I propose a game, given a list, find a way that each item is not like the others:

- Kidnapping - It's the only action.

- Explosives - It's the only thing that is illegal to make.

- African Militias - It's the only one about using people.

- Unbreakable Encryption - It's the only thing that is used by regular people on a regular basis.

- Missile Guidance Systems - It's the only thing that's not unique.

- Private jets full of gold - It's the only thing most people would trade an arm and a leg for.

> It's the only thing that's not unique.

I see you get one joker in your game.

> Explosives - It's the only thing that is illegal to make.

doesnt the US restrict import/export of encryption over a certain keylength as well?

Uh, I don't think so? Pretty sure they either gave up, decided it was unconstitutional, or both.

Either way, "make", not "export". I'm almost certain it's illegal to export missile guidance systems under ITAR.

> Uh, I don't think so? Pretty sure they either gave up, decided it was unconstitutional, or both.

I think it's technically still a law that's on the books and the American federal government did try to claim PGP was "munitions" at one point in the 90's, but the feds were skirted by PGP being printed in a book which is protected by the 1st amendment.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#Criminal_i...

Explosives aren't necessarily illegal to make.

Missile guidance systems would probably be illegal to export, though. (You'd have to declare the gold.)

You mean private jets full of gold that are actually legal (though probably evading taxes) as opposed to the illegality of all the rest?

Unbreakable encryption it's quite legal where i live

Actually, a private jet full of gold would be definitely illegal to attempt to fly: it would weigh more than the allowable take-off weight.

Furthermore, there is no way a private jet full of gold would actually fly. It would be too heavy to succeed in taking off. Gold is extremely dense, almost as dense as lead. You could put gold in a private jet, but it wouldn't be "full of" gold; there'd have to be a substantial amount of unused space for the thing to fly.

True. But I don't think it's a like for like comparison. It's more "these are the kinds of things that sound like they'd be part of an exciting spy story". I mean, if you were to add "beautiful tuxedos" or "high stakes card games" it could be the dust jacket for a James Bond novel.

Unbreakable encryption

For all practical purposes, it is true.

Unbreakable encryption is a thing though. It's called one-time-pad and it doesn't require any sort of fancy algorithms. As long as your random key is the same length as the message, the decryption is literally unbreakable(because the contents could decode into literally any other message of the same length).

As basically a complete novice in encryption, it was interesting to learn about the unbreakable "one-time pad" method.

"The one-time pad (OTP) is an encryption technique that cannot be cracked, but requires the use of a one-time pre-shared key the same size as, or longer than, the message being sent. In this technique, a plaintext is paired with a random secret key (also referred to as a one-time pad). Then, each bit or character of the plaintext is encrypted by combining it with the corresponding bit or character from the pad using modular addition."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad