rufus

Nice. Does anyone have an idea if there's open source third-party clients for that? I don't have the Android Google services installed on my phone.

That was the graph that opened my eyes a bit back in another discussion. I knew that people were dying in the States because they can't afford insulin/medication/treatment. But I somehow thought they were at least paying less for healthcare and just poor and society didn't care about people in need. But it's way worse. They are dying 2 years earlier WHILE paying twice as much for healthcare. And ruined financially if anything happens to them or their loved ones.

And all of that is a scheme to rip off everyone. Sadly a quite successful scheme for decades already. I mean I'm really amazed by the extent. And I wonder if it were possible to adopt another style, give healthcare to everyone plus every citizen an additional $5.000 for free each year. I don't really see that happening though. Every government in the past decades, no matter their color, has contributed to keep that graph going in this direction.

Edit: And I'd like to see that diagram for a few other countries. Not just against Europe, Japan, Australia, Israel and Korea.

Hmmh. I recently learned about that. Seems to be roughly 1980 (Reagan era?) when things started going really sideways and nowadays it's just bad beyond words...

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_the_United_States

Both cryptography and that part of history are fascinating topics. I can also recommend watching "The Imitation Game" with Benedict Cumberbatch starring as Alan Turing... I mean it's just a movie and skips lots of the interesting stuff and details. YMMV.

It's the beginning of computers. And I think especially that time has some interesting stories, discoveries/inventions and personas. There is also the history and role of women in computing which I think is something more people should know about and it's related to that. After that we needed secrecy in the cold war. I think public key cryptography hasn't been around until the 1970s. There had been export regulations on cryptography until after I was born. And modern encryption algorithms like AES are from the 1990s. Nowadays everyone and their grandma relies on the availability of secure communications.

I think I spent some nights jumping from Wikipedia article to Wikipedia article and reading all of that.

Ah, that is a really good question. These things happen. People have entire harddisks filled with "rainbow tables" which do these kind of attacks against hash-functions which are supposed to be one-way functions. This way they have terabytes worth of pre-computed hashes for the most common passwords and can immediately tell if one of those passwords is in a database leak.

For this it needs additional measures. Passwords are augmented with additional random data so people can't pre-compute the hashes. So it wouldn't be just 'Hello', but 'Hello' plus an additional (random) "salt" that gets fed into the one-way function so it can't be brute forced.

PGP for example uses both symmetric cryptography and asymmetric cryptography. The actual message is encrypted with symmetric encryption and the key to that is encrypted with asymmetric encryption. Unfortunately it's been a while since I last read a book on cryptography. I think they did that because symmetric cryptography is way faster. But things like that could also prevent such attacks. If you use the asymmetric encryption just for decrypting the other randomly chosen key which encrypts the actual message... There is no way to guess that. You'd have to check not just a small dictionary or know the plaintext, but check every random number in existence.

It's not always obvious to the layman what kinds of attacks are possible with the crypto algorithms. They definitely need to protect against such scenarios or they're worthless for that kind of use. There are "known plaintext attacks". Usually people don't want anyone even able to prove that you sent a certain message. And an algorithm also isn't good if you can learn something about the secret key if you have access to both a ciphertext and plaintext (the other variables in the equation). I think this was part of how they cracked the supposedly secure enigma machines of the Nazis. A proper modern cryptography algorithm protects against any of that. Sometimes by combining several things.

Edit: Sure and I forgot padding which @mumblerfish said. And appending data additionally helps if you don't want someone to know the exact length of a message. Or an algorithm sometimes can't encrypt arbitrary amounts of plaintext but does it in fixed block lengths...

It is unique to the way healthcare works in the USA. I don't know why, the complete system looks broken. I can only tell you we pay less for healthcare here in Europe and we don't have to call unless it's really complicated and a rare situation. I'm sorry if that sound a bit off and doesn't help...

I'm not sure I get your question... Sure other people can also follow the same process and encrypt stuff to you. They can also do the calculations with your private key and arrive at the same result, sure. But the calculation involves your private key. Your secret. If that's known to someone, they can do the calculations. In the example you need to keep the "53" a secret and give the "221" to other people. Everyone with the "53" can decrypt. Everyone with the "221" can encrypt. It's just with the "221" you can't decrypt. That part of the calculation needs people to put in the other number.

Sounds good to me. And washing feet is easier than washing shoes anyways.

My wife has some clogs next to the door. Slip in, take out the trash or water the plants and take them off on the way inside.

If you go outside for longer periods, you can put on proper shoes. You can also keep your porch clean and get away with going out in socks or nothing at all.

I mean depending on the amounts of doors your house has to the outside, you'd need about that amount of slip-on shoes. Or less if one way to the outside requires you to put on proper shoes anyways.

It think the common analogy is a padlock and a key. One party gets the padlock and the other one the key. Now with the padlock you can just lock the box but not open it. And with the key you can just unlock and open the box. That's assymetric. You hand out padlocks (your public key) to everyone, but keep the key (your private key).

The maths behind that is a bit difficult to explain but not that difficult. I think it's about one-way functions that are easy to calculate in one direction and impossible to solve the other way around. There are several ways to do it. Like the old approaches with prime numbers. It's easy to multiply two prime numbers. But given an arbitrary large number, it's difficult to tell which prime numbers it consists of.

https://www.baeldung.com/cs/prime-numbers-cryptography

AI is everywhere. It's inside of your camera detecting faces, in the OCR of your scanner, speech recognition and synthesis. Driving your Tesla... In science doing specific astronomy tasks or biology research stuff with DNA. Doctors are looking for ways to augment and improve medical diagnosis with AI. The weapons industry is currently trying to improve killing people with it... And it's probably in some bots of computer games... Doing weather forecasts...

For consumer products there always is the economy of scale. So the software inside is made for the masses. But I think some of the other tasks aren't what consumers do every day. (Look for exoplanets in the universe. [https://www.astronomy.com/science/how-artificial-intelligence-is-changing-astronomy/])

Stay at a friend's house where people don't wear shoes inside and watch them.