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 ..."
Of course, since it was just an encoded mathematical problem, I doubt they even bothered to copyright it. And it was the poster, not the editor, who made the stupid comment. I still would argue that the flambait line should of have been removed, but hey. Too bad you can't mod stories.
The idea sounds interesting, but kinda gimmicky. Especially with a scholarship for speed--with a problem it took 30 minute for _New_Scientist_ to solve (or did I misread something) that seems a bit silly. Now, waiving the application fee for anyone who solves it, that seems a more commensurate prize.
In the old times of FidoNet, I shared a BBS with several students. I was teaching computer science 101 then. At 00:00 AM, 8 hours before the exam, I posted the exam to the BBS, in postscript (with the first line deleted, so that it was not inmediately recognizable as such), and compressed with zoo (not a very popular compressor, now and them). I put a rubbish name on top, so that, well, it wasn't only using zoo and ghostview. I sent a message to the 3 students telling them that I had posted the message in the file area, without telling them the name or anything else. They managed to "crack" it the next morning, 2 hours before the exam. The zoo part was easy (it includes "zoo" as the first letter in the file), the PS file a bit harder, and the hardest part, 10 years ago, was to find a program to print PS (download it thru fidonet and all the stuff).
They passed, but not with high marks; after all, they had only a couple of hours to prepare it. They would have been better off studying thru the night...
It's just a BloJJ
The cryotography turns out to have been very trivial.
Yep. The web site gives lots of hints, and even offers live help via E-mail. They are trying to make it almost as easy as possible. Why?
"The University of Lethbridge is holding a contest to attract computer scientist students",
This wasn't done as a scolarship program for deserving students. It's a PUBLICITY STUNT.
The hardest part is either translating all the letters by hand, or typing it into a program to translate it for you.
As for the math problem in the message -
Any Math major that can't find a pattern to get the answer deserves to be rejected.
Any Computer major that can't write a program to get the answer deserves to be rejected.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.