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some essential definitions some essential definitions in the field of cryptography are: - - - "Few false ideas have more firmly gripped the minds of so many intelligent men than the one that, if they just tried, they could invent a cipher that no one could break." (David Kahn) The variants of encryption systems are endless. For deciphering there exists always the same game of trial and error (first guessing the encryption method, then the code). A help to do so is pruning. Once, after a more or less long or short period a code/cipher breaks. Monoalphabetic ciphers can be broken easily and of course are no longer used today but for games. for further information on codes and ciphers etc. see: |
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1980s: Artificial Intelligence (AI) - From Lab to Life Following the commercial success of New technologies were being invented in Japan. |
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Radio Between the two World Wars the radio started becoming more and more important; as well in education (e.g. By hearing unconsciously, without listening, while concentrating on something else, it is easy to spread ideas and emotions. This fact was taken advantage of. The German Minister for Propaganda, Radio Moscow, which started working in 1922, tried to intervene in innerstate-affairs in Britain as well as in other countries. The radio was supposed to push ahead the idea of communism. |
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Another voluntary Disinformation A very different form of voluntary disinformation are the calls for donations. Donations offer the possibility to do something good, to help the poor. Afterwards one does no longer have to feel guilty for being luckier than those "others". The same pictures of starving and desperate children for decades, of starving babies with big sad eyes. The pictures show a terrible life. But the idea that contributing money would change the destiny of those children and other people is a lie. States use their population for paying money to make the states' policy less unjust. In fact the money of the Western donators perpetuates the dependence and because of this prolongs the misery into a vicious circle of disinformation on both sides, but it is clever to have one's people believing that they can change the world. |
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The Right to get Disinformed Disinformation might also be welcome: While the ones criticize disinformation and try to fight against it, others do nothing against it. And others again seem to enjoy getting disinformed. How this works? It is the result of a society that does no longer want to live under the pressure of doing and hearing everything at the same time. Acceleration of life seems too fast. The only way to get out is to refuse certain things/messages/truths. Receiving disinformation can be more comfortable than getting so-called correct information. This is especially true for the readers of the yellow press. The yellow press lives on that perspective, the commodity of getting light news, mostly wrong news and lies - but those being wrapped up in nice pictures and stories about those who seem to reign the world. The aim is the escape out of reality. A surplus of information, information terror, can produce disinformation. The profusion can get exploited for disinformation. This works in that way that in the mass of information the individual has no possibility to get an overview of the different ways of thinking and to reach a stage of objective knowledge. |
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Basics: Introduction Copyright law is a branch of |
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1961: Installation of the First Industrial Robot Industrial |
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Credibility The magic word is credibility. Disinformation can mean leaving out important informations. Telling lies is not the only method of disinformation. The not telling also creates thoughts and delegates them into certain directions, whereas other models of thinking are left out. Like this, the deaths on the own side are adjusted downwards whereas the victims of the enemy are counted proudly - as long as they are not civilians. The post-Gulf War period demonstrated how the population reacts if the number of innocent victims is much higher than expected. It was the fact of those numbers that provoked the biggest part of the post-war critique. The media in democratic states tend to criticize this, which does not mean that they always want to be free of governmental influence. They can choose to help the government in a single case by not writing anything against it or by writing pro-government stories. At the same time every democracy has undemocratic parts in it - which is already part of democracy itself. There are situations when a democratic government may find it essential to put pressure on the media to inform the population in a certain way; and also censorship is nothing that can only be connected to dictatorship; just think of the Falkland War, the Gulf-War or the Kosovo-War. |
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World War I ... With World War I an entire system of ideas how wars work collapsed. Suddenly it was no longer mostly soldiers who had to fight. War became an engagement of every day's life. Everybody got involved. Propaganda therefore changed as well. The campaigns were no longer temporarily and recent but had to be planned for years. Who failed in organizing it or used the wrong keywords failed. Masters of modern propaganda became the British, whereas the Germans failed completely in the beginning. |
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The Role of the Media "Although this is a free society, the U.S. mainstream media often serve as virtual propaganda agents of the state, peddling viewpoints the state wishes to inculcate and marginalizing any alternative perspectives. This is especially true in times of war, when the wave of patriotic frenzy encouraged by the war-makers quickly engulfs the media. Under these conditions the media's capacity for dispassionate reporting and critical analysis is suspended, and they quickly become cheer-leaders and apologists for war." (words as propaganda, by The mass-media would have a possibility to get out of this circle of being disinformed and making others disinformed. To admit that oneself is not always informed correctly, and also mention that the pictures shown are not in any case suitable to the text, as some of them are older, or even from another battle. For the media it would be easy to talk about the own disinformation in public. Doing this would provoke the government or in the case of the |
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The big "change" ... With the invention of the printing press and - as a consequence - the distribution of information in masses (by then already mostly in the shape of propaganda), propaganda could change its methods. It could not only be produced but also reproduced and therefore spread widely. The Protestant Reformation profited by this. The idea of translating the Bible into local languages was successful, because it got possible for many people to get a Bible, as books no longer were affordable only for the nobles and the Church. Royalty and the Courts realized that prestige asked for propaganda and that it was impossible to reign over the people if their mood turned against the king. This gave the impetus for acting. Pamphlets were used for spreading royal messages; like the so-called "mazarinades" ( When - in From that time on propaganda and manipulation were carried out for the most different political ideas and nearly without frontiers. Censorship - a part of disinformation - seems to have been the only barrier then. Sometimes even the source of a message kept hidden, which was part of the disinformation process. It is easier to spread ideas against somebody if the own name is kept hidden; and speaking out some kind of laudation that the own party is better without mentioning that it was oneself who spread it and therefore claim that it was someone else who praised the very idea. |
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The Post-World-War II-period After World War II the importance of propaganda still increased, on the commercial level as well as on a political level, in the era of the Cold War. The propaganda institutions of the different countries wanted their people to think the right way, which meant, the national way. In the USA the McCarthy-era started, a totalitarian system in struggle against communism. Cold War brought the era of spies with it, which was the perfect tool of disinformation. But the topic as a movie-genre seems still popular today, as the unchanged success of James Bond-movies show. A huge net of propaganda was built up for threatening with the nuclear bomb: pretending that the enemy was even more dangerous than the effect of such a bomb. And later, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, disinformation found other fields of work, like the wars of the 1990s showed us. |
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New Forms of Propaganda (in the 19th Century) As soon as governments found out that newspapers were a fantastic and very often unsuspicious medium for supporting propaganda they tried to pull them to their side. Two ways existed: a) to have one's own newspaper, which implies that mostly friends of the government read it. Nothing is regarded as something neutral. b) to keep a good relationship to the most powerful/most frequently read newspapers and then try to make one's opinion theirs. Today mostly elected is b), trying to set up alliances. |
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The Catholic Church In the beginnings of Christianity most people were illiterate. Therefore the Bible had to be transformed into pictures and symbols; and not only the stories but also the moral duties of everybody. Images and legends of the Saints turned out as useful models for human behavior - easy to tell and easy to understand. Later, when the crusades began, the Christian Church used propaganda against Muslims, creating pictures of evil, pagan and bloodcurdling people. While the knights and others were fighting abroad, people in Europe were told to pray for them. Daily life was connected to the crusades, also through money-collections - more for the cause of propaganda than for the need of money. During the period of the Counter-Reformation Catholic propaganda no longer was against foreigners but turned against people at home - the Protestants; and against their publications/books, which got prohibited by starting the so-called index. By then both sides were using disinformation for |
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The Theory of the Celestro-Centric World In 1870 the U.S.-American for further details see: Those who believe in it, call it the truth, those who simply like the idea, may call it a parallel science. Others call it disinformation, asking for the reasons to spread it. The turning to the inside, where there is no way out, produces a different reality. It shows that realities are always produced. Political conservatives and racists like |
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cryptoanalysis the study of breaking others' codes to transform a message back into a legible form without knowing the key from the beginning |
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codes an algorithm for bringing a legible message into an illegible form. There has to exist some sort of code book to encode/decode it. |
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Division of labor The term refers to the separation of a work process into a number of tasks, with each task performed by a separate person or group of persons. It is most often applied to |
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Moral rights Authors of copyrighted works (besides |
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ciphertext the enciphered/encoded and primarily illegible text |
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NSFNet Developed under the auspices of |
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Backbone Networks Backbone networks are central networks usually of very high bandwidth, that is, of very high transmitting capacity, connecting regional networks. The first backbone network was the |
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cryptology also called "the study of code". It includes both, cryptography and cryptoanalysis |
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World Wide Web (WWW) Probably the most significant Internet service, the World Wide Web is not the essence of the Internet, but a subset of it. It is constituted by documents that are linked together in a way you can switch from one document to another by simply clicking on the link connecting these documents. This is made possible by the Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML), the authoring language used in creating World Wide Web-based documents. These so-called hypertexts can combine text documents, graphics, videos, sounds, and Especially on the World Wide Web, documents are often retrieved by entering keywords into so-called search engines, sets of programs that fetch documents from as many Among other things that is the reason why the World Wide Web is not simply a very huge database, as is sometimes said, because it lacks consistency. There is virtually almost infinite storage capacity on the Internet, that is true, a capacity, which might become an almost everlasting too, a prospect, which is sometimes According to the Internet domain survey of the |
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Economic rights The economic rights (besides |
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Sun Microsystems Founded in 1982 and headquartered in Palo Alto, USA, Sun Microsystems manufactures computer workstations, For more detailed information see the Encyclopaedia Britannica: |
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water-clocks The water-clocks are an early long-distance-communication-system. Every communicating party had exactly the same jar, with a same-size-hole that was closed and the same amount of water in it. In the jar was a stick with different messages written on. When one party wanted to tell something to the other it made a fire-sign. When the other answered, both of them opened the hole at the same time. And with the help of another fire-sign closed it again at the same time, too. In the end the water covered the stick until the point of the wanted message. |
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Electronic Messaging (E-Mail) Electronic messages are transmitted and received by computers through a network. By E-Mail texts, images, sounds and videos can be sent to single users or simultaneously to a group of users. Now texts can be sent and read without having them printed. E-Mail is one of the most popular and important services on the Internet. |
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blowfish encryption algorithm Blowfish is a symmetric key block cipher that can vary its length. The idea behind is a simple design to make the system faster than others. |
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DMCA The DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) was signed into law by U.S. President Clinton in 1998 and implements the two 1996 |
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Ron Rivest Ronald L. Rivest is Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in MIT's EECS Department. He was one of three persons in a team to invent the |
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IDEA IDEA is another symmetric-key system. It is a block cipher, operating on 64-bit plaintext blocks, having a key-length of 128 bits. |
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George Boole b. Nov. 2, 1815, Lincoln, Lincolnshire, England d. Dec. 8, 1864, Ballintemple, County Cork, Ireland English mathematician who helped establish modern symbolic logic and whose algebra of logic, now called Boolean algebra, is basic to the design of digital computer circuits. One of the first Englishmen to write on logic, Boole pointed out the analogy between the algebraic symbols and those that can represent logical forms and syllogisms, showing how the symbols of quantity can be separated from those of operation. With Boole in 1847 and 1854 began the algebra of logic, or what is now called Boolean algebra. It is basically two-valued in that it involves a subdivision of objects into separate classes, each with a given property. Different classes can then be treated as to the presence or absence of the same property. |
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Harold. D. Lasswell Harold. D. Lasswell (* 1902) studied at the London School of Economics. He then became a professor of social sciences at different Universities, like the University of Chicago, Columbia University, and Yale University. He also was a consultant for several governments. One of Lasswell's many famous works was Propaganda Technique in World War. In this he defines propaganda. He also discussed major objectives of propaganda, like to mobilize hatred against the enemy, to preserve the friendship of allies, to procure the co-operation of neutrals and to demoralize the enemy. |
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Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) is a standard reference model for communication between two end users in a network. It is used in developing products and understanding networks. Source: Whatis.com |
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Boris Yeltsin Boris Yeltsin was Russian President until the end of 1999. After many years of work for the Communist Party, he joined the Politburo in 1986. His sharp critique on Mikhail Gorbachev forced that one to resign. Yeltsin won the 1990 election into Russian presidency and quit the Communist Party. Quarrels with the Parliament could not destroy his popularity until the secession war with Chechnya. When the Russian economy collapsed in 1998, he dismissed his entire government. In the end the sick old man of Russian politics had lost all his popularity as a president and resigned for the benefit of his political son Vladimir Putin. |
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Federal Networking Council Being an organization established in the name of the US government, the Federal Networking Council (FNC) acts as a forum for networking collaborations among Federal agencies to meet their research, education, and operational mission goals and to bridge the gap between the advanced networking technologies being developed by research FNC agencies and the ultimate acquisition of mature version of these technologies from the commercial sector. Its members are representatives of agencies as the National Security Agency, the Department of Energy, the http://www.fnc.gov |
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CIA CIA's mission is to support the President, the National Security Council, and all officials who make and execute U.S. national security policy by: Providing accurate, comprehensive, and timely foreign intelligence on national security topics; Conducting counterintelligence activities, special activities, and other functions related to foreign intelligence and national security, as directed by the President. To accomplish its mission, the CIA engages in research, development, and deployment of high-leverage technology for intelligence purposes. As a separate agency, CIA serves as an independent source of analysis on topics of concern and works closely with the other organizations in the Intelligence Community to ensure that the intelligence consumer--whether Washington policymaker or battlefield commander--receives the adaequate intelligence information. http://www.cia.gov |
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Adi Shamir Adi Shamir was one of three persons in a team to invent the |
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RSA The best known of the two-key cryptosystems developed in the mid-1980s is the Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) cryptoalgorithm, which was first published in April, 1977. Since that time, the algorithm has been employed in the most widely-used Internet electronic communications encryption program, |
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Intranet As a |
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Bandwidth The bandwidth of a transmitted communications signal is a measure of the range of frequencies the signal occupies. The term is also used in reference to the frequency-response characteristics of a communications receiving system. All transmitted signals, whether analog or digital, have a certain bandwidth. The same is true of receiving systems. Generally speaking, bandwidth is directly proportional to the amount of data transmitted or received per unit time. In a qualitative sense, bandwidth is proportional to the complexity of the data for a given level of system performance. For example, it takes more bandwidth to download a photograph in one second than it takes to download a page of text in one second. Large sound files, computer programs, and animated videos require still more bandwidth for acceptable system performance. Virtual reality (VR) and full-length three-dimensional audio/visual presentations require the most bandwidth of all. In digital systems, bandwidth is data speed in bits per second (bps). Source: Whatis.com |
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Writing Writing and calculating came into being at about the same time. The first pictographs carved into clay tablets are used for administrative purposes. As an instrument for the administrative bodies of early empires, who began to rely on the collection, storage, processing and transmission of data, the skill of writing was restricted to a few. Being more or less separated tasks, writing and calculating converge in today's computers. Letters are invented so that we might be able to converse even with the absent, says Saint Augustine. The invention of writing made it possible to transmit and store information. No longer the ear predominates; face-to-face communication becomes more and more obsolete for administration and bureaucracy. Standardization and centralization become the constituents of high culture and vast empires as Sumer and China. |
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Bertelsmann The firm began in Germany in 1835, when Carl Bertelsmann founded a religious print shop and publishing establishment in the Westphalian town of Gütersloh. The house remained family-owned and grew steadily for the next century, gradually adding literature, popular fiction, and theology to its title list. Bertelsmann was shut down by the Nazis in 1943, and its physical plant was virtually destroyed by Allied bombing in 1945. The quick growth of the Bertelsmann empire after World War II was fueled by the establishment of global networks of book clubs (from 1950) and music circles (1958). By 1998 Bertelsmann AG comprised more than 300 companies concentrated on various aspects of media. During fiscal year 1997-98, Bertelsmann earned more than US$15 billion in revenue and employed 58.000 people, of whom 24.000 worked in Germany. |
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Walter Benjamin The German philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) and author believed in the duty to educate people (including children) politically. In the German radio he had a series where he tried to do this. These texts are most important for Radio work - even today. Still he is more famous for his critiques on literature and art. Benjamin immigrated to Paris in 1934 and killed himself in 1940 at the boarder between Spain and France as he was afraid to get caught by German troops. |
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