Viewing profile — cantos

Sadly, Crypto 2 seems to be delayed to Oct 15 now.

My knowledge of this topic is limited but I believe if you are saying that the majority of crypto libraries have had major bugs, in the sense that they are made trivial to break, t…

jerf started from two propositions, 1) "a sterotype exists" 2) "the study is correct" he argued that these propositions imply the proposition "a stereotype does not exist." This co…

Yes algorithms courses are a bit of a grab bag. Really, whether you enjoy them just comes down to your interests. I loved learning algorithms because the important ideas can be con…

If you are really worried about government or government contractors building quantum computers in secret to break RSA in order to read your email you can just encrypt with either …

It bothers me that finding someone's location is such a problem since the technology exists to do it. How much would it cost to track a boat by GPS? Search and rescue missions over…

Average-case complexity is a not a topic I know a lot about, and I can't easily get the paper itself, but what the abstract seems to say is that for some particular NP complete pro…

Apparently it is very hard to prove results in average case complexity theory. We don't even know if computational problems that are hard on average assuming P!=NP exist, let alone…

There are two things wrong with this. First, you are assuming that a nonzero fraction of people will sign up for every open-membership community available to them, frequent, and vo…

Let me be more specific. All that is required is "reasonable suspicion" in order to require access to all the files on your computer, unencrypted. "Reasonable suspicion" is a very …

I postulate that it would be a good place to start.

All electronic devices are subject to search at the U.S. border. http://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/crcl-bor...

I've often heard the claim that elliptic curve cryptography is not used much in practice compared to RSA. I don't doubt its true but I would like to have some evidence for it so I …

It's either collecting call metadata on US citizens or open war mongering? I was going to say that you're giving a false choice but then I realized there doesn't really seem to be …

I agree their front page is overloaded with silly human interest stories and other fluff. However, this is an update to an older story that was apparently broken on May 11th 2006 b…

I agree. I email my friends, or see them in person so I know what's going on in their lives. Too often people only want to analyze facebook as an organizational tool. But there is …

Here's a transcript http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/f/food-inc-script... Several people in the farm industry are interviewed. Their statements are not questioned or furt…

The study of solutions to equations only in the positive integers, or other subsets of integers also falls under Diophantine equations, as far as I know. Subset sum problems are ob…

I don't have access to the original paper but from the summary here http://www.epi.umn.edu/cvdepi/study.asp?id=13 it looks like the study was only observational, roles were not ran…

I had a brief look at the paper. I got stuck on the section about scalability. I can't see how that could be implemented so that authentication can be done given that the nodes are…

If any evidence of the kind ever came out it would be the top story for every news organization in the US. So logically, since we all know with unshakable certainty that the NSA ha…

The changes are good. On another note, don't buy into golden ratio hype. The supposed "beauty" of this ratio and its appearance "over and over again" in nature is one of those myth…

Attempted proofs of Fermat's Last theorem by cranks used to be so common that Edmund Landau, a German mathematician, had a form letter for them: “Dear Sir/Madam: Your proof of Ferm…