Group items tagged

Continuation of a story I posted a while ago. Britain's top code-breakers say they are stumped by a secret code found on the leg of a dead pigeon. .

"With end-to-end encryption in place, not even WhatsApp's employees can read the data that's sent across its network. In other words, WhatsApp has no way of complying with a court order demanding access to the content of any message, phone call, photo, or video traveling through its service. Like Apple, WhatsApp is, in practice, stonewalling the federal government, but it's doing so on a larger front-one that spans roughly a billion devices."

I found this article and liked it because it gave me a lot of information about the Beale Cipher and treasure, even more information than Singh. I especially was interested in the reasons describing the possibility of it being real or a hoax.

This was a bit surprising. More and more people are getting smart TVs so this could be a serious problem.

I felt that this article was particularly well written because of how conversational the author was with the reader. The conversational aspect allows the scientific aspect of the article to be better understood, in a way. The use of a video was also allowed for a better understanding of the physics.

I was thinking about doing this one! I curled for a couple of winters, and always wondered about the weirdly illogical physics of curling stones. Unfortunately, the nearest curling club is 3 hours away in Knoxville...

I feel this article is well written for a few reasons. If has the feel of telling a story but remains formal and in the style of academic writing at the same time. The flow of the post is very well done also as each paragraph logically leads into the next. Lastly, the post concludes very well tying in everything the post discusses and how they relate to science in the world today.

"More worrisome, Cory now had the ability to view all future flights tied to that frequent flyer account, change seats for the ticketed passengers, and even cancel any future flights."

"More worrisome, Cory now had the ability to view all future flights tied to that frequent flyer account, change seats for the ticketed passengers, and even cancel any future flights."

After a high school principle pulls the plug on a plan to use Little Brother as a common reading, Cory Doctorow sends the school 200 copies of the book for free. Good man.

Here's a few lessons Kashmir Hill learned after living on Bitcoin for a week in San Francisco. (I said in class it was New York City. Oops.)

This one is a little sketchy. It's just links to articles on VPNs from news sources I haven't heard of. Can you find someone a little less spammy and a little more likely to be a real person?

This is a scholarly article from 2012 about how gait recognition is possible using technology based on Microsoft Kinect, a game for the XBOX 360.

"The problem of securing biological research data is a difficult and complicated one. Our ability to secure data on computers is not robust enough to ensure the security of existing data sets. Lessons from cryptography illustrate that neither secrecy measures, such as deleting technical details, nor national solutions, such as export controls, will work. "

For longer ciphers, Kasiski analysis is useful for determining possible keywords using a modified frequency analysis and repetition analysis. This is an online tool to find repeat sequences in a ciphertext, and can be used to quickly decrypt a Vigenere ciphertext.

This reminds me just a bit of the Mary, Queen of Scots, story. Helpful messages that are actually covers for malicious intent.

I thought this article was very well written because at first it has a nice captivating introduction and title. The author goes on to explain the concepts in the most technical manner, but then he takes a step back and goes back to the reader's level in order to facilitate the reader's understanding if he or she does not have much knowledge on the topic. All in all, the article introduced a very interesting discovery about human evolution.

Bernoulli numbers are a sequence of numbers important to the field of number theory, trigonometric expansions, and analysis. Ada Lovelace wrote a theoretical program to calculate these that would work on Charles Babbage's unfinished Analytical Engine. It's pretty interesting how Lovelace was a "leading figure" in the now massively male-dominated computer programming field, but didn't receive recognition for her work until fairly recently.

See also Riley's bookmark and my comments on it.

This blog has information about military cryptography and privacy in general, including this post about the Zimmermann Telegram. Is it ethical to lie to an ally if it is in their best interest? What are the ethics behind spying on one's allies? Do ethics hinder one's ability to win a war, and if so, should ethics be disregarded in times of war? Another interesting post examines how Snowden should be viewed as a patriot, not a traitor. This made me question where one's loyalty should remain- to the government or to the people?

What really stood out to me about this article was that they said the NSA actually pays more attention to those people who use encryption. So, in order to protect ourselves and also avoid prying NSA eyes, we should encourage people to stand in solidarity with encryption. I thought this was really interesting because I always thought that encryption would undoubtedly make everything more secure, but here they're saying that it actually attracts attention (which isn't necessarily a good thing).

When I was a kid, I read an issue of Superman in which he faces Batman's villain, the Joker. At one point, the Joker tells Superman that he's kidnapped all of Superman's best friends (Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, and so on) and locked them inside lead-lined caskets, hidden throughout Metropolis. Since the caskets are air-tight, they only have an hour to live, and Superman can't find them because his x-ray vision can't see through lead! That's what the Joker said. Actually, since Superman can't see through lead, those caskets *stood out* when he scanned the city with his x-ray vision, and he rescued all his friends in short order. Same basic idea.

You can find anything on the Internet: http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/superjoker6.jpg.