7 ms·
"At approximately 1:30p.m. eDT on August 2, 2013, Mr. Levison gave the FBI a printout of what he represented to be the encryption keys needed to operate the pen
by speeq 13y ago
"At approximately 1:30p.m. eDT on August 2, 2013, Mr. Levison gave the FBI a printout of what he represented to be the encryption keys needed to operate the penregister. This printout, in what appears to be 4-point type, consists of 11 pages of largely illegible characters.
Moreover, each of the five encryption keys contains 512 individual characters - or a total of 2560 characters. To make use of these keys, the FBI would have to manually input all 2560 characters, and one incorrect keystroke in this laborious process would render the FBI collection system incapable of collecting decrypted data."
- drdaeman 13y ago> To make use of these keys, the FBI would have to manually input all 2560 characters They would probably have to OCR the thing.
- johnchristopher 13y agoWhat are interns for ? Or are they "non-essential" employees ?
- Colliwinks 13y agoShould have printed it out as images via ReCaptcha
- archangel_one 13y ago2560 characters isn't that many. You'd have to proofread the OCR'd version anyway, I'd say it'd be easier to just type it in.
- MagicWishMonkey 13y agoNope. Ladar intentionally used an obscure font (some variant of Helvetica with extremely narrow kerning) to make OCR difficult. Obviously it would be possible to apply OCR, but it would take a few days/weeks to train the algorithm. An out of the box solution would not work.
- deanclatworthy 13y agoPresumably they could quite easily OCR it.
- StavrosK 13y agoWell, with a 4pt font, accuracy would probably suffer greatly.
- tiatia 13y agoOCR? Nearly impossible. OCR only works decent in combination with a dictionary.
- desas 13y agoIt's in the court documents. They did OCR it, to present as an exhibit. It was illegible, they also stated that the original was nearly as illegible.
- dalore 13y agoShould have given the next lot with 1 char per page in a huge font (so it's legible), but then "accidentally" drop it and change the order of pages.
- archangel_one 13y agoAs funny as that might be, there is such a thing as contempt of court which I guess he'd find less so.
- rmc 13y agoSure, it'd be hilarious. Until the court says "You didn't do what you were ordered to. Either do it, or be fined".
- walshemj 13y agoTake the piss to much with the wrong judge and its jail time.
- RBerenguel 13y agoI would have kept sending printouts with ever so slightly larger fonts (i.e. 10 steps from 4 point to 5 points.)
- Terretta 13y ago> To make use of these keys, the FBI would have to manually input all 2560 characters... My reaction to that was "oh boo hoo". When people my age were kids (get off my lawn) we used to type pages of raw hexadecimal from the back of magazines into a machine prompt. We didn't cry about it, we were just careful. I can't find a hexadecimal example at the moment, but look at some of these TRS-80 programs (pp. 110-111, 143) which have multiple pages of data/digits to transcribe: http://archive.org/stream/80-programs-for-the-trs-80-1979jim-perrypdf/80programsforthetrs-801979jimperrypdf#page/n81/mode/2up http://archive.org/stream/80-programs-for-the-trs-80-1979jim... Btw, the originals were often bad photocopies. So maybe not 4 point font, but certainly ambiguity in some bits.
- 16s 13y agoAnd also... C64 programs. They were manually typed in by 10 year old kids. The programs were printed in the computer magazines (early 80s) that dealt specifically with C64's. These programs were far more than 2560 characters (in some cases). If young, interested kids can do it, I'd hope that a nation state could figure it out. Link: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a5/ComputesGazetteProgramPage.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a5/ComputesGazett...
- Bill_Dimm 13y agoYep, I did that when I was a teenager -- entered the machine code for an entire word processor for the C64 called SpeedScript. The good old days ;-)
- csbrooks 13y agoAlthough to be fair, Compute! magazine at least had a checksum calculator to help you make sure you entered each line properly.
- bsenftner 13y agoYep, I remember doing that with an Apple II back in '79 to get a simple lunar lander game. The process took more than a day, with two friends to help double check the values as we copied everything over. When it ran, and worked, we thought we were gods!
- tlarkworthy 13y agoYou get three people to independently input the codes and take a vote on the characters (or inspect the disagreements) Voilà, information is transported reliably over a noisey medium! error correcting codes in practice 101 EDIT: voilà typo fixed :p
- kerneis 13y agoIt's "voilà", not "viola". Both of them are French words, but the latter means "raped" (probably not what you meant).
- alasano 13y agoViola actually doesn't mean anything by itself. The noun is Viol, the verb violer and only in the simple past 3rd person does it become viola.
- flurie 13y agoSince I guess this is the place for pedantry, viola is the third person singular passé simple of violer.
- kerneis 13y agoRapped actually doesn't mean anything by itself. The noun is Rape, the verb rape and only in the simple 3rd person does it become rapped. (Well, not "only", but I guess you can see my point.)
- adamnemecek 13y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viola https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viola
- tedunangst 13y agoAnd all this time I thought I thought a viola was something like a violin.
- 13y ago
- kerneis 13y agoI don't get it. 2560 characters in 4pt should fit in far less than 11 pages…
- drharris 13y agoThey were to turn over the keys and all information required to decrypt everything. Presumably, they wrote a LOT of 4pt boilerplate on how to use the keys for decryption.
- vacri 13y agoSingle sided, double-spaced, abstract, appendices, title page, dedication page, headers, footers... still doesn't seem to be enough. Maybe the numbers were in Roman numerals?
- spc476 13y agoMaybe he printed it out using only zeros and ones?
- r0h1n 13y agoEven cooler would have been Lavabit scanning and photocopying the 2650-character printouts on Xerox machines :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6156238 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6156238
- csmatt 13y agohahaha. Thanks for making me smile this morning :)
- sigkill 13y agoIt's not a big deal though. They subsequently specifically asked him to put it on a CD in PEM format and deliver it by 5 that day or be faced $5000 fine per day or something like that.
- jessaustin 13y ago...put it on a CD... There should be a standard virus-laden ISO image specifically designed for "compliance" with court orders.
- sigkill 13y agoDoes it really help? I'm assuming they'd be running SELinux. Autoplay isn't going to really help when they've specified the format as well. If you gave them a rar, tar.gz, zip or anything, the Man can hold you for contempt if he really wants to.
- TeMPOraL 13y agoPreferably modified Stuxnet. They'd get the taste of their own medicine.
- chaz 13y ago4 people can get this data entry done in an hour. One person reads out loud while the other person types and confirms each character. The second team does exactly the same work enabling a diff on the completed work to quickly find errors once everything is done. One character per second isn't unreasonable, so that's less than an hour. Or the same team does it twice in 2 hours.
- brownbat 13y ago> To make use of these keys, the FBI would have to manually input... Has the FBI never heard of OCR, or were these printed as CAPTCHAs?