Tag: The Breakfast Club

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover  we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

Today is Pi (π) Day, how could we live without it. So let’s celebrate π on it’s day 3.14. This year it’s even more special because today’s date is 3.14.15 matching the first five digits of the mathematical constant. The next Super Pie Day won’t happen for another 100 years.

As you remember from grammar school math, π is the mathematical constant consisting of the main numbers 3, 1 and 4. According to the Wikipedia of π, “it is the the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, and is approximately equal to 3.14159.”

It has been represented by the Greek letter “π” since the mid-18th century, though it is also sometimes written as pi. π is an irrational number, which means that it cannot be expressed exactly as a ratio of two integers (such as 22/7 or other fractions that are commonly used to approximate π); consequently, its decimal representation never ends and never settles into a permanent repeating pattern. The digits appear to be randomly distributed, although no proof of this has yet been discovered. π is a transcendental number – a number that is not the root of any nonzero polynomial having rational coefficients. The transcendence of π implies that it is impossible to solve the ancient challenge of squaring the circle with a compass and straight-edge.

OK, enough of that. Let’s get on to the party part.

It’s earliest known celebration was in California where in 1988 at the San Francisco Exploratorium physicist Larry Shaw along with the staff and the public marched around one of its circular spaces eating fruit pies. In 2009. The US House of Representatives passed a non-binding resolution declaring 3.14 π (Pi) Day. And in 2010, a French computer scientist claimed to have calculated pi to almost 2.7 trillion digits.

Coincidentally, it is also the birthday of theoretical physicist Albert Einstein. So at Princeton University in New Jersey there are numerous celebrations around both events that also include an Albert Einstein look alike contest.

Besides the partying at Princeton, here’s what is going on elsewhere to celebrate this mathematical necessity that drives mathematicians nuts.

Celebrating Pi Day, a sweet time for scientists and pie lovers

By Steve Rubenstein. SFGate

It took the ancient Greeks and the infinite power of the circle to make it happen, but the California Academy of Sciences is opening four minutes early on Saturday.

It’s going to open at 9:26 a.m. instead of 9:30 a.m. And the reason for that is because pi, the ancient ratio that specifies how many times longer the circumference of a circle is than its diameter, is 3.1415926 … , with a particular emphasis on the 926. [..]

At the California Academy of Sciences, after throwing open the doors four minutes early, astronomers will celebrate by joining visitors in the dropping of Popsicle sticks. It’s a mathematical game in which the sticks are used to model the mathematical formula for pi. The best way to find out how that works, academy insiders say, is to show up and drop a few sticks yourself.

While astronomers are dropping Popsicle sticks, other astronomers at the Golden Gate Park academy will hold a “Pi in the Sky” lecture in which they will explain how they use pi to calculate the volume of planets outside the solar system. Pi works not only on Earth, but billions of light-years from Earth, too.

About 3.14 miles to the east, the Exploratorium is trying to one up the academy, pi-wise. Admission will be free, all Pi Day long.

‘Super Pi Day’ – 3.14.15 – will feature weddings, food specials as math nerds celebrate once-a-century date

By Sasha Goldstein, New York Daily News

Dana Emanuel and Byron Clarke both love pie – she the food, he the numerical constant (spelled pi). And Saturday’s date, 3.14.15, dubbed “Super Pi Day,” happens to be the first five digits of the infinite number, which represents the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter and remains the same no matter the size of the circle.

The date won’t come around again for 100 years, so the couple decided it was a “no brainer,” set the date and printed off circular wedding invitations to dash off to dozens of family and friends. The nuptials will bring them full circle after they got engaged on June 28 last year – 6.28, or two pi. [..]

– Runners on New York City’s Roosevelt Island will take off on a 3.14-mile course at exactly 9:26:53 a.m. Saturday on what is billed as a “Girls Prep Ultimate Pi Day Pi K.”

– A variety of events will honor the Pi Day of the Century at Manhattan’s Museum of Mathematics on East 26th St.

– The math whizzes over at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will let prospective students know if they’ve been admitted beginning at 9:26 a.m. on Saturday. The prestigious school announced the date with a two-minute video showing drones delivering the decisions.

– Greenwich Village pizzeria Ribalta will offer diners $3.14 off their bill if they wish their server a Happy Pi Day.

– The American Pie Council has an activity packet filled (pdf) with pi- and pie-related fun, games and food ideas.

– Pie cups at all Hill Country Chicken locations will be on sale for $3.14 on Saturday.

– Pie Corps in Greenpoint will offer a 10-inch pie for $31.41, while a 4-inch mini pie will fetch $3.14, according to DNAinfo.com, which highlighted five city spots featuring Pi Day pie specials.

In 2010’s “Moment of Geek”, Rachel Maddow, host of MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show,” featured a math student teacher, Teresa Miller, from the University of New Mexico with a hula hoop and a Rubic’s Cube that was quite amazing.

I was never that energetic as a math student. Teresa should be a great math and phys ed teacher.

So, whatever you do today, eat something round and remember π.

Breakfast Tunes

Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac

In matters of truth and justice, there is no difference between large and small problems, for issues concerning the treatment of people are all the same.

Albert Einstein

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover  we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

This Day in History

Uncle Sam cartoon debuts; Brigadoon opens on Broadway; Deadly rampage at Scottish elementary school.

Breakfast Tunes

Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac

Grifters Gonna Grift

And media organizations like Politico make it so damn easy because it’s their grift too.

Atrios

The Guardian

So it’s 4 years on now from the Fukushima disaster.  What do we know?

Well we know a little bit more about the extent of the damage.  There are 6 reactors at Fukushima Daichi only 3 of which were in operation at the time, but all of which are involved.  You don’t hear much about reactors 5 and 6 which were off line, but the reason they were off line is they were experiencing cooling problems.  They sit today fueled, hot, closely monitored but unapproachable due to the high levels of radiation, slated for decommissioning.

Unit 4 was in a similar stand down.  What makes it unique is that it still experienced massive damage from a hydrogen explosion and the bulk of its nuclear fuel was stored in a pool on it’s roof.

The good news is that all 1533 fuel rods have been removed as of just this last December, the bad news is that the ground is subsiding underneath it and the building is in danger of collapse.  Even without the fuel the structure is still highly radioactive in operating areas and thoroughly contaminated by fallout.

All of the active reactors, 1, 2, and 3 experienced both hydrogen explosions and core meltdowns which almost certainly in the case of Unit 1 and probably in all of them has breached every level of containment and is sitting partially buried in plain old soil.

The salt water used as an emergency measure during the early stages of the disaster has corroded and ruined almost every installed control system and massive amounts of water continue to be pumped to this day to contain the reaction.  This highly radioactive water is stored in big steel tanks (think Power Plant size) that are starting to rust and leak.  There is no plan for how to dispose of it.

Speaking of radioactive water, it leaks out of the big holes in the bottom of the reactor containment units into the ground and natural ground water continues to flow through the site to the sea in a large and permanent plume.  All efforts, including the much vaunted ‘ice dam’ created by freezing the dirt around the site have been an utter failure.

There doesn’t seem to be a Plan B.

Speaking of radiation, in most critical areas it remains high enough that even specially hardened electronics fail within hours, humans would die in days from exposure.  Even in outlying areas of the 30 km exclusion zone workers can receive a lifetime dose in weeks or months.  Thyroid cancer (an early indicator) has risen from 2 – 7 cases in a population of 100,000 to over 100 reported in a population of 300,000 so far.

Does that seem gloomy enough?

TEPCO (a zombie company, effectively bankrupt) and the Japanese Government continue to delay, obsfuscate, and minimize the impact of this event.  Independent science is actively discouraged in favor of happy fun time propoganda.  The Japanese Government, which is paying Billions for fossil fuels to maintain energy capacity, is actively pushing for the resumption of nuclear power production and the re-activation of the remaining 40+ plants despite the fact that they are no safer than they ever were.

In the mean time Solar is getting cheaper and better than ever to the point where it is price competitive with Oil even at $50 a Barrel.

Remember, it’s safe, clean, AND makes you glow in the dark so it’s easy to find your way to the bathroom at night!

The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

–Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)

Science News and Blogs

• Gamma Rays May Be Clue on Dark Matter, By DENNIS OVERBYE, The New York Times
• Nine new dwarf galaxies full of dark matter found just chilling around the Milky Way, By Rachel Feltman, Washington Post
• NASA’s Dawn Probe Begins Orbiting Dwarf Planet Ceres, By KENNETH CHANG, The New York Times
• Ancient Mars Had an Ocean, Scientists Say, By MARC KAUFMAN, The New York Time
• Astronomers Watch a Supernova and See Reruns, By DENNIS OVERBYE, The New York Times
• Anthropocene: New dates proposed for the ‘Age of Man’, By Rebecca Morelle, BBC
• Saturn’s moon suggests the question of life beyond Earth may soon be answered, By Terrence McCoy, Washington Post
• Fossil Tells of 520-Million-Year-Old Creature Like a Giant Lobster, By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times
• Mount Everest’s Poop Situation Is About To Go From Bad To Worse, by Emily Atkin, Think Progress
• Neanderthals Wore Eagle Talons As Jewelry 130,000 Years Ago, by Megan Gannon, Live Science

Science Oriented Video

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

Three corners has my hat

And had it not three corners

It would not be my hat!

I dunno, maybe it makes more sense in Italian.

This is the famous (I mean, as far as any Renaissance Italian Folk Tune appropriated for ‘Art Music’ can be) Carnival of Venice.

Or infamous in my case as it was the audition piece for All-State Band and since my sight reading skilz are for crap I really didn’t have even a clue what it was supposed to sound like and between the triple and quadruple tounging and the rampant octave jumps (not to mention the rapid fire fingering) I could only make up in energy and enthusiasm what I lacked in technique.

You know, like your first sexual experience.

I have dissipated a youth of extreme privilege on these ephemeral photons.  I went to Summer Camp every year, sometimes twice at different places.  This year my family in Michigan pulled some strings and got me in a Youth Music program that featured lessons with the great Leonard Falcone who just happened to have arranged (that’s a technical musical term for someone who re-does an original piece for different instruments or ensembles, or changes the key or tempo to make it sound different even though it’s really the same) my audition piece.

What could go wrong?

Well, I am a horrible musician, even for a brass player, and I have a tin ear and no discipline or muscle memory whatsoever.  It took Falcone mere seconds to recognize how hopeless I was.

But he was a trooper and there were only so many Euphonium players so he was stuck with me for 2 weeks.

Towards the end I dragged out my audition piece and said-

“Do you think you can help me with this?”

“Let me hear it.”

So I embarrassed myself and he said-

“It should sound like this.”

My Hat It Has Three Corners

It wasn’t a total waste.  I did learn a lot about music and improved tremendously (though I still couldn’t get a gig in a Circus Band which is somewhat unfair to them because they are dead serious professional musicians who practice every day and then do 3 shows) and I also hooked up with this clarinetist who came to my Grandmother’s place where I had to wait for my parents to pick me up after camp was over and took me to a Drive In Movie where I got to second base with her.

Anyway, I’m not here to talk about my early relationships (as amusing as they are in retrospect) what I really want to talk about is Frank Music.

Let’s set the wayback machine to August 16, 2014 where I wrote in Renaissance Man about the importance of a common musical notation that could be printed and distributed to the development of Western ‘Art’ Music.

(A)mong the signal advances musically during this time period is the development of recognizably ‘modern’ musical notation.

…

(T)he systematized notation of music and printing of same made the spread of musical ideas philosophy, science, and theology (the latter of which was pivotal in the political struggles of the period) much easier than previously possible.

…

(I)nfluence on European music was widespread, from … England to the remotest eastern principalities of the Holy Roman Empire.

…

The secret of … success?  The printing press and musical notation.

If you are of a certain age you’ll remember what we called Ditto machines but which were far more likely Spirit Duplicators or Mimeographs.  Man, nothing like sniffing the solvent off a fresh Ditto to give you that nice, in class, buzz.

Sheet Music for Band was reproduced the same way and it was a source of continual irritation for me that I always got the flimsiest, crappiest copies, especially since they always doubled the Tenor Sax parts (hey, at least they were in B-Flat which meant I didn’t have to do any in my head transpositions).  The problem was I didn’t understand how Sheet Music was packaged and sold.

As a Band Director you’d find a piece you liked and thought your Band could handle and then searched through catalogs and stores until you came up with an Orchestration Package.  They typically cost over $100 and included (in addition to the Conductor’s Score) original individual parts for each instrument called for by the Composer.  Since School Bands are always much larger you had to copy those so that you had one for every student to practice with.

So that’s why your teacher was always so mad at you when you lost your folder.  Those things are hard to get.

Now as it turns out Carnival of Venice was not available locally and the closest place to get a copy was Frank Music in New York City.  It was a big deal for me as it’s the first time I can remember visiting the City alone (for which I’d probably get seized by DCS now).

Frank Music is a dingy hole in the wall in Mid-town filled floor to 15 or 20 foot ceiling with shelves stacked about as close as you can the sheet music laying flat inside and layers of faded labels pasted on the dividers.  If you have any sense at all you’ll wait for a clerk to find what you want but I was adventurous and wandered around the mustiness.

In the end I found it and a copy of Arban’s (neither of which helped, see above) and escaped about $50 lighter than I went in.  With the train and lunch it was a $100 day but I could have gone golfing and spoiled a good walk.

New York City’s last classical sheet music shop closes its doors after eight decades

by Lauren Gambino, The Guardian

Friday 6 March 2015 12.33 EST

After nearly eight decades in business, Frank Music, the last classical sheet music store in New York City, will close on Friday at 5pm.

With a pencil tucked behind her ear, Heidi Rogers, the 63-year-old shopkeeper, puttered around the store, retrieving scores from the shelves piled high with music from the classics – Beethoven, Chopin, Stravinsky – to the arcane. She paused occasionally to look around at the spartan office, tucked away on the 10th floor of a midtown Manhattan building, as if keen not to forget the position of a single score.

Rogers indulged every customer – new and old – at the checkout line. With the faithful patrons who had shopped there for years, she reminisced. With the first-timers, she joked, taking digs at the “freebie” culture that brought about the store’s demise, and guessing their musical forte.

…

Frank Music has struggled in the internet age, as more musicians turn to Amazon or other online sellers that sell scores for less than their brick-and-mortar counterparts charge. It has also had to compete with free downloads, found on websites such as IMSLP, a virtual music library that allows users to download scores at no cost.

“To be replaced by something so inferior – it’s such an insult,” Rogers said. “But if you appeal to people’s lowest instincts, like we’re going to give you this score for nothing, it’s basically saying it has no value.”

Until the very end, Frank Music resisted the creeping digitization of the internet age. The store’s vast inventory, methodically organized by composer, is registered only in Rogers’s brain. She almost never takes credit cards; she prints handwritten receipts; and she records her sales with a pencil on a piece of loose-leaf paper.

“The way other stores bought was very different than the way I bought,” Rogers said. “They would buy 20 copies of one thing that they knew they would sell 20 copies of. I would buy one copy of 20 things they didn’t want to be bothered with.”

The store’s stock boasts, in Rogers’s estimation, hundreds of thousands of scores. The massive, and unique, inventory is what Rogers believes set the store apart.

…

Annie Shapero, a vocal student and fragrance reviewer, said she heard about the store’s closure on the radio and had to come in and smell the sheets of music before it was too late.

“It’s an olfactory archive,” Shapero said, holding a book to her nose and inhaling deeply. “It’s a smell that’s disappearing from this city.”

“I think it’s something that you just take for granted living here,” Shapero said. “You just think, it’s New York – it’ll always be filled with stores like that. But it’s not! It’s gone. This is it.”

I’ll miss that place, the world has changed and not for the better.

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover  we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

This Day in History

Alamo falls to Mexican forces; Michelangelo born; Walter Cronkite retires.

Breakfast Tunes

Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac

Good Question: Iran’s Foreign Minister suggests the US should ask itself why it continues to create extremists that it later fights. Someone should tell him that to the US that’s a benefit, not a bug.

Charles Kingsley Michaelson, III, Some Assembly Required

Well, I had hoped for a nice quiet discussion of wave/particle duality again because there are new developments that are worthy of note or perhaps a good chuckle at Homer Simpson predicting the GeV of the Higgs Boson to within experimental error because I’m just a sucker for the intricacies of Quantum Physics, BUT…

The big news of the day is on the technology front and particularly NSA v. Encryption.

Now I’ll take it as a given that you know thanks to Ed Snowden and Thomas Drake and subsequent public testimony that the NSA is obsessed as an organization by collecting every communication you have.  What you may not know is how far back that goal goes and why it compromises all of our security.

Way back in the days of the Big Dog when all we had to worry our pretty little heads about was blowjobs and blue dresses the Internet started gaining steam as a place to buy things.  People were rightly concerned about personal information and credit card numbers falling into the hands of thieves (though I’ll tell you quite frankly that you’re in much more danger from your food server if you’re a bad tipper because they have plenty of time alone with your card to write down all your imprint numbers as well as the ones that are just printed which is sufficient for ruining your credit by telephone, let alone computer).

Anyhow the major Internet Retailers and the companies that served them started demanding an encryption scheme to bolster public confidence that it was safe to buy things.  Thus Secure Sockets Layer (SSL).

Even this paltry (and believe me it is, though I recommend the study of The Reichenbach Fall because not everything is complicated and mysterious) level of security was deemed by the NSA “too dangerous for export” so they made an even weaker one with 40 bits of encryption instead of 128 (too hard, my brain hurts) for use overseas.

Well, Moore’s Law and all, and today even 128 bit encryption is somewhat passe and 40 bit can be cracked in 7 hours using Amazon Cloud computers.

The reason this is important is because websites, in order to be compatable globally, are designed to accept ‘export’ keys as valid along with ‘domestic’ keys.  A switch in the site software allows them to be forced into ‘export’ key mode via a third party who is not a valid client and once that is done it’s easy to conduct man-in-the-middle attacks that compromise the connection by appearing as the host site to the client and a valid client to the host.

Now I’ve been very careful to try and make it clear that this is not a bug or a flaw.  The NSA deliberately influenced the design of the standard to make this possible.

Since then there have been new standards adopted that are not subject to this type of spoofing, but adoption inertia being what it is over a third of websites worldwide are vulnerable including the NSA’s.

So what is the solution?  For a user nothing much, browsers are rightly designed to be compatible with as many sites as possible.  If you are paranoid enough you can get software plugins that ‘protect’ you from vulnerable sites, but ‘protect’ in this case means you can’t use them.  Secure browsers like Tor already do this and as I’ve said before what’s notable about them in action is how many things you used to do that you can’t anymore.

For sites there is a minor code fix that won’t allow a third party to force ‘export’ mode and we will see a rush of them implementing it.

What makes it interesting politically is context.  In recent months tech companies have been forced by public demand to implement more secure encryption schemes.  The NSA in turn has been petulantly stamping its feet and holding its breath in a tantrum insisting that these be designed with backdoors that can be accessed by State Spy Services.  They claim that this can be done so that only ‘responsible’ parties acting under the rule of law will have these abilities.

There are at least 2 problems with this.  First, a backdoor is a backdoor and anyone can use it.  It doesn’t care if you’re a White or a Black Hat, it’s just a door.  Second, other governments are demanding the same thing.  Governments like China.  If you’re the NSA it’s pretty hard to make the case that our computer communications should be less secure so that China can spy on them.

In the long run either our Representatives will put a stop to this or Engineers will make it technically impossible.  Mr. Market will be served.  In a positive sign this will happen the NSA was forced to give up crypto restrictions in 2000 because it was ruining the export business of the tech titans.  Given what we are aware of today I don’t think it will be nearly that long before the blowback begins.

FREAK: Another day, another serious SSL security hole

by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, ZDNet

March 3, 2015 — 22:19 GMT

It seemed like such a good idea in the early 90s. Secure-Socket Layer (SSL) encryption was brand new and the National Security Agency (NSA) wanted to make sure that they could read “secured” web traffic by foreign nationals. So, the NSA got Netscape to agree to deploy 40-bit cryptography in its International Edition while saving the more secure 128-bit version for the US version. By 2000, the rules changed and any browser could use higher security SSL. But that old insecure code was still being used and, fifteen years later, it’s come back to bite us.

The Washington Post reported today that cryptographers from IMDEA, a European Union research group; INRIA, a French research company; and Microsoft Research have found out that “They could force browsers to use the old export-grade encryption then crack it over the course of just a few hours. Once cracked, hackers could steal passwords and other personal information and potentially launch a broader attack on the Websites themselves by taking over elements on a page, such as a Facebook ‘Like’ button.”

…

Nadia Heninger, a University of Pennsylvania cryptographer, told the Post, “This is basically a zombie from the ’90s… I don’t think anybody really realized anybody was still supporting these export suites.”

Heninger, who has been working on cracking the obsolete 40 to 512-bit RSA encryption keys, found that “she could crack the export-grade encryption key in about seven hours, using computers on Amazon Web services.” Once done, this enables hackers to easily make “man-in-the-middle” attacks on the cracked websites.

Guess what? Over a third of “encrypted” websites, according to tests made by University of Michigan researchers J. Alex Halderman and Zakir Durumeric, are open to FREAK attacks. Specifically, OpenSSL and Apple TLS/SSL clients such as the Safari Web browser are vulnerable to FREAK. When using these programs, it’s relatively simple to downgrade their “secure” connections from “strong” RSA to the easy-to-break “export-grade” RSA.

All of this has happened because as Matthew Green, a cryptographer and research professor at Johns Hopkins University, succinctly put it, the NSA made sure that the early “SSL protocol itself was deliberately designed to be broken.”

And, now, it has been. It’s just that it’s now open to being broken by anyone with basic code-breaking smarts and easily available computer resources. The key problem is that OpenSSL and Safari both contain bugs that cause them to accept “RSA export-grade keys even when the client didn’t ask for export-grade RSA.”

Websites, generally speaking only create a single export-grade RSA key per session. They, like Apache with mod_ssl, will then re-use that key until the web server is rebooted. Thus, if you break a site once, chances are you’ve broken into it for days, weeks, even months.

Many of the websites that are “FREAKable” seem to be on Content Delivery Networks (CDN)s such as Akamai. That’s the reason why, for example, the NSA site is vulnerable. Akamai is working on fixing its web servers.

Encryption Backdoors Will Always Turn Around And Bite You In The Ass

by Mike Masnick, Tech Dirt

Wed, Mar 4th 2015 10:50am

As you may have heard, the law enforcement and intelligence communities have been pushing strongly for backdoors in encryption. They talk about ridiculous things like “golden keys,” pretending that it’s somehow possible to create something that only the good guys can use. Many in the security community have been pointing out that this is flat-out impossible. The second you introduce a backdoor, there is no way to say that only “the good guys” can use it.

As if to prove that, an old “golden key” from the 90s came back to bite a whole bunch of the internet this week… including the NSA. Some researchers discovered a problem which is being called FREAK for “Factoring RSA Export Keys.” The background story is fairly involved and complex, but here’s a short version (that leaves out a lot of details): back during the first “cryptowars” when Netscape was creating SSL (mainly to protect the early e-commerce market), the US still considered exporting strong crypto to be a crime. To deal with this, RSA offered “export grade encryption” that was deliberately weak (very, very weak) that could be used abroad. As security researcher Matthew Green explains, in order to deal with the fact that SSL-enabled websites had to deal with both strong crypto and weak “export grade” crypto, — the “golden key” — there was a system that would try to determine which type of encryption to use on each connection. If you were in the US, it should go to strong encryption. Outside the US? Downgrade to “export grade.”

…

(T)he lesson of the story: backdoors, golden keys, magic surveillance leprechauns, whatever you want to call it create vulnerabilities that will be exploited and not just by the good guys.

…

Whether it’s creating vulnerabilities that come back to undermine security on the internet decades later, or merely giving cover to foreign nations to undermine strong encryption, backdoors are a terrible idea which should be relegated to the dustbin of history.

The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

–Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)

Science News and Blogs

• In Net Neutrality Fight, Both Sides Gear Up for Long Haul, by Nadia Prupis, Common Dreams
• Why McDonald’s Announcement on Chicken Is Important for Everyone’s Health, by Andrea Germanos, Common Dreams
• Oldest Human Fossil Found, Redrawing Family Tree, by Jamie Shreeve, National Geographic
• Computing without a Computer, by Joey Bernard, Linux Journal
• History Repeats Itself: Ancient Cities Grew Much Like Modern Ones, by Megan Gannon, Live Science
• 8 possible explanations for those bright spots on dwarf planet Ceres, by Eric Mack, CNet
• Comet-orbiting spaceship glimpses its own shadow (+video), by Paul Sutherland, Christian Science Monitor
• Astronomers Find a Dusty Galaxy That Shouldn’t Exist, by Michael D. Lemonick, National Geographic
• Exclusive: Lost City Discovered in the Honduran Rain Forest, by Douglas Preston, National Geographic
• Could This Alien Cell Thrive on Titan?, by Ian O’Neill, Discovery News
• Arctic Sea Ice ‘Thinning Dramatically,’ Study Finds, by Laura Geggel, Live Science
• International scientists question rush to build Nicaragua canal, by Justin Beach, National Monitor
• The Keurig K-Cup’s inventor says he feels bad that he made it – here’s why, by Drake Baer, Business Insider
• Fireworks at Chile’s Villarrica Volcano Light Up Night Sky, by Becky Oskin, Live Science

Science Oriented Video

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover  we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

This Day in History

Franklin D. Roosevelt sworn in as president, Ronald Reagan takes responsibility for the Iran-Contra affair, the AAA is born in 1904.

Breakfast Tunes

Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac

We’ve collectively decided that putting kids in 3000 pounds of metal traveling at 65 MPH is safe, while letting them walk unsupervised can potentially get them taken away from you and placed in a foster situation. Also known to be safe.

ugh.

Atrios