Math 1111: Cryptography

Ladar Levison and William Binney each paid the price for a moral stand against the U.S. government. And your digital privacy is slightly better for it.

Non-U.S. users frequently encounter the annoyance of geo-blocked content when trying to access popular sites like Hulu, but every now and then we feel the burn in the States, too. Reader hengehog details how to access BBC's iPlayer from outside the U.K.

Keep a paper trail: Print and save records of your online transactions, including the product description, price, online receipt, terms of the sale, and copies of any email exchange with the seller. Read your credit card statements as soon as you get them to make sure there aren't any unauthorized charges.

This site could be stealing your password... it's not, but it easily could be. Be careful where you type your password.

This is a website introducing codes and ciphers in WW II by Tony Sale. Given this specific war context, is there really a guideline of what an action is ethical and what is not in terms of cryptoanalysis? Would an action be ethical whenever the majority's well-being is satisfied, or there's a line that should not be crossed?

Quote: What you are looking at is one of the many undersea cables that carries inside it, to put it simply, the magic of the Internet. This particular cable, which runs aground on the coast of Florida, has been tapped by the NSA according to Paglen's research. Paglen, an artist who has been documenting the physical footprint of surveillance for years, got scuba-certified in order to go diving "at several locations off the coast of Florida," he says, to find and photograph the cables.

The US Copyright Office has issued a statement saying that it would only issue copyrights to humans. PETA objects to this, having just filed a suit to grant that macaque monkey the copyright for the selfies it took back in 2011. The struggle is real.

Andy Greenberg covers cybersecurity and hacking for Wired magazine.

Nicole Perlroth covers cybersecurity for the New York Times.

Kashmir Hill is a journalist who covers digital privacy, among other topics.

About the same time we talked about the Ahmed Mohamed story during class yesterday, this happened.

A blog, by multiple authors, about new results in elliptic curve cryptography.

A security blog created by a multinational software company.

"A factory refurbished Thinkpad shipped with Windows 7 and a scheduler app that ran once a day, collecting usage data about what you do with your computer and exfiltrating it to an analytics company. "

A pre-WWII NSA document on advanced military cryptography which was declassified in 2014. This leads to the question of what impact disclosing these military secrets has on encryption and decryption of messages in future wars, and also why were these documents released in the first place.

Embeddable cryptographic processors are enabling a host of new defense communications applications, such as smartphones and tablet computers for tactical use on the front lines, but should soldiers be using the same object for both secure and insecure communications? Or does this create a conflict of interests?

This is an article about the advancement of technology and how it has affected cryptography and secret-keeping during wartime.