Nothing of general importance happened. Today you get a list of events that show I have few projects that can be completed in a day or two, having completed all those before I was 25. So it may seem some things disappear, but they are merely on the symbolic back burner. For instance, my puzzle patent. It turns out what I want is a design patent, as different from a utility or an engineered plant patent. The cost to file it on my own is roughly $680 to $800.
The process has been needlessly complicated by lawyers and bureaucrats over time. A paper shuffle. Also, I intend to write a letter to the Zoom Corporation in Japan, saying if they will guarantee me some type of regular payments, I will share my ideas of a proper drum box with them. I honestly believe that my concept represents a true giant leap into the future for the manufacturer to commits to it.
While reading several law books, I noticed it is still illegal to buy radio-shielding materials in the USA without a government license. Not a permit, a license. These materials are used to block “tempest attacks”, which most of us have seen only in the movies. You know, the van parked outside with the g-men listening. These are not wire-taps, they are picking up the very faint electronic signals made by your computer keyboard as you type. Yes, it works and it is very real.
Nor are the telecommunications companies any protection, since they are bound by a law that states they must “permit the government to obtain plain text contents of [all] communications when authorized by law”. Not when permitted by the Constitution, but when authorized by law, a big major difference. We’re safe though, because everybody knows the phone company would never just give your phone records to the police without a warrant. Ha, ha.
You know, that is what the big stink was over twenty years ago when some college types came up with ways to scramble digital telecommunications. In fact, why don’t I talk about that subject just for interest’s sake. One of the inventors (Heller? Hellman?) was nearly jailed over the issue. This breaks up the chain of thought here, so let me start over at a more logical point.
There are two sides to the privacy issue. One is that the police need the ability to catch criminals. The opposite view is that the authorities have a solid history of using the same techniques against innocent people. (I’m on the side of the people, saying the police already have all the power they need to combat crime if they would just use it right.) There is a massive government intrusion into privacy via a program called “Echelon”. This is not conspiracy theory, but a fact of life. It is computer software that picks up certain keywords from private conversations that “merit further investigation”.
And that is precisely the abuse of authority. An innocent person who says “assassinate” and “president” in the same conversation is automatically a suspect. Some say he has nothing to worry about if he is innocent, others say that civil liberty demands that he should never be subject to warrantless searches. The people who invented freedom knew that you cannot give the police special privileges. Ever.
The remainder of my curiosity with codes (actually ciphers) is their construction. Ciphers are the technique of rendering a message unreadable by anyone who intercepts it between the intended destinations. Mankind has fought a battle with these objectives for two thousand years. If the authorities are the ones illegally reading the messages, the cornerstone of free expression becomes meaningless.
Years ago, I described the example of the two-keyed box, which see. That practice is not realistic because it involves sending the message back and forth three times instead of once. For a one-way message, both remote parties must have a key that enables the transmitter to “lock” the message, and the receiver to “unlock” it. Now the problem becomes one of exchanging the “keys”. What is needed is a key that means nothing to an eavesdropper. Enter a thing called “one-way functions”.
Ah, but you want the easy explanation. Sure. I’ll pick up where most people would set down the book: Clock arithmetic. If it is 9:00 in the morning and we are going to meet in “4” hours, that means 1:00 in the afternoon. There, you just used a “code”. Nine plus four is not one, yet in your head, when you got to twelve, you started counting again at one.
The strength of this concept is very deep. If you and I were the only ones who knew that 10:00 was the starting point, we would only have to exchange the “4” to understand each other. Anyone else would have to guess the total number of hours in a day and would be no better off by knowing the “4”. These one-way functions are the basis of scrambling digital communications, they are known as modular functions.
If you are still here, let’s examine the importance of prime numbers in ciphers. Anyone can crack any cipher by trying every number, starting at one, then two, then three, and so on to eventually find the key that works. It is only a matter of time. But it should be clear that if a cipher cannot be cracked by a “2”, it cannot be cracked by a “4” or a “6” and so on. Same with 3, 6, 9, see the pattern? One need only test by using prime numbers.
Thus, the trick is to find a number where it takes thousands or millions of years to test every combination. The computer security programs find such a number by taking two huge prime numbers and multiplying them together. The results are numbers so huge that when expressed in binary terms, they become 64 binary digits long, or 128 binary digits. Truly huge numbers, indeed. And that explains things if you’ve ever heard of “64-bit encryption”.
There is more to it, of course, and more powerful computers will eventually become available. These are called “quantum computers”, which are mostly theory at this time. If history repeats itself as it always does, the big criminals will have their own quantum computers and the police will use their computers to collect traffic fines.
