How true can this be?

[Robert J. Hansen]

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Raygene wrote:
| I do admit that this is all random and anyone can claim to be a
| so-called expert on something or other (then again, there are the
| know-it-alls and phonies) but how true is that claim?

~  1. Completely true.
~  2. Completely false.
~  3. Somewhere in between.
~  4. A quixotically jocular zephyr named "oblong threnody".
~  5. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
~  6. The business of the book sleeps eternally.

There is signal and there is noise.  At present, you do not have any way
of distinguishing the two.  That means it's all noise, and the last
three answers are just as meaningful as the first three.

You are looking for simple and pat answers.  They do not exist.  You
need to do a good bit of reading if you want to have a good handle on
this question.

| We all know that the various "Agencies" have super computers and some
|  of the best programmers and internet security experts in the country
|  ... have you ever heard of some agency actually cracking a lot of
| people's encrypted emails or files? Is encryption as safe as claimed?

I sent you (off-list) a link to a web page that talks about this in some
detail: the Landauer Bound, the Margolus-Levitin Limit, the
thermodynamic and quantum information theoretical limits of crypto. You
may find some useful information in there. I would suggest two things:

~  1. Read it skeptically.
~  2. Whatever else, don't believe it just because I wrote it.


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