Seems 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.
A Backdoor in a NIST Pseudorandom Number Generator?
Is there a backdoor in NIST’s SP800-90 Dual Ec pseudorandom number generator?
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Proof by Logical Exhaustion
Uncertain Chad asks “What’s your favorite dubious proof technique?” I just don’t have one dubious proof technique: I have an entire book of dubious proof techniques! Seriously, I have a book where I write them all down.
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Stealing Virtual Furniture
Can you be arrested for stealing furniture in a virtual world? The source of this question: Philip K. Dick? Nope, NPR:
A teenager faces charges of stealing furniture that doesn’t exist. The youth in the Netherlands was on one of those Web sites where you create virtual people to wander around virtual buildings spending what amounts to real money. You pay cash for credits to spend online. The 17-year-old allegedly stole $5,800 worth of imaginary furniture. Real police arrested him. They suspect other teens of receiving the stolen goods.
Numbers Factored Relativistically?
This glib article from the Wired Blog Gadgets Lab discusses some of the “crazy” ideas for building computers. Among them, of course, are quantum computers, which means, of course that a quantum computing bastardization, can’t be far from behind.
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The Bacon Test
Over 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.
Let This Quantum Computing Bastardization Pass?
In an article on stopping a large spectrum of light with metamaterials in The Telegraph (research which is very cool, but isn’t available online, yet, as far as I can tell), I find some lines that would make the Optimizer go bonkers:
By contrast, the switches in a quantum computer can be both “on” and “off” at the same time. A “qubit” could do two calculations at once, two qubits would do four and so on. Thus, it was theoretically possible to use quantum computers to explore vast numbers of potential solutions to a problem simultaneously.
Ouch, my brain hurts.
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To Every Ranking, Spin, Spin, Spin
This morning I received a funny email from a graduate student here at UW, Nicholas Murphy, which made me laugh out loud (reproduced and linkified here with permission from Nicholas):
Subject: Times Higher Education Supplement rankings: a study in spin
http://www.topmba.com/fileadmin/pdfs/2007_Top_200_Compact.pdf
For entertainment purposes, the same news story from different university publications:
Harvard:
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=520741
Duke:
http://media.www.dukechronicle.com/media/storage/paper884/news/2007/11/13/News/Duke-Stays.13.In.Thes.Rankings-3096978.shtml
Yale:
http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/22370
Stanford (I particularly enjoy the terse, annoyed tone here, especially given the first comment):
http://daily.stanford.edu/article/2007/11/13/briefStanfordRankingFallsFrom6thTo19th
BBC generally:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7083292.stm
To which I will gleefully add my own spin: the west coast of the US gets no respect, damnit!
I Am a Quantumist: Bring it On!
Tonight I watched NOVA’s Judgement Day: Intelligent Design On Trial. Ah shucks, us quantum physicists never get to have so much fun (err, I mean, experience so much pain and deal with so much silliness) trying to defend our science. It’s not like, you know, there aren’t people who think quantum theory is wrong or that quantum theory is somehow related to the Vedic teachings of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. So why is it that quantum theory (which after all is “just a theory” wink, wink, nod, nod) doesn’t illicit courtroom battles of such epic scope as the Dover trial?
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Happenings in the Quantum World: Nov 13, 2007
Grad school opportunities, postdoc opportunities, interference experiments, more D-wave, and sabbatical at the Blackberry hole
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