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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.
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...
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
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
No.
KFG
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?
Now all the foreign people can study this course for free.
And without it they couldn't just go to a library.
KFG
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?
I mean, this is Slashdot after all.
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?
How much are you paying the Sumerian guy (yes, and others) who invented writing? The Babylonian who invented the calendar? Hell, most of the early American industrial revolution depended on violating English patents on water-wheels and drive-shafts and various cogs and pulleys. That God there was no Berne Convention then, huh?
When you enjoy Bach's Musical Offering, do you send a buck to the descendants of Bach's patron, Frederick II of Prussia?
The truth is, every one of us -- even the most prolific and creative inventors -- benefit far more from our shared cultural patrimony than we contribute to it.
Most of Newton's genius would have been wasted if he'd had to spend his life chasing down gazelles to get his lunch. Little of that genius would have been transmitted to anyone without the efforts of the anonymous inventor of writing and thousands of others who refined that tool and so many other tools down through the ages.
Information, knowledge -- they are not, contrary to the more glib claims of the Open Source movement, free. Knowledge must be wrested from nature at great cost by discovers, and each of us to understand that knowledge must pay our own cost to learn it.
But the Open Source advocates aren't wrong either: knowledge can be transmitted at little marginal cost: developing the course did cost the tax- and tuition-payers of Washington State, but the additional cost to make it available to all is the negligible amount required to host it on a web server. Nor is it "free" to anyone -- anyone who wants to possess it must take the time and effort to learn it, to re-make his own mind by incorporating that new (to him) knowledge. There is no "royal road" to knowledge; commoner or king must wrestle it into his own head.
Don't be a Philistine: millions, alive and dead, your teachers and people entirely unknown to you have for fifty thousand years given you knowledge and indeed a rich material culture based on that knowledge. Don't begrudge passing it on.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
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.
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.
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.
No it's not.. it's password protected!
Oh right, I get it.
Okay. The alternative is that an intelligent Indian person comes to the US and studies cryptography, then goes back to India and starts teaching it.
What's the net benefit to the US? Maybe $100K. So how do we keep the money in the US? Force everyone with a graduate degree from a US university to stay in the country? Then you get a pair of intelligent Indian people; one gets a doctorate in applied cryptography and teaches everything he learns to the other.
Now we require that everyone who talks with anyone with a graduate degree from a US university has to stay in the country. Hell, why not just close the borders entirely? Nobody gets in, nobody gets out.
There's still the problem of correspondence. So why not close all borders permanently to all traffic? No goods enter or leave the country; no communications outside the country. And set up a 50-mile wide belt of land mines around all our borders so people can't use semaphore, and outlaw radio communications, and....
Hell, why not just outlaw learning. That'd show 'em.
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.
Since the passage of the DMCA, most people who can break encryption are Teh Terrorists.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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.)
As others have said "hell No"!
oh alright - yeah, sometimes
Sometimes you need various accreditation to get/keep/progress in a job. this may be
BUT (and it's a big point) eventually you get to the stage where another bit of paper just doesn't matter. You are interested in knowledge and skills for their own sake. That motivation is desirable even in the accreditation activities above. But what do you do when you've got all the paper you want/need/care-about? Often self-study and keeping abreast of the field is enough. But sometimes it's good to take a prepared and structured course that is relevent to you regardless of whether you get the final qualification.
I regularly "cherry-pick" courses with no intention of getting the final certificate. It plays hell with the institutions completion-rate reports, but that's not my problem.
I love the idea of these courses being made freely available for cherry pickers such as myself that just want to learn
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.