U. Washington Crypto Course Now Online for Free
Alien54 writes "Who wants to pay for Stanford's Crypto Course, when University of Washington has made the whole Cryptography Course available online for free. Yes, all the presentations, videos (mp3, WMV), homework, quizzes etc. are available online. The material seems pretty decent, and is intended for an advanced audience." Found on linkfilter.
I think most online software developpers should learn the basics of cryptography. Not only would it improve security but it would also lead to better design in general. No more "base 64 encoded password in a text file" stuff please!
Radicode
The MIT OpenCourseWare site has a sizeable amount of free learning materials. I had it bookmarked a while back when they weren't offering that much but they've since put a lot online.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
I so, so TOTALLY love the fact the little sub-title/blurb for this story is in a backwards-writing code, and that there is a misspelling.
Sometimes, it's all just so perfect.
Thanks again.
And once you've cracked the encryption, the course is free!
Isn't the whole point of taking post secondary courses to have the credentials necessary to get a job in your chosen field?
Powered by caffeine and sugar; BSD
The US Government has allowed us in Europe read it too! They finally realised that learning about cryptography doesn't mean you are a terrorist.
Or perhaps they are using the website to collect IP addresses of potential terrorists?
I'll probably be modded down for this...
Lots of universities have their course information online. I fail to see why this case is of any significance?
Damn! This is tax payers money that gets wasted big time! Now all the foreign people can study this course for free. It has costed some big dollars to get that course material. Tax payers money! We pay - others benefit. Do you have ANY idea how much this costs?
Yeah and it was on college's website before that too.
.. duh.
Why don't i just visit all the websites on the internet every day? Then i wouldnt have to bother with the inconvenience of browsing slashdot.
As for having the same writeup? The bottom of the text credits linkfilter
People in India and China will use this course material to study crypto and eventually more American jobs will be transfered to India. This is like a jackpot to Indian educational institutes. And all of this is funded by American citizens. Like Kennedy said - ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. This is just wrong! College students pay huge amounts of money to get access to this kind of material. They pay - the rest of the world benefits.
How is this special? Princeton's entire CS curriculum has been there for all to see for the last 9 years, and I haven't seen any /. articles about it in that time.
Great, now you can get some decent comments about it.
damaged by dogma
Looks like good stuff, and even the textbook is freely available. I've also enjoyed podcasted courses from several sources. One thing I do miss, when auditing by podcast, is a chance to discuss the course material with others (and the tests that would allow me to know how much of the material I'm getting).
Anyone want to join me in taking the course as a group? We could "meet" in IRC or via a listserv. and we'd probably get more out of the course by having others to bounce ideas off of, to challenge our assumptions, and to correct our errors.
If you're interested in joining me in this, reply to this post, and I'll see about organizing things in my Slashdot Journal.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Did they reaad the material before posting this article??
Some math questions involving a MOD and the final homework... How much bandwidth is VeiSign using.
Where is the questions about breaking the code?
4987520-23495863459802-349876927450-09827-10960349 56-875-19608917294857019. 2398798-897326-10691326! 234987340-189763865-19287638946?
I mean, this is Slashdot after all.
Winter '06 was actually our second crypto class for UW PMP; lectures and materials from when Josh Benaloh and I taught crypto in Winter '02 are also available on-line. The material covered in the two courses is similar (we added material on cryptanalysis in '06 and updated the existing material). If you're working through the course at home you might find it helpful to work through the '02 assignments as well.
1560464-40437870136830!
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
is the OP a moron? i can't believe this is a college class.
On a related note I've recently noticed this post about getting into the theory of cryptography. I don't know anything about the author nor the topic so I cannot verify is the advice is good, but it sounds reasonable.
T
Dear NSA,
Our plan is working splendidly. Numerous people have given us their names, addresses, social security numbers, and personal information. This along with their expressed interest in encryption will keep the data miners happy. We will, as previously agreed, forward all correspondence from students of this class. Enclosed please find an Excel file of all information on the online course takers. I can't believe you were right, that potential enemies of the State would voluntarily sign up for something so obvious.
Yours truly
Tobias Fünke
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Subject says it all.
Except digg has a typo:
"for advance audience"
And slashdot does not.
It's a cold day in hell.
Since people seem to be interested in this, you might also take a peek at
the CMU computer networks course, which I put online almost entirely (lecture nodes, video, homeworks, and the programming projects). Click on "Syllabus" to get to the contentful-bits. Feedback is welcome: Srini and I hope that leaving it online will be useful for students and instructors everywhere.
Strike me interested. Will be tuning in to your JE's now.
More than mere navel gazing.
No it's not.. it's password protected!
Oh right, I get it.
It's not a misspelling, the first thing you do when encrypting is compress, to remove all the redundant data. So that was Taco's little joke, he 'compressed' out the 2nd "L" character.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
you may be able to turn someone's credit card number into an asymetric cipher hidden inside a jpeg of his last family reunion but you can't stop the idiot user from writing his password on a sticky note on the side of his monitor.
Whoops! Then I guess I shouldn't post this link...
But yes, Walter Lewin's lectures were fantastic. It's a shame that he doesn't do freshman physics anymore, with the advent of the s/learning/technology/g program (a.k.a. TEAL). I think the move to make his old 8.01 lectures available was in part to provide a good resource to those students who don't like TEAL and who don't learn well in that environment.
I know most of what I need to know about crypto -- just feed it through gpg or openssl, done. I'd want to take some other course -- right now, I'm wanting to learn C# on Mono (Windows, Mac, Linux, and I do have them all) and do some more advanced algorithms and data structures.
I'd also be interested in hanging out around a class on crypto, or on introductory programming. I haven't finished college (and probably won't), but it's been a hit-and-miss whether I'm a better teacher than my professors.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
In the past, as I'm sure most here know, encryption software was considered to be munitions. I actually purchased the Zimmerman book that was just PGP in source code format at the UW bookstore. The idea at the time was how can you control a book? Now, I know that laws have changed, and the US has relaxed its stance on this. Most distributions of GNU/Linux have SSH included.
This is fresh in my mind because I recently created a specialized GNU/Linux distribution and debated about whether or not to include SSL and SSH. Although I knew the status of this software had changed, I could not find any definitive regulations regarding crypto software. Certainly the last four years don't make me any less paranoid about getting burned by making a mistake here. There is a good presentation that specifically talks about these issues here in TFA. Yes, it does talk about how the munitions stance has relaxed, but I'm still not entirely sure that I don't have to notify some government agency that I'm including encryption if I distribute the root filesystem in binary form.
I never clip my fingernails for fear of dangling symbolic links.
Looks promising. I'll be checking it out when I have more free time. Thanks!
Download free e-books, lectures, and tutorials at bookgoldmine.com
You're not gonna believe this. The NSA uses Excel! Call up our friends at Microsoft and let us crush the infidels once and for all!
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
(In case you didn't get it, the point of this satire is that if the NSA truly believes in preventing people from studying encryption, then most of the crypto experts will be terrorists.)
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The URL you gave is valid, but the links from that page are dead.So much for open education at Princeton.
On a similar note, we made the contents (lecture slides, video etc.) from Operating Systems online. Would appreciate any comments on whether such efforts are useful to the larger community (http://www.cse.nd.edu/~surendar/teach/spr06/cse30 341/lecture.shtml).
"Who wants to pay for Stanford's Crypto Course, when University of Washington has made the whole Cryptography Course available online for free."
I do. Personally, I'm willing to pay money to take a couse from a school like Stanford even if a free alternative is available from a school like the University of Washington.
I think most online software developpers should learn the basics of cryptography. Not only would it improve security but it would also lead to better design in general.
Ah-ha, now I get it, so that's where RMS learnt UI design when he was developing Emacs. Explains it all. Why, it really is better!
I wonder if he'll open them up to the general public now.
You're missing out on possibly the most amazing undergraduate and graduate crypto classes out there. His research and course notes (which are almost book-like) have become a standard in the community. (And other schools, such as Berkeley and Maryland, use his course notes for their crypto classes.)
you gotta be joking. You find an on-line syllabus and that makes the slashdot cover?!
MIT has OpenCourseware, and a lot of other university "open" up courses just as much as UWI has, which is to say, they do not deliberately lock up the material.
So, either the editors are ignorant of these obvious facts, or this must be a *REALLY* slow day. Oh nevermind, this is slashdot.
-L
Don't Panic.
Just finished lecture 1. Good stuff! I never took a Networking course in college so I hope this will fill in the gaps of my knowledge.
...that Open Source encryption software is exempt from access controls, provided the US Government is notified of where the source is, and that there are no constraints on binary-only encrypted software. So, if you are using a standard Open Source library for encryption that has been properly registered by its authors, I wouldn't see that there was a problem. If you don't already do so, it might be a good idea to state what encryption software is used - it would make it harder for anyone to reasonably claim it might be proprietary (as proprietary algorithms aren't exempt). A lawyer would be able to give a clearer answer, but bear in mind that 100% of all court cases involve lawyers losing.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
All the lectures (as video), slides, assignments, and the students' final projects are posted.
http://outcampaign.org/
The entire site is huge -- several gigabytes. Does anyone have a .torrent?
Cryptography Class Rule #1
Don't trust the professor unless the PDFs available were obviously typeset in LaTeX.
Of course, I'm kidding. But here's some more crypto material from one of my professors.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
BTW, This course demands that you to run Windows. Lecture videos won't work with Linux and even Mac! Don't know if thing have changed. http://scpd.stanford.edu/scpd/courses/ProEd/compSe c/
After DRM/trusted computing is done, there will be no libraries.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Uh ... I give up. People who want to learn something about crypto?
You get what you pay for. Then again, according to that maxim, every CS course at the University of Washington should be free.
I find it ironic that the Stanford course requires the use of IE on Windows, the least secure possible combination, as well as one that will exclude quite a few potential students.
are publicly accessible.
s .html
check out
http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/course-web
Most of them probably don't have a free text book though... but it's still cheaper than tuition. Generally lecture slides are there too. I don't know if they put these pages together with public consumption in mind though.
btw, speaking as a student, the UW is an excellent school for computer science.
The whole point of digg, is to beta test articles for /.
Get back to work (reading crap posts) and stop trolling!
Could we get direct download links for the videos?
I guess that's an "unintended consequence" of Bill Gates donating the Gates Computer Science Building (http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/1996/jan 96/stanford.mspx)...
I wasn't being vitriolic. I was just saying. In a friendly manner. I regret that I came across as that.
laters friendly etc. etc.
Thank you, unknown friend.
Knowing Taco, it's a misspelling.