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From: Walter Roberson <roberson@hushmail.com>
Organization: Canada Eat The Cookie Foundation
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Subject: Re: Check internet connection status using Matlab
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Date: Sun, 19 Oct 2008 17:55:02 -0500
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Scott Burnside wrote:
 
> I agree with Walter in that I think a purpose-built remote entity who responded to strongly
> encrypted interrogations with strongly encrypted replies would be as close as you
> could get but certainly not 100%. 

That's why I mentioned quantum cryptography. With regular cryptography, you could have
a "man in the middle", if the "man in the middle" could solve the cryptographic
challenges sufficiently quickly -- something which cannot be done on any publicly
known system, but which is theoretically vulnerable to "quantum computing"
(all solutions theoretically calculated simultaneously), and which might plausibly
be within reach with publicly known technology based upon "biological computing"
(extreme mass parallelism at low price and low heat.) Is there any NSA, or
Mossad, or Men in Black covert system that can handle sufficiently strong
"man in the middle" challenges in real time? The answer to that is either "NO"
or "Walter Roberson is not authorized to even hear rumours of such a system
really existing", but "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence".

But with quantum cryptography, "man in the middle" attacks are not *possible*
according to all current quantum physics: all experimentation so far indicates
that any attempt to "snoop" on quantum-entangled particle pairs would de-tangle
the particles, with the effect of randomizing the content of the transmitted
message. No possible "man in the middle" attack, because what is transferred
in quantum cryptography is not mere "information" that could be replicated.