Relevance of PGP?

[abreauj-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org (John Abreau)]

Isaac Asimov had a famous short story with that title.
I hadn't heard of Phillip K. Dick using the title.

Asimov's story was about a history professor who was
obsessed with ancient Carthage, and he was denied use
of the government's time viewer to do his research. He
then recruited a young physics professor to figure out
how to build their own viewer, and they eventually
discovered that the government program was a fraud,
and that a time view can only see up to a century into
the past. Set it to one second in the past, and it becomes
the ultimate surveillance tool.

Is this the story you're thinking of, or did Phillip K. Dick
also use the title "The Dead Past" for one of his stories?



On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 9:12 PM, Mark Woodward <markw-FJ05HQ0HCKaWd6l5hS35sQ at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On 06/10/2011 08:50 PM, Tom Metro wrote:
>> Mark Woodward wrote:
>>> OTR encrypts an IM TCP stream so that agents between the two end points
>>> shouldn't be able to read the data.
>> Technically, I believe OTR encrypts the message, which then gets handed
>> off to the particular IM protocol, which in turn is transported via TCP.
>> I imagine there is a fair bit of data leakage in those intermediary
>> layers, such as identifying both parties in the conversation.
> Yes.
>> One can envision a more security oriented IM protocol where intercepting
>> a connection between a client and the server would expose nothing about
>> who the other client is (the interceptor would be able to identify the
>> IP of at least one client), and with the use of padding and no-op
>> messages you could also obscure the size and timing of your messages.
> Well, the end points must be public, otherwise the packet could not be
> routed.
>> (Have you heard that encrypted voice streams that use a variable bitrate
>> codec (for example, Skype) can be decoded by mapping the pattern of data
>> bursts to English phrases?)
> Yes I did, thats f-ing wild. ?I fear that with enough computing power
> backing up deviously clever people, human existence is in for some
> serious change. Read Philip K. Dick "The Dead Past." Not a direct
> analogy, but pretty similar.
>> ? -Tom
>>
>
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-- 
John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix
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