The invasion of the purple flowers. Hang on, I’ll go outside and count them for you. Everybody underestimates the size of this place. Okay, we have between 625 and 650 purple flowers. We also have red, pink and yellow flowers, but those are behaving. Today’s photo is a stitch of 9 pictures of our entranceway. It would require another 33 pictures to get just the street side of the forest.
A couple of lessons learned today, one is that American food does not have as many preservatives as Canadian food. Nobody here would buy it. That is why they have ingredient labels on the package. A lot of us read them. An entire half-gallon of milk went so bad after two days that even the cat wouldn’t touch it.
I had enough call-outs today that I had money to go downtown. I stopped at a place called “Octopus” and to hear a 1962-style teenage band. Except these guys were in their 50s. It was a superb show and nearly perfect sound.
Technician-wise I discovered a couple of new virus or virus-like attacks. The more clever viruses are using spyware as the vector. Our old friends Smitfraud, Virtumode and (Zlob) Downloader are back. One disturbing development is the way this spyware is increasingly able to prevent its own deletion, similar to how viruses operate. Spyware represents an invasion of privacy that can only get worse.
My first plan for today was to do some research. Many moons back, I had investigated the theory of cryptography as it applies to computers. I understood how the system worked but not the subtleties of electronic encoding. This was one of the factors that led me to underestimate the Enigma. Military leaders from the Romans to the Germans found out the hard way that every cipher based on transposition and substitution can be broken. (This is normally done by letter frequencies and the way every second or third letter in English is usually a vowel, plus these vowels have fairly fixed ratios and positions. For example, no two-letter word ends with a “u”.)
The contemporary methods of encryption involve scrambling the plaintext so as to strip away frequency and position as clues. This is done electronically because any other method is too slow. This is where my understanding broke down. Cannot every math formula, no matter how complicated, be reduced to its factors? I know if a code “key” is the number 6, I will ignore 1 and 6 as factors, leaving only 2 and 3. Code broken.
Turns out I was wrong, there are irreversible formulas. It is called modular arithmetic. It is easy to do although I still don’t know how it is used to create cipher text. But I’m on the track to understanding. For the non-mathematicians out there, modular deals with the remainder after division. Six divided by five has a remainder of one. That remainder gives no clue as to how it was derived and reduces code-breaking to exhaustive trial and error. At least I think so at this point.
During this research, I found out several other facts. Around 2004, I commented on the simple brilliance of the key dilemma, or the difficulty of sending secure information without the two parties having to give each other a key. At that time I simply passed it off as an amusing theory. Now I intend to look at it microscopically. The problem is that the keys can’t be encoded and this made them vulnerable during transport, also providing the plot for several dozen spy movies. You remember, the secret agent with the briefcase chained to his wrist. These couriers actually used to jet around the planet with these codes. My oath, they must have been a trustworthy lot, at least before Ollie North.
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