn't do anything for the credibility of US-based companies, N.B.: _" hardware and software developers around the world._"

<comment><USER40> So, should we re-evaluate if Intel/AMD's chips (and possibly even the new ARM ones) contain hardware backdoors for the NSA?

<comment><USER41> If the source code/hardware diagrams are kept private you should assume backdoors, always, with everything. How is there any other way to know for sure otherwise?

These government agencies are obviously dug much deeper in private industry than many expected so I wouldn't put it past them

<comment><USER42> If you see the diagram, and someone else makes the chip, how do you know the diagram matches exactly with what's on the chip? Unless you can make your own chip from the diagram, you still cannot be sure.

<comment><USER41> Very valid point, and I you're right you really would have no idea. You could check on some devices if you knew enough about hardware to compare the internals and the diagram, but that is a select few people.

This is why customer-company relationships and company integrity is becoming increasingly important, and frankly not many US companies are doing well in that regard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Snowden claimed a while back that encryption itself was not broken by the NSA, but that the endpoint security usually was (no surprise there): [http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/17/edward- snowden-...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/17/edward-snowden-nsa- files-whistleblower?commentpage=1#block-51bf3588e4b082a2ed2f5fc5)

</comment><comment><USER44> Can someone who actually knows about encryption comment on whether it's actually physically feasible for the NSA to have actually broken, say, SSL 3.0 (which has 128 bits of entropy, IIRC) on a large scale (i.e., when you're sifting through petabytes of data on a daily basis)?

And if this were really an issue, couldn't you just use 4096-bit RSA (unless they have managed to surreptitiously insert a backdoor in it)?

<comment><USER45> SSL relies on a chain of trust, and it's prudent to assume that the NSA has the private keys necessary to produce valid certificates that will be accepted by the certificates that ship with Windows, OS X, Firefox, etc out of the box.

So man-in-the-middle attacks are certainly within their capability and fairly hard to detect. As to whether the NSA can passively intercept and decrypt SSL traffic, I don't know, but they may not need to.

<comment><USER46> How are they hard to detect? Wouldn't solutions like certificate pinning prevent this?

<comment><USER45> Yes, certificate pinning would alert the user to a MITM attack, but it's not commonly used. By "hard to detect", I meant that it's impossible to see simply by examining the certificate if it's genuine, you can only detect when the certificate changes. And since SSL certs expire and are re-issued all the time, it makes it a fairly large headache to continually try and guess whether the other party changed their own cert or if you are experiencing a MITM attack.

<comment><USER46> Isn't it considered best practice, especially for situations where you can control the client - i.e. banking apps on your phone?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> This is likely a minority view, but I have no problem with the NSA being able to break encryption, that's in fact part of their job. Decoding encryption has long been part of their mission. I also suspect they're not alone in terms of signals intelligence groups in having this capability.

The issue to me has always been how and what data they access and store, and how it is used.

<comment><USER48> I have a problem with encryption being breakable, regardless of who's doing the breaking. I want encryption to be mathematically solid with the only option being brute-force older-than-age-of-earth time. When we get to quantum computing, then I don't know what we'll do...

<comment><USER49> Quantom computing cannot break all of crypto. Anything based on P!=NP is believed to be secure against quantom computing, and there are several encryption methods backed by P!=NP

<comment><USER50> > Quantom computing cannot break all of crypto.

Correct (except for the spelling of "Quantum").

> Anything based on P!=NP is believed to be secure against quantom computing, > and there are several encryption methods backed by P!=NP

Incorrect, well mostly. The deal is that there are problems that can be done in "polynomial time" (how long it takes is not exponential in the size of they key) for a normal computer (or person); the set of these is called "P", the ones that CANNOT be done on polynomial time is "NP". And there are problems that can be done in "polynomial time" (with reasonable limits on errors) by a quantum computer; the set of these is called "BQP". If P = BQP it would mean that quantum computers can (in reasonable time) solve all the same problems that classical computers can. But in fact, P is a subset of BQP: there are problems that are "hard" for classical computers but "easy" for quantum computers.

An example of this is factoring numbers. Shor's algorithm is a way to factor numbers using a quantum computer and it runs in polynomial time. Now it isn't practical today: the biggest quantum computers in existence are hard put to factor the number "10", much less some 40-digit monstrosity. But computers only get better.

Fortunately, there are problems which are NOT in BQP -- problems that are hard even for quantum computers. And these are the ones you want (not those in NP) if you want to stymie a quantum computer.

For more details, see [http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/bqpph.pdf](http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/bqpph.pdf) or frankly ANYTHING written by Scott Aaronson ([http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/)).

<comment><USER51> > the ones that CANNOT be done on polynomial time is "NP".

I see you've solved one of the great open problems!

NP is defined as problems that a nondeterministic turing machine can solve in polynomial time. Imagine, if you will, a turing machine that when it "branches" always chooses the right path (Or: chooses "both" without overhead)

<comment><USER52> The latter of which sounds suspiciously like what a quantum computer does.

How sure are we that BQP != NP?

<comment><USER53> We aren't: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BQP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BQP)

However a quantum machine that would be capable of post-selection is described by the more powerful class PostBQP = PP, and we know that PP includes NP, so this justifies your analogy.

I don't know much about quantum physics or quantum computing, so I may be mistaken, but it seems to me that post-selection is more of a philosophical construct than something that is physically possible, though.

<comment><USER52> I've seen post-selection demonstrated in a laboratory. It definitely isn't just a philosophical construct, except inasmuch as what it says about time making people _want_ it to be less than real, and logic doesn't work that way.

As for whether you could make a PostBQP-capable computer, though.. I don't think so, at least in the most general case. I don't understand this nearly well enough to be sure, but from what I've heard, tricking causality like that has the problem that you're increasing the chance of your circuitry failing right along with the chance of getting the right result, and quantum computers are already hard enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> There is an old saying that states that a jealous husband or wife can't be trusted. They don't trust you because they are, have, or are thinking about fucking someone else.

When the combined '5 eyes' come out and ban Lenovo / Huawei from being used on any of their secure networks, because of fears of back doors [1], one has to imagine that the same is true of themselves.

The hardware is most likely backdoored as well as firmware, the OS and installed software. I would not trust anything, even open source, because to be perfectly honest, there a very few people who really are smart enough to understand the in depth cryptographic requirements. If there are people, then they probably already work for the NSA or GCHQ.

If you want to plan a terrorist attack or become a politician or business leader who does not want to be blackmailed, don't do anything on the internet apart from share pictures of cute cats.

My advice to any terrorists is to go dark. Speak in private. Write it down pass the note and then burn it. Use old methods like book ciphers. Touch and electronic device and they have you.

Legal note: Of course I'm not advocating 'advising' terrorists, well only the good ones, you know those ones that we call 'freedom fighters'. The ones western governments like to back when it suits their purposes.

[1] [http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/view/33679/lenovo- compu...](http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/view/33679/lenovo-computers- banned-by-the-five-eyes-spy-agencies/)

</comment><comment><USER55> I feel like these kinds of articles are meant to induce a sense of hopelessness regarding the ability to push back against the NSA.

If it turns out one way functions actually don't exist, I'll give in and learn to love big brother. Withstanding that, I'll continue considering communications freedom (and all that it implies) as our manifest right and view these types of breaks as implementation errors.

<comment><USER56> You mean ability to push back _technologically_ against the NSA, right? This sort of article makes you think you can't beat the NSA tech, they will outsmart you.

What this sort of article does to me (unlike you, I make no claims to know what the article was 'meant' to do, other than report the news) is make it clear that we need to push back against the NSA _politically_ to win, make what they are doing illegal, change the gag order laws, etc. We aren't going to beat them technologically, but (for those of in the U.S.), it's theoretically a democracy, we can tell them to stop.

I've seen that argument made before, several times, in essays linked to on HN. It's a political problem, not a tech problem, that the NSA can force corporations to install back doors and give the NSA the keys.

<comment><USER55> The problem is technological, as deficiencies in relied-upon communication technologies is what have allowed surveillance to scale from human intelligence on prioritized targets to dragnet _scrutiny of everybody_. No matter how much effort is required, "law enforcement" will always be snooping on _some_ suspects - what we'd like to prevent is an institutionalized fishing expedition.

You're signing up for a losing game. The myth of Democracy (tm) is another layer of control over individuals.

1\. Most people will never have a problem with what the NSA is doing. They support the NSA's goals (tautology, since as you've mentioned, it is responsible to the majority), and if its methods end up causing harm to enough people, they will simply be adjusted to reduce aggregate harm (not to rule out any possible harm). The feedback loop of democracy works on specific actualities, not hypothetical corner cases.

2\. The most memetically fit ideas are the simplest ones that elicit the strongest feelings (see: bikeshedding). Outrage peddlers swamp the political reception bandwidth with lowest common denominator controversy - <USER3> judgments on other's lifestyles.

3\. Even if there is a widespread preference to reduce the scope of the NSA, the people simply do not have the transmit bandwidth to make this preference clearly known. And they are easily led into squandering their input on the aforementioned manufactured controversy.

4\. Elected figures don't actually run the government, the entrenched bureaucracy does at an imperceptible glacial pace. The elected figures run interference by making the majority believe they voted for this shit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> This essentially bolsters the claims in this article that the NSA has "neutralized" SSL.

[http://rt.com/usa/allegations-nsa-tool-decrypts- https-085/](http://rt.com/usa/allegations-nsa-tool-decrypts-https-085/)

<comment><USER58> This "SSL Locksmith" software isn't really a top-secret NSA tool: [http://www.accessdata.com/products/cyber-security/ssl- locksm...](http://www.accessdata.com/products/cyber-security/ssl-locksmith)

It's a MITM solution that injects fake certificates, i.e. nothing groundbreaking and equivalent to compromised/corrupt CAs (which, as we know, exist and are able and willing to hand out fake intermediate certs etc. to rogue entities). The Whole CA ecosystem is broken and basically snake oil and pretty much everyone knows it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Some organizations have IT security departments that attempt to foil encryption already. They use devices to terminate SSL before it leaves their network and forge certs back to clients and basically act as a MITM for the clients making the TLS/SSL request. They do this to inspect the traffic before it leaves the network.

I predict that in the next 5 to 10 years, many organizations across all industry sectors will drop/reject encrypted packets (SSL, SSH, SFTP, etc) that they cannot decrypt. And the reason they'll give is that it makes them more secure.

The concern I have (as a security technologist) is that most people who use encryption are not bad, however everyone is punished and every packet must now be inspected because a few people use encryption to do bad things. So one day soon, I'm afraid that anyone who uses encryption will be suspect simply because they do and the stronger the encryption, then the more suspect they'll be.

Will it become illegal to do encryption research or use OpenPGP unless you agree to escrow your private key or will everyone be forced to use very weak ciphers? In today's climate (encryption is evil), I see all of these things as very real possibilities.

<comment><USER59> Cisco firewalls, _by default_ , perform a MITM protocol downgrade attack on the SMTP sessions they see. They modify the SMTP setup to prevent the endpoints from negotiating STARTTLS and cause them to fall back to cleartext communication. Has been true for years.

You can turn it off... but how many admins do? If you want an example of behavior which is completely plausibly-deniable, but which immensely reduces internet security, this is a good one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Speaking as an American, it's not a problem that the capability to break encryption exists and the NSA has it. It _really does_ make national security stronger if your intelligence people can read enemy communications.

The problem is that the NSA apparently used those capabilities on basically _everyone_ , millions of innocent Americans whose activities should be of no interest to intelligence agencies, not just the handful of genuine spooks and terrorists our intelligence agencies are supposed to protect us from. (To international people: Cosmically speaking, you're not less important than we are, but the NSA's first responsibility is to protect and serve the USA, so them spying on innocent Americans is _at least as bad_ as them spying on innocent foreigners.)

And it has been shown that the NSA provided information to ordinary criminal investigations with no links to terrorism or foreign intelligence, having police say "it's a lucky traffic stop," where the government actually knew the drugs were in that car ahead of time due to a decrypted phone call. This makes a mockery of the Fourth Amendment because, when prosecutors/police lie to the courts about the origin of evidence, the courts cannot properly answer the question of whether their methods of gathering evidence violate the defendant's Constitutional protection against unreasonable search and seizure.

In short, this is coming out -- which, as the article said, will weaken those capabilities -- because the NSA went too far outside their mission scope. If they hadn't done those two things, I'd be willing to bet Snowden wouldn't have leaked this data.

<comment><USER61> A political counter-argument is that this program may represent terrible value for money in the long run. If we are in a security arms race this money neither buys weapons or a defence that can't be overcome by opponents simply buying better weapons and defences.

The NSA could have made more of an effort to harden American business and infrastructure to attack. They could have spent the money on developing intelligence sources who actually work for opponents instead of US telcos. They could have fixed zero day exploits.

We are rapidly approach a time where oponents will be able to attack completely annonymously. American infrastructure or buisness could be damanaged and know one ever know who or why. If that happens cold war tactics will seem hopelessly naive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Can someone elaborate on how secure the underlying algorithms still are? Most of the NSA's "foiling" seems to be done via coercing corporations and side- channel attacks. Are TLS, AES, etc. still thought of as secure?

<comment><USER63> Bruce Schneier has seen the documents, and here's his advice: [http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-how-to- rema...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-how-to-remain- secure-surveillance)

<comment><USER62> Saw that too. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> "the agency used its influence as the world's most experienced code maker to covertly introduce weaknesses into the encryption standards."

This is the part that truly disgusts me.

<comment><USER65> I think people were speculating this on HN with this article: [http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securityma...](http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2007/11/securitymatters_1115)

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> > _The documents are among more than 50,000 shared with The New York Times and > ProPublica, the nonprofit news organization, by The Guardian, which has > published its own article. They focus primarily on GCHQ but include > thousands either from or about the N.S.A._

Is this the first time we've seen a 5-digit number to describe the number of documents Snowden has? Of course, these are just the ones used for this story...

<comment><USER67> I noticed that number as well and don't recall seeing it before, but I do seem to recall reading something about "multiple laptops" of Snowden's. Obviously, one can store a helluva lot of documents on three or four laptops.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> One-page [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much- internet...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-internet- encryption.html?pagewanted=all)

</comment><comment><USER6> So does this means they have broken or fund a bug in RSA, fast enough computers to brute force or solved the P versus NP problem. In decreasing chances of possibility. I am also an encryption noob, so I gather that if they have broken a crypto then my 4096 bit files will be no more secure than 1024 bit ones. Right?

<comment><USER69> The best publicly known attacks on RSA reduce the attack time by a few orders of magnitude at best. A functional quantum CPU could reduce that by a few more orders. Your 4096-bit RSA key is still 2^3072 times harder to break, so even with reductions we're still talking about "heat death of the universe" amounts of time to brute force.

RSA has issues but as of yet hasn't yielded entirely to cryptanalysis.

As the article says, it's easier to attack the system and try to get the plaintext, or coerce you into giving up your key through legal means.

Edit: adding a link to Wikipedia's article on post-quantum crypto, it's a good place to start understanding how to answer these type of questions:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post- quantum_cryptography](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography)

<comment><USER36> "Your 4096-bit RSA key is still 2^3072 times harder to break,"

No, because the difficulty of breaking RSA keys doesn't scale in the same way as symmetric encryption. Integer factorisation is much easier than a brute force search of the keyspace. A 1024-bit RSA key is believed to be roughly equivalent to an 80-bit symmetric key. A 3072 bit key is about as hard to brute force as an 128-bit symmetric key.

(Source: [http://www.keylength.com/en/4/](http://www.keylength.com/en/4/) )

<comment><USER69> Ah shoot, you're right. I'm an armchair crypto geek at best.

In any case, you can choose a public key exponent large enough to still make it a hard problem to crack in a reasonable amount of time. Barring some huge vulnerability in RSA that hasn't been discovered in 30 years of public scrutiny, of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 The most fascinating part of this article to me is this part, which proves that even a super-secure intelligence agency can still have very weak links that can be penetrated:

 _Only a small cadre of trusted contractors were allowed to join Bullrun. It does not appear that Mr. Snowden was among them, but he nonetheless managed to obtain dozens of classified documents referring to the program's capabilities, methods and sources._

Who knows what other documents other internal hackers could have stolen?

</comment><comment><USER70> Can someone boil this down and tell me the same thing from the technical side? I.e. what technical barriers have they managed to break (RSA, DSA, AES, etc.) ?

<comment><USER64> I think you have to assume the answer is: all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > A 2010 document calls for "a new approach for opportunistic decryption, > rather than targeted." By that year, a Bullrun briefing document claims that > the agency had developed "groundbreaking capabilities" against encrypted Web > chats and phone calls. Its successes against Secure Sockets Layer and > virtual private networks were gaining momentum.

This paragraph interests me the most.

For one, it's clear that their goal is opportunistic decryption; that is, decrypting everything and being able to search through it, rather than targeting known endpoints. This is an important point that a lot of people miss when debating cryptography. While it's fairly likely that the government can find ways to access any communication they want in a targeted manner, as they have so many means to do so (hacking the endpoints, physically breaking in and performing an evil maid attack, etc), widespread encryption is generally good enough to prevent opportunistic data gathering.

The other point I note is that they only mention "web chats and phone calls" in their breakthrough. It doesn't sound like the breakthrough is something that works well for arbitrary SSL connections. The main link I can see between web chats and phone calls is that they are long lived connections, with bursty traffic (HTTP or email protocols, on the other hand, tend to stream a lot of data at once, and then the connection is closed). I'm wondering if there's some kind of traffic or timing analysis vulnerability that they've discovered.

Also interesting is this quote from the Guardian article:

> To help secure an insider advantage, GCHQ also established a Humint > Operations Team (HOT). Humint, short for "human intelligence" refers to > information gleaned directly from sources or undercover agents. > > This > GCHQ team was, according to an internal document, "responsible for > identifying, recruiting and running covert agents in the global > telecommunications industry."

Various technology companies have been adamant in maintaining that they haven't been been giving the NSA direct access to their data. However, with HUMINT programs like this, you always have to wonder if the NSA has hired anyone within such companies to put backdoors into their systems, without authorization by the company. Obviously, they'd have to be subtle about it (it's hard to install new gigabit fiber pipes to siphon off the data without anyone noticing), but just setting up a way for the NSA to covertly run queries, disguised as some other type of job that would normally run on the system, would probably not be too hard to do.

<comment><USER71>
        (it's hard to install new gigabit fiber pipes to siphon
        off the data without anyone noticing)

If you have access to manufacturers that can put in back doors for you, I reckon you don't even need your mole to install stuff for you. Instead you just ask your mole to inform you want is going to be installed and then make sure that the company gets backdoored systems when hardware is installed/upgraded/replaced.

I'm wondering is datacenter monitoring utilities like the stuff Boundary[0] is working on could be used to identify anomalies in how network hardware is behaving versus how it should be behaving. I know that in my conversations with cliff, they are trying to get their monitoring solution to the point where they can visualize "the circulatory system" of a data system with the goal of spotting things that don't look quite right.

[0] [http://boundary.com/](http://boundary.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> With a byline from our very own "thejefflarson" (on HN). That's a lovely thing to see.

</comment><comment><USER73> The Allies had broken most of the Nazi codes during WWII but they still withheld information from commanders unless the information concerned an absolutely strategic battlefield that hang on the balance. Better suffer a few dead or some minor setbacks than let the Germans grow suspicious and start doubting their cryptography. Morale of the story: unless you're the next Osama or Showden or some major narco-trafficker it doesn't apply to you.

<comment><USER74> Or the next MLK...

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> Out of humor and a bit of worry, I had previously posed a conspiracy theory that the NSA/etc. had undermined (coerced, compromised, whatever) the Internet's certificate authorities. I no longer am comfortable dismissing it as silly humor. I worry that such a theory has about equal parts merit as not.

I now want viable open source web-of-trust encryption for the web as soon as possible.

<comment><USER76> The worrying part is the "etc" part of your sentence, namely that all federal agencies in the US Government now have unrestricted access to encrypted communications. The DEA and the IRS are only the tip of the iceberg.

If one government agency has your data then the rest of them do too.

<comment><USER52> Oh, don't forget other governments. If the NSA can do it, China and Russia certainly can too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> From the other article on the same subject:

"Among the specific accomplishments for 2013, the NSA expects the program to obtain access to "data flowing through a hub for a major communications provider" and to a "major internet peer-to-peer voice and text communications system". "

That second one is hard to read other than 'skype'.

</comment><comment><USER77> I really wish these guys would understand how they're impacting Internet-based commerce. What good is controlling the Internet if people stop using it because of privacy concerns? They seem completely unconcerned about how IT drives the US economy and how a lack of confidence in that sector leads to bad things.

</comment><comment><USER78> This doesn't make sense. It can't be. Why would cryptography be subject to export regulations then? If we follow this logic, you would think export barriers would have been brought down decades ago and use of NSA cryptography highly encouraged worldwide.

</comment><comment><USER79> Can I spotlight exactly why installing backdoor in software is especially worrisome?

Why is this not just the same as the other clever ways the smart NSA listens in things (not that I'd like but there's something more)?

Well, the thing about backdoors is they get installed on the outside of everyone's software/chips/machines and then ... someone _else_ , someone with less to loose than the NSA, starts to use them for more crudely nefarious reasons, either criminal activity or spying by other nations.

All of this bears resemblance to the former USSR. Once bureaucracy claimed unlimited political power, the next step was for the "mafiya" to take advantage of the universal silence and surveillance.

</comment><comment><USER80> Single page link: [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much- internet...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-internet- encryption.html?pagewanted=all)

</comment><comment> B-Con > The N.S.A.'s Commercial Solutions Center, for instance, invites the makers > of encryption technologies to present their products to the agency with the > goal of improving American cybersecurity. But a top-secret N.S.A. document > suggests that the agency's hacking division uses that same program to > develop and "leverage sensitive, cooperative relationships with specific > industry partners" to insert vulnerabilities into Internet security > products.

That sounds a lot like "the division to provide security advice was providing advice that would make it easier for the NSA to break".

Page 4 of the article was the most interesting.

</comment><comment><USER81> This thread reminds me of an xkcd comic which is a good description of what might be happening: [http://xkcd.com/538/](http://xkcd.com/538/)

</comment><comment><USER82> I wonder if the recently discovered problems with non-unique key parameters could be the result of the cooperation of particular network gear vendors with NSA.

[https://factorable.net/weakkeys12.conference.pdf](https://factorable.net/weakkeys12.conference.pdf)

[https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurit...](https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurity12/sec12-final228.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER83> TLS/SSL has a whole bunch of options that are negotiated between client and server to find one that they can both accept. I speculate that some of these may be badly broken by the NSA but the exact ones haven't been revealed so we don't know which ones need taking off the table.

Is there anything unusual about the cipher options offered by NSA/GCHQ servers? Or any recent changes at The NYTimes or Guardian's servers.

</comment><comment><USER84> Just shame on the rest of countries around the world to let the USA control and abuse the internet and all relevant technologies. Every major chip, OS and software is created in the USA. If people elsewhere lack the brains and innovation of USA, they should accept the consequences. Of course, I'm part of the dumb ass rest of the world.

</comment><comment><USER85> As is usually the case with an article in the mainstream media, the most interesting part is what _isn 't_ in it. If much Internet traffic is vulnerable to the NSA (and to the UK's GCHQ), doesn't that imply that much Internet traffic is also vulnerable to other governments? Such as, oh, say, China and Russia?

</comment><comment><USER86> It always seemed likely to me that governments can generate fake trusted certs for browser TLS traffic and then man in the middle the traffic, but what are the likely modes of attack otherwise? I don't really see what they are from this article - do they have a database of keys they have acquired nefariously?

</comment><comment><USER67> If you need me, I'll be off changing every password that I've ever stored in LastPass (incidentally enough, I just realized that their Corporate HQ is just outside Washington, D.C.).

</comment><comment><USER87> So, NSA has solved P vs NP and they're just not telling us?

<comment><USER88> What they have is a bunch of telepaths in tanks that can see dimly into the future and they recover the keys.

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> The NSA promises to make our country stronger, then they purposefully weaken it. Then they name the programs after battles in the Civil War.

</comment><comment><USER90> Where are the original documents (primary sources)?

</comment><comment><USER91> I am not really concerned about this encryption business...but have they managed to solve P=NP in the process of cracking crypto algos??

</comment><comment><USER92> I wonder if RHEL and Ubuntu distros have NSA/FBI root kit backdoors in their kernel binaries and/or subscription services.

<comment><USER93> You think no-one's tried recreating various distros' binaries from their published source, to check they're the same? E.g. Jos van den Oever did that for Debian, Fedora, and OpenSUSE here[1].

Which isn't to say that backdoors inserted into the binary that aren't in the published source are impossible, only that they need something more subtle than the crude/easily-detectable 'merge backdoor, compile, ship'. Something like a Ken Thompson 'Trusting Trust'[2]-style attack. (Though there are ways of at least having a good chance of detecting even those - see [3]).

(More likely, IMHO, are just deliberately-introduced, plausibly-deniable bugs in the source - think [4]. Yeah, they might be found & reported by an outsider reviewing the source, in which case you thank them, fix it, and introduce another couple somewhere else next week).

[1] [http://blogs.kde.org/2013/06/19/really-source-code- software](http://blogs.kde.org/2013/06/19/really-source-code-software)

[2] [http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html](http://cm.bell- labs.com/who/ken/trust.html)

[3] [http://www.dwheeler.com/trusting- trust/](http://www.dwheeler.com/trusting-trust/)

[4] [http://underhanded.xcott.com/](http://underhanded.xcott.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> > In effect, facing the N.S.A.'s relentless advance, [Lavabit] surrendered

I disagree with this characterization. Surrendering to the NSA would be Google/Facebook/Microsoft's approach of unconditional cooperation. Lavabit's refusal to work with the NSA -- even though apparently the only alternative was shutting down their business or going to jail -- is more along the lines of a scorched earth retreat (destroying your own stuff when you can't hold the line).

</comment><comment><USER94> It would be so damaging for Intel or AMD if a credible leak revealed they had backdoors built in, is it this really conceivable?

</comment><comment><USER95> > The N.S.A. hacked into target computers to snare messages before they were > encrypted.

I wonder which computer viruses belong to the NSA.

<comment><USER96> Windows, Mac OS, Android, iOS, Symbian, and any Linux distribution you haven't culled together and compiled yourself.

<comment><USER97> > ...any Linux distribution you haven't culled together and compiled yourself.

And maybe even ones you have compiled yourself "from scratch":

[http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html](http://cm.bell- labs.com/who/ken/trust.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER98> Knowing what kind of encryption NSA uses internally, can tell all about what is compromised and what's still secure.

<comment><USER67> Every publicly known cipher is compromised then? The ciphers that the NSA primarily uses (internally) are classified.

<comment><USER98> wouldn't it be logical for them to use ciphers that they do not know how to compromise yet?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER99> I am saddened by how out of control this is

</comment><comment><USER100> So the Feds mandate data security, e.g. HIPAA, and then actively subvert our ability to achieve that security.

</comment><comment><USER30> If we are going to vilify encryption, then we should just stop teaching math. That's all encryption is.

<comment><USER101> That is a really weird conclusion to draw from this article. I don't know who you think is "vilifying" encryption as an application of mathematics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER102> Wow .... so SSH is broken? Wow ....

</comment><comment><USER103> Shouldn't this result in a drastic devaluation of crypto currencies like bitcoin?

</comment><comment><USER104> All the more reason for choosing Chinese own brand.

</comment><comment><USER88> Best to only use Open Source encryption software.

<comment><USER105> yeah, cuz there's no way the NSA could contribute code to that too.

<comment><USER106> It might be time for the community to do some thorough code audits on stuff like this... :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> _" The NSA is just doing its job."_

<comment><USER102> In a sense, yes. In fact, it is good that they put the effort into breaking these systems, and good that Snowden let us know about it. Now we know that the vulnerabilities exist, we can go about fixing it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER107> "Cryptographers have long suspected that the agency planted vulnerabilities in a standard adopted in 2006 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the United States' encryption standards body, and later by the International Organization for Standardization, which has 163 countries as members."

Wonder if it is referring to the Dual_EC_DRBG RNG.

<comment><USER15> Well, it goes on to say "Classified N.S.A. memos appear to confirm that the fatal weakness, discovered by two Microsoft cryptographers in 2007, was engineered by the agency." The Dual_EC_DRBG vulnerability was revealed by two Microsoft researchers in 2007: [http://rump2007.cr.yp.to/15-shumow.pdf](http://rump2007.cr.yp.to/15-shumow.pdf)

So I'd say yes, it sounds like that's what they're talking about.

Speaking of which, I'm really quite frustrated how many of these recent reports about the NSA elide the technical details. You have to read between the lines to figure out what's really going on, what weaknesses there really are.

As a matter of security, it would be better to know specifically what vulnerabilities there really are. Merely the announcement of vulnerabilities can allow a dedicated black-hat to find and exploit it; but someone who's trying to secure their system, and isn't following cryptography incredibly closely, won't know what they need to do or change to make their systems more secure against these types of attacks.

There's a reason that the security community advocates for full disclosure (or at least responsible disclosure, if it's possible to selectively disclose to a few vendors so they can do a coordinated release that fixes the vulnerability before it becomes public), in which you completely disclose a vulnerability so people aren't left guessing about it.

<comment><USER50> > Speaking of which, I'm really quite frustrated how many of these recent > reports about the NSA elide the technical details.

Are you? Well please sign up to work for the NSA, learn the technical details, then go public with them. The reason that the NYTimes isn't publishing the technical details is because they DON'T KNOW THEM. (They might not publish them if they did.) They don't know them because Edward Snowden was a system administrator not a cryptography expert and he's releasing memos about the process.

<comment><USER108> From the article:

> _" Intelligence officials asked The Times and ProPublica not to publish this > article, saying that it might prompt foreign targets to switch to new forms > of encryption or communications that would be harder to collect or read. The > news organizations removed some specific facts but decided to publish the > article because of the value of a public debate about government actions > that weaken the most powerful tools for protecting the privacy of Americans > and others."_

NYT, the Guardian, etc do have access to these details, but chose not to publish them.

<comment><USER50> They say that they were asked not to publish at all, but did so anyway and chose to remove some specific facts. I don't understand how you get from that to concluding that they know (and are suppressing) the particular vulnerabilities that the NSA is exploiting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER109> I want to take a step away from the personal privacy violations here, and approach from an angle that (unfortunately) would motive those with money to lobby against this: your business secrets are out there being collected and reviewed by an organization composed of the smartest and most secretive people in our country.

There really should be no doubt at all that there is corporate espionage and insider trading going on. On one hand, if the NSA approached this with giving helpful 'heads up' when a US-based multinational's overseas factory might be planning to strike, or provide their foreign competitors' private dealings etc etc, they could win brownie points.

But you know it won't stop with screwing around with overseas business. If they are not already, you can bet that internal insider information is going to be traded and sold. You can't trust a rogue, so as long as it is not dismantled they are indirectly if not directly a hostile threat to your ability to conduct business.

</comment><comment><USER110> I've take a look at half the article so far and still can't find a single _specific_ example of a "backdoor".

The entire thing seems hand-wavy.</comment>


Discovery of the Higgs Boson rumoured to be at 3.5 sigma. - <AUTHOR> http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=4212

<comment><USER2> This is Hacker News - do we really need "god particle" added to the headline? It's not present in the article.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry prawn, on reflection I think you're probably right. It's unnecessary.

<comment><USER3> I thought you were being rude but prawn really is his name.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well, if we take the 3.5 sigma at face value and bound it using Chebychev's inequality [1], it seems that the discovery of the Higgs Boson is bounded by 1/3.5^2, which is 8%. In fact, the standard inequality is two-tailed. If we're measuring just from one tail, we can use the single-sided inequality to yield 7.5%. Remember, we can't always assume a distribution is normal, a mistake that even respected researchers often make.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chebyshevs_inequality>

<comment><USER5> Hmm, I don't actually think chebyshev applies (in a meaningful way) in this context. 3.5 sigmas refers to the probability of the observation being significant, not the average mass of the higgs. Or did I misunderstand what you meant?

As an aside, there is a typo in the parent's link: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chebyshev_inequality>

<comment><USER6> 3.5 sigmas refers to the probability of some statistic being as severe as they're observing under a model where the Higgs does not exist. Regardless of the distribution, Chebyshev applies solely by assumption that sigma is a meaningful unit. It may be overly conservative though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> OK, now thanks to Wikipedia, I have a vague idea of what a higgs boson is and why it is important. But could someone explain to me what those sigma's are (in non Sheldon Cooper terms)? Is it a measure of the degree of certainty of the particle actually being there?

<comment><USER8> Yes. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation> . In that first graphical plot, the little σ after the number is lowercase Greek sigma. (The upper case sigma, which may be more recognizable, is Σ, which you may recognize as being used for summation.) Per the chart about halfway down the page, a 5 sigma result means that there is a 1 / 1,744,278 probability that it has come from pure chance.

<comment><USER9> Buy that same table at 3 sigma there is still 99% chance that they have found the damn thing.

Isn't it usually accepted that it is statistically significant when p goes above 0.95? If so, why aren't they happy with a 20 times better result?

<comment><USER8> Particle physicists generate data by the petabyte. If they used 3 sigma confidence they'd confidently declare all sorts of false things. We know this, because if you pay attention to particle physics you hear about all kinds of 3 sigmas that turn out to be spurious. (About every six months to a year or so, I'd say.) 5 is just where they start to feel comfortable, they'll take more if they can get it.

<http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110119/full/469282a.html>

<comment><USER10> Your answer is good and sufficient. For people who aren't yet getting an intuitive feel: if 99% confidence means you're right 99% of the time (it doesn't quite mean that but lets go with it), then you'll still be wrong 1% of the time. If 3000 studies are published each year with that cutoff for significance, you should expect about 30 spurious results accepted as true each year. Ouch.

<comment><USER11> That reasoning neglects the bias towards papers with interesting results, which leads to a much higher rate of false reports in hot journals.

<comment><USER10> In human genetics, studies will meta-analyze each of the ~million SNPs tested across each study, rather than just picking the "candidate" SNPs that came to attention because of their association signal in any particular study. So the file drawer problem is still relevant, but the risk is greatly mitigated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder if they can combine the experimental results from the 2.5 sigma and the 3.5 sigma experiments. If two independent experiments confirmed some hypothesis at 2.5 and 3.5 sigma, the combined evidence is surely much larger than 3.5. Does anyone know what the right way of combining experimental results is, to yield a more accurate answer?

<comment><USER12> Assuming the errors are random and uncorrelated, the total significance is the square root of the sum of the squares. In this case, that's only 4.3 sigma.

<comment><USER13> > _only 4.3 sigma_

I generally treat particle physics as a black box from which magic appears, but my understanding was that 3 is where things start getting interesting, and 5 is where it's considered pretty conclusive, so wouldn't going from 3.5 to 4.3 be a significant jump?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was always curious how they measured these things. Does anyone have a good reference that doesn't involve years of particle physics study?

<comment><USER15> It's a long way down the rabbit hole. There's a series of steps for measuring in a particle accelerator and each itself is a big area of knowledge: \- Detectors \- Hardware triggers \- Software triggers \- Data storage \- Statistical analysis

I guess Wikipedia can give you an idea: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATLAS_experiment> A common statistical method used in particle physics is the Monte Carlo method: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Carlo_method>

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Sure, it's 3.5 sigma in this particular energy band, but is it 3.5 sigma in every energy band?

It might be like expressing amazement that someone in the world won the lottery. There's a difference between someone in particular winning the lottery, and anyone winning the lottery.

Xkcd says it better than me. (hat tip to starwed)

<http://xkcd.com/882/>

<comment><USER17> They don't expect it to show up in every energy band - the whole point is that they expect to see a lot of Higgs boson formation at a specific energy level, and anything higher or lower drops to a background level. The sigma value is basically a measure of how many standard deviations off from the background event count the event count for this particular energy level is.

<comment><USER16> I'm sorry but I don't see how this addresses my point? If they are checking 20 bands for results with p < 0.05, the likelihood is that one will show up, just from fluctuations from background.

<comment><USER18> Yes, but there's a prior prediction from theory that the Higgs will be within this energy band.

<comment><USER16> This specific one? What about all the other predictions over the years?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Honest question: what are they gonna do once they find it?

<comment><USER8> First, a big celebration.

Then after the party, everybody has the hangover that may never end, because finding the Higgs right where we expected it is potentially the worst case scenario: <http://www.sciencemag.org/content/315/5819/1657.full>

<comment><USER20> Informative, but strange circular arguments in that article, especially from a scientific process perspective.

There are a ton of questions that Higgs cannot answer already and yet if we find Higgs precisely, research comes to a stop?

It almost feels like there's a split between theoretical physcists and everyone else, with theoreticians saying if you take away our broken toy, you better replace it with something we can play with!

Given Nature already trumped Einstein, his contemporaries, and all since, I think we can be fairly secure that we will ALWAYS having find something new to learn or discover from practical science.

After all, that's how we used to almost exclusively learn before scientists went a bit crazy with maths. These days there seem to be many more models out there than there is good science behind it - at least to a layperson like me. :)

<comment><USER8> The meta-point is more that we need to find a deviation from the current Standard Model. Further confirmations of the Standard Model are in a sense bad news; we _want_ it to come apart so we can examine the pieces. It is true that if we can produce the Higgs we can then study it, but if it then turns out to precisely fit the parameters predicted by the SM, that's bad.

This argument should also be read along with the fact that last I knew, none of the accelerators have been able to turn up anything else particularly interesting either. Some of the supersymmetry theories predicted particles in ranges that we should be able to see (barely) and none of them have appeared. We're down to hoping that there's something else to find in the extra room the LHC will give us at full blast or we really will be up a creek.

"These days there seem to be many more models out there than there is good science behind it - at least to a layperson like me."

And in fact your observation is connected; particle physics has been starved for data and in the interim have come up with all kinds of things, trying to find things that may have testable consequences. This would go a lot better with some data.

<comment><USER17> Surely there's still gravity left to explain away at the quantum level?

<comment><USER21> There are irreconcilable differences between general relativity and quantum mechanics. A lot of thought has gone into the problem, with little success. But even if someone did come up with something concrete, what then? Try to come up with an interesting experiment that combines gravity and quantum mechanics.

I know of only one, and whether it tests anything at all depends on which interpretation of QM you have. Based on a Geiger counter, either place, or don't place a heavy weight. Try to measure its gravitational pull regardless of what you do. It only measures a pull if you placed the object. If you believe in the Everett interpretation, this says that gravity, at least to a first order approximation, splits with the universe. We do not have sensitive enough instruments to measure non-linear differences from GR.

History tells us that theoretical science done in the absence of experiment is unlikely to lead to useful knowledge.

<comment><USER22> What is this experiment called? Any links to read up on?

<comment><USER23> perhaps reading this <http://www.hedweb.com/everett/everett.htm>

(especially question 7) will help, even though it does not give the name for such an experiment.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


John Gruber Misses the Point About Lightning Headphones - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@stevestreza/john-gruber-misses-the-point-completely-about-lightning-headphones-45d67af821da?source=user_profile<comment>---1- </comment><comment><USER3> The headphone port is inherently analog - more like power than VGA.

With VGA, it made sense to switch to digital ports once the displays went all digital (flatscreens). With VGA, you were converting a digital signal to an analog signal just to send it over the wire, where it got converted back to digital to drive the display.

But speakers or headphones are analog devices, they need analog voltage to make membranes move back and forth. The analog headphone port directly drives the speakers, whereas any digital port needs a chip inside the speakers to convert the digital signal to analog. It makes much more sense to have a single DAC (digital-to-analog converter, or "soundcard") inside the phone, than to have a separate one in every single pair of headphones.

Granted, you could argue that a digital signal travels better over the wire, or that the user could choose to use headphones with better quality DACs. But for all practical purposes, the analog headphone port works fine, and when it comes to standards, open and universal wins over the highest quality any time.

<comment><USER4> Very good points. Digital audio links will open market for deported DACs. Even maybe tiny generic CPU/DSP hybrids for [en]coding evolution purposes. Since nowadays this class of chips is hitting commodity production costs ..

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Apple controls the Lightning port and cables completely. They could easily detect when headphones are plugged in (which would take a tiny passive chip), and then serve an analog audio signal over designated pins in the Lightning cable. This would obviate all the discussion about putting DACs and other intelligence in the headphones themselves. It would be the exact same headphone with a different plug on the end.

The cable isn't the point, anyway. Apple is planning for a world in which all headphone connections are Bluetooth. Which, by the way, like the 3.5mm jack, is an open standard that anyone can build to. That's how accessory companies get around the Lightning port and MFi program in the future.

Wireless is what Apple thinks will be the best user headphone experience, so they will provide a platform incentive to go that way. That is why it's like the iMac shifting to USB and removing the floppy. Doing that gave the entire Mac ecosystem a shove toward building more USB peripherals, and doing more data management on the network. Getting rid of the 3.5mm jack will give everyone a shove toward Bluetooth headphones.

You're never going to plug a cable into your Apple Watch. So if the Apple Watch is going to start doing more audio stuff, cannibalizing the iPhone, Apple needs their user base to switch over to Bluetooth headphones.

<comment><USER6> I really don't understand how Bluetooth headphones can be a passable user experience, to say nothing of _better_.

\- I need to charge them, which means toting around yet another charge - <USER2> chargers, actually if I want to charge in parallel, one for each ear!

\- They probably weigh more, because now they include a battery.

\- They're no longer plug-and-play, I need to manually pair them, then forget them to use them with another device.

\- I probably have to manually turn them on and off.

The only improvement is that there isn't a cable.

Maybe switching to Bluetooth will be more profitable, but I can't see it providing a better user experience.

<comment><USER5> If Apple does this (to be clear, I'm speculating), I think they would be betting that those are problems which can be solved or improved by spending enough time and money on engineering. They have made similar bets before.

The Internet was pretty bad at moving data around, and USB drives were big and expensive, when they killed the floppy drive. But once the floppy was gone, it was a race among vendors to sell the most USB stuff and improved bandwidth. It created a market opportunity, which drove innovation.

The iPhone attacked a bunch of these restrictions. RIM thought the fact that the Blackberry sipped data and lasted a week on battery was a competitive advantage. Turns out users will charge daily, and cell companies will invest heavily, if given enough incentive.

The Macbook Air shipped without an Ethernet port. It hasn't slowed it down-- WiFi just got good enough.

Of course, my thinking about the headphones is all speculation, but to me at least it seems in line with how Apple tries to shift things around.

I mean look at it this way--if all those problems you list could go away, wouldn't it be nice to not deal with a cord? Phones and computers exploded in popularity once the cord was gone. Why not headphones?

<comment><USER6> Not really, the cord is a feature sometimes. I can undo one earbud and let it hang there if someone wants to talk to me quickly. Since they're essentially on a string, I don't need to worry about them falling out and getting smashed on the ground or touching a gross subway floor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My issue with Lightning as the new audio connector is that it's not going to be a "Standard."

Yes, headphone makers are making lightning cable headphones, but I doubt any device company outside of Apple will use it as audio out. Not only phone and computer makers but makers of AV receivers, amps, mixing boards, etc.

If the 3.5mm jack is the new floppy drive and ADB port, USB will be the standard that kills it, like it killed the others.

[http://www.anandtech.com/show/10273/intel-proposes-to-use- us...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/10273/intel-proposes-to-use-usb-typec- cables-to-connect-headsets-to-mobile-devices)

<comment><USER8> Last time i looked at a USB-C analog audio out suggestion it wanted to overload the basic USB pins with yet another task (thus interfering with charging and data transfer) while the extension pins went ignored.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This article also misses that a large amount of people aren't tech savvy and as such have to live with all the DRM issues. I've had to explain many times to people as to why they could not freely listen to the music they bought on any device.

</comment><comment><USER10> Combining the rumors of the dropping of the headphone jack with [http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2016/06/22/apple- iph...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2016/06/22/apple-iphone- edgeless-display/#3d2a49111f3d) ( _" And what would help to really turn heads? The fact its chassis is also expected to be 'all glass'…"_)

I envision this iPhone:

      - 100% glass enclosure out of one piece
      - screen everywhere (front, back, left, right, top, bottom)
      - no connectors:
        - wireless charging
        - Bluetooth audio
      - waterproof (you would get that for free, once you've figured out
        how to close the glass enclosure without frying the electronics
        inside it)

Problems abound: I wouldn't know what the utility of the extra screen space would be (yes, you cannot accidentally take the thing out of your pocket with the back side facing you), wonder whether a device that can't be plugged into billions of existing devices would be successful in the market, and don't have the faintest idea how one would go about making one.

However, it is a design I would like to see Apple attempt.

I guess a version where most of the device is display with the bottom of the device a separate part with only a lightning connector, would be doable, or at least not completely out of reach for a company willing and able to spend big on manufacturing technology.

If that is their vision, I can see them wanting to give up the audio jack. Problem, I think, is that many people own expensive headphones and audio systems that require one.

<comment><USER11> I don't own expensive headphones, I own cheap ones - and I very badly want to keep things that way. I'm fine buying a $10 replacement pair of earbuds every time I snag my current ones on something, but I would be pissed if I had to buy a $40 replacement pair.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think apple will sell cables: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11968130](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11968130)

</comment><comment><USER13> I wish everyone would stop calling it an analog audio port. Yes it's a 1/8th port, but they haven't been purely analog for quite some time.

<comment><USER14> But the 1/8" TRS/TRRS jack (headphone / headphone-with-mic jack) _is_ analog when it's used for analog output (headphones/line-out) or input (microphone/line-in). The DAC is on the device side, not the accessory side.

Perhaps you're referring to the SP/DIF "hiding" inside the 1/8 jack of many Macs?</comment></comment>


How is computer programming different today than 20 years ago? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/swlh/how-is-computer-programming-different-today-than-20-years-ago-9d0154d1b6ce <comment><USER2> "Some programming concepts that were mostly theoretical 20 years ago have since made it to mainstream including many functional programming paradigms like immutability, tail recursion, lazily evaluated collections, pattern matching, first class functions and looking down upon anyone who don't use them." This is true, although some programmers might have used tail recursion before it was common, as you can do this in assembly language in instruction sets older than twenty years.

"A pixel is no longer a relevant unit of measurement." I don't believe that; I use it a lot.

"A desktop software now means a web page bundled with a browser." While this is very common, it is not true of all software (and I don't use any "web page bundled with a browser" except the browser itself, and I would like to have more stuff you can just use a command-line (e.g. curl or nc) or telnet and don't need the web browser).

"Running your code locally is something you rarely do." Are you sure?

"Storing passwords in plaintext is now frowned upon, but we do it anyway." I think some people do use hashed passwords; I have not seen much of storing passwords in plain text.

"Documentation is always online and it's called Google. No such thing as offline documentation anymore. Even if there is, nobody knows about it." There are man pages, plain text files (what I generally use to write documentation), ZIP files of HTML, and PDF. But unfortunately some programs don't have a documentation you can store on your own computer.

</comment><comment><USER3> So many things wrong with this list of memes but my current annoyance is this;

"A package management ecosystem is essential for programming languages now. "

Package managers are an anti-pattern brought on by the abuse of OOP systems as tool for api dependence; [https://owensoft.net/v4/item/2577/](https://owensoft.net/v4/item/2577/)

<comment><USER4> Your link says more specifically "Composer is an anti-pattern". I don't see where it applies to all package managers.

Bear in mind that TeX, a non-OO language, has had CTAN for almost 30 years, which lead to CPAN (since before perl had OO support), CRAN (R), and CEAN (Erlang, also a non-OO language).

<comment><USER3> Definately not all package managers or package management on a whole but how they are used in modern programming to create "churn as default" situation.

<comment><USER4> That appears to be rather different than your original comment.

<comment><USER3> Noted. The contrast between old and new plus the reference to composer should have pointed in the right direction. But alas.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How To Find And Choose An Idea For Your Project - <AUTHOR> http://tbbuck.com/how-to-find-and-choose-an-idea-for-your-project/

<comment><USER2> Cool article and interesting suggestions on where to come up with ideas...I tend to come up with ideas while I'm in the middle of working on projects. My most recent idea came to me several weeks ago when I found out I had several Giftcards from last year and had a painful time trying to get the balances on all of them, and then GiftcardMate was born.

Isn't the mother of invention necessity? Need something, and then make it happen!

</comment><comment><USER2> I see that you yourself have had many necessities based on your profile, so I'm sure you have no shortage of ideas

<comment><AUTHOR> Hehe, it's true: I do come up with a lot of ideas. _Viable_ ones, on the other hand...

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I've had many ideas over the years, some of which never made any ground...this new night-time/weekend project I'm working on I think could be really useful though as a lot of people tend to get many Giftcards around the holidays and managing balances on all of them can be a pain -- what are your thoughts? Viable or not? Monetization could be done by offering a buy-back service on Giftcards that users don't want, by offering 80% of face value and then reselling to make a small profit while charging less than the cards actual value

I'd be interested in hearing your opinions -- my post last night seemed to get no responses, I'm really just looking for some constructive criticism on the idea and validation or invalidation, either way really

<comment><USER2> That's the thing, I suck at marketing.. programmers aren't known for Design or Marketing skills and that's been my biggest hurdle. The incentive to use the service based on the giveaway would work, but I don't know what marketing channels to pursue. It would remain a free service, but making money in the future would be to offer a buy-back program whereby the users can sell their unwanted Giftcards for cash (less than the cards face value) and then I would mark it up a bit while still making it less than the cards actual value, so that would be the monetization plan, but again marketing for me seems impossible and always has been</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Asus replaced the touchpad on its new ZenBook Pro with a 5.5-inch touchscreen - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/5/17424770/asus-zenbook-pro-screenpad-specs-release-date-price-computex-2018 <comment><USER2> I think this is a terrible idea from a practical point of view. I don't want to look down when I use my laptop. Let's see how buggy it will be in real life usage.

</comment><comment><USER3> looks cool!</comment>