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CryptoDox: Encyclopedia on Cryptography & Info
xorgb writes "CryptoDox is an online encyclopedia on Cryptography and Information Security. The data is being made available under the GNU Free Documentation License. The site is powered by MediaWiki and in the few months that it has been online it has got some good articles on the basics of cryptography. It is currently looking out for contributors to enhance its database of articles. Check it out!"
You'll need the PGP public key on page five to read the contents
I'm a rabbit startled by the headlights of life
Have the administrators contacted Bruce Schneier yet? His guide Applied Cryptography is one of the friendliest yet at the same time rigorous introductions to the science, and now that 11 years have passed since its publication, perhaps he'd be willing to allow the use of it as the basis of further expansion of the encyclopedia.
Wikipedia does not have ads and much more information. Cryptodox is just plain disappointing.
Summary:
- too many not found errors
- slow db query
- indentical wikipedia article superior
- only enough information to whet appetite for advertised books
- lame (as in crippled)
If you're planning to submit to crytpography documentation I would recommend you contribute to the already extensive Crytpography Project on Wikipedia: Cryptography WikiProject
The project in the article is rather limited, conflicts with other worthy projects, and made me feel that I was browsing the amazon cryptography book section, what with all the amazon adverts on it.
...another server bites the dust!
I wouldn't wipe my ass with a printout from this site, encrypted or not. Slow, loaded with ads, 404s more frequently than your mom gives me a handjob, need I go on?
I'd prefer an apology from this site for the 5 minutes of my life it wasted.
You make a good point, but in this case I don't think that the other project really detracts too much from Wikipedia in the long run -- they use the same license on their content, so that they could borrow from each other.
I would hope that the CryptoDox people would at least start by using what's been written in Wikipedia, and that Wikipedians would feel free to borrow back improved content that was worked on at CryptoDox.
I think this is similar to the greater argument between a totally open, encyclopediac-style information source, and a more specialized source with slightly higher barriers to entry. (Not an 'expert system' per se, but just because it's dedicated to a particular topic, it means that only people interested in that topic will probably join.) I think there's room for both, and by using compatible licenses, both can benefit.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I wonder why they didn't go for the obvious coinage-- the fictional Cryptonomicon was supposed to be a collection of crypto wisdom, much as the Necronomicon was supposedly Lovecraft's book of occult and death.
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I've always kind of wondered if you could use cryptographic principles to enhance communication with a wider audience. Sort of anti-cryptography. Or is there some sort of entropy sort of thing - that you can decrease the understandability of a message, but you can't increase it.
meh
Forbidden
You don't have permission to access / on this server.
Guess it isn't secure, as proven by its inability to withstand access by slashdoters.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
Either way, I find it hard to believe that no one else has noticed this.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
You can hear the cries of frustration now coming from washington ( and a few other governments in the world )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Very similar to www.wikistc.org
I'm getting 403
Last week we had advisories from the OpenSSL project and the Mozilla team that the two most popular open-source implementations of RSA, probably accounting for the majority of all deployed RSA code, were so badly broken that an arbitrary attacker could generate a valid SSL certificate for Wells Fargo offline and sell it.
This got no coverage on Slashdot. Ok, fine. Maybe it's a bit esoteric.
Today, an amateur wiki site on cryptography, with (apparently) fewer articles than even the Wikipedia crypto collection, does get coverage.
What am I missing here?
Even longer answer: There is a mathematical problem, called "The Byzantine General's Problem", which asks a similarish question: "If there are N people in a group, and M of them corrupt any communication that takes place, what is the smallest ratio of honest people to corrupt people that would allow accurate communication to take place?" This is very closely related to crytography and secure comunications. A variant of this problem is used to describe how you would divide a key into fragments, such that if parts of the key are revealed, the message remains secure, and if parts are destroyed, you can still read the message.
Methods along these lines are used by NASA to make messages from deep space probes "more readable". They don't contain more information, per se, but the message can be damaged in transit by noise and still be perfectly readable. This form of "more readable" certainly therefore exists.
Now, what about other forms of "more readable"? Well, you're stuck with the semantic information in the original. There's nothing you can do about that, as there are no meaningful semantic parsers for computers at this time. You've a few trivial syntax parsers, but that's it. You can't therefore enhance the meaning, but you MIGHT be able to enhance the delivery. However, this would not be by means of encryption (which is a mathematical process) but by the application of standard rules.
What about images? Images and sounds are a special case, because these are processed very directly by sensors that can be described mathematically. Unlike a word, which may be processed by the same senses but is then REprocessed by the linguistic centers of the brain, what you see and what you hear goes through a process that is much easier to understand. I do not know if anybody has actually tried the experiment, but I can see no reason why you could not "uncrypt" such data in a way that provides the brain with less noise and more of the key features it is looking for. This would arguably be enhanced from the perspective of understanding, but without experimental data, I don't think anyone could tell you by how much.
A variant on that theme, which MAY under certain circumstances be possible, would be to both encrypt AND uncrypt. All singal processing is subject to a glitch called aliasing, where two or more distinct inputs produce identical outputs. There is no guarantee that two brains will share an identical set of aliases. In consequence, it should be possible to produce an image comprised entirely of such aliases as exist for the intended recipient. The intended recipient will see the intended image, but nobody who does not share those aliases will. This is encryption, in that we are applying a well-defined reversible mathematical function with a well-defined data set and well-defined key. It merely happens that the key used is biologically stored over a bunch of neural circuitry in the brain. This does have one major strength - duplicating the key is going to be a very very hard problem. It also has one major weakness - your recipient had better not walk into any walls, drink strong liquor or otherwise change their neural key. Make that two weaknesses - nobody has a friggin' clue how to do this kind of stuff.
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)
Disclaimer: I started the English Wikipedia's Cryptography Project page:
t _Cryptography
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProjec
CryptoDox seems to be doing the same thing: creating an encyclopedia about cryptography using MediaWiki. To be honest, I don't really understand why this guy wants to do it outside of Wikipedia -- I've asked him, but he's never given any reason for it . Still, he's quite welcome to do what he likes, of course, and since he's now using the GFDL (he was using Creative Commons Non-Commercial last week), we can copy material back and forth between Wikipedia and CryptoDox. So, if you're into crypto and fancy helping out, feel free get involved with either project -- it's a win for both.