Wiretap Relaunch - Coming AUGUST 26 to KS

[DevilishRogue]

Hello everyone! Dave Boyd here; apologies in advance for the mega-post.

First off, I'd like to thank everyone who offered constructive criticisms, comments, and unabashed praise during the last campaign. Though it did not reach its funding goal, I learned a lot and took the time to fine-tune issues that sprung up during the original Mar-Apr campaign. If you would like to view the original campaign, please click HERE: http://goo.gl/u2S5uJ

I'd like to proudly reintroduce Wiretap Playing Cards - a deck about the recent NSA spying scandals in Washington DC. It features prominent whisteblowers and presidents who either helped or hindered the U.S.'s intelligence efforts (depending on the viewer's perspective, of course).



The deck will offer the following features, and 2,500 copies will be printed by the USPCC (if the KS reaches its goal).

• Fully reversible back.
• Air Cushion Finish.
• Custom pencil artwork for all 56 cards, including Jokers.
• Tiny "cameras" in each of the pips.

Here are a few lo-res images of the spade and heart courts, a sample number card, the dual-art Jokers designed by myself and Chase Camp, and the back design.



Shown above (L/R, T/B) - President Bush, Karen Kwiatkowski, Edward Snowden, President Obama, Laura Poitras, and Julian Assange.
For a full uncut sheet preview, please visit http://www.humorousrobot.com/wiretap_relaunch/. This post also includes the Gag Order full-sheet , which is too large for me to fit into this post.

The new campaign will be quite lightweight, and will also offer dice among other add-ons. Seen here is a first look at the unbranded/branded tuck and the blue limited edition dice that will be available within the week through my site. Red dice will become available during the campaign.


(Pen for scale.)


I've received excellent advice from members of this forum during the last campaign, and I would love to hear your feedback on things you might like to see/should be changed during this upcoming campaign. I'll see you all on AUGUST 26th 2014 @ 6pm EDT / 3pm PDT!

- Dave

[JDoc]

#1 Early Birdy, I am down.  Where is the Amazon cashier?
I can't stop myself when I see a nice bike deck!

[Don Boyer]

The art for President Bush looks nothing like EITHER of the Presidents Bush.  President Obama looks like he's been eating a few too many burgers and not running enough laps.

Have you considered an alternate printer?  The Bicycle brand name used to be a big deal for collectors but these days there's been so much junk printed with the brand it's been pretty well diluted.  Expert or Legends PCC would probably do the job for considerably less and you'd still have a quality deck.

Good luck with the second time around.  There's many decks on KS that failed the first time and succeeded on the second try because of the lessons learned.

[JDoc]

I admire people who can draw nice and I appreciate quality works done and delivered.

It is hard to satisfy everyone but I do respect to designs from creator's own idea.  That is how exactly KickStarter works because of majority opinion wins!

Now days quality of American living goods are going downhill because things can be produced cheaper from oversea places.  Just recently I start collecting playing cards and studied about USPCC stop using quality stock paper (UV500?), and my guess it is all about the cost.  The tucks can labeled  "Made in USA" but who actually knows where the raw materials came from.  Trees in China or inks from India maybe?  And now for an average deck price at $11 on KS but still cannot bring back the quality paper.

Your idea is valuable and priceless to me!

[DevilishRogue]

@ Don -
Excellent calls, as usual. In the morning I'll be doing a pass over all of the Kings (McCarthy's head was looking rather... potato-ish). Still waiting on a reply from Legends and Expert.

@Jdoc -
Glad to hear they're up your alley!

[Don Boyer]

Now days quality of American living goods are going downhill because things can be produced cheaper from oversea places.  Just recently I start collecting playing cards and studied about USPCC stop using quality stock paper (UV500?), and my guess it is all about the cost.  The tucks can labeled  "Made in USA" but who actually knows where the raw materials came from.  Trees in China or inks from India maybe?  And now for an average deck price at $11 on KS but still cannot bring back the quality paper.

Actually, Expert PCC has done their print work in Taiwan and China because the largest printer in the US has a near-monopoly in this country by either forcing competitors out of business or buying them, charges prices that rise with little rhyme or reason year after year and has a reputation for being unresponsive to what their print customers want and directly competing against them.  It's the American way, isn't it? 

Simply put, in the land of US playing card manufacturing, the field is anything but level.

[Faume]

I like the illustrations of the people and I'm sure they'll look great once reworked to more accurately match those they are intended to represent.

I'm not sure how other printers may handle this, but I remember seeing something in the documentation that USPCC sent me regarding printing images (including drawings) of specific people.

We can print images (photographs or drawn) of people (famous/historical or not); however a signed letter of release from those whose picture will be used in the deck, or from their estate, must be submitted to USPC proving you have permission to use their image in your custom deck of playing cards. For more info, please contact your Custom Sales Representative.

For this type of deck, this is definitely something you should get clarification on with your printer before going much further. You may have already done so, but it came to mind so I thought I'd mention it!

I'm a little confused by the frames on the cards. Are they intended to be battleship themed based on the loose lips sink ships thing? With a name like Wiretap I sort of expected something with more wires!

I really like the Aces and how you've incorporated camera lenses in them. I like your pips on the number cards - they recall the Ace pip, but are a clear, simplified version of it.

The art on the Jokers is very cool, though I can't help but wish it had a bit more space for the art and a bit less frame.

I think the unbranded box art looks much nicer and I'll second the notion that the Bicycle branding doesn't mean much to me. I almost always prefer the non-branded art.

[Don Boyer]

I like the illustrations of the people and I'm sure they'll look great once reworked to more accurately match those they are intended to represent.

I'm not sure how other printers may handle this, but I remember seeing something in the documentation that USPCC sent me regarding printing images (including drawings) of specific people.

We can print images (photographs or drawn) of people (famous/historical or not); however a signed letter of release from those whose picture will be used in the deck, or from their estate, must be submitted to USPC proving you have permission to use their image in your custom deck of playing cards. For more info, please contact your Custom Sales Representative.

For this type of deck, this is definitely something you should get clarification on with your printer before going much further. You may have already done so, but it came to mind so I thought I'd mention it!

I'm a little confused by the frames on the cards. Are they intended to be battleship themed based on the loose lips sink ships thing? With a name like Wiretap I sort of expected something with more wires!

I really like the Aces and how you've incorporated camera lenses in them. I like your pips on the number cards - they recall the Ace pip, but are a clear, simplified version of it.

The art on the Jokers is very cool, though I can't help but wish it had a bit more space for the art and a bit less frame.

I think the unbranded box art looks much nicer and I'll second the notion that the Bicycle branding doesn't mean much to me. I almost always prefer the non-branded art.

If you've a person in the news as opposed to being a Hollywood star, the rules for image use can apply a little differently - but it's certainly prudent to consult with a lawyer before using images of living people.  When in doubt, ask a lawyer.

In the original version of the deck, the frames and lenses were meant to make the cards appear vaguely like the surveillance devices used for wiretapping and other electronic intelligence gathering.

There is a topic floating around in the Plethora about the original version of this deck - if you do a search for it, it shouldn't be too hard to find.  You'll learn more of the background behind this deck.

[DevilishRogue]

@Faume -

I read the documentation USPCC provided cover-to-cover to make sure that I was not breaking any laws with the deck. Here's the gist of what I sent to Bicycle's legal team a few months ago:

All of the likenesses in the deck are hand drawn and no ill will is meant towards any of the figures; it is merely a catalog of people associated with gathering electronic intelligence. With all of that being said, is it still possible to print this deck?

Let me know. Cheers.

And they responded with:

As long as they are public domain and original drawings our legal group will have no issues.  Thanks!

Now, Bicycle's legal team may not have an issue with the likenesses, but I still am not 100% that these twelve individuals will not take offense to being portrayed in the deck. To cover my bases, letters are being sent out to all of the representatives of the portrayed characters. It would be a very nasty surprise to have the deck fully funded and then have the entire stock taken and be sued because I didn't do something as simple as send a letter to gain consent.

All of that being said, there is some wiggle room within the First Amendment under parody laws. I may fall into legal murky waters if any of the parties involved can prove that I caused damages to them. For example, if you go into court and say "Dave Boyd made a deck that portrayed me as a terrible person and it has hurt my brand," good luck presenting that to a jury. However, if you can present actual fiscal damages, such as, "Dave Boyd made a deck that portrayed me as a terrible person, and because of that I lost a $50k contract with Viacom," then I'd be facing a tougher situation.

Again, this goes back to letters requesting consent. Some parties (Edward Snowden, for example) simply cannot be reached, but I'll be doing my best to make sure that my legal defense is rock-solid.

[DevilishRogue]

Worst comes to worst, I'll be printing a deck with a likeness of J-rock NoDrama, Forge Kush, and Treadword Broden.

[Don Boyer]

@Faume -

I read the documentation USPCC provided cover-to-cover to make sure that I was not breaking any laws with the deck. Here's the gist of what I sent to Bicycle's legal team a few months ago:

All of the likenesses in the deck are hand drawn and no ill will is meant towards any of the figures; it is merely a catalog of people associated with gathering electronic intelligence. With all of that being said, is it still possible to print this deck?

Let me know. Cheers.

And they responded with:

As long as they are public domain and original drawings our legal group will have no issues.  Thanks!

Now, Bicycle's legal team may not have an issue with the likenesses, but I still am not 100% that these twelve individuals will not take offense to being portrayed in the deck. To cover my bases, letters are being sent out to all of the representatives of the portrayed characters. It would be a very nasty surprise to have the deck fully funded and then have the entire stock taken and be sued because I didn't do something as simple as send a letter to gain consent.

All of that being said, there is some wiggle room within the First Amendment under parody laws. I may fall into legal murky waters if any of the parties involved can prove that I caused damages to them. For example, if you go into court and say "Dave Boyd made a deck that portrayed me as a terrible person and it has hurt my brand," good luck presenting that to a jury. However, if you can present actual fiscal damages, such as, "Dave Boyd made a deck that portrayed me as a terrible person, and because of that I lost a $50k contract with Viacom," then I'd be facing a tougher situation.

Again, this goes back to letters requesting consent. Some parties (Edward Snowden, for example) simply cannot be reached, but I'll be doing my best to make sure that my legal defense is rock-solid.

Parody laws could protect you, but you'd want to insure that people understood the art was meant to be humorous, with your famous people present almost a caricature of the individuals being represented.  The broader the brush you paint with, the less seriously anyone would take the images as being truly representative of the people in them.

At least that's my two cents.

And I'd wager that someone somewhere can reach Snowden, likely on the Internet.  No man is an island - he must have friends somewhere who keep in touch with him (with encryption, perhaps, but still)!  It's not hard to develop "bulletproof" encryption, either - I had a friend back in the '90s who hacked an old version of PGP for MS-DOS/IBM-DOS, increasing the maximum key length from 128 bits to 4,096 bits!

[DevilishRogue]

I had a friend back in the '90s who hacked an old version of PGP for MS-DOS/IBM-DOS, increasing the maximum key length from 128 bits to 4,096 bits!

Jeez, that's crazy. I'd love to pick his/her brain sometime.

Though TheDiscourse caters to a large crowd who are exclusively interested in cards and cards alone, I just wanted to give everyone a heads-up that the limited-edition Wiretap dice finally have a product page in the shop I've set up. If you are interested in grabbing a few of these, check up on the link here - http://www.humorousrobot.com/shop/. Soon I plan to have that page populated with more cards and products, so stick around.

[Don Boyer]

I had a friend back in the '90s who hacked an old version of PGP for MS-DOS/IBM-DOS, increasing the maximum key length from 128 bits to 4,096 bits!

Jeez, that's crazy. I'd love to pick his/her brain sometime.

The really wild part is that each additional bit makes the encryption twice as difficult to crack.  So as hard as it is to crack 128-bit encryption, his 4,096-bit keys were 2^3,968 times more difficult to break than PGP's standard key length.  I'm afraid to plug that into a calculator to see how big that number is...

[DevilishRogue]

The really wild part is that each additional bit makes the encryption twice as difficult to crack.  So as hard as it is to crack 128-bit encryption, his 4,096-bit keys were 2^3,968 times more difficult to break than PGP's standard key length.  I'm afraid to plug that into a calculator to see how big that number is...

It would be interesting to see what steps of encryption are available between 128 and 4,096. Just from a quick search I can see that there is 128, 192, and 256-bit encryption, but each one requires different levels of "transformations" between the input data and the cryptotext. Respectively, there are 12, 14, and 16x transformations.

If this is applied to the 4,096-bit model (64^64), then there's a good chance that his model ran the data through 124 transformation cycles (!) unless there's a cap I'm unaware of.

Also, if it is indeed true that it becomes twice as difficult for each bit included, your friend's algorithm would be 3.0691830754069217948799249581913e+1194 more difficult to crack than the base data. Whew!
There's some fascinating reading about the standards for this type of encryption here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standard

[Don Boyer]

The really wild part is that each additional bit makes the encryption twice as difficult to crack.  So as hard as it is to crack 128-bit encryption, his 4,096-bit keys were 2^3,968 times more difficult to break than PGP's standard key length.  I'm afraid to plug that into a calculator to see how big that number is...

It would be interesting to see what steps of encryption are available between 128 and 4,096. Just from a quick search I can see that there is 128, 192, and 256-bit encryption, but each one requires different levels of "transformations" between the input data and the cryptotext. Respectively, there are 12, 14, and 16x transformations.

If this is applied to the 4,096-bit model (64^64), then there's a good chance that his model ran the data through 124 transformation cycles (!) unless there's a cap I'm unaware of.

Also, if it is indeed true that it becomes twice as difficult for each bit included, your friend's algorithm would be 3.0691830754069217948799249581913e+1194 more difficult to crack than the base data. Whew!
There's some fascinating reading about the standards for this type of encryption here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standard

I always loved cryptography as a kid, in the days BEFORE people used computers.  I even learned of a cipher method that the Soviets were using in the US in the 1950s that involved the use of a one-time pad - completely unbreakable even to this day, though somewhat unwieldly in its use.  It creates a ciphertext that's completely random and patternless, unbreakable by even the fastest computers working in tandem - they'd have an easier time counting the grains of sand in the air during a desert sandstorm, then LABELING them!  Its problem was that while the ciphertext could be freely transmitted on public airwaves, the keys consisted of exceptionally long number sequences that had to be distributed to agents in the field before they went on their assignments, that had to remain hidden at all times along with the decryption method and that could only be used one time before being disposed of and never used again.  Use any given key as infrequently as just twice and a chink develops in the armor which allows patterns to develop in the two messages, patterns that can be detected.  The more times a key gets reused, the easier the pattern becomes to detect and for the key to be discovered through cryptanalysis.

For any cipher key, each additional character in length will give the key as many possible additional permutations as there are options for what to place in that character space.  In binary keys, you have two options, so adding one character to the length of the key gives you twice as many options.  if it was a decimal numeric key, adding a character gives you ten times more possible permutations; a hexadecimal key has 16 times more permutations for each additional character/digit; an alphabetic key would have 26 times more possibilities for each extra character and an alphanumeric key would offer 36 times more permutations per extra character.  The more permutations, the harder the code is to break.  That lowly binary digit, only making it twice as hard, is pretty weak by itself, but string enough binary characters together and you're literally expanding the number of permutations exponentially.

The steps you mention really only apply to commercial encryption methods, and they tend to follow the same pattern as computer RAM does, usually moving up either by powers of two or by half-steps between two consecutive powers of two.  You mentioned 128-, 192- and 256-bit key lengths.  That's 2^8, (2^9 - 2^8 /2) + 2^8 and 2^9.  But in reality, the key length doesn't depend on binary at all - it's just something convenient to hang the standard on.  Early web browsers meant for use outside of the US were at one time restricted to only 40-bit keys for encrypted pages - anything stronger was classified by the US Government at the time as "munitions" and was illegal to export.  When banks finally insisted on using stronger encryption to protect their transactions, the government relented and raised the limit to allow for 128-bit encryption, which banks are (foolishly) still using today.  I say foolishly because processing power has increased in leaps and bounds since then and it's been proven that 128-bit encryption is now breakable, though only with a lot of resources and a fair amount of time.  Give it a few more years and the newest tablets and smartphones will be able to break it.  It's been years since the military established 256-bit encryption as military-grade, and I suspect they've increased it since then.

There's a drawback to increasing the security, though.  Even when using the correct key, if you make a key that's seriously long (while at the same time not exceeding the length of the message being sent), you need more computing power just to perform standard encryption and decryption - computers do have limits as to how quickly they can process really large numbers.  That hacked PGP with the 4.096-bit keylength ran on an Intel 80486 processor (or worse, maybe a '386) - I'm guessing it took a few days or more to process a single message...

Now despite the whole cool spy factor to discussions about encryption, we're REALLY getting off topic here!  If you wish to continue, I'll break off the conversation and move it to the Parlor.