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by LargeWu 3933 days ago
But they got the implications of it right. "There isn't a government in the world that wouldn't kill us all to get their hands on this." That is absolutely true. Whether or not such a device exists, or could possibly exist, is irrelevant.
2 comments
lotsofcows 3932 days ago
And then the USA got it's hands on it and turned out to be super altruistic! I'd managed to maintain the illusion up to that point...
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DanBC 3933 days ago
> Whether or not such a device exists, or could possibly exist, is irrelevant.

It is a little bit relevant in a post that is replying to another post that says nothing in Sneakers is impossible.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223284

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gknoy 3933 days ago
Putting on my tin foil hat ... one could imagine a box the size of a phonebook (or just a laptop) that could, when it encounters packets or encrypted data, send signatures and packets to the NSA data centers, and do the kind of matching/etc that they are building towards.

Heck, even having it try to decrypt the packet(s) in a distributed manner with $ALL_THE_KEYS that might have already been collected via nefarious means, and then return the key + plaintext that is most likely, certainly seems possible if the box was created by someone with the resources of the NSA.

I would be extremely surprised if someone were not already working on (or had not already created) something very much like that.

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superuser2 3933 days ago
The box in Sneakers is a valuable theft target, implying it is not merely a frontend, or if the Russians got it the NSA would simply revoke its API keys, so to speak. It's also the product of a stroke of genius by a single cryptographer.

It has to be a breakthrough in factoring large numbers very quickly, like what quantum computers are promised to be. So maybe possible after all, I guess. It's also very clearly a device, not an algorithm, so probably not a Von Neumann machine.

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