The Deep North

The GNU concept was announced more than a quarter of a century ago on a mailing list by Richard Stallman. The date was Sept. 27. I am a few weeks late mentioning it. In fairness, the founding of the Free Software Foundation did not happen until a couple of years later and I would expect that to be a bigger celebration. We shall see. I wrote an article about Richard Stallman a number of years ago where I said: "Here is what Richard has done for us all: He has created and protected the ' free software ' movement. This has been a difficult task against great odds and he has taken a lot of unwarranted personal grief over the years." True Liberty in all of its various forms still gets a bad rap. It was ever thus. I am gratified that a true champion of Freedom like Richard Stallman and people like Lawrence Lessig are still around. They have taken outrageous attacks over the years, but I think that might finally be starting to settle down for them. Of course, one worries tha...

Description This section discusses some of the encryption strategies originally employed by DataHush. Some novel strategies remain unpublished. In general, an encryption’s strength relies upon the following: - Encryption algorithm – the ‘formula’ used to encrypt - Length of key - Processing power/time We have the following techniques that we feel make it possible to strongly secure a transmission: Dual encryption technique and compression Two strong encryptions are used. One method is based on a known published method, the other proprietary. A third layer is related in that the stream is compressed according to one of a battery of techniques. Compression is a form of encoding that effectively strengthens the encryption, since even if the decompression technique is known, it increases the burden of overhead required to break the code. Physical possession It is possible to require a proprietary hardware device. This would require physical possession of the hardware device to make a tr...

Explaining Public Key Encryption Many years ago, as a part of my company's research, I built a tool called 'DataHush'. It was a drag and drop encryption/decryption program. The tool, as I built it for original demonstration, did not include standard Public Key encryption. Patents encumbered well-known systems and I have always shied away from patents. Despite not supporting it in the original tool, the design demanded Public Key encryption and supporting Infrastructure (PKI). It also had facilities that I felt improved upon the strength of PKI as generally practiced. I felt it necessary to explain to business partners just exactly HOW Public Key encryption worked and how, for banking and mission critical information PKI alone was (potentially) flawed. I am currently working on a project where I have been asked to deliver some tools and protocols for an advanced secure infrastructure. First, though, it requires PKI and most people have such a hard time with the basics th...

Fans of Matt Groening ('graining') will get the reference. Anyway, I am posting to gripe about yet another generic problem in my saga of endless updates to a very complicated small business and research system. Here's the background: I have six servers and nine workstations. In addition, I use two servers and a workstation via VPN at a client site. There are other people on the systems, but for the most part, the systems are designed so that I can use various things. It is like a gigantic workstation. Operating systems currently installed: FreeBSD (Remote Server for ssh, ftp, http, database, mail) Centos (Fedora derivative) Fedora Ubuntu Server Ubunto Desktop Custom Linux for Wireless router. Windows 98 Windows 2000 Pro Windows XP Pro Windows Vista Home Premium Windows Vista Business Windows Server 2003 Windows Terminal Server Edition I have also various live-boot CDs that I use and USB (like DSL) and an ancient notebook running Windows 95. These are not all on the network ...