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.
You mean like when Professor Felten was threatened because he met the challenge to break SDMI? Oh wait...
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
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
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.
Just because you broke some method of encryption doesn't necessarily make you a good computer science student. What about good design or object oriented techniques? How about math skills and knowledge of discrete mathmatics and its relation to programing language design?
Since I know scripting languages, am I an elite hacker?
Since I can install linux, am I a sys admin?
Since I can make brownies am I Wolfgang Puck?
IMHO breaking the encryption doesn't mean too much.
- gtaluvit (prnc. GOT-tuh-LUV-it)
See, these people write in with links to articles, and they write a summary of the article and usually throw in their opinion. Those parts are italicized. Then an editor approves the story and sometimes they make comments themselves.
And sometimes they don't make comments. Like this time.
So, I think you owe timothy an apology.
"And like that
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.
From slashdot:
But from the article:
And from slashdot:
Uh, yeah. Whatever.
Here's a link to the puzzle from the college's website:
http://www.whatmagnet.com/gofigure/index.html
(And yes, the RIAA backed off...but the threat was credible enough that it left the lingering possibility that someone could be prosecuted under the DMCA for breaking encryption when invited to do so, if the inviter disapproves of what they do with the information afterwards.)
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
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...
The point of college is to learn the things you have mentioned. Does filling out a college application or writing an entrance essay make you a good CS student? No. It just demonstrates your ability to perform a task involving some thought. Does breaking an encrypted message make you a good CS? No, of course not. But, it DOES show that you have strong skills in mathematics and analytical logic. Don't be so silly in jumping to conclusions.
Why bother.
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.
You know, this makes sense, up to a point. Most Liberal Arts kids have to write Essays to get into college, why not have Computer Science Geeky Kids Crack Codes?
Well, I think the major problem is the *lack* of creativity. This doesn't quite show that you have creative thought, only that you can deduce something logically. Now, as I understand it, that applies to programming, but really, if you're going to be a college student, life is more about creative problem solving than it is about logical.
Although, it is a neat idea. Will physics students be allowed to design experiments, or will others get similar "bonuses" to their college application process? I'd like to hope so.
Down with Standardized Tests, In With Creative Applications.
That would depend on the type of the problem given by the aforementioned American universities. If it was something that could be cracked by solid quantitative reasoning alone, I would very much agree--especially if this is an intro course you're talking about. Make sure that you're testing ability and potential, not knowledge at this point!
Not every kid who wants to try CS needs to be a math whiz. I was a Music major when I took my first CS class on a whim, and now I'm getting my Comp E degree. When I started, I didn't know anything about algorithm formation or discrete math.
- - - - - - - -
Don't worry, being eaten by a crocodile is just like going to sleep in a giant blender.
If anyone's interested in the real story, they should go to this story in the National Post.
/. gets a bad reputation from time to time?)
Amongst other things, it talks about how the code is the first part of the challenge. The coded message leads to a math problem (which is actually kind of fun and has a rather elegant solution). Solve the math problem, and you get into school with the chance to win a scholarship.
Having gone to the site and gone through the decode and solve phases, I can happily report that the "code" isn't really a code at all. As the site hints, it's basically "coded" by being written in base-4. The challenge is really in the math problem, which requires applicants to find the summation of all decimal digits in the sequence of natural numbers from one to one million. While this isn't impossible, it does require some thought and intelligence. I thought it was a great idea for students who liked math and computer science (the problem can also be solved with a simple brute force algorithm) but weren't neccessarily that stellar students nor interested in lengthy University applications.
Heck - I spent an hour coming up with a solution and then verifying it with a quick little Java program. It was fun! Give it a shot!
(As a Troll-y sidenote, I'd like to mention with some degree of bitterness that I submitted this story, except when I did it, I got the facts right. Apparently this warrants a rejection, and irrelevant whining about the DMCA warrants approval. Do you ever wonder why
Does this strike anyone else as a great way to get someone else to finish up the work on your thesis for you?
A = /001 /002
B =
etc. Numbers, dates and punctuation not included.
Answer's 27,000,001 in case you were wondering.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're NOT after you.
Actually, it DOES apply. Professor Felten was asked to break it as part of a competition, but was then prosecuted fo it. Also, Dmitry Sklyarov was not asked to break Adobe's encryption, but a precedent was set when Adobe chose not to prosecute him, but the US government decided to prosecute him in federal court because breaking encryption broke the CRIMINAL LAW aspect of the DMCA.
It is definitely feasible that a college student breaking the encryption on an encrypted message, even when specifically asked by his college to break the encryption on a message given to him by his college, would be at risk for prosecution under the DMCA. It is a very broad piece of legislation, the specific wording of which could easily be held up in court in a variety of cases, regardless of whether or not the defendant was asked to break the encryption and whether or not the person that originally encrypted it had a problem with it.
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
I lived in Lethbridge for a few months over ten years ago. It was a small town then and still is, as you can see here (less than 70,000 population).
IMHO, Southern Alberta is an attractive region if you're into farming or ranching, but doesn't generally have a large enough population to support the University of Lethbridge on its own. Calgary is only a couple hours away by car, and tends to draw the more city-minded students.
It seems the U of Lethbridge has to use these clever gimmicks to attract enough students from outside the region to keep itself viable. By making the crypto test relatively simple, it taps into the ego of a wider number of prospective students.
Pretty smart marketing move, actually.
Anybody want a peanut?
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.
First off, I went into the site and couldn't even figure out the navigation well enough to even want to go through it. And, for a scholarship don't they think they could have come up with a little bit of a harder problem? After giving up on their silly site, I perused slashdot and was kind of disappointed that it was that silly.
The college I attended had an annual competition where high school students built robotics or coded something, and would give out some degree of scholarships or other financial assistance towards prospective students and I can tell you that anybody who wrote a program to find the summation of all natural numbers would be laughed out. These were things like kernels, AI schemes, language recognition applications. I fail to see the cool factor in this. Any nerd deserving a scholarship for brains alone should really be challenged and not something that can be solved by a 2 minute script.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
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
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.
D.. M.. C.. A..
Don't Mess with Company Assets
Decieving Many Consumer Assholes
Devious Money Consumes All
Diabolical Medling Corporate Attorneys
Etc.. etc..
EVERYBODY NOW.. It fun to violate the D.M.C.A..
D.M.C.A.
Starsucks
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.
That would mean that the average digit sum of a number was 5, which is clearly wrong.
I happened to find the same result as the parent ((45 * (10 ^(n-1)) * n) + 1), which makes it likely to be right. That gives 27.000.001.
Method: See that all possible combinations of 6-digit numbers are in the range 000000...999999. Then for a given digit all numbers occur with the same frequency due to symmetri. Then the average contribution of that digit is sum(0..9)/10=45/10. Then the average contribution of a 6-digit number is 6*45/10. There are 1.000.000 numbers in 000000...999999, so we multiply the average with 1000000. Now we have the sum from 1-999999, but we needed the sum 1-1000000, so we add digitsum(1000000)=1.
The result is then 45/10*1.000.000*6+1 = 45*100.000*6+1=45*10^(6-1)*6+1. Generalize the number of digits and you get the formula above.
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.