July 2018 - cypherpunks-legacy

[drone-list] NYPD Commissioner on drones for monitoring assembly
by Gregory Foster 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

dnaInfo (Jan 11) - "NYPD Eyeing Drones to Monitor Crowds": [1]http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20130111/new-york-city/nypd-eyeing-d rones-monitor-crowds Drones might eventually be used for surveillance in New York City, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly revealed Thursday. Kelly said the eyes in the sky -- which have worried civil rights activists -- could prove useful when sizing-up demonstrations, adding to an NYPD arsenal that already includes 3,000 cameras and high-powered anti-aircraft rifles that can shoot down planes. "We're looking into it," Kelly told an audience during a rare public interview at the 92nd Street Y Thursday night. "Anything that helps us." Kelly noted that drones are widely used in law enforcement, especially along the border. But New York presents challenges. "There's a lot of air traffic," he noted. As a result, "The only thing we would do is maybe use the cheap $250 ones to take a look and see the size of the demonstration or something along those lines." Kelly noted that a drones program is not being actively pursued at this time. HT @colvinj via @naomirwolf: [2]https://twitter.com/colvinj/status/289766982188924928 gf -- Gregory Foster || [3]gfoster(a)entersection.org @gregoryfoster <> [4]http://entersection.com/ References 1. http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20130111/new-york-city/nypd-eyeing-drones-m… 2. https://twitter.com/colvinj/status/289766982188924928 3. mailto:gfoster@entersection.org 4. http://entersection.com/ _______________________________________________ drone-list mailing list drone-list(a)lists.stanford.edu Should you need to change your subscription options, please go to: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/drone-list If you would like to receive a daily digest, click "yes" (once you click above) next to "would you like to receive list mail batched in a daily digest?" You will need the user name and password you receive from the list moderator in monthly reminders. Should you need immediate assistance, please contact the list moderator. ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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Re: Ultimate limits to computation
by Jerry Leichter 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

On Aug 11, 2009, at 2:47 PM, Hal Finney wrote: >[Note subject line change] >Jerry Leichter writes: > >>Since people do keep bringing up Moore's Law in an attempt to justify >>larger keys our systems "stronger than cryptography," it's worth >>keeping in mind that we are approaching fairly deep physical limits. >>I wrote about this on this list quite a while back. If current >>physical theories are even approximately correct, there are limits to >>how many "bit flips" (which would encompass all possible binary >>operations) can occur in a fixed volume of space-time.... > >Things may not be quite as favorable as this. Here is a posting I made >to cypherpunks in 2004: > >To: cypherpunks(a)al-qaeda.net >Date: Wed, 4 Aug 2004 11:04:15 -0700 (PDT) >From: hal(a)finney.org ("Hal Finney") >Subject: Re: On what the NSA does with its tech > >MV writes: >>Yes. They can't break a 128 bit key. That's obvious. ("if all the >>atoms in the >>universe were computers..." goes the argument). > >Not necessarily, if nanotechnology works. 128 bits is big but not >that big. > >Eric Drexler, in Nanosystems, section 12.9, predicts that a nanotech >based CPU fitting in a 400 nm cube could run at 1000 MIPS and consume >60 nanowatts, performing 10^16 instructions per second per watt. > >Let's design a system to break a 128 bit cipher. Let's suppose it has >to do 2^10 instructions per test, so this is 2^138 instructions total, >or about 10^41. Let's let it run for four months, which is 10^7 >seconds, >so our necessary processing rate is 10^34 instructions per second.... It must be the summer weather or something. I've received a whole bunch of messages - mainly privately - that say either "Here's another result that has a higher upper bound on computation" or "Here's a design for a machine that exceeds your bound". Both ignore (a) how bounds work: That fact that you have a weaker bound doesn't mean I don't have a stronger one; (b) that impossibility results can exist in physics, not just in mathematics. True, the nature of such results are a bit different, since all our current physical theories might turn out to be wrong. But, hey, maybe our understanding of computation or even mathematics has some fundamental flaw, too. The estimate on the limits to brute-force search are mine, based on a *very* rough estimate that draws on the results in the following paper: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6TVM-46X8Y6W-1&_u… (I haven't actually read the paper; my analysis was based on an article I can't find that discussed the implications of this one.) The basic summary of the author's result is: "[T]he total number of bits and number of operations for the universe does not exceed O(10^123)." I guessed about how this value scales (as the cube of the time - one factor for time, two for the size of the light sphere you can reach in that time; not 3 because the information content of space goes up as the area, *not* the volume - a very weird but by now standard result). Now, my scaling technique may be completely flawed, or my computations may be wrong. Or the paper could be wrong. (I wouldn't bet on it.) Or the physics may be wrong. (I *really* wouldn't bet on that.) But the fact that there are other bounds around that are not as tight, or that one can describe a machine that would do better if there were a way to realize it, aren't evidence for any of these. Bounds can be improved, and a description isn't a working machine. In fact, the whole point of the article that I *did* read is that this result should make use re-examine the whole notion of a "possible" computation. It's easy to describe a computation that would take more than 10^123 steps. Ackerman's function exceeds that for pretty small input values. We've traditionally said that a computation is "possible" if we can describe it fully. But if it couldn't be realized by the entire universe - is that really a *useful* notion of "possible"? -- Jerry --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)metzdowd.com ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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cost to install surveillance cameras in public places
by kragen＠pobox.com 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Suppose you wanted to plant a hidden camera for some long period of time and capture photos of all that went past. You'd like to never again have to enter the place where it's hidden, and only visit it rarely; you'd like it to be small; and you'd like it to last a long time. For example, the book "The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces" was based on a few years of research in this vein using Super 8 cameras for time-lapse photography. It appears to me that this equipment should now be incredibly cheap. USB "webcams" that capture 100-kB 640x480 JPEGs are on the order of $10. I think 4-port USB hubs (again, on the order of $10) contain all the hardware necessary to act as USB host controllers; one could imagine integrating the USB hub hardware with a small single-board computer with SD/MMC and Bluetooth interfaces, for a total cost on the order of $50 plus up to 4 cameras and their USB cables, and an MMC card ($50-$110). This device would presently be limited in smallness only by the size of its power supply, USB ports, and multi-chip integration, so it could be concealed in many places. You could probably run it on 200mW when running (for less than a second) and <1mW when idle. You could drop by periodically with an inconspicuous Bluetooth device, such as a cellphone or laptop, to download the pictures (say, 4 cameras * 100kB/shot/camera * 4 shots / minute * 60 minutes/hour * 24 hours/day = 2.3GB/day; but one shot per minute is only 144MB/day). Anyone snooping over Bluetooth at the time could tell that a lot of data was being sent over Bluetooth (1megabit/sec? not sure; but at that speed you'd have to spend 2300 seconds in the vicinity.) Alternatively, you could use a directional antenna from hundreds of meters away (the "Bluesniper" folks managed to do 1km.) An adaptive surveillance algorithm could shoot four times per minute until the data card was full, followed by twice a minute (replacing every other old shot, starting with the oldest) until the data card was all full at twice a minute, then once per minute (thinning out old shots to once a minute) until it was full again, etc. Supposing that USB 12Mbps transfers were the limiting factor, you'd need about 67ms of "on time" per shot, or (according to my 200mW estimate above) 13.4 mJ. My laptop's Li-ion battery supposedly holds around 46Wh, or 165kJ (abridged info below): $ cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/state present rate: 1227 mA remaining capacity: 2579 mAh present voltage: 11300 mV $ cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/info design capacity: 4500 mAh last full capacity: 4067 mAh design voltage: 10800 mV model number: XM2018P02 battery type: Li-ION 11.3V * 4.067Ah = 46Wh. On that basis, my laptop's battery could power 12 000 000 invasions of privacy by this system --- saving that many camera shots to an MMC card. It might only be able to power 4 000 000 invasions of privacy if it had to transmit them all over Bluetooth. Still, that's nearly six months in the four-shots-with-four-cameras-per-minute maxi configuration described above, where you'd have to come download up your photos at least once a day, and at one camera shooting once per minute, it would last 8 years. (I'm assuming that the webcams power up instantly. This may be unreasonable.) Obviously you could do a similar job with audio surveillance, but ironically, this may consume more storage and power; minimally comprehensible speech is 10kbps under the best of conditions, so you'd need at least 108MB/day, and probably several times that to get anything useful. You'd need some very-low-power constantly-on device to buffer the audio so you wouldn't have to run the CPU all the time. A similar system, but without the cameras or other transducers, could serve as a maildrop or backup server (for data with high value per byte, obviously). We can anticipate that the power and monetary cost of data storage and transmission will decrease considerably more before Moore's Law runs out. ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]

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Re: Ultimate limits to computation
by Jerry Leichter 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

On Aug 11, 2009, at 2:47 PM, Hal Finney wrote: >[Note subject line change] >Jerry Leichter writes: > >>Since people do keep bringing up Moore's Law in an attempt to justify >>larger keys our systems "stronger than cryptography," it's worth >>keeping in mind that we are approaching fairly deep physical limits. >>I wrote about this on this list quite a while back. If current >>physical theories are even approximately correct, there are limits to >>how many "bit flips" (which would encompass all possible binary >>operations) can occur in a fixed volume of space-time.... > >Things may not be quite as favorable as this. Here is a posting I made >to cypherpunks in 2004: > >To: cypherpunks(a)al-qaeda.net >Date: Wed, 4 Aug 2004 11:04:15 -0700 (PDT) >From: hal(a)finney.org ("Hal Finney") >Subject: Re: On what the NSA does with its tech > >MV writes: >>Yes. They can't break a 128 bit key. That's obvious. ("if all the >>atoms in the >>universe were computers..." goes the argument). > >Not necessarily, if nanotechnology works. 128 bits is big but not >that big. > >Eric Drexler, in Nanosystems, section 12.9, predicts that a nanotech >based CPU fitting in a 400 nm cube could run at 1000 MIPS and consume >60 nanowatts, performing 10^16 instructions per second per watt. > >Let's design a system to break a 128 bit cipher. Let's suppose it has >to do 2^10 instructions per test, so this is 2^138 instructions total, >or about 10^41. Let's let it run for four months, which is 10^7 >seconds, >so our necessary processing rate is 10^34 instructions per second.... It must be the summer weather or something. I've received a whole bunch of messages - mainly privately - that say either "Here's another result that has a higher upper bound on computation" or "Here's a design for a machine that exceeds your bound". Both ignore (a) how bounds work: That fact that you have a weaker bound doesn't mean I don't have a stronger one; (b) that impossibility results can exist in physics, not just in mathematics. True, the nature of such results are a bit different, since all our current physical theories might turn out to be wrong. But, hey, maybe our understanding of computation or even mathematics has some fundamental flaw, too. The estimate on the limits to brute-force search are mine, based on a *very* rough estimate that draws on the results in the following paper: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6TVM-46X8Y6W-1&_u… (I haven't actually read the paper; my analysis was based on an article I can't find that discussed the implications of this one.) The basic summary of the author's result is: "[T]he total number of bits and number of operations for the universe does not exceed O(10^123)." I guessed about how this value scales (as the cube of the time - one factor for time, two for the size of the light sphere you can reach in that time; not 3 because the information content of space goes up as the area, *not* the volume - a very weird but by now standard result). Now, my scaling technique may be completely flawed, or my computations may be wrong. Or the paper could be wrong. (I wouldn't bet on it.) Or the physics may be wrong. (I *really* wouldn't bet on that.) But the fact that there are other bounds around that are not as tight, or that one can describe a machine that would do better if there were a way to realize it, aren't evidence for any of these. Bounds can be improved, and a description isn't a working machine. In fact, the whole point of the article that I *did* read is that this result should make use re-examine the whole notion of a "possible" computation. It's easy to describe a computation that would take more than 10^123 steps. Ackerman's function exceeds that for pretty small input values. We've traditionally said that a computation is "possible" if we can describe it fully. But if it couldn't be realized by the entire universe - is that really a *useful* notion of "possible"? -- Jerry --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)metzdowd.com ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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cost to install surveillance cameras in public places
by kragen＠pobox.com 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Suppose you wanted to plant a hidden camera for some long period of time and capture photos of all that went past. You'd like to never again have to enter the place where it's hidden, and only visit it rarely; you'd like it to be small; and you'd like it to last a long time. For example, the book "The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces" was based on a few years of research in this vein using Super 8 cameras for time-lapse photography. It appears to me that this equipment should now be incredibly cheap. USB "webcams" that capture 100-kB 640x480 JPEGs are on the order of $10. I think 4-port USB hubs (again, on the order of $10) contain all the hardware necessary to act as USB host controllers; one could imagine integrating the USB hub hardware with a small single-board computer with SD/MMC and Bluetooth interfaces, for a total cost on the order of $50 plus up to 4 cameras and their USB cables, and an MMC card ($50-$110). This device would presently be limited in smallness only by the size of its power supply, USB ports, and multi-chip integration, so it could be concealed in many places. You could probably run it on 200mW when running (for less than a second) and <1mW when idle. You could drop by periodically with an inconspicuous Bluetooth device, such as a cellphone or laptop, to download the pictures (say, 4 cameras * 100kB/shot/camera * 4 shots / minute * 60 minutes/hour * 24 hours/day = 2.3GB/day; but one shot per minute is only 144MB/day). Anyone snooping over Bluetooth at the time could tell that a lot of data was being sent over Bluetooth (1megabit/sec? not sure; but at that speed you'd have to spend 2300 seconds in the vicinity.) Alternatively, you could use a directional antenna from hundreds of meters away (the "Bluesniper" folks managed to do 1km.) An adaptive surveillance algorithm could shoot four times per minute until the data card was full, followed by twice a minute (replacing every other old shot, starting with the oldest) until the data card was all full at twice a minute, then once per minute (thinning out old shots to once a minute) until it was full again, etc. Supposing that USB 12Mbps transfers were the limiting factor, you'd need about 67ms of "on time" per shot, or (according to my 200mW estimate above) 13.4 mJ. My laptop's Li-ion battery supposedly holds around 46Wh, or 165kJ (abridged info below): $ cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/state present rate: 1227 mA remaining capacity: 2579 mAh present voltage: 11300 mV $ cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/info design capacity: 4500 mAh last full capacity: 4067 mAh design voltage: 10800 mV model number: XM2018P02 battery type: Li-ION 11.3V * 4.067Ah = 46Wh. On that basis, my laptop's battery could power 12 000 000 invasions of privacy by this system --- saving that many camera shots to an MMC card. It might only be able to power 4 000 000 invasions of privacy if it had to transmit them all over Bluetooth. Still, that's nearly six months in the four-shots-with-four-cameras-per-minute maxi configuration described above, where you'd have to come download up your photos at least once a day, and at one camera shooting once per minute, it would last 8 years. (I'm assuming that the webcams power up instantly. This may be unreasonable.) Obviously you could do a similar job with audio surveillance, but ironically, this may consume more storage and power; minimally comprehensible speech is 10kbps under the best of conditions, so you'd need at least 108MB/day, and probably several times that to get anything useful. You'd need some very-low-power constantly-on device to buffer the audio so you wouldn't have to run the CPU all the time. A similar system, but without the cameras or other transducers, could serve as a maildrop or backup server (for data with high value per byte, obviously). We can anticipate that the power and monetary cost of data storage and transmission will decrease considerably more before Moore's Law runs out. ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]

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