“Quantum physics enables perfectly secure cloud computing: Researchers have succeeded in combining the power of quantum computing with the security of quantum cryptography and have shown that perfectly secure cloud computing can be achieved using the principles of quantum mechanics. They have performed an experimental demonstration of quantum computation in which the input, the data processing, and the output remain unknown to the quantum computer.
[...] current trend of cloud computing: central remote servers are used to store and process data – everything is done in the “cloud.” The obvious challenge is to make globalized computing safe and ensure that users’ data stays private.
The latest research, to appear in Science, reveals that quantum computers can provide an answer to that challenge. “Quantum physics solves one of the key challenges in distributed computing. It can preserve data privacy when users interact with remote computing centers [...]
The scientists in the Vienna research group have demonstrated the concept of “blind quantum computing” in an experiment: they performed the first known quantum computation during which the user’s data stayed perfectly encrypted. The experimental demonstration uses photons, or “light particles” to encode the data. Photonic systems are well-suited to the task because quantum computation operations can be performed on them, and they can be transmitted over long distances.
The process works in the following manner. The user prepares qubits – the fundamental units of quantum computers – in a state known only to himself and sends these qubits to the quantum computer. The quantum computer entangles the qubits according to a standard scheme. The actual computation is measurement-based: the processing of quantum information is implemented by simple measurements on qubits. The user tailors measurement instructions to the particular state of each qubit and sends them to the quantum server. Finally, the results of the computation are sent back to the user who can interpret and utilize the results of the computation. Even if the quantum computer or an eavesdropper tries to read the qubits, they gain no useful information, without knowing the initial state; they are “blind.”" http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-01/uov-qpe011612.php

Publication: “Demonstration of Blind Quantum Computing” Stefanie Barz, Elham Kashefi, Anne Broadbent, Joseph Fitzsimons, Anton Zeilinger, Philip Walther. DOI: 10.1126/science.1214707

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1110.1381

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EUDataProtectionSupervisor: No privacy without net neutrality “78. Inspection techniques based on traffic data and inspection of IP payloads, i.e. the content of communications, may reveal users’ Internet activity: websites visited and activities on those sites, use of P2P applications, files downloaded, emails sent and received, from whom, on what subject and in which terms, etc. ISPs may want to use this information to prioritise some communications, such as video on demand, over others. They may want to use it to identify viruses, or to build profiles in order to serve behavioural advertising. These actions interfere with the right to the confidentiality of communications.” http://www.edps.europa.eu/EDPSWEB/webdav/site/mySite/shared/Documents/Consultation/Opinions/2011/11-10-07_Net_neutrality_EN.pdf

[Via http://www.laquadrature.net/en/no-privacy-without-net-neutrality ]

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“[...] the US government’s dollar position is short, not long — its dollar-denominated debts are greater than its dollar-denominated assets. In financial terms, a short position is a way to bet against the value of the underlying commodity. The US government is currently about $7 million million dollars “short”.

An illustration may help to clarify. Suppose you are a private in the Zimbabwean military in September 2007. Suppose your monthly pay is about US$180, but you are paid in Zimbabwean dollars, so your pay packet is actually Z$5.4 million for the month. The Zimbabwean dollar has been hyperinflating, and you expect it to continue to lose value. You don’t currently need to pay any expenses. Consider the following options:

A. Keep the Z$5.4 million in cash.

B. Immediately buy other commodities with it; for example, buy 300 kilograms of rice and store it in Tupperware in the pantry.

C. Immediately buy other commodities with it, and also borrow an additional Z$10 million some poor sucker is willing to lend you at an extortionate 20% APR, and use that to buy rice too.

Option “A” is maintaining a “long” position in the Zimbabwean dollar. This amounts to a bet that the Z$ will retain its value. If you had taken this option, you would have lost 90% of your salary within a few weeks.

Option “B” is maintaining no position in the Zimbabwean dollar. It doesn’t matter what the Zimbabwean dollar does thereafter; you still have the same amount of rice. (Practically speaking, in situations like this, there tend to be price controls on most things you can buy with the collapsing currency.)

Option “C” is maintaining a “short” position in the Zimbabwean dollar. If you had somehow found such a sucker, then within a few weeks, you could have paid them back by selling off a tiny percentage of the rice you bought, as the Zimbabwean dollar continued to inflate.

This is the position the US government has taken relative to the US dollar.”

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Government internet control increases online radicalisation – LulzSec is not an isolated phenomenon http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/28/radical-hackers-lulzsec-governments

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High Technology, Not Low Taxes, May Drive US States’ Economic Growth http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110623130751.htm

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“[...] Feeling satisfied as I enjoyed my lunch, I remembered how many people I’ve heard continue to call Bitcoin imaginary, or a pyramid scheme. But I used it in a retail point-of-sale transaction and got a tasty meal, with nothing more than a cryptographic signature asking everyone whom it might concern to consider the Meze Grill the new owner of my half an imaginary coin. [...]

I find it incredible that people are so captivated by the notion of Bitcoin as Ponzi scheme that they would simply overlook the potential appeal of these properties: of cash that we can spend on-line. [...]

The idea that a bank’s responsibility to its customers might sometimes be useful is becoming increasingly concrete in the Bitcoin world as the scandals about Bitcoin thefts unfold and we see that, much of the time, Bitcoins really do work like cash: if someone steals them from you, there’s a real chance that they’re just gone. Keeping thousands of coins under your digital mattress is a great thing for financial privacy, but it raises the possibility that your mattress might not be the safest place for them. Hence the prediction that many of the financial intermediaries we use with traditional currencies may get reinvented in some form for cryptocurrencies and may even get regulated the way the weary giants of flesh and steel did.

All fiat currency is imaginary sub specie (hee hee) aeternitatis and gets its value from psychology and various institutional arrangements. And that’s true of the currency in your wallet right now. It’s fair enough to point at the tremendous resources that might be brought to bear to defend the value of the U.S. dollar. Not much will defend the value of a Bitcoin once anything at all goes awry, and as Adam Smith might have said, there is a great deal of ruin in a currency. But I have no patience for theories that say that I couldn’t possibly have bought lunch with my half a Bitcoin or that the restaurant was crazy to accept it. It was a delicious thrill; I suggest you go down to Columbus Circle and try it for yourself while we watch to see what else this experiment has to teach us.” http://starburst.hackerfriendly.com/?p=1530

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Lulz #AntiSec Manifesto http://pastebin.com/9KyA0E5v & http://lulzsecurity.com/releases/1000th_tweet_press_release.txt

“Government hacking is taking place right now behind the scenes.” https://twitter.com/#!/LulzSec/status/82841336683831296

Cf. http://lulzsecexposed.blogspot.com/2011/06/operation-security.html

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“The Leader of LulzSec is Doxed. Game Over for you Guys !!!” http://lulzsecexposed.blogspot.com/2011/06/sabu-doxed.html

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BBC: LulzSec opens hack request line so its fans can suggest potential targets http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13777129

Cf. https://twitter.com/#!/LulzSec/status/80675710246723584

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Eavesdropper that illustrates a loophole in quantum cryptography http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-06/cfqt-mqc061011.php

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“Internet in a Suitcase”: A Detour Around Censors http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/world/12internet.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all

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Why we secretly love LulzSec: “So for the last ten years I’ve been working in media, trying to raise awareness of the idea that maybe, just maybe, using insecure computers to hold your secrets, conduct your commerce and run your infrastructure is a shitty idea.

No one who mattered listened. Executives think it’s FUD. They honestly think that if they keep paying their annual AV subscriptions they’ll be shielded by Mr. Norton’s magic cloak.

Security types like LulzSec because they’re proving what a mess we’re in. They’re pointing at the elephant in the room and saying “LOOK AT THE GIGANTIC FUCKING ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM ZOMG WHY CAN’T YOU SEE IT??? ITS TRUNK IS IN YR COFFEE FFS!!!” [...]” http://risky.biz/lulzsec

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Forget piracy, US government is going after Bitcoin http://venturebeat.com/2011/06/08/government-crackdown-on-bitcoin/ Cf. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2636078

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INFORMATION AND ITS METRIC “When one speaks of information one refers to that entity shared by all sources that are equivalent up to recoding. This observation suggests a definition of information. Information of the source S is the equivalence class of all recodings of the symbol sequences from S. This is noteworthy since information generally is left undefined in information theory. Information theory only considers the amount of information or rates of production, loss, and transmission, as measured by various entropies. [...]

Recoding R partitions the space I of unique information sources into mutually disjoint subsets. [...]

This suggests the definition of the more abstract information space I [...] as the set of equivalence classes of I under recodings R. [...] Elements of shall be denoted X, Y, and so on. [...] The elements of I shall be the objects of interest in the following. The necessary logical distinction between the class X and its constituent sources will be blurred in the following. A reference to X as an information source should be construed as connoting the common properties of its members. As a source, X is the generic source. We can speak, in a similar vein, of the events or measurements of source X. [...]

Theorem: d is a metric and (I, d) is a metric space. [...]

The theorem indicates that the space of information sources has quite a bit of topological structure. For example, the notion of [epsilon]-balls of “close” information sources, the continuity of functions on information sources, and the limits and convergence of sequences of information sources, can be developed. These and numerical computations of information distances will follow in a sequel. [...]

CONCLUDING REMARKS

One question that arises in this development is why not simply use mutual information instead of the information metric. Aside from the pseudo-geometric picture we have presented, we note that the former measures only a kind of informational correlation. The information metric, however, quantifies the degree of recoding equivalence. And so, it provides some insight into the nature of information itself. Mutual information is a derivative concept that simply reflects the properties Shannon entropy and no more.

The foregoing mathematical development instantiates a particular philosophical view- point, that of phenomenology. All that an observer has to work with in developing an understanding of the world are finite measurements and the attendant information. This intrinsic finiteness derives first and foremost from the limited computation resources available to an observer in a finite space-time region. The information space, as developed here, is the substrate for all perception, quantification, and modeling building. This is then structured with the pseudo-geometry as we have just shown. Only under suitable restrictions is one justified in using observations to form probabilities via (say) frequencies of events.

Information theory was founded on a quantitative measure of the amount of information. The foregoing has given a formal definition of information itself in terms of the equivalence class structure of sources. But what of the “meaning” of this information? A motivation of this work, unstated until this point, was the conviction that an understanding of the topological structure of the metric lattice of inferential logic is necessary for developing a quantitative measure of meaning and of context. Thus, we offer no immediate answer to the question, only the hope that progress can be made. We shall return to this question in the future.”

@inproceedings{crutchfield1990information,
title={Information and Its Metric},
author={Crutchfield, JP},
booktitle={Nonlinear structures in physical systems: pattern formation, chaos, and waves: proceedings of the Second Woodward Conference, San Jose State University, November 17-18, 1989},
pages={119},
year={1990},
organization={Springer}
}

Download: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=2410770660010935934

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MI6 to Rest of World: Cyber War is On. Anyone, Anywhere is Fair Game. Arm yourselves. “[...] it makes it OK for any government agency to target our servers and the tone of the article suggests moral impunity for government agencies engaging in these attacks. If it’s OK for British intelligence to hack (most likely) US based servers then it’s OK for Chinese officials to attack an ad network based in the USA if they run an ad for a dissident website.

At first glance this looks like a cute prank. But this attack may spark the beginning of a global cyber war fought by government agencies and private contractors, the logical conclusion of which is an Iron Curtain descending on what was once an open and peaceful communication medium.” http://markmaunder.com/2011/cyber-war-is-on/

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