Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Sale, Secrecy, Lasers
That's a lot of Molsen. Bigger R writes contributes this link to a story in the Calgary Herald with more detail on the sale of Corel's Linux division which was mentioned in vague terms the other day. It's going to a company called Xandros, in exchange for cash and equity, so Corel will still have at least some interest in the continued success of Linux, or at least its distro. A snippet: "Xandros Corp. president Michael Bego, who started the Ottawa company recently in preparation for the deal announced Wednesday, is also a shareowner in Linux Global Partners, a privately held New York venture firm that put up $10 million US to start Xandros."
Small, cheap and fun are all good words. An Anonymous Coward writes "There's an announcement of the winners of the embedded linux journal's design contest over at linuxdevices.com. Cool projects -- voting system, digital audio workstation, solar racing vehicle, GizmoCopter Project, and Hacking BigMouth Billy Bass. Follow the urls for the projects which are given in the announcement to learn about each project. Oh, and the prize for winning each category? An all expense paid trip to Costa Rica. Dang, why didn't I enter?"
Stuff that's hard to read. John Sokol writes with an update on the Cayley-Purser Algorithm mentioned here before.
"This story went through some time back about a 16-year-old girl outdoing RSA, but it lacked any discussion of the actual algorithm. This link is her paper that she now has posted on the net. It seems reasonable. Maybe someone here can find a flaw in it?"
Roll 'em. Slide100 writes: "It seems that there is more to the desktop rover that was posted about on Tuesday.
The marketing manager sent me a PDF file that explains some more - apparently, they just don't have the time to update the website.
Each rover comes with a cable that plugs into the transmitter and software to allow control of the rover from your computer (or through TCP/IP).
Additionally, each rover has 'Laser Tag' as an integral part of the vehicle. 10 hits (including sound effects) and your rover is disabled 'till the next match See it here. BTW - I have nothing to do with the company, I just think its very cool."
There is a book entitled "In Code" by Sarah and her father, published by Workman, NY, that very interestingly describes her work. In it she tells of being advised by a well known mathematician that there is an attack on the method she described, due to the famous Caley-Hamilton theorem.
It's very strange that I am moved to post by this thing.
Many of the most useful little devices started as toys. For instance the Aztec and Inca civilizations had wheels on their childrens toys but not on their wagons and carts.
This little toy, or at least the model of a cheap travelling rover based on existing tech, could lead to cheaply revolutionized communications in cities and other compact spaces, such as aircraft carriers, etc.
Using these devices as messengers would cut down on traffic and save gasoline and car-use resources in many cities.
It sounds weird to us not because it's scientifically or fiscally implausible but because we are involved in a car culture.
Global warming is good for you!
My crypto (and linear algebra) is somewhat rusty, it's been a few years, but I think that the problem is that Alice can't sign with her secret code. The paper mixes Alice and Bob a little, but assuming that Alice publishes and Bob encrypts in the algorithm, then unlike the RSA keys, Alice can't sign a message with her private key for all the world to see (using her public key). That is a big advantage of RSA.
Is it a feature or a bug? what's the difference?
I don't know a lot about alternative encryption schemes, but the relatively simple math involved suggests that this has the potential to be fast by any standard.
I'm wondering if it might be worthwhile to do a mixed scheme whereby E is returned using RSA or some other technique and the bulk of the message is encrypted using C-P. If I read the comments correctly one has to retrieve the unique E for each message in order to break the system and read the encrypted text of that message.
The table on the end show that a 250k file takes 50 minutes to encrypt/decrypt with RSA on the P 133 under Mathematica (relatively inefficient), and only a little more than 2 mins for C-P. Even given faster computers and optimized code, it would seem that one might see significant gains in speed if you are encrypting multi-megabyte files.
Any thoughts?
Block ciphers like DES and AES are much faster to compute than even C-P, since they don't require multiprecision arithmetic. AES, in particular, screams.