Computer Science
pontiff | November 19, 2007Here is a picture I call "STOC 2008 deadline":
STOC 2008 will be in Victoria, British Columbia. I was just across the border in Surey, BC, and shot this picture which I call "Crazy Canadian Fireplace Channel":
pontiff | November 16, 2007Seems it 'tis the season for warnings about the security of cryptosystems. The New York Times has an article on the latest issue here. It seems that Adi Shamir (the S in RSA) has a note out describing how faults in chip hardware could render cryptosystems insecure. It's not at all clear to me how this differs from analysis where the faults are injected into the hardware (such as described here) because the article doesn't contain any real details.
pontiff | November 15, 2007Is there a backdoor in NIST's SP800-90 Dual Ec pseudorandom number generator?
According to a presentation by Dan Shumow and Niels Ferguson from Microsoft given at CRYPTO 2007, there is a backdoor in this pseudorandom number generator. While the authors don't know how to use the backdoor, they point out that it is possible that the creators of the algorithm specified in the NIST standard could have access to numbers which would render the pseudorandom number generator insecure.
pontiff | November 14, 2007Over at The World's Fair, a challenge:Anyway, this meme asks that you come up with your own scientific eponym. What's that exactly? Well, first read this excellent primer by Samuel Arbesman, which basically provides a step by step description of how to do this effectively. Then have a go at your own blog. If all goes well, I'd like to create a page at the Science Creative Quarterly, that collects (and links to) the good ones.
Of course there is already a formula for Best Bacon Butty, so I can't do anything about Bacon Butties, damnit. Well recently I've been thinking about how bad I am at…
pontiff | November 5, 2007(With apologies to Jorge Luis Borges.)
The universe, which others call the cellular automata, is composed of an indefinite (and perhaps infinite) number of square rooms, each room having four doors (in what we can, for lack of a better choice, assumelie in the cardinal directions of north, south, east, and west.) Each door leads to an adjoining room which is identical to the other rooms except for one salient feature. In the middle of each room stands a monstrous monolith whose color is not fixed, but changes regularly every forty two seconds.
Like most inhabitants of the universe, I have…