AES isn't broken

I wrote a longer entry on this that LogJam threw away, but in summary, it now looks like the XSL attack on AES, which was always an academic attack anyway, won't even work in theory, according to Moh and Coppersmith. I don't understand the attack well enough to discuss the detail of all this though.

( footnote defending Bruce Schneier )

US won't take "yes" for an answer

Iraq say they will accept inspections under the conditions the UN have been asking for for four years. Now the US want more - in particular, they want to search Saddam's eight presidential palaces, which between them cover twelve square miles.

Now, that doesn't seem like a position beyond the bounds of reason. What really is lunatic, what makes it unambiguously clear that the US wants war at any cost and fears nothing more than Iraqi co-operation with weapons inspection, is that the US has said it will prevent any inspections going ahead at all until its new conditions are agreed upon.

Presumably if Iraq is awkward enough to agree to these too, then still further conditions will be imposed, perhaps if all else fails insisting that Israeli spies once again accompany the weapons inspectors. Or most likely, the bombing will simply start one day, without warning, while negotiations proceed; Dubya will declare that he has "waited too long".

Mano a Mano duel, courtesy of godlike superbeings.

I watched an episode of Blake's 7 the other day which seemed to have a very familiar plot. Godlike superbeings pluck two major characters - most usually the main character and their main opponent - out of their spaceships to force them into a mano a mano duel, in which they are armed with more primitive weapons than their familiar blasters. The fight is to be to the death, but the hero, having evaded the villain's trickery and gained the upper hand, refuses to kill the villain at the end; this turns out to win the approval of the godlike superbeings, who let them both go.

I feel sure that this exact plot has been replicated many times by cheap TV SF, but we could between us think of only one other example, an episode of Star Trek. Does anyone know of any others?

For that matter, could someone arrange for some godlike superbeings to pay us a visit?