Solarian Military Catchup Attempts

Your quote is clearly wrong. My sources, delivered via encrypted HTTPS no less, says he said
"The problem with quotes from the internet is it is hard to verify their authenticity"-- Abraham Lincoln

fallsfromtrees wrote:

Joat42 wrote:My point was that it's entirely possible to send signed and verified data via email, there is no security problem doing that.

The problem you have is that the is currently no way to verify that the public key you are using for PGP actually belongs to the person you think it does -how do you generate a reliable source of public keys.

A lot of very smart people have been working on that. You might want to look at this:

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x ... Keychain-3

It's getting there...

fallsfromtrees wrote:

Joat42 wrote:My point was that it's entirely possible to send signed and verified data via email, there is no security problem doing that.

The problem you have is that the is currently no way to verify that the public key you are using for PGP actually belongs to the person you think it does -how do you generate a reliable source of public keys.

How much of a problem this is depends on who you need to email securely.

If it's just your friends then it's not too much of a hassle to use an out of band communication (in person, over the phone, etc) to confirm that the public key you have for them has the right fingerprint.

Or if it's within your company you can reasonably rely on the IT group to control an internal (or external) certificate authority (CA) that issues keys for employees of the company. And for directly issued keys within a company (where you likely don't have to deal with intermediate CAs) the public key infrastructure (PKI) is fairly straightforward.

Where it gets messy is verifying the key of some person you have no previous relation with, which might be self-signed, might be signed by a CA you have no direct trust of (in which case you're kind of screwed). Or it might be signed by a CA that's pretty far down the chain from a CA you ultimately do trust; then confirming that each cert in the chain is valid, it allowed to create subsidiary CAs, and isn't revoked, is a tedious PITA.

http://hackaday.com/2013/12/09/google-s ... es-forged/

Yup.

Doesn't anyone feel sorry about the Solarian League? I do and I would like to see David Weber or Eric Flint do a beginning series of a Solarian League politician beginning the battle against the bureaucracy and its incompetency.

james99 wrote:Doesn't anyone feel sorry about the Solarian League? I do and I would like to see David Weber or Eric Flint do a beginning series of a Solarian League politician beginning the battle against the bureaucracy and its incompetency.

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That's essentially what we have from the scenes of the "renegade" BF Captain and his cohorts in the archieve room.

-- Stewart

stewart wrote:

james99 wrote:Doesn't anyone feel sorry about the Solarian League? I do and I would like to see David Weber or Eric Flint do a beginning series of a Solarian League politician beginning the battle against the bureaucracy and its incompetency.

--------------------

That's essentially what we have from the scenes of the "renegade" BF Captain and his cohorts in the archieve room.

-- Stewart

Not to mention Barregos and Roczak.

Albeit they are using their skills to save what they can rather than trying to reform/prop up the crumbling edifice.

I'd like to see people like them to save a good chunk of the SL. It did stand for something good and can still do it again. I'd like to see both the MAlign and the SEM/GAs plans fail in some way and have the SL maintain its coherency with better leadership. I don't think that would be unreasonable. No plan survives contact with the enemy. Why cant that apply to everyone?

Zakharra wrote:I'd like to see people like them to save a good chunk of the SL. It did stand for something good and can still do it again. I'd like to see both the MAlign and the SEM/GAs plans fail in some way and have the SL maintain its coherency with better leadership. I don't think that would be unreasonable. No plan survives contact with the enemy. Why cant that apply to everyone?

The reasons the two factions have for taking out the existing League structures are quite different and they will be using quite different methods to do so. The Grand Alliance does not want to actually conquer the League and take its place, they just don't want the MAlignment taking over and using the League collapse to do so. They also want the OFS exploitation and arrogant demands/ignoring of their own situations in the future.

I think the most likely situation for a part of League surviving is a number of the inner most core planets (within a few light-years of Sol itself) forming a new structure of their own while all the Shell and Verge planets, and most of the Old League go their own ways. This new nation (call it the Solarian Union for the sake of argument) would probably settle for peace with old neighbors and new structures and just go back to its original stand-offishness, but without the potential to come back as a superpower again.

However we wont know about this sort of thing without learning about the existing tensions between the core worlds that the Mandarins have been afraid of blowing up. We should probably start seeing this soon, along with all the Alignments next phase of destabilization involving them.

Valen123456 wrote:

Zakharra wrote:I'd like to see people like them to save a good chunk of the SL. It did stand for something good and can still do it again. I'd like to see both the MAlign and the SEM/GAs plans fail in some way and have the SL maintain its coherency with better leadership. I don't think that would be unreasonable. No plan survives contact with the enemy. Why cant that apply to everyone?

The reasons the two factions have for taking out the existing League structures are quite different and they will be using quite different methods to do so. The Grand Alliance does not want to actually conquer the League and take its place, they just don't want the MAlignment taking over and using the League collapse to do so. They also want the OFS exploitation and arrogant demands/ignoring of their own situations in the future.

I think the most likely situation for a part of League surviving is a number of the inner most core planets (within a few light-years of Sol itself) forming a new structure of their own while all the Shell and Verge planets, and most of the Old League go their own ways. This new nation (call it the Solarian Union for the sake of argument) would probably settle for peace with old neighbors and new structures and just go back to its original stand-offishness, but without the potential to come back as a superpower again.

However we wont know about this sort of thing without learning about the existing tensions between the core worlds that the Mandarins have been afraid of blowing up. We should probably start seeing this soon, along with all the Alignments next phase of destabilization involving them.

I can kind of see that, but people in the SL that are honest are believing that the MAlign is there and trying to take down the SL, so it's not like they would be unaware. If some managed to clean out their leadership and hold onto as much of their territory as possible (within reason of course), I could see them sending envoys to the GA/SEM to basically sue for peace and despite Harrington's declaration, I can see the SEM receiving them. Why? Because unless the SEM/GA wants to militarily and economically dominate all of SL space and basically become what they hate to ensure no power ever arises to challenge them (I believe that was Harrington's main point), the GA/SEM would be better off giving them a chance. After all they gave Haven a chance after fighting them in a cold and hot war for 50 bloody years. To think they wouldn't give a change of leadership of the SL a chance is.. odd. Especially if the new leadership acknowledges SL fault and offers to help go after the MAlign.

It does risk the remaining SL becoming a threat later, but the same could be said for Republic of Haven and the Andermani Empire. There's nothing to say they won't ever become a threat to the SEM, or for that matter that if a prime minister like High Ridge gets in power again that Manticore itself might not become a danger to others. There is basically no guarantee either way for any of the stellar powers.