Slashdot Mirror
Cracking Crypto To Get Into College
Kallahar writes "New Scientist is running a story about a Canadian university who had students break an encrypted message in order to get into college. A good idea to grab a good student, but here in 'Free' America these kids would have been thrown in jail for violating the DMCA ..."
shut up timothy - the DMCA doesn't apply when the copyright holder asks you to break the encryption.
It is worth pointing out that Timothy isn't the one who made that comment. It was the submitter, Kallahar...
What do you know I wrote a novel
You mean like when Professor Felten was threatened because he met the challenge to break SDMI?
Proffesor Felten was threatened when he attempted to publish his results - The specific charge, as I recall, was distribution of a circumvention device. This is different, one notable difference being that most universities won't try to sue you for entering their contest.
Reboot macht Frei.
The cryotography turns out to have been very trivial. Here are the details.
Here's a link to the puzzle from the college's website:
http://www.whatmagnet.com/gofigure/index.html
The New Scientist article was really short on details. Anyway though, I found the university's press release, which has much more details. It can be found here. This link also contains the actual puzzle in case anyone is so inclined to try to break it...
All the code is is the index of the letters of the alphabet in base 4. There's a URL underlined in there that makes it really obvious what the "encryption" technique being used is.
SPOILER ALERT
Heh, they can call it encryption if they want, but this is encryption on the same scale as ROT-13. The message is encoded in the Base-4 number system with each number being the alphabet's letter's numerical position. so a = 1, z = 26. Or encoded, a = 001, z = 122.
And like numerous people have pointed out, while this contest in itself can't lead to a DMCA violation, the sad thing is, a piece of software "encrypted" with this algorithm could.
I'm no genius but it took me 30 seconds to decipher the code. It's base 4 with the letters numbered consecutively.
I doubt they even bothered to copyright it.
Anything you write is automatically copyrighted. You don't have to register it or anything anymore.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Y'all are freaking retarded. If there is anything that the Skylarov(sic), the copyright holder doesn't have to grant the Government permission to charge someone with a crime. The DMCA is very much a Criminal law as much as a Civil law. Even after adobe backed out, he still got charged for the crimes committed. In this case, I doubt anyone would get charged. Doesn't mean it couldn't or wouldn't happen.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
All he'd need is a valid disclaimer. If he is creating his own crypt method then he just needs to say that it's ok to break it. Surely?
Do any of you guys try to find stuff out on your own, or do you just regurgitate the shit that Slashdot feeds you.
The DMCA is about copyright, not about decrypting a message in base four. Geez. If Adobe (as just a hypothetical example) decided to encrypt their PDF files in base four, then it would be illegal to decrypt those files. But it would NOT be illegal to decrypt any non-PDF base four encodings. The DMCA is Evil enough without you inventing yet new Evils for it.
In summary, no one needs any damn disclaimer to use base four (or rot13). Get real.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
You summed the series, but that's not what's being asked. You are supposed to sum the digits
For a series that would be
(n + 1) * (n / 2)
The answer is (45 * (10 ^(n-1)) * n) + 1 where n is the power of ten, 6 in this case.
This is a harder problem than you might think, but it's not helped by the idiots who can't even understand the question and try to add the numbers 1 to 1,000,000.
The DMCA is a bad law, but it does NOT prevent anyone from doing cryptography or breaking it. It ONLY applies to circumvention of access control to a COPYRIGHTED WORK. It is copyright law, not encryption law.
I think slashdot is perpetuating misunderstanding about this law, and I think that hurts our cause. Being informed is the first and most important step. Otherwise, we are just clueless zealots.