You might notice that they neglected to mention that these were fingers by shape only. I think this is essentially the same technology that made ears using plastic molds, applied to finger-shaped objects. These artificial fingers have no bones, no nervers, and probably don't have the right muscle configurations to do anything but sit limply on the end of a hand. I'm not sure why they called them fingers at all...
Found out this thread by checking my referred logs (I have the DNA-o-gram generator at http://dna2z.com/DNA-o-gram (thanks Infiniter X).
1) DNA encryption is really no different from any other nonobvious code-based encryption. You must still transmit all the information to decode the message in a secure manner. The method referred to in the BBC article operates in the same manner as the DNA-o-gram generator (try it out), except that the code is generated randomly. If someone were to intercept the DNA-to-text code and the information necessary to isolate the coding DNA from the "noise" DNAs, they could crack the code.
2) This has nothing to do with human DNA. There is DNA in everything from the fungus between your toes to houseplants. The DNA used for encryption would probably be chemically synthesized.
3) A good sequencing run can read 1000 bases of DNA. Because three bases correspond to one english letter, you could get ~300 letters at a time.
4) You would be better off adding fake gene sequences to a gene database and giving someone the keys to decrypt it. That saves all the hassle of synthesizing and sequencing the DNA.
A description of Adelman's solution to the travelling salesman problem can be found at http://dna2z.com/dnacpu. (whuppy)
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You might notice that they neglected to mention that these were fingers by shape only. I think this is essentially the same technology that made ears using plastic molds, applied to finger-shaped objects. These artificial fingers have no bones, no nervers, and probably don't have the right muscle configurations to do anything but sit limply on the end of a hand. I'm not sure why they called them fingers at all...
1) DNA encryption is really no different from any other nonobvious code-based encryption. You must still transmit all the information to decode the message in a secure manner. The method referred to in the BBC article operates in the same manner as the DNA-o-gram generator (try it out), except that the code is generated randomly. If someone were to intercept the DNA-to-text code and the information necessary to isolate the coding DNA from the "noise" DNAs, they could crack the code.
2) This has nothing to do with human DNA. There is DNA in everything from the fungus between your toes to houseplants. The DNA used for encryption would probably be chemically synthesized.
3) A good sequencing run can read 1000 bases of DNA. Because three bases correspond to one english letter, you could get ~300 letters at a time.
4) You would be better off adding fake gene sequences to a gene database and giving someone the keys to decrypt it. That saves all the hassle of synthesizing and sequencing the DNA.
A description of Adelman's solution to the travelling salesman problem can be found at http://dna2z.com/dnacpu. (whuppy)