jool

It would be great if they had one of those little icons you could put on your site advertising that they think you really suck. You know, like the "top rated download" things but in reverse.

I use unison for something similar. With some appropriate command line switches it works fine from one drive to another without much hassle.

Since it only uses a limited set of characters it has to be using more than one character in the encrypted text for each clear text character. If you didn't make a mistake while writing it down there is a problem though, you've got an uneven number of characters. I found this lump of Javascript I created a while back for a similar course, it's not automatic in any way but it does speed up simple frequency analysis. It lets you count characters or groups of character and also replace characters. The first field is for the crypto text, the second one is for the length of the character groups and the third one is for replace instructions ("AB=a C=b").

If it is on the basic level and you really want to learn how it all works I would really recommend doing the analysis either by hand or using tools you write yourself. Not trying to be demeaning or anything, I just know that most learn better by doing things themselves and some damaged people (like me) actually find manual crypto analysis quite interesting/satisfying/fun. If you are interested and have the time I would recommend reading The Code Book by Simon Singh. But if you just want to get through the course without thinking there is always pages like this that one can find with some googling.

Since it is Java someone could easily utilize the AES libraries and then everybody is screwed :) But it sounds like it's a beginners course in cryptography, which should mean that most will probably go for a simple substitution cipher which are easy to break. If someone goes a bit advanced they will probably at most do a polyalphabetic cipher with some form of rearrangement, but still the methods for breaking those are fairly well documented (you might need to find some app or write one to do the analysis since it's a pain to do by hand). Wikipedia has a wealth of knowledge about different classical cryptos and how to break them. Even if anyone uses binary operations to encrypt the same methods of breaking applies (frequency analysis and such) as long as they don't use advanced methods. If you get access to the encryption part of the others programs you can often figure things out about how it works by encrypting data with small changes in content and length.

If you use 7zip (comes in a portable flavor as well) you can open single files without extracting and it detects changes made and updates the file. Won't let you run something like Firefox without unpacking it though. Wikipedia has some suggestions but the few I have tried haven't even come close to TrueCrypt.

One: The instructions are pretty clear I think, even though I didn't copy them over at least one was able to scroll up a few messages. Doing things like this via pm avoids the infinite "Me too" responses that no one else is interested in. Two: Your address is hidden.

Well, I've got at least five invites right now. From what I've heard they might be infinite but I'm not sure. Anyways, I will be giving away as many invites that I can. The instructions I gave the last time still apply. Edit: Just checked the invites status and apparently I now have 998 invites left :)

Even though TrueCrypt is portable it still requires admin privileges to load the device driver and without that it just doesn't work. If your paranoia level is low then you could try just using a passworded zip file. It will keep the nosy out but if someone really wants to know it's relatively quickly broken.

Is it just me or does this seem like a joke? Just in case it isn't: Without booting into something else or access to an account with higher privileges you won't be able to do anything. Windows is actually quite secure despite what some people say about it. Would you also like to explain why "stupid ppl" have admin access to your machine while you don't? (No they can't install anything from the guest account that you can't also remove from it) Are you sure you didn't just steal someones laptop and now you don't want them to track you by the IP-address used by the IM clients?

I know it's an unimportant and fun thing but I do think it is suffering from the Digg mentality. That is, voting down everything you don't agree with whether or not it's a proper article or comment (they really should fix that problem over there where it's actually important). I think it's actually quite fun to see how people react to posts both positive and negative, but without being able to see what for it is a bit confusing. That confusion and that some will take the apparent "popularity contest" seriously may very likely cause some unnecessary problems. This is not a vote to remove it, it's just something for the benevolent forum overlords to think about.

Answering my own question in case anyone else was interested as well: It's supposedly a processing key (better than a device key) that was found a while ago, it's getting attention now because of the DMCA notices.

Interesting to see that either saying some truths about linux or joking about the admins gets your reputation voted down. ... Windows sucks? :)

I'm wondering, what level of the encryption scheme is that key for? Is it a device key or is it even better than that?

One of the best ways of increasing battery life is to pull down the brightness on the screen as much as you can while still being readable. Otherwise you can see if you have anything running in the background all the time, but if you get the same battery life on all OSs that probably isn't the problem. Finally, batteries do degrade over time and get worse performance until they stop working altogether.