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Interview With Cryptographer Elonka Dunin
An anonymous reader writes "Whitedust is running a very interesting article with the DEF CON speaker and cryptographer Elonka Dunin. The article covers her career and specifically her involvement with the CIA and other US Military agencies."
is quantum cryptography being persued in the military?
They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me. -Nathaniel Lee
I had the pleasure of working with Elonka through her primary employer, Simutronics for a few months... She's brilliant and I think her work in cryptography as it relates to the subject matter of this article is top notch.
"It's not stealing if you don't get caught!"
Looks like she's the real thing, even makes Russell Crowe seem boring.
--Pat
After meeting her both at defcon and when she was kind enough to come and speak at a couple of the UMR ACM meetings she is completely brilliant. I wish her the best of luck with the final parts of the sculpture as well as success with her game company. Good taste in sushi too :)
I met elonka at a con a few years ago, and I can honestly say she's one of the coolest people to go out and have a few drinks with; very interesting conversations.
;),
Jay
Btw, its about time we caught another movie
Quantum cryptography is neat, to be sure, but what happens if the cat dies?
Funny sigs make your Karma go down.
The CIA is not supposed to be a "military agency". It was originally supposed to be an assassination agency supporting US military overthrow of enemy governments during WWII, when it was the "Office of Special Services". When it was converted to the CIA, its postwar role was supposed to be foreign intelligence gathering, with domestic operations confined to centrally processing government intelligence information. None of its operations are supposed to be military, as in tactical violence against strategic targets to support government policies.
The CIA is not supposed to trade guns for cocaine or peddle them in the US, or work with the mafia to fund operations secret from Congress, either.
--
make install -not war
Not only is she featured on Slashdot. She's also a member.
We must get Elonka Dunin to Tir Asleen where she will be safe from the evil Queen Bavmorda!
From TFA:
And there was an extensive scan of images done by a team from the University of Michigan,
looking through millions of internet locations, and then clustering computers together and
running password dictionary attacks on anything that looked suspicious, but they never found
a single thing.
Given the prevalence of near GB files traversing the internet, and a payload of only a few kB,
is there any reasonable expectation that one could find it if it did exist, let alone decrypt it?
For emotional satisfaction, it has been helping out with the war on terrorism, and educating government agents about steganography and what types of codes that Al Qaeda might (or might not) be using.
I would like to ask her if she feels that the amount of fear that people feel today about terrorism is justified? Is Elonka fearful of terrorist cells in our midst? Does she think that we are due for another attack?
It would be interesting to know what she has to say about the 'War on Terrorism.'
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
These names are just too confusing nowadays is this a KDE project (ElonKa) or a gnome project like Ekiga?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I think it's just that she's intelligent enough to realize that the idea of marriage doesn't appeal to her, though of course, there could be more to it than that. I don't know her personally, but I did meet her one year at SimuCon and the conversation I had with her strongly suggested to me that she is quite sexually liberated, and this may account for her apparent aversion to monogamy. She was flirtatious and didn't seem socially awkward to me, but then I suppose you have to consider the setting (the St. Louis Hilton populated by hundreds of inebriated gaming geeks.)
A lot of men would probably feel threatened by this type of woman, and that might make it difficult for her to find someone to settle down with, assuming she wants to.
Or course she could be wacko-nuts, for all I know, but I kind of doubt it. She's certainly different/special, and that alone, in the perceptions of many, would make her at least a little "crazy".
Oops, it the Sheraton, not Hilton. I have to admit that it is all kind of a blur, given that I didn't get much sleep over the few days that I was there, owing to the fact that I was sharing a room (with two beds) with eleven other people.
I played Gemstone III via GEnie for six years and worked as an associate sysop for the GEnie Multi-Player Games Roundtable for almost that long. I remember Elonka and the folks at Simutronics as one of the main driving forces behind establishing online gaming in the early '90s. Everquest and World of Warcraft owe Simutronics and other early online gaming pioneers like Kesmai a great debt for getting the ball rolling.
;)
Fifteen years ago, Gemstone had a top simultaneaous limit of 60 players and was apparently only allowed as much memory on the server as a word processing application took on a PC. MMOGs have come a long way since then.
(Gemstone Trivia and In-Joke Alert: The "TLR" in my sig stands for "The Lost Ranger." Old Gemstone III players and GMs may remember who I was in game.)
TLR
A man no more knows his destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company
"Nobody names their kid 'Elonka'"
It's amazing how often parents make really poor choices when naming their children. For example, Yahoo's people search comes up with 82 occurances of people named Richard Head.
Elonka's bio states she was a USAF avionics tech with the SR-71 and U-2 programs.
Anyone know her AFSC (Air Force Specialty Code)?
What?
Nobody names their kid "Elonka". I suspect if you decode E-L-O-N-K-A-D-U-N-I-N correctly that you'll find out her real name is Xenia Onatop or Alotta Fagina or something like that.
More probably her real name is "LEONA UNKIND". Or, since this is Slashdot and sooner or later the question "hotness" comes up when any woman is discussed, you might want to click "ON A NUDE LINK", and hope you don't get "A NODE UNLINK", or if she's feeling a bit waspish you may be in for "A DUNK ONLINE".
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
for Elonka in US not, but for Ilonka in Poland, yes. That is Helen if you are a native English speaker... E is just for correct pronunciation.
This seems like the perfect place for a Bob The Angry Flower link http://www.angryflower.com/schrod.gif
Yes, she's clever. But perhaps not much more than that. Colour me unimpressed.
The old HR manager where I work was named Richard Burns.
That's gotta hurt.
Life has many choices. Eternity has two. What's yours?
I'm interested in cryptography, but could someobody explain to me why anyone should care about this person? Most of the posts so far are something like, "She's so cool! I met her!" or "I went on a date with her, look at me!" But what has she done that is significant other than socializing with the nerds of slashdot? Are there any widely-implemented algorithms to her name? Did she find a novel way to break a cipher? Will I find theories or equations named after her in a crypto textbook?
I'm hoping someone can post what it is that makes her famous, other than being a girl in one of the geekiest parts domains of CS.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
A lot of people are saying some pretty borderline rude things about someone they don't know (not unusual for /.) so let me state that she is, in fact, one of the nicest and most "normal" people I have ever met. I have known Elonka for quite some time. We meet up a couple of times each year at miscellaneous conferences and I consider her a good friend. The fact that she doesn't answer some of these comments probably makes her more "normal" than most of you now doesn't it?
To make my post more self-promoting, I will point readers to 2 episodes of Binary Revolution Radio that she was on Here and Here.
As far as the personal questions, how about you STFU and GTFO because it is NOYGDB? kthxbye!
--- The revolution will be digitized! - http://www.binrev.com/ ---
... bury it ;)
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Yup, you get the prize for coming closest, though I got a kick out of the various anagrams, too. :)
For the record (and those not interested in genealogy or name origins can stop reading now), it's my real birth name, and is Hungarian. I was named after my maternal grandmother, Ilona Pazman. The "ka" is a diminutive suffix (like in Spanish, "Juan" will become Juanito or Juanita when used with a child), and the "E" was substituted as an Americanized spelling so that it would be pronounced correctly. And yes, it means "Helen" which is Greek for "light" or "shining", as in "Hellenic culture".
Elonka :)
eventually
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
does that cat knows any secrets?
russian cat: Where secret's don't kill the cat but the cat kills you!
Polish cat: *pop*
dutch cat: I'm too stoned, leave me alone.
Cartoon cat: In little pieces you go for knowing my classification level!
USA cat: I can tell you but then I have to kill you!
English cat: Martini please, shaken, not stirred (while thinking: I'm using my license to kill)
Iraki cat: *boom*
Smart cat: Got to report this to the cryptonomium
My cat: is there any food left?
Your cat might be in the resistance too, using secret bio-weapons, taking over every human on this planet. Do look for any unusual behavior, running around like crazy to train for any happening incidents, owning property, peeking through blankets or small spaces, eavesdropping and much more.
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
I can't speak for Elonka, but when I was helping (a little) with the codes book which is going to be published Real Soon Now, I got the extremely strong impression that, about Iraq at any rate, she was strongly in favour of robust, informed debate. She filled the book with quotes about the moral and pragmatic issues of war from multiple perspectives for precisely that reason.
So if I had to guess, if you asked her that question, the answer would almost certainly be along the same lines.
On a personal note, as to whether or not there's more terrorism in store for the US homeland: Of course there is! What I can't tell you is whether it will be from an Al Qaeda franchise or from the next Timothy McVeigh.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
I couldn't have put it any better myself. You got it exactly right, and I'm glad that that came through, at least to you, one of my contributors who saw an early draft . Unfortunately, the publisher edited out some of my stronger comments from the book's introduction (I may re-post them via my blog, I haven't decided yet), but all of the plaintext (and encrypted!) quotes are still there, so the opinions that I wanted represented, still are. ;)
Elonka :)
(Answer to Cryptogram #52: "When I am abroad, I always make it a rule never to criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home." - Winston Churchill)
Well, I'm Hungarian, but from your relatives I've thought you are 100% Polish. There is always a Hungarian thread... :-)
Elonka, thanks for writing, I will have to check out your blog some time. Good luck on your future endeavors! :)
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I wouldn't say that I know Elonka, but I've met her numerous times at Dragon*Con, have spoken with her during and after various hacker panels, and even snapped a couple of pix of her (no, not THOSE kinds of pix!).
;-)
She's one of the most impressive people I've ever had the pleasure of meeting. She's staggeringly intelligent, yet completely approachable and unassuming. She's the only person I've ever met who can discuss quantum cryptography in detail without coming across sounding "high brow". Think of a female Buckaroo Banzai with a better sense of humor and you'll get an idea.
My wife has a strong interest in cryptography, and has made it clear that Elonka is her hero. Personally, I suspect that she (my wife) has a bit of a crush on her, but that's fodder for a different forum.
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
Nope, you haven't been trolled. It was an honest question.
The above poster makes a good point about her being flirtatious and sexually liberated, which isn't something you can really pick up from her (admittedly large) body of published material online.
It's interesting to me that most geeky women seem to fall either into the "sexually repressed" or "libertine" categories. I can't actually think of a single geeky girl I know who is just straight-up sexually normal on that scale.
+++ATH0