Re: CRIME Fwd: uncertainty principle is untenable !!!

From: Crispin Cowan (crispin@private)
Date: Wed Dec 04 2002 - 15:47:57 PST

  • Next message: Todd Ellner: "Re: CRIME Fwd: uncertainty principle is untenable !!!"

    Todd Ellner wrote:
    
    >
    > >> ..I think I prefer when they just ask for money :)
    >
    > >Really. I can't figure out what it is that they want. I have also
    > >received spam that is comprised of incoherent blithering and bizzarre
    > >conspiracy theories, but it usually involves Jesus :-)
    >  
    > Reminds me of some people who were around Portland a few years
    > back. Their schtick was that "infinity" was really a number
    >
    I think the IEEE floating point spec defines "infinity" and "not a 
    number" separately :-) I saw a talk long ago in which the difference 
    mattered to an algorithm. The algorithm tried to use iterative 
    approximation to find a zero-point of a function. The function had a 
    zero point, but it was uncomfortably close to a point where the function 
    was asymptopic to infinity, inducing a divide-by-zero error while trying 
    to approximate the zero point. The (then new) IEEE floating point 
    standard allowed the FPU to return a value instead of dumping core, so 
    the algorithm could continue.
    
    ObSecurity: software security faults almost always occur around improper 
    handling of error caes and boundary cases, e.g. buffer overflows, 
    off-by-one errors, etc.
    
    Crispin
    
    -- 
    Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
    Chief Scientist, WireX                      http://wirex.com/~crispin/
    Security Hardened Linux Distribution:       http://immunix.org
    Available for purchase: http://wirex.com/Products/Immunix/purchase.html
    			    Just say ".Nyet"
    
    
    
    



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