And you thought government workers were already in promiscuous mode!
I'm not sure whether it'll be a good or a bad thing that they'll all be sneakily monitoring each other's Skype calls and email... it'll take away from the time they're on *our* backsides!
Hmm -- he's *still* not a geek then. As far as I can tell, he did a much better job of picking a wife than of picking an operating system. Granted she's not a calendar pin-up, but she's presentable and smart, and appears to be sensible... unlike Windows!
>... the poor twinks who have their domain name spoofed will probably ignore it.
This is *such* annoying advice. I have a long-duration (approximately 1993) very public email address, and it's spoofed a lot and one of my main annoyances is this auto-replied "You've reached a bogus address or domain" message.
DO NOT send any auto-replies for anything.
DO NOT send messages saying that the (probably spoofed) sender has sent you a virus.
I haven't been able to log into gmail for the last few hours (Server Error / The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request. / Please try again in 30 seconds. ) and ordinarily this wouldn't set off any alarms. After all, it is a beta service.
However, I checked in on Orkut, a Google-provided networking/community bulletin board site, and did a search in "Communities" for "gmail". Yesterday this returned dozens of groups, and at the moment it returns none. Other groups appear to be perfectly operational.
Is it a coincidence that Orkut gmail-related communities disappeared at the same time as Gmail did?
Ian Holm has already played the younger Bilbo -- in a flashback we see him finding the Ring and popping it in his pocket as an anguished Gollum screams in the background. I think he had a hand double, but his facial wrinkles were smoothed out by pulling his skin back toward his ears, like a temporary facelift.
I'm sure he'd find it supremely uncomfortable to undergo this for an entire movie shoot, and I'm not sure it could be sustained for all the necessary camera angles. But of course CGI will have advanced significantly in the two or more years before I'd expect the film rights could be straightened out.
Yes! Although I learned to program on the vacuum-tube Johnniac, my first personal computer was a Heathkit H89 that I built myself in '79 -- I braided the 8-wire cables to keep everything really tidy. It started out an H88, which means it had no disk -- cassette tape only!
I upgraded from 56K RAM to 64K RAM by physically piggybacking 8 RAM chips on top of the last row of on-board ones and bending up pin 3 on each of them; I soldered the remaining pins to the chip underneath, and soldered the timing wire along all those pin 3's -- it was like the chips were holding their hands up ready to get connected.
AC wonders whether Wiles used the STW conjecture or circumvented it. In fact he proved the part of it that he needed for FLT (semistable elliptic curves), and the full conjecture is what was proven last summer building on Wiles' work. STW doesn't follow from FLT -- FLT follows from part of the STW. That's all in the BBC article.
While I don't pretend to understand the math involved, Simon Singh's book Fermat's Enigma gives a good explanation of why the Shimura-Taniyama-Weil conjecture is interesting and important, even beyond its application in proving Fermat's Last Theorem. It serves to unify two unexpectedly related fields of math. I recommend the book -- although nonmathematical, it gives a feeling and appreciation for the mathematical discovery process, and is a gripping read. It's a midway point between "popular math" and real math.
I wonder whether Webster actually opened the envelope (or the triple-sealed envelope, depending on the story). I suppose he must have, if he remembered that it was obscure.
What that may mean is that he read the words, but did not solve the meta-puzzle that will be evident (according to Sanborn) if the last part is decrypted.
I think the "dedicated hardware" kind of approach is overrated. If you have a poor approach, the best hardware in the world isn't going to crack the problem. If the cipher is a Beaufort, then running dedicated Vigenere crackers won't touch it, no matter how many of them you've got. Hardware is good, but the program is the important part. With something like RC5, where you know what's on the other end, it's a different story and you can optimize the bejeepers out of it. With an unknown cipher, simply throwing hardware at it doesn't cut the mustard.
Oops, I meant "hopeful that the last section is NOT OTP."
The sculptor, Jim Sanborn, wrote that he had given the "keys" to the cipher in a sealed envelope to the DCI, so that he could easily decrypt it all. While one put a OTP key in there, what would be the point?
The "digraphic" part is wrong -- that's like a Playfair, and there was on digraphic system in the three parts so far decrypted. The first two are polyalphabetic with keyed ciphertext and plaintext alphabets, and the third is a triple complete columnar transposition, with different periods than the guess in that document.
I'm hopeful that the last section is OTP. Perhaps Running Key, which is like OTP except that it has a coherent non-repeating key... and there's a chance that the coherence would be solvable. It could also be other stuff, of course, like an autokey or a combination polyalphabetic and transposition.
The NSA did solve this one. When I called the CIA to tell them I'd solved it, they told me somebody at CIA had already done so. When they sent me the blurb from a year ago announcing his talk (he turned out to be David Stein, but that info was blacked out on the announcement), it said that found out after he broke it that a team of three NSA cryppies had broken the same amount some time earlier.
Nobody has cracked the final 97 characters, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps Calligra is intended to evoke "Calligraphy on Viagra."
And you thought government workers were already in promiscuous mode!
I'm not sure whether it'll be a good or a bad thing that they'll all be sneakily monitoring each other's Skype calls and email... it'll take away from the time they're on *our* backsides!
Hmm -- he's *still* not a geek then. As far as I can tell, he did a much better job of picking a wife than of picking an operating system. Granted she's not a calendar pin-up, but she's presentable and smart, and appears to be sensible... unlike Windows!
>... the poor twinks who have their domain name spoofed will probably ignore it.
This is *such* annoying advice. I have a long-duration (approximately 1993) very public email address, and it's spoofed a lot and one of my main annoyances is this auto-replied "You've reached a bogus address or domain" message.
DO NOT send any auto-replies for anything.
DO NOT send messages saying that the (probably spoofed) sender has sent you a virus.
I haven't been able to log into gmail for the last few hours (Server Error / The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request. / Please try again in 30 seconds. ) and ordinarily this wouldn't set off any alarms. After all, it is a beta service.
However, I checked in on Orkut, a Google-provided networking/community bulletin board site, and did a search in "Communities" for "gmail". Yesterday this returned dozens of groups, and at the moment it returns none. Other groups appear to be perfectly operational.
Is it a coincidence that Orkut gmail-related communities disappeared at the same time as Gmail did?
Ian Holm has already played the younger Bilbo -- in a flashback we see him finding the Ring and popping it in his pocket as an anguished Gollum screams in the background. I think he had a hand double, but his facial wrinkles were smoothed out by pulling his skin back toward his ears, like a temporary facelift.
I'm sure he'd find it supremely uncomfortable to undergo this for an entire movie shoot, and I'm not sure it could be sustained for all the necessary camera angles. But of course CGI will have advanced significantly in the two or more years before I'd expect the film rights could be straightened out.
Yes! Although I learned to program on the vacuum-tube Johnniac, my first personal computer was a Heathkit H89 that I built myself in '79 -- I braided the 8-wire cables to keep everything really tidy. It started out an H88, which means it had no disk -- cassette tape only!
I upgraded from 56K RAM to 64K RAM by physically piggybacking 8 RAM chips on top of the last row of on-board ones and bending up pin 3 on each of them; I soldered the remaining pins to the chip underneath, and soldered the timing wire along all those pin 3's -- it was like the chips were holding their hands up ready to get connected.
Those were the days!
AC wonders whether Wiles used the STW conjecture or circumvented it. In fact he proved the part of it that he needed for FLT (semistable elliptic curves), and the full conjecture is what was proven last summer building on Wiles' work. STW doesn't follow from FLT -- FLT follows from part of the STW. That's all in the BBC article.
While I don't pretend to understand the math involved, Simon Singh's book Fermat's Enigma gives a good explanation of why the Shimura-Taniyama-Weil conjecture is interesting and important, even beyond its application in proving Fermat's Last Theorem. It serves to unify two unexpectedly related fields of math. I recommend the book -- although nonmathematical, it gives a feeling and appreciation for the mathematical discovery process, and is a gripping read. It's a midway point between "popular math" and real math.
I wonder whether Webster actually opened the
envelope (or the triple-sealed envelope,
depending on the story). I suppose he must
have, if he remembered that it was obscure.
What that may mean is that he read the words,
but did not solve the meta-puzzle that will
be evident (according to Sanborn) if the last
part is decrypted.
I think the "dedicated hardware" kind of approach
is overrated. If you have a poor approach, the
best hardware in the world isn't going to crack
the problem. If the cipher is a Beaufort, then
running dedicated Vigenere crackers won't touch
it, no matter how many of them you've got.
Hardware is good, but the program is the important
part. With something like RC5, where you know
what's on the other end, it's a different story
and you can optimize the bejeepers out of it.
With an unknown cipher, simply throwing hardware
at it doesn't cut the mustard.
Oops, I meant "hopeful that the last section is
NOT OTP."
The sculptor, Jim Sanborn, wrote that he had
given the "keys" to the cipher in a sealed
envelope to the DCI, so that he could easily
decrypt it all. While one put a OTP
key in there, what would be the point?
Somebody running MapBlast told me the location
is in Glen Echo, MD in a CIA parking lot.
I wonder whether it was a parking lot in 1980.
Think "ID BY ROWS" could relate to parking lot
rows?
The "digraphic" part is wrong -- that's like a
Playfair, and there was on digraphic system in
the three parts so far decrypted. The first two
are polyalphabetic with keyed ciphertext and
plaintext alphabets, and the third is a triple
complete columnar transposition, with different
periods than the guess in that document.
I'm hopeful that the last section is OTP.
Perhaps Running Key, which is like OTP except that
it has a coherent non-repeating key... and there's
a chance that the coherence would be solvable. It
could also be other stuff, of course, like an
autokey or a combination polyalphabetic and
transposition.
Keep plugging...
The NSA did solve this one. When I called the
CIA to tell them I'd solved it, they told me
somebody at CIA had already done so. When they
sent me the blurb from a year ago announcing his
talk (he turned out to be David Stein, but that
info was blacked out on the announcement), it
said that found out after he broke it that
a team of three NSA cryppies had broken the same
amount some time earlier.
Nobody has cracked the final 97 characters, though.