some essential definitions in the field of cryptography are:
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"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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The convergence of biology and technology is not an entirely new phenomenon but and has its origin in the concept of modern technology itself. This concept understands technology as something bigger, stronger, and more reliable than ourselves. But, unlike human beings, technologies are always tied to specific men-defined purposes. In so far as men define purposes and build the technology to achieve those purposes, technology is smaller than ourselves. The understanding of technology as a man-controlled tool has been called the instrumental and anthropological understanding of technology.
However, this understanding is becoming insufficient when technologies become fast and interdependent, i.e. when fast technologies form systems and global networks. Powerful modern technologies, especially in the field of informatics, have long ceased to be mere instruments and have created constraints for human action which act to predetermine activity and predefine purposes.
As a consequence, the metaphysical distinction between subject and object has become blurred. In the 1950s Heidegger already speaks of modern technology not as the negation but as the culmination of metaphysical thought which provokes men to "overcome" metaphysics. The weakening of metaphysical determinations which occurs in the project of modern technology has also meant that it become impossible to clearly define what being human is, and to determine the line that separates non-human from human being. These changes are not progressing at a controllable rate, but they are undergoing constant acceleration. The very efficiency and power of calculation of modern technologies means that acceleration itself is being accelerated. Every new technological development produces new shortcuts in socio-technical systems and in communication.
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There is no society - in the past or in the present - free of censorship, the enforced restriction of speech. It is not restricted to authoritarian regimes. Democratic societies too aim at the control of the publication and distribution of information in order to prevent unwanted expressions. In every society some expressions, ideas or opinions are feared. Censored are books, magazines, films and videos, and computer games, e.g.
In defence of its monopoly of truth, the Catholic Church published a blacklist of books not allowed to be read: the Index librorum prohibitorum. As indicated by the fact that every declaration of human rights - including the United Nations' Declaration of Human Rights and the
To a high degree the Protestant Reformation was made possible by the invention of the printing press. Now those who were capable of writing and reading no longer needed to rely on the priests to know what is written in the Bible. They could compare the Bible with the sermons of the priests. This may be one of the reasons why especially in countries with a strong Protestant or otherwise anti-catholic tradition (with the exception of Germany), free speech is held in such high esteem.
There seems to be no alternative: free speech without restriction or censorship. But censorship is not the only kind of restriction of speech. Speech codes as politically correct speech are restrictions, sometimes similar to censorship; copyright, accessibility and affordability of means of communication are other ones. Because of such restrictions different to censorship, we cannot think coherently about free speech independently of issues about social justice. Many campaigns for free speech, the right of free expression are backed by the concept of free speech as unconstrained speech. That is perfectly well understood under the auspices of regimes prominently, which try to silence their critics and restrict access to their publications. But the concept of free speech should not solely focus on such constrains. Thinking of free speech as unconstrained speech, we tend to forget to take into account - to campaign against - these other restrictions. Additionally, free expression understood in that way offers no clue how to practice this freedom of expression and what free speech is good for.
In liberal democratic societies censorship is not justified by recurring to absolute truth. Its necessity is argued by referring to personal integrity. Some kind of expression might do harm to individuals, especially to children, by traumatize them or by disintegrating personal morality. Some published information, such as the names of rape victims, might infringe some people's right on privacy or some, as others say, such as pornographic images or literature, e.g., infringes some people's right on equality (how?).
For more information on the history of censorship see
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The new U.S. regulations are based on the Wassenaar Arrangement Revision of 1998, where exports without license of 56 bit
For more information see:
Seven states stay excluded from the new freedom. These are states like Libya, Iraq, Iran, North Korea and Cuba, altogether states seen as terrorist supporting. No encryption tools may be exported into those countries.
This is, what happened in the USA, whereas in Germany the issue of a cryptography-law is still on the agenda. Until now, in Germany, everyone can decide by her-/himself, whether she/he wants to encrypt electronic messages or not. Some organizations fear that this could get changed soon. Therefore an urgent action was organized in February 2000 to demonstrate the government that people want the freedom to decide on their own. One governmental argument is that only very few people actually use cryptography. Therefore the urgent action is organized as a campaign for using it more frequently.
For more information on this see:
Other European countries have more liberate laws on cryptography, like France. Austria doesn't have any restrictions at all, probably because of a governmental lack of interest more than accepting freedom.
The (former) restrictions in the bigger countries influenced and hindered developments for safer key-systems, e.g. the key-length was held down extraordinarily.
"Due to the suspicious nature of crypto users I have a feeling DES will be with us forever, we will just keep adding keys and cycles (...). There is a parallel between designing electronic commerce infrastructure today that uses weak cryptography (i.e. 40 or 56 bit keys) and, say, designing air traffic control systems in the '60s using two digit year fields. (...) Just because you can retire before it all blows up doesn't make it any less irresponsible."
(Arnold G. Reinhold)
The Chinese State Encryption Management Commission (SEMC) announced in March 2000 that only strong encryption tools will have to be registered in the future. Which sounds so nice on first sight, does not mean a lot in reality: any kind of useful encryption technique, like the
The restrictions and prohibitions for cryptography are part of the states' wish to acquire more control - in the name of the battle against criminality, probably?
Due to the emerging organized criminality the governments want to obtain more freedom of control over citizens. Organizations like the NSA appear as the leaders of such demands.
What about civil rights or Human Rights?
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Artificial Intelligence is concerned with the simulation of human thinking and emotions in information technology. AI develops "intelligent systems" capable, for example, of learning and logical deduction. AI systems are used for creatively handling large amounts of data (as in data mining), as well as in natural speech processing and image recognition. AI is also used as to support
Yahoo AI sites:
MIT AI lab:
The WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) is a specification for a set of communication protocols to standardize the way that wireless devices, such as cellular telephones and radio transceivers, can be used for Internet access, including
While Internet access has been possible in the past, different manufacturers have used different technologies. In the future, devices and service systems that use WAP will be able to interoperate.
Source: Whatis.com
As can be read in the Convention's preamble, the member states of the Council of Europe, the European Convention on Human Rights is intended as a follow-up of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 10 December 1948 and as an official act of "securing the universal and effective recognition and observance of the Rights therein declared." Because it is stated "that the aim of the Council of Europe is the achievement of greater unity between its Members and that one of the methods by which the aim is to be pursued is the maintenance and further realization of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms", the European Convention on Human Rights can be read as the political sibling to the biblical Ten Commandments on which effective and legitimate European democratic government are based. The European Convention on Human Rights is intended to represent the essence of the common heritage of European political traditions and ideals.
Signed in Rome on November 4, 1950, the Convention is supplemented by five protocols dated from March 20, 1952 (Paris), May 6, 1963, September 16, 1963, and January 20, 1966 (Strasbourg).
http://www.hri.org/docs/ECHR50.html
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
The research and development division of
http://www.research.att.com/