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A Nice Little Cryptography Primer

By itss | 28/06/2021
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Pun Intended.

Category: Technology
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  • Another Woman Sues Flock For Mistaken Crime Accusation By Police - and for Surveillance
    by EditorDavid on 10/10/2026 at 5:34 pm

    Last week a Florida woman sued Flock over its role in police officer accusing her of a crime she didn't commit But she's not the only one suing Flock over mistaken accusations, reports Gizmodo: . A Ring video of a Colorado woman being handed a criminal summons for a porch-package theft she did not commit recently went viral after the accusation rested on a Flock Safety automated license plate reader hit. Now, the woman involved in that case, Chrisanna Elser, is suing Flock Group, the towns of Columbine Valley and Bow Mar, Sergeant Jamie Milliman, and Chief Bret Cottrell in federal court on behalf of herself and other Coloradans whose plates the company has logged... The package in question was worth $25... The claims aimed at the company are intrusion upon seclusion, plus negligence and negligent design, on the theory that Flock sold a searchable archive and refused to require a warrant, a case number, or a supervisor's sign-off before an officer could run a plate... Elser is asking the court to make Columbine Valley, Bow Mar, Cottrell, and Flock delete the retained location data, to bar them from keeping it unless it is tied to an open case number, and to make Flock require a warrant, a case number, and a supervisor's approval before a Colorado agency can search the system. The Colorado Sun has more details. "Elser did not steal anything, but spent the following two weeks proving her own evidence to a department that did not return her calls, she said. [P]olice Sgt. Jamie Milliman told her the town of Bow Mar's surveillance cameras captured her forest green Rivian driving through town the same day a package disappeared from a thief... When Elser offered to show her own evidence to prove her innocence, including footage from her Rivian's onboard cameras, Milliman said she could bring it to court. Now, she is suing the officers and Flock Safety in U.S. District Court in Denver, alleging that the warrantless tracking violated her constitutional rights and that Flock's surveillance system unlawfully documents Coloradans' movements... "The scariest part is what happened to me can happen to anyone. I had no idea the Flock cameras existed and no idea a private company was keeping a record of every time I drove past my own neighborhood, or that any officer could pull it up without asking anyone or giving a reason for doing so," Elser said in a statement Tuesday. "If it can happen to me, it can happen to you...." "As noted in the complaint, the Flock system accurately identified the location of Ms. Elser's vehicle, while law enforcement retained responsibility for interpreting and weighing that information as part of the broader investigation," Paris Lewbel, Flock's public relations manager said. "Flock stands by the accuracy and integrity of its technology and intends to vigorously defend itself in this litigation." The article includes this statement from the woman's attorney. "Coloradans pass Flock's cameras on the way to work, church, the doctor, a protest, and a friend's house, and Flock keeps a detailed record of their every movement. It knows where you went, when you went there, and how often you go back, and it gives that information to a police officer with no limits. "We are asking a federal court to say what should be obvious: Flock's surveillance is straight-up creepy and the government does not get to follow everyone, all the time, without any reason for doing so." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Meta Developing Compressed RAM 'CRAM' For Linux: Better Than ZRAM and Zswap?
    by EditorDavid on 10/10/2026 at 12:04 pm

    Phoronix reports on a presentation this week by Meta engineer Gregory Price at the Linux Plumbers Conference in Prague: With today's memory shortages, high prices, and ever increasing memory capacity needs, Meta engineers have been working on Compressed RAM ("CRAM") for Linux. This hardware-offloaded compression still allows cacheline/byte access to compressed memory and in turn a better implementation than the likes of ZRAM and Zswap. Very promising is that there is near-native performance to raw DRAM speeds with CRAM... For end-users that may already be relying on the likes of Zswap or ZRAM, CRAM is offering near-native DRAM speeds. Read-only data is shown to be as fast as the raw DRAM performance. And for memory writes, CRAM is much faster than ZRAM or Zswap or plain swap. "Most of the individual pieces needed to support CRAM are already mainline," the article points out. Tom's Hardware writes that "It uses a private NUMA node (essentially, a ghost CPU) instead of pretending to be a block device, and this lets Linux continue using all of its memory semantics, including migration and ballooning, to manage CRAM." Because CRAM is stored in RAM and treated as RAM, with full cacheline/byte access, it can be accessed in a read-only fashion with little delay; just the cost of hardware-offloaded compression... Even when you enable writes, CRAM is still much faster than ZRAM; 5.4x in the worst tested case of 20% writes. That's a huge drop from the 452x read-only case, but keep your context; a 5.4x speedup is still titanic. The massive performance cliff when writes are involved comes down to the need to page fault and migrate folios back to the original NUMA domain, as you can't write directly to compressed data; you'd corrupt everything... While the obvious target of the work here (given its origin at Meta Platforms) is big Linux servers, ZRAM and Zswap are used all over the Linux ecosystem, even on machines as constrained as the Steam Deck. Many distributions enable one or the other by default. CRAM seems like it could offer a considerable speed-up for some of these machines, so hopefully it finds its way into the kernel once the remaining implementation questions are answered. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • First Thorium Nuclear Clocks Begin to Tick
    by BeauHD on 10/10/2026 at 7:34 am

    Researchers in Vienna and Beijing have independently built the first nuclear clocks based on oscillations inside thorium nuclei, marking a major milestone for a field that could eventually produce highly portable, ultra-precise timekeepers. The clocks are already precise enough to lose only about a second over millions of years. The New York Times reports: The first nuclear clocks are not going to immediately supplant the worldwide network of atomic clocks, whose steady ticking we rely on for GPS and the definition of a second. Nor have they captured the record for most precise timepiece; the best atomic clocks are about 10,000 times more reliable and would take more than 100 billion years to lose one second. But nuclear clocks hold a bevy of potential advantages over existing atomic clocks. One day, they could be more reliable than the leading atomic versions, and nuclear clocks could be made more portable. They even hold the ability to search for certain kinds of dark matter -- the invisible stuff whose clumps make up 83 percent of the matter in the universe. If a particle of dark matter passed through the thorium nuclei, it could register as a wobble in the nuclear clock's otherwise steady ticktock. The findings have been published in the journal Nature. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • AI Surveillance Startup Flock To Cut Several Hundred Jobs Amid Backlash, Sources Say
    by EditorDavid on 10/10/2026 at 3:00 am

    Reuters reports: Flock plans to let go of about 18% of its employees, people with direct knowledge of the plans said on Thursday, as the maker of AI-powered surveillance cameras and license-plate readers faces mounting opposition to its products from communities and lawmakers.... The company has about 1,500 employees [with job cuts hitting 270 employees]. Flock faces growing scrutiny from regulators, lawmakers, and privacy advocates, despite drawing strong investor interest among venture capitalists. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll showed Americans are divided on whether Flock cameras are a good idea. Some 38% of the country supports the use of Flock cameras in their community, compared to 47% who oppose their use. A related story... In Texas this week a county commissioner decommissioned all 61 of their Flock surveillance cameras and license plate readers, according to a local news report. County residents "have raised serious questions about who can access this data, what vendors can disclose, improper searches, and records being kept after data expires," the precinct's Chief Public Affairs Officer said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Cloudflare Keeps 1.1.1.1 Out of Piracy Blocking, Escapes Penalties In France
    by BeauHD on 09/10/2026 at 3:00 pm

    An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Cloudflare doesn't block pirate sports streaming sites through its 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver in France, only through its CDN. The Paris Judicial Court has now accepted that stance, rejecting [French pay-TV provider] Canal+'s request for penalties of 50,000 euros per site, per day. Interestingly, the court's conclusion relies on statistics provided by Canal+ itself. [...] As a result, Cloudflare will not be penalized under these orders, even though its public DNS resolver is not blocking the sites in question. That is in line with the company's long-standing claim that it doesn't interfere with its DNS. In its recent transparency reports, Cloudflare repeatedly stated that it hasn't blocked any content through 1.1.1.1, despite orders from French and Italian courts. "To date, Cloudflare has not blocked content through the 1.1.1.1 Public DNS Resolver," the company's latest report reads. [...] Blocking through the CDN is another matter. According to the same report, Cloudflare geoblocked 1,238 domains in France in the second half of 2025, all under a single court order. In the first half of the year, it geoblocked 662 domains under seven orders. Cloudflare recently explained its position to the European Commission, in a submission (PDF) to its Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List consultation, stressing that global public DNS resolvers should not be used to block or restrict access. Instead, it highlights its real-time pirate stream blocking program, which allows vetted rightsholders to flag pirate streams that run through its network. These streams are disrupted "within seconds," Cloudflare says, without any DNS or IP address blocking. "For live content, where speed is crucial, Cloudflare has built real-time mitigation mechanisms that allow vetted rightsholder partners to flag infringing streams. When those streams are running through our network, we act on them in seconds," Cloudflare informed the Commission. For now, Cloudflare can continue to block pirate sites through its CDN only, while its 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver remains untouched. Canal+ can still appeal the rulings, so it may not be the last we hear of it. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • A 1960 Paper Published In Science Predicts World Will End Next Month
    by BeauHD on 09/10/2026 at 11:00 am

    sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: A physicist has put a definite date on Doomsday," The New York Times wrote on November 4, 1960. "He calculates that it will come on Friday the Thirteenth in November, 2026 A. D. On that date, or thereabouts, the human population will have expanded so far as to approach infinity and thus will automatically annihilate itself." The newspaper was right -- but the prediction was wrong. That week, Austrian American physicist Heinz von Foerster and two colleagues published a paper in Science with the stunningly succinct title "Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026." The work was based on a simple observation: The time it took for the human population to double in size kept getting shorter. Using population estimates from about 400 B.C.E. until 1958 C.E., the authors -- all from the department of electrical engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign -- came up with an equation that best described the trend. If things continued the way they were going, the number of humans on Earth would rise faster and faster, reaching more than 25 billion by 2020. The researchers didn't calculate when humanity would run out of food, land, or energy. They just concluded that at some point this year, the equation ceased to give meaningful results because the predicted population shot toward infinity. That was their doomsday. "Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve," they wrote. "They will be squeezed to death." The exact date was somewhat arbitrary, however. The formula solved to 2026.87 plus or minus 5.5 years, and The New York Times reported that von Foerster "searched the center of this doom-time span for an appropriate date and found that a Friday the Thirteenth would fall conveniently in November of 2026." (November 13 also happened to be his birthday.) [...] [D]emographers, annoyed by what they saw as a provocation by outsiders, pointed out obvious flaws. For example, the time it takes for the number of humans to double could get a lot shorter, but certainly not shorter than the 9 months it takes for a baby to develop. "In view of the comments that subsequently were published in this journal, an extensive discussion of this article does not seem to be required," public health expert Harold Dorn drily noted in Science 2 years after von Foerster's article was published. The forecast would set a record, he predicted, "for the short length of time required to demonstrate its unreliability." "The failure of the Doomsday equation is ultimately a cautionary tale about the dangers of extrapolating from historically exceptional circumstances," writes economist Javier Birchenall of the University of California, Santa Barbara writes in a Perspective published in Science today. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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