Math 1111: Cryptography

This article, though very clearly biased, describes the ways in which the movements of citizens are being tracked by both technology and the police. The video/information slides are obviously carried out with bias, but the information is still there. The end of the article has some interesting (helpful?) information about what the judicial system is ruling on cases involving location tracking without warrants.

In the war over encryption between the NSA and privacy activists, at first it seemed as though the activists had won - but now it's not so clear.

This was shared with the group! Did you do anything different this time? Your comment appeared twice, but that's fine.

I didn't do anything different! It must have appeared twice because I posted it twice.

The thing I found very interesting about this article is the discussion about ex-NBA owner Donald Sterling. Yes, his comments were horrifying, but he said things in the privacy of his home. I guess what I, and this article, are trying to say is that privacy is dead and all information is vulnerable.

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

The way NSA did to track individual's information in the credit cards.

Just like in Little Brother! Schneiner responds to this article here: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/09/gait_analysis_f.html

Facial scanning isn't quite to the point where it could be reliably implemented in a school, but it's not far off either.

Heathrow is linking biometric information with boarding pass information to create a database.

At a New York state elementary school, teachers can use a behavior-monitoring app to compile information on which children have positive attitudes and which act out. In Georgia, some high school cafeterias are using a biometric identification system to let students pay for lunch by scanning the palms of their hands at the checkout line.

There are already in place many automatic license plate readers on things such as road signs and bridges. This has purposes for helping track vehicles known to be owned by criminals, but simultaneously the tracking information is stored for millions of innocent people as well.

Here's just some more information about Ada Lovelace because she's pretty cool.

I thought this article was interesting because it mentioned Ada's childhood imagination and inventions. It's interesting to consider what she could've done if she had grown up in a different place or at a different time. Also, the article mentioned that there was a computer program named "Ada" after her and I thought it was pretty cool that she's beginning to be recognized more and more. (Sorry, I don't know why this comment wasn't here earlier. It's in my original Diigo bookmark.)

This resource is interesting in light of our discussing Babbage and Lovelace, as well as Ada Lovelace Day. This article is particularly interesting to me as it deals with women's contributions to significant advancements in history, many of which are often ignored or excused.

Riley, I mentioned in class that October 14th is Ada Lovelace Day, an international day for recognizing the contributions of women in science. Details: http://findingada.com/. I've wanted to organize an Ada Lovelace Day event here at Vanderbilt for a few years now, but never found the time. Let me know if you'd like to cook something up (an event? a blog series? a Wikipedia editing party?) for the 14th.

I found it really interesting that people took the fact that Lovelace made a few mistakes as an excuse to try to remove her contribution to computer programming. Male scientists and programmers also make mistakes, but we rarely see those used in an attempt to discredit them. Also, she literally designed a computer program before the computer even existed. I think we can excuse a few past mathematical errors.

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 outlines the gronsfeld cipher, which is a modification of the vigenere cipher. I like and find this cipher interesting because of it using numbers instead of letters, and I like cryptography which uses numbers.

Interesting. Gronsfeld ciphers then form a subset of Vigenere ciphers. That is, there's a one-to-one correspondence between Gronsfeld ciphers and Vigenere ciphers where keywords are formed from the letters A through J.

This post is about cracking the vigenere cipher. It also uses computer programming to solve it which I found interesting.

Interesting article about Charles Baggage's computer designs finally being put to use! Found it interesting because we read about Charles Babbage and I was surprised to learn that the computer hadn't been built yet.

For the latest on Plan 28, the initiative to build Babbage's analytic engine, visit http://plan28.org/.

Good link from Khan Academy that has good practice questions/explanation of the Vigenere cipher.

I found this interesting because it mentions the fact that there may have been a revision to the Beale cipher before it was published.