

The Maginot Line - devindotcom
http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/25/the-maginot-line/

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revelation
The image of the Maginot Line article in full resolution:

[http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/maginotl...](http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/maginotlinearticle.jpg)

Its better reading than all of techcrunch, so..

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Patient0
Interesting that they originally planned to have it cover Belgium too - if
they'd actually finished it Germany would not have been able to go through
Belgium after all. I wonder why they didn't finish it?

~~~
vonmoltke
As I recall there were a few reasons. The two biggest ones:

1) The Belgians threw a shitfit over the French wanting to build a wall to
seal in France with them on the wring side of it. They offered instead to
allow the French to connect French eastern border defenses to Belgium's
eastern border defenses, promising that if the Germans did decide to invade
Belgium again that their line would hold.

2) The portion that was completed cost over twice what was projected. The
Franco-Belgian border would have been harder to fortify than the Franco-German
border, and considering the cost overruns on the latter portion the former
started to look infeasible.

~~~
cstross
Also worth noting: Belgium was traditionally neutral, having been set up as
effectively a buffer state in the wake of the Napoleonic wars. The bloody
quagmire First World War was in no small part precipitated by Germany's
violation of Belgian neutrality, which brought Great Britain into the war on
the Franco-Russian side -- the UK had committed as a guarantor of Belgian
neutrality. So despite strong misgivings about German revanchism during the
1920s and 1930s, Belgium was also historically somewhat ambivalent about joint
defense projects with foreigners.

~~~
walshemj
But if they had allowed the British and French to advance to the defense line
before the Germans invaded ww2 would have turned out very different.

Part of the reason that the German blitzkrieg worked so well is the french and
British forces where out of position.

~~~
cstross
Yes, absolutely. And I note that these days Belgium is home to NATO's Supreme
Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE). They might not have worked it out
after WW1, but after WW2 ...

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ballard
Strawman recapitulation of PHKs thoughts. Unfortunately, the conclusions are
both wrong, and naïve at worst.

Crypto that gets used has to be easy-to-use, MySQL style. I think a project
like tcpcrypt is great example, in theory. Simple is good because the pain of
setup has to be least. (Tcpcrypt is opportunistic encryption that needs no
additional setup and is different from SSL.)

Crypto does work. Snowden admitted as such.

“Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the
few things that you can rely on. Unfortunately, endpoint security is so
terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it.”

[http://m.techcrunch.com/2013/06/17/encrypting-your-email-
wor...](http://m.techcrunch.com/2013/06/17/encrypting-your-email-works-says-
nsa-whistleblower-edward-snowden/)

(The last point is another form of the ancient security problem of taking
steps to minimize chances of plaintext disclosure.)

The cost to capture or recover plaintext should be much greater to the
proportion of the potential value of the PT over the time it could cause
damage.

Just giving up is defeatist and expects that some future government made of
fallible people would suddenly get enlightenment and act benignly. Never going
to happen, there is too much money and power at stake. (USG fears its citizens
but abuses power to crucify dissenters.)

Encrypting almost everything is one immediate way to forcibly remove the
possibility of abuse. Remember that even if (and that's a big "if") political
sands were shifted one way, they would certainly shift back to a culture of
secrecy and expedient Machevellianism. If you don't take reasonable measures
to protect yourself, you don't understand what's going on or what works. There
are no easy fixes, only defense-in- __depth __. Security is fundamentally an
unending competition of gambits and countermeasures that will continue so long
as people have secrets or desire freedom from intrusion.

~~~
eru
> Crypto that gets used has to be easy-to-use, MySQL style. I think a project
> like tcpcrypt is great example, in theory. Simple is good because the pain
> of setup has to be least. (Tcpcrypt is opportunistic encryption that needs
> no additional setup and is different from SSL.)

The off-the-record (OTR) plugins for various IM clients spring to mind as easy
to use.

~~~
Argorak
Except that a lot of people never care about validating the peers fingerprint.
"Hey, I am A, I am at another computer at the moment, hence then new keys."

(I know this is somehow mitigated by SMP in libotr, but some clients have not
implemented it yet, e.g.:
[https://trac.adium.im/ticket/9768](https://trac.adium.im/ticket/9768))

~~~
eru
I found OTR's handling of that via shared common knowledge (e.g. Socialist
Millionaire Protocol) quite pleasant.

~~~
Argorak
Hence the reference that not all clients provide an interface to SMP,
including very popular ones.

~~~
eru
Sorry, my reading comprehension failed.

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fauigerzigerk
I think what we can achieve with cryptography is to force the government to
use proper courts and due process instead of mass surveillance.

I don't know why war metaphors are used for everything since 9/11\. The
Maginot Line is completely irrelevant, because this is not a war where one
party wins and one loses. It's a complex and ongoing political and social
process.

We can use technology to make long standing legal principles more effective
and their violation more visible.

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gruseom
I read somewhere recently that the Maginot line has been unfairly maligned and
that it actually did its job pretty well.

Edit: this is the piece I was thinking of:
[http://ericmargolis.com/2013/06/on-ne-passe-pas-the-
unknown-...](http://ericmargolis.com/2013/06/on-ne-passe-pas-the-unknown-
victory-of-the-southern-maginot-line/)

~~~
PhasmaFelis
Yeah, my understanding is that the French knew very well that the Germans
would go around; the Line was only meant to force them to detour through rough
country and slow them down long enough for the French Army to mobilize. It
failed because the Nazis used unprecedented tactics and technology to storm
through Belgium and the Netherlands faster than anyone thought they could; the
French Army still knew they were coming, but weren't able to mobilize fast
enough to stop them.

~~~
rodgerd
Also, the British forces that were supposed to be guarding the Western route
into France folded quickly and retreated. "Blood, Tears, and Folly" contains
exceprts from contemporary sources noting that the British determination to
retreat was such that they prevented French troops from redeploying to their
Western flank so as to avoid the French defence impeding the British retreat.

~~~
vonmoltke
Additionally, the Belgian fortifications were not nearly up to the level of
the Maginot Line, nor the level the Belgians boasted. They proved to be little
more than a speedbump for the Wehrmacht.

~~~
pash
The Germans also devised novel tactics to overcome the Belgian fortifications.
In the initial attack on Eben-Emael [0], for example, commandos descended on
the fort in gliders in the black of night and used newly devised shaped
charges to destroy the heavily bunkered Belgian guns.

Blitzkrieg itself was a new tactic, but its success depended on surprise,
which the Germans achieved by sending their main mechanized force through the
rough, wooded terrain of the Ardennes while feinting an attack to the north,
through the plain of Flanders, where the Belgians and French expected them.
That was a hugely risky endeavor, and the offensive would probably have failed
if the German movements had been discovered during the several days it took to
cross the Ardennes Wood.

0\. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Eben-
Emael](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Eben-Emael)

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jpalomaki
The article mentions " I was told yesterday (by Bruce Schneier, so I trust it)
that the noise pattern from a device’s antenna can be used to fingerprint it,
a side effect of high-precision wireless transceivers."

My quick attempts with Google did not provide any good results. Does anybody
have pointers to research about how feasible this fingerprinting is for
example against modern cellphones?

~~~
AsymetricCom
Modern cellphones have many, many other ways to fingerprint them that are more
economic. I doubt what Schneier suggests would ever be used in anything other
than military applications for the next 10 years.

~~~
rdl
It's more of an issue for something like wifi, where you can trivially change
MAC (and do host-level stuff to change the fingerprint of the rest of the
stack).

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Sagat
This is perhaps off topic but my cousin is a tour guide in one of the villages
close to the border with the Germans. Thanks to this I had the opportunity to
visit some of the Maginot bunkers where the French troops waited anxiously for
the invasion to come to their doorstep. A few rooms had their walls entirely
covered in miniature Mickeys, giving the place an eerie and deeply melancholic
atmosphere.

The point of my post is that it feels really great that France and Germany are
now allies, maybe even friends. You can criticize Europe a lot but at least we
aren't fighting each other and hopefully won't do so for another century.
Whenever I see Americans complaining about their country turning to shit I
want to tell them to focus on the fact that it could have been so much worse.

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dangayle
I actually appreciate that article. Yes, it is written a little heavy
handedly, but the point is sound. Sure, there are some smart/informed people
who knew the actual power of the gov't to snoop, but by and large the "carbon
copy" metaphor is dead on.

Even here on Hacker News recently, there was an article about how the entire
US nuclear armament is run through ancient computers and we chuckle. "Ha ha,
you gov't people are stuck in the stone ages".

Of course, they let us laugh.

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unhammer
"when a burglar comes through the window, do you put more locks on the door?
Better to just acknowledge that we chose to live in a dangerous neighborhood."

So they start keeping both the door _and_ the window unlocked? If that
happened to me, I would 1) get better at keeping my windows
closed/locked/barred 2) consider moving to a better neighbourhood.

"People can barely manage the privacy settings on Facebook" – Citation
Missing. [http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2013/Where-Teens-Seek-
Pri...](http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2013/Where-Teens-Seek-Privacy-
Advice.aspx) suggests the opposite.

"in violation of the 5th amendment, likely, but how long until a friendly
precedent on that account?" – so vote, speak out, do something instead of
accepting the status quo.

Who wrote this, Keith Alexander?

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joseph_cooney
I was amused to learn the Germans had built a similar line on THEIR side of
the river, called the Siegfried line.

~~~
arethuza
Defence of their Western border was very important when the Wehrmacht was
active in the East - early in the war they really didn't have the men to
attack in the East _and_ defend in the West so having fixed defences there was
seen as very important.

~~~
joseph_cooney
By the time they were active in the east, their western border was "The
English Channel". This was the one they built before the outbreak of WWII.

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snowwrestler
It's written to be over-the-top, but I agree with the sentiment that we cannot
fight government eavesdropping with "even better" technology.

The only thing that limits the law is the law; the solution to our problems,
at least in the U.S., must in the end be political not technological IMO.

~~~
unhammer
The fact that law must limit law does not make "privacy technology" pointless.

E.g. the dragnet would capture a whole lot more if no web sites used TLS at
all, and three-letter agencies would have a lot easier time of it.

