12 ms·

Code that helped end Apartheid

362 points by impish9208 2y ago

kombine 2y ago
[flagged]
- mjcohen 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - emsimot 2y ago
    https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/07/19/world-court-finds-israel-responsible-apartheid https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/07/19/world-court-finds-israel...
- worik 2y ago
  Yes One day we will be telling these stories about Palestinians
  - mjfl 2y ago
    That is a hopelessly optimistic statement. Wait until the Israelis write the history, they will have your grandchildren worshipping at their feet for surviving the Hamas onslaught.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - ein0p 2y ago
      You’re presupposing they actually survive the current events and come out victorious in order to “write history”. I’m not sure of that at all if things kick off in earnest there.
      - sceptical 2y ago
        Quite a bit of wishful thinking here. Who exactly would be able to defeat Israel? Iran? They are cowering in fear right now. Hamas? Hezbollah? Please.
        ein0p 2y ago
        Just Iran alone is capable of defeating Israel if it wishes. Israel is only 8M people. There are hundreds of millions of Muslims living in Middle East. They aren’t united right now, but Israel, ironically, could unite them.
        sceptical 2y ago
        But it wishes it already. Israel however has nukes and is backed by the US. Iran wouldn't last 10 minutes.
        ein0p 2y ago
        Not only does Iran not wish to destroy Israel, it is also unwilling to allow Hezbollah to successfully do so either. If it wanted to destroy Israel, Israel wouldn’t have any AD after the last strike.
        fldskfjdslkfj 2y ago
        You are delusional. Iran lost most of its deterrence, its proxies have been decimated and its ICBM capabilities, although not nothing haven't really managed to cause any significant damage and have shown that they lack sufficient accuracy. Will the balance of power change a few decades from now? Maybe, who knows, but for now Iran is in a tough spot.
        ein0p 2y ago
        Uh-uh. The country which has just tested a nuke a couple of weeks ago and easily defeated the Iron Dome with its cheaper rocket stock is “totally decimated”. Sure buddy.
pvg 2y ago
https://archive.is/yK8Jb https://archive.is/yK8Jb
jgrahamc 2y ago
So when he DM’d me to say that he had “a hell of a story”—promising “one-time pads! 8-bit computers! Flight attendants smuggling floppies full of random numbers into South Africa!”—I responded. Ha ha ha. Yes, that was literally my very short pitch to Steven about Tim Jenkin's story! The actual DM: "I think this has the makings of a hell of a story: https://blog.jgc.org/2024/09/cracking-old-zip-file-to-help-open.html https://blog.jgc.org/2024/09/cracking-old-zip-file-to-help-o... If you want I can connect you with Tim Jenkin. One time pads! 8-bit computers! Flights attendants smuggling floppies full of random numbers into South Africa!"
- jefb 2y ago
  Did you end up discovering the original password to the zip file? (was it, as I'd hope, `TIMBOBIMBO` ?)
  - jgrahamc 2y ago
    No, I did not. I threw quite a lot of compute power at it using bkcrack (CPU) and hashcat (GPU) but never found out what it was. It was definitely not TIMBOBIMBO, sadly! I also ended up sponsoring the bkcrack project because the maintainer added a new option for me: https://github.com/kimci86/bkcrack/pull/126 https://github.com/kimci86/bkcrack/pull/126
    - latchkey 2y ago
      How much was "quite a lot"?
      - 1970-01-01 2y ago
        I did a pass with bkcrack. The password is over 13 char. bkcrack.exe -k 98e0f009 48a0b11a c70f8499 -r 1..18 ?p bkcrack 1.7.0 - 2024-05-26 [11:07:33] Recovering password length 0-6... length 7... length 8... length 9... length 10... length 11... length 12... length 13...
        2y ago
1970-01-01 2y ago
A longer version is here https://github.com/Vulacode/Articles/blob/main/Talking%20To%20Vula.pdf https://github.com/Vulacode/Articles/blob/main/Talking%20To%...
rsynnott 2y ago
You know it's _proper_ vintage crypto code because it uses the now very unfashionable word 'encipher'.
- quuxplusone 2y ago
  Funny but also thought-provoking! When did the verb "encipher" give way to "encrypt," and why? I might enjoy reading a well-researched piece on that subject.
  - jgrahamc 2y ago
    I don't know why but here's when: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=encipher%2Cencrypt&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=de-2019&smoothing=4&case_insensitive=false https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=encipher%2Cenc...
    - seanw444 2y ago
      Wow. Apparently that's when AES and Triple DES were introduced, which can't be coincidental.
      - kylecazar 2y ago
        Yeah... Data Encryption Standard published in the late '70s, and given its adoption, I assume solidified the use of 'encryption' in this context.
    - iamthepieman 2y ago
      So basically encipher was never used in the context of the web. And the web is what made encrypt popular separate from encipher. It does look like maybe encipher was possibly going to take off but encrypt stepped on its head.
      - macobrien 2y ago
        Interestingly, the basis of web encryption does use the term "encipherment" -- the `KeyUsage` field of X.509 certificates has `keyEncipherment` and `dataEncipherment` flags.
Simulacra 2y ago
I think it was the fishing trip with Mandela and then-Prime Minister F.W. de Klerk in 1990 that ended apartheid. Specifically when one of de Klerk's people got a hook in his hand, and a Mandela person cleaned and bandaged it. After that trip Apartheid was finally broken.
- tgv 2y ago
  That might have been the symbolic last drop that made the bucket overflow.
- mschuster91 2y ago
  Sometimes all it takes is for the right people to see at the right time that their opponent bleeds just the same red blood as they do.
- bdndndndbve 2y ago
  What actually ended apartheid was international pressure and the white government's fear of a civil war. Economically isolated and vastly outnumbered, the apartheid government would have been completely removed from the country and had their property seized. My understanding is Mandela was a respected leader who was willing to play ball and facilitate a peaceful transition where the white leadership got to keep all their property. That's why there's still massive economic inequality in SA today. Not to say Mandela wasn't admirable or that he didn't suffer, but it was a conscious choice to avoid outright military conflict at the cost of preserving an implicit racial hierarchy.
  - rsynnott 2y ago
    The existence of a viable ANC was arguably pretty important to the international pressure, though. Absent a viable opposition, you probably do not _want_ to exert _too_ much pressure on a rogue state, however nasty, because its only response is to either go full autarky, or collapse into complete chaos. Take North Korea, say, another extremely nasty rogue nuclear-armed state. Even if there was a level of pressure that the international community could put on North Korea that would collapse it (it's already pretty far down the 'autarky' route), you can see that countries would be unwilling to go quite _that_ far, because there's no viable opposition and it would likely collapse in a very dangerous and ugly way.
McBainiel 2y ago
The tech side of this is really cool but I'd also like to read more about the non-tech stuff. I wonder if the sympathetic Dutch flight attendant is still alive or the guys who actually carried the Trojan horse books to Mandela. What an amazing story!
- tow21 2y ago
  Coincidentally I was reading this story yesterday: https://www.londonrecruits.org.uk/index.php/items-received-since-the-book-was-published/john-o-malley-and-joy-leman https://www.londonrecruits.org.uk/index.php/items-received-s... about the “London Recruits” in the 70s and 80s who smuggled books, leaflets, etc into apartheid SA on behalf of the ANC, doing so in such secrecy they didn’t know each others identity until 29 years after the apartheid regime fell. Joy Leman, one of the recruits, was my late father-in-law’s colleague.
- steven 2y ago
  She is alive and hearing her recollections is super cool. If you follow the link to the short documentary I mentioned in the column you will see her then and now.
vt85 2y ago
[dead]
amelius 2y ago
Maybe in the future we can also see the code that ended democracy. (The FB source code).
GordonS 2y ago
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- johndevor 2y ago
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- sschueller 2y ago
  Nelson Mandela was on the US terrorist watch list until 2008. Also the fact that so many in the US claim they remember he died in prison should say something about the media landscape. From the European perspective I recall the concerts that were held to free him and then also the concert that was held after he was free. Simple Minds even made a famous song for it [1]. I don't know if those concets were a big show in the US, we only had a few TV stations and this was always a big thing. [1] https://youtu.be/xfk13uUuD8Q https://youtu.be/xfk13uUuD8Q
  - GordonS 2y ago
    Yes, and also the UK just denied Nelson Mandela's grandson access to the UK, because of his views on modern day apartheid.
  - skrtskrt 2y ago
    As far as the European vs. US on the current situation - Euro countries are denying entry to journalists and doctors who are EU citizens just because they are speaking about the atrocities they have seen on the ground. While Euro countries tend to be a tiny bit better than the US on the issues, they are generally much more restrictive in terms of protected speech.
    - immibis 2y ago
      For example, a former Greek finance minister was banned from the Schengen area (which includes Greece) by Germany, and not because the Greek economy is terrible. You say "Euro countries" but let's be clear - it's only Germany.
- 2y ago
farceSpherule 2y ago
We need to show this "code" to Israel...
SkyeForeverBlue 2y ago
This is paywalled; how can I read it?
- LeifCarrotson 2y ago
  Most paywalled articles on HN will have an archive.is link in the comments, pvg posted one here.
  - SkyeForeverBlue 2y ago
    Thank you!
- RandallBrown 2y ago
  https://archive.is/yK8Jb https://archive.is/yK8Jb
LeifCarrotson 2y ago
Interesting how the PKZIP password-protected compressed file is now easily decrypted in <5 minutes, but the original one-time pad is still as mathematically robust as ever. We could have had a very different history if they'd used DES or RC2 for encryption!
- rtkwe 2y ago
  One time pads used properly are theoretically perfectly unbreakable. The problem is making sure no one ever uses the same 'pad'/keystream twice, that your pad generation is actually random, and that the pads never fall into the hands of your adversaries. (or if they do you've been diligent about completely destroying the used pads and the other end of your communications doesn't use the captured set of pads) They're just not very good at anything other than point to point secret passing and require a real world connection to distribute. So much of symmetric key cryptography is just trying to find creative ways of creating and recreating 'one time pads' so we can distribute the key material instead of the pads themselves.
  - janzer 2y ago
    > that your pad generation is actually random The one thing that stood out to me with the original blog post and a quick glance at the code was that it appeared as if the pad was certainly not actually random. Could anyone that has actually understood it a bit more confirm or reject this? Edit: It seems that the random generation can be found starting here https://github.com/Vulacode/RANDOM/blob/d6a1a1d694b22e6a115b50a6c2d2bada41cda075/RANDOM.BAS#L1262 https://github.com/Vulacode/RANDOM/blob/d6a1a1d694b22e6a115b... With three methods, one (RAND2) seems to use the basic interpreter rng more or less directly and the other two seem to be fairly simple prngs seeded from the basic interpreter's rng. I don't actually know what the state of basic interpreter rngs was in the early '80s but I would be fairly surprised if they're anything that is secure.
    - rtkwe 2y ago
      At the time PRNG was probably good enough. I wouldn't want to go up against the NSA today using the same entropy source but against South Africa decades ago it was probably good enough. Even knowing what PRNG source the original noise came from it'd take a hell of a lot of guess and check with cribs to come close to guessing the seed for the PRNG. That would be my first crack at breaking a OTP I knew was generated with a particular PRNG at least as a casual student of the craft. Generate huge amount of noise for the possible seeds and see if any names like "Mandela" or other known leaders suddenly pops out of intercepted messages starting at different points in the noise stream (and see if the rest of the message makes any sense when that does happen).
deleted 2y ago
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rgblambda 2y ago
>Working in the woodshop, he crafted mockups of the large keys that could unlock the prison doors. I got to here before realising this is the same guy portrayed by Daniel Radcliffe in Escape From Pretoria. Great film.
pbiggar 2y ago
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- deleted 2y ago
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submeta 2y ago
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- fldskfjdslkfj 2y ago
  In the west bank yes, in israel proper no. And to sprinkle some "whataboutism" - just a reminder that most of the muslim world is an apartheid based on gender, and even men who don't suffer from it usually have way less human rights than arab israelis.
  - nxobject 2y ago
    No, even within the 1948 borders too. [1] [1] https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/isra...
    - fldskfjdslkfj 2y ago
      That's not a verdict. The only case that was brought to court afaik was for the occupied territories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICJ_case_on_Israel%27s_occupation_of_the_Palestinian_territories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICJ_case_on_Israel%27s_occupat...
  - submeta 2y ago
    I disagree. Won’t repeat the arguments, just point to another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41886598 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41886598
motohagiography 2y ago
I remember the activist campaigns and the movie Cry Freedom about Steve Biko, another SA activist, had a significant impact on my worldview growing up. As revolutions and coups go it was clearly a success. I'd wonder how much of a role their electronic opsec played in it. I think it was the ANC and its activists organizing the coalition of other countries to sanction and isolate the government that ultimately caused it to yield power, which is the necessary condition for any revolution- it requires allies to be in place to support it for when it succeeds. On the ground, you only really need a few dozen people to seize some buildings and bank accounts, it's coordinating the external trade links to keep everyone paid and in their jobs while the top of the regime changes to new hands that's difficult. The opsec for that ground force just has to get most of them to their X day, where they're going to take casulties anyway. In the case of SA, it seemed like a matter of convincing other countries to do nothing, by persuading the world the govt were just racist villains, and convincing the National Party in government that nobody would intervene to save them if there were a civil revolt. That part was organized in plain view. Opsec is interesting and mysterious, but often less important than the stories we tell about it afterwards.
- nxobject 2y ago
  > it's coordinating the external trade links to keep everyone paid and in their jobs while the top of the regime changes to new hands that's difficult. That's actually a really good insight. It explains why quite a few successful revolutions – e.g. Russia and China – happened in countries _without_ an established administrative bureaucracy, and patted themselves on the based on their apparent competence in building one.
  - motohagiography 2y ago
    the view of coups as one faction replacing another is quite a rabbit hole, but it's a political analysis that has some experimental and predictive power. there has to be guarantor or benefactor on the other side of it. in this view, leaders are figureheads accountable to the small essential coalition who keeps them there. the idea of secret cabals orchestrating these things is usually backwards, where a revolutionary (or politician) is really just an entrepreneurial dealmaker between elite factions. it's essentially demesquita's "logic of political survival," also distilled into the well made cartoon, "rules for rulers" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
nxobject 2y ago
Perhaps the only successful counterxample to "don't roll your own crypto!"
anlsh 2y ago
Why does a password-protected zip file reveal a list of the files within lol? If I'm understanding this right, we'd have been hosed if the files had been TARd first?
- emmelaich 2y ago
  And then encrypted? Not sure, the known structure of tar (or zip) can help with decryption. [edit] ... This is addressed in the article. In fact the zip contained a zip and this helped! > He realized the zip file contained another zip file, and that since all he needed was the right original text for a specific part of the scrambled text, his best chance was using the first file name mentioned in the zip within the zip.
highcountess 2y ago
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- ein0p 2y ago
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- bjourne 2y ago
  Then why does ANC keep winning elections in SA?
YawHawHawn 2y ago
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vidarh 2y ago
This article (and a lot of the other content on that site) goes into a lot more depth on Operation Vula: https://omalley.nelsonmandela.org/index.php/site/q/03lv03445/04lv03996/05lv04001.htm https://omalley.nelsonmandela.org/index.php/site/q/03lv03445...
amai 2y ago
See also: https://blog.jgc.org/2024/09/cracking-old-zip-file-to-help-open.html https://blog.jgc.org/2024/09/cracking-old-zip-file-to-help-o...

362 points by impish9208 2y ago

kombine 2y ago

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mjcohen 2y ago
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- emsimot 2y ago
  https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/07/19/world-court-finds-israel-responsible-apartheid https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/07/19/world-court-finds-israel...
worik 2y ago
Yes One day we will be telling these stories about Palestinians
- mjfl 2y ago
  That is a hopelessly optimistic statement. Wait until the Israelis write the history, they will have your grandchildren worshipping at their feet for surviving the Hamas onslaught.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - ein0p 2y ago
    You’re presupposing they actually survive the current events and come out victorious in order to “write history”. I’m not sure of that at all if things kick off in earnest there.
    - sceptical 2y ago
      Quite a bit of wishful thinking here. Who exactly would be able to defeat Israel? Iran? They are cowering in fear right now. Hamas? Hezbollah? Please.
      - ein0p 2y ago
        Just Iran alone is capable of defeating Israel if it wishes. Israel is only 8M people. There are hundreds of millions of Muslims living in Middle East. They aren’t united right now, but Israel, ironically, could unite them.
        sceptical 2y ago
        But it wishes it already. Israel however has nukes and is backed by the US. Iran wouldn't last 10 minutes.
        ein0p 2y ago
        Not only does Iran not wish to destroy Israel, it is also unwilling to allow Hezbollah to successfully do so either. If it wanted to destroy Israel, Israel wouldn’t have any AD after the last strike.
        fldskfjdslkfj 2y ago
        You are delusional. Iran lost most of its deterrence, its proxies have been decimated and its ICBM capabilities, although not nothing haven't really managed to cause any significant damage and have shown that they lack sufficient accuracy. Will the balance of power change a few decades from now? Maybe, who knows, but for now Iran is in a tough spot.
        ein0p 2y ago
        Uh-uh. The country which has just tested a nuke a couple of weeks ago and easily defeated the Iron Dome with its cheaper rocket stock is “totally decimated”. Sure buddy.

pvg 2y ago

https://archive.is/yK8Jb https://archive.is/yK8Jb

jgrahamc 2y ago

So when he DM’d me to say that he had “a hell of a story”—promising “one-time pads! 8-bit computers! Flight attendants smuggling floppies full of random numbers into South Africa!”—I responded. Ha ha ha. Yes, that was literally my very short pitch to Steven about Tim Jenkin's story! The actual DM: "I think this has the makings of a hell of a story: https://blog.jgc.org/2024/09/cracking-old-zip-file-to-help-open.html https://blog.jgc.org/2024/09/cracking-old-zip-file-to-help-o... If you want I can connect you with Tim Jenkin. One time pads! 8-bit computers! Flights attendants smuggling floppies full of random numbers into South Africa!"

jefb 2y ago
Did you end up discovering the original password to the zip file? (was it, as I'd hope, `TIMBOBIMBO` ?)
- jgrahamc 2y ago
  No, I did not. I threw quite a lot of compute power at it using bkcrack (CPU) and hashcat (GPU) but never found out what it was. It was definitely not TIMBOBIMBO, sadly! I also ended up sponsoring the bkcrack project because the maintainer added a new option for me: https://github.com/kimci86/bkcrack/pull/126 https://github.com/kimci86/bkcrack/pull/126
  - latchkey 2y ago
    How much was "quite a lot"?
    - 1970-01-01 2y ago
      I did a pass with bkcrack. The password is over 13 char. bkcrack.exe -k 98e0f009 48a0b11a c70f8499 -r 1..18 ?p bkcrack 1.7.0 - 2024-05-26 [11:07:33] Recovering password length 0-6... length 7... length 8... length 9... length 10... length 11... length 12... length 13...
      - 2y ago

1970-01-01 2y ago

A longer version is here https://github.com/Vulacode/Articles/blob/main/Talking%20To%20Vula.pdf https://github.com/Vulacode/Articles/blob/main/Talking%20To%...

rsynnott 2y ago

You know it's _proper_ vintage crypto code because it uses the now very unfashionable word 'encipher'.

quuxplusone 2y ago
Funny but also thought-provoking! When did the verb "encipher" give way to "encrypt," and why? I might enjoy reading a well-researched piece on that subject.
- jgrahamc 2y ago
  I don't know why but here's when: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=encipher%2Cencrypt&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=de-2019&smoothing=4&case_insensitive=false https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=encipher%2Cenc...
  - seanw444 2y ago
    Wow. Apparently that's when AES and Triple DES were introduced, which can't be coincidental.
    - kylecazar 2y ago
      Yeah... Data Encryption Standard published in the late '70s, and given its adoption, I assume solidified the use of 'encryption' in this context.
  - iamthepieman 2y ago
    So basically encipher was never used in the context of the web. And the web is what made encrypt popular separate from encipher. It does look like maybe encipher was possibly going to take off but encrypt stepped on its head.
    - macobrien 2y ago
      Interestingly, the basis of web encryption does use the term "encipherment" -- the `KeyUsage` field of X.509 certificates has `keyEncipherment` and `dataEncipherment` flags.

Simulacra 2y ago

I think it was the fishing trip with Mandela and then-Prime Minister F.W. de Klerk in 1990 that ended apartheid. Specifically when one of de Klerk's people got a hook in his hand, and a Mandela person cleaned and bandaged it. After that trip Apartheid was finally broken.

tgv 2y ago
That might have been the symbolic last drop that made the bucket overflow.
mschuster91 2y ago
Sometimes all it takes is for the right people to see at the right time that their opponent bleeds just the same red blood as they do.
bdndndndbve 2y ago
What actually ended apartheid was international pressure and the white government's fear of a civil war. Economically isolated and vastly outnumbered, the apartheid government would have been completely removed from the country and had their property seized. My understanding is Mandela was a respected leader who was willing to play ball and facilitate a peaceful transition where the white leadership got to keep all their property. That's why there's still massive economic inequality in SA today. Not to say Mandela wasn't admirable or that he didn't suffer, but it was a conscious choice to avoid outright military conflict at the cost of preserving an implicit racial hierarchy.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  The existence of a viable ANC was arguably pretty important to the international pressure, though. Absent a viable opposition, you probably do not _want_ to exert _too_ much pressure on a rogue state, however nasty, because its only response is to either go full autarky, or collapse into complete chaos. Take North Korea, say, another extremely nasty rogue nuclear-armed state. Even if there was a level of pressure that the international community could put on North Korea that would collapse it (it's already pretty far down the 'autarky' route), you can see that countries would be unwilling to go quite _that_ far, because there's no viable opposition and it would likely collapse in a very dangerous and ugly way.

McBainiel 2y ago

The tech side of this is really cool but I'd also like to read more about the non-tech stuff. I wonder if the sympathetic Dutch flight attendant is still alive or the guys who actually carried the Trojan horse books to Mandela. What an amazing story!

tow21 2y ago
Coincidentally I was reading this story yesterday: https://www.londonrecruits.org.uk/index.php/items-received-since-the-book-was-published/john-o-malley-and-joy-leman https://www.londonrecruits.org.uk/index.php/items-received-s... about the “London Recruits” in the 70s and 80s who smuggled books, leaflets, etc into apartheid SA on behalf of the ANC, doing so in such secrecy they didn’t know each others identity until 29 years after the apartheid regime fell. Joy Leman, one of the recruits, was my late father-in-law’s colleague.
steven 2y ago
She is alive and hearing her recollections is super cool. If you follow the link to the short documentary I mentioned in the column you will see her then and now.

vt85 2y ago

[dead]

amelius 2y ago

Maybe in the future we can also see the code that ended democracy. (The FB source code).

GordonS 2y ago

[flagged]

johndevor 2y ago
[flagged]
sschueller 2y ago
Nelson Mandela was on the US terrorist watch list until 2008. Also the fact that so many in the US claim they remember he died in prison should say something about the media landscape. From the European perspective I recall the concerts that were held to free him and then also the concert that was held after he was free. Simple Minds even made a famous song for it [1]. I don't know if those concets were a big show in the US, we only had a few TV stations and this was always a big thing. [1] https://youtu.be/xfk13uUuD8Q https://youtu.be/xfk13uUuD8Q
- GordonS 2y ago
  Yes, and also the UK just denied Nelson Mandela's grandson access to the UK, because of his views on modern day apartheid.
- skrtskrt 2y ago
  As far as the European vs. US on the current situation - Euro countries are denying entry to journalists and doctors who are EU citizens just because they are speaking about the atrocities they have seen on the ground. While Euro countries tend to be a tiny bit better than the US on the issues, they are generally much more restrictive in terms of protected speech.
  - immibis 2y ago
    For example, a former Greek finance minister was banned from the Schengen area (which includes Greece) by Germany, and not because the Greek economy is terrible. You say "Euro countries" but let's be clear - it's only Germany.
2y ago

farceSpherule 2y ago

We need to show this "code" to Israel...

SkyeForeverBlue 2y ago

This is paywalled; how can I read it?

LeifCarrotson 2y ago
Most paywalled articles on HN will have an archive.is link in the comments, pvg posted one here.
- SkyeForeverBlue 2y ago
  Thank you!
RandallBrown 2y ago
https://archive.is/yK8Jb https://archive.is/yK8Jb

LeifCarrotson 2y ago

Interesting how the PKZIP password-protected compressed file is now easily decrypted in <5 minutes, but the original one-time pad is still as mathematically robust as ever. We could have had a very different history if they'd used DES or RC2 for encryption!

rtkwe 2y ago
One time pads used properly are theoretically perfectly unbreakable. The problem is making sure no one ever uses the same 'pad'/keystream twice, that your pad generation is actually random, and that the pads never fall into the hands of your adversaries. (or if they do you've been diligent about completely destroying the used pads and the other end of your communications doesn't use the captured set of pads) They're just not very good at anything other than point to point secret passing and require a real world connection to distribute. So much of symmetric key cryptography is just trying to find creative ways of creating and recreating 'one time pads' so we can distribute the key material instead of the pads themselves.
- janzer 2y ago
  > that your pad generation is actually random The one thing that stood out to me with the original blog post and a quick glance at the code was that it appeared as if the pad was certainly not actually random. Could anyone that has actually understood it a bit more confirm or reject this? Edit: It seems that the random generation can be found starting here https://github.com/Vulacode/RANDOM/blob/d6a1a1d694b22e6a115b50a6c2d2bada41cda075/RANDOM.BAS#L1262 https://github.com/Vulacode/RANDOM/blob/d6a1a1d694b22e6a115b... With three methods, one (RAND2) seems to use the basic interpreter rng more or less directly and the other two seem to be fairly simple prngs seeded from the basic interpreter's rng. I don't actually know what the state of basic interpreter rngs was in the early '80s but I would be fairly surprised if they're anything that is secure.
  - rtkwe 2y ago
    At the time PRNG was probably good enough. I wouldn't want to go up against the NSA today using the same entropy source but against South Africa decades ago it was probably good enough. Even knowing what PRNG source the original noise came from it'd take a hell of a lot of guess and check with cribs to come close to guessing the seed for the PRNG. That would be my first crack at breaking a OTP I knew was generated with a particular PRNG at least as a casual student of the craft. Generate huge amount of noise for the possible seeds and see if any names like "Mandela" or other known leaders suddenly pops out of intercepted messages starting at different points in the noise stream (and see if the rest of the message makes any sense when that does happen).

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rgblambda 2y ago

>Working in the woodshop, he crafted mockups of the large keys that could unlock the prison doors. I got to here before realising this is the same guy portrayed by Daniel Radcliffe in Escape From Pretoria. Great film.

pbiggar 2y ago

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submeta 2y ago

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fldskfjdslkfj 2y ago
In the west bank yes, in israel proper no. And to sprinkle some "whataboutism" - just a reminder that most of the muslim world is an apartheid based on gender, and even men who don't suffer from it usually have way less human rights than arab israelis.
- nxobject 2y ago
  No, even within the 1948 borders too. [1] [1] https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/isra...
  - fldskfjdslkfj 2y ago
    That's not a verdict. The only case that was brought to court afaik was for the occupied territories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICJ_case_on_Israel%27s_occupation_of_the_Palestinian_territories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICJ_case_on_Israel%27s_occupat...
- submeta 2y ago
  I disagree. Won’t repeat the arguments, just point to another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41886598 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41886598

motohagiography 2y ago

I remember the activist campaigns and the movie Cry Freedom about Steve Biko, another SA activist, had a significant impact on my worldview growing up. As revolutions and coups go it was clearly a success. I'd wonder how much of a role their electronic opsec played in it. I think it was the ANC and its activists organizing the coalition of other countries to sanction and isolate the government that ultimately caused it to yield power, which is the necessary condition for any revolution- it requires allies to be in place to support it for when it succeeds. On the ground, you only really need a few dozen people to seize some buildings and bank accounts, it's coordinating the external trade links to keep everyone paid and in their jobs while the top of the regime changes to new hands that's difficult. The opsec for that ground force just has to get most of them to their X day, where they're going to take casulties anyway. In the case of SA, it seemed like a matter of convincing other countries to do nothing, by persuading the world the govt were just racist villains, and convincing the National Party in government that nobody would intervene to save them if there were a civil revolt. That part was organized in plain view. Opsec is interesting and mysterious, but often less important than the stories we tell about it afterwards.

nxobject 2y ago
> it's coordinating the external trade links to keep everyone paid and in their jobs while the top of the regime changes to new hands that's difficult. That's actually a really good insight. It explains why quite a few successful revolutions – e.g. Russia and China – happened in countries _without_ an established administrative bureaucracy, and patted themselves on the based on their apparent competence in building one.
- motohagiography 2y ago
  the view of coups as one faction replacing another is quite a rabbit hole, but it's a political analysis that has some experimental and predictive power. there has to be guarantor or benefactor on the other side of it. in this view, leaders are figureheads accountable to the small essential coalition who keeps them there. the idea of secret cabals orchestrating these things is usually backwards, where a revolutionary (or politician) is really just an entrepreneurial dealmaker between elite factions. it's essentially demesquita's "logic of political survival," also distilled into the well made cartoon, "rules for rulers" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

nxobject 2y ago

Perhaps the only successful counterxample to "don't roll your own crypto!"

anlsh 2y ago

Why does a password-protected zip file reveal a list of the files within lol? If I'm understanding this right, we'd have been hosed if the files had been TARd first?

emmelaich 2y ago
And then encrypted? Not sure, the known structure of tar (or zip) can help with decryption. [edit] ... This is addressed in the article. In fact the zip contained a zip and this helped! > He realized the zip file contained another zip file, and that since all he needed was the right original text for a specific part of the scrambled text, his best chance was using the first file name mentioned in the zip within the zip.

highcountess 2y ago

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ein0p 2y ago
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bjourne 2y ago
Then why does ANC keep winning elections in SA?

YawHawHawn 2y ago

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vidarh 2y ago

This article (and a lot of the other content on that site) goes into a lot more depth on Operation Vula: https://omalley.nelsonmandela.org/index.php/site/q/03lv03445/04lv03996/05lv04001.htm https://omalley.nelsonmandela.org/index.php/site/q/03lv03445...

amai 2y ago

See also: https://blog.jgc.org/2024/09/cracking-old-zip-file-to-help-open.html https://blog.jgc.org/2024/09/cracking-old-zip-file-to-help-o...