lovingboth | (no subject)

Thinking about sources of money... what bits of electronic equipment are not currently possible because of the lack of cheap but serious processing power? It'd need to be reasonably simple, given the cpu power, and desirable enough to sell a million or so. You can have a TV output and a USB port on it. And a CPU that can do 600 MIPS but costs a couple of dollars.

If I look at what I do that needs crunch power, there's chess, but that wouldn't sell enough - 99.999+% of the chess players in the world can't beat the current portable chess computers.

Real-time MPEG-4 video encoding would be good, but you'd need too many other things (video grabbing h/w etc)

A portable audio recorder that does real-time MP3 encoding would be possible - use it as a portable (dictation, meetings, bootlegs etc) and attach it to a PC via the USB.

Paul, anything in the cryptography line? Phone scramblers don't need that much crunch, and I doubt there's the market for something to break codes the hard way (although it'd pay well)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Paul, anything in the cryptography line?"

Basically, no. Modern ciphers run fast enough for most purposes, and are designed to be resistant to the entire computing power of the world combined, running for millenia.

Oh sure - but various things mean they're not always used. I remember reading that the encryption in the GSM phone spec was downgraded three times, as various national security agencies insisted on having something they could break.

And then there's the old US export controls issue.

There are two GSM encryption systems. A5/2 is used in Africa and other places GCHQ want to spy on, and is very broken. A5/1 is used in the UK and Europe; a very practical attack was presented at FSE2000. This attack can recover a session key in two minutes, given two seconds of "known plaintext". But the thing that bounds the speed of this attack is hard drive seek time, not processor speed.

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