JacobEdelman

This is, to a large extent, scaremongering. While there are some valid points made in the article, the article fails to differentiate between security problems that can be exploited by trolls or single, untrained individuals, and ones that take a powerful team working on behalf for a government or other such group to exploit. It's the difference between the hospital being defended against your average thief, and being defended against a strike squad of ninjas. Despite this, the article does make good points when it comes to the lack of worry about the problems they found. Even though these vulnerabilities may be over hyped, they are real and the lack of focus on these vulnerabilities is chilling. The real underlying problems for this stem not from an industry that leaves bugs in applications designed for high security, but in the fact that the industry doesn't realize that security needs to be the default, whether or not you see exploits being used.

We wouldn't need to do this. One computer would suffice to generate primes at a pace making cracking computation infeasible. Though, even if we switch primes every few seconds, if somebody wanted to put a few hundred million dollars into cracking a few seconds of messages, they could do it.

The problem is that there needs to be an agreed upon key that each of the parties knows before-hand. But yes, there are definitely viable ways to generate new ones or implement new, safer, standards. Alternatively, a much larger prime can be used. Also, the Diffie-Hellman protocol is a well known one that many many security researchers, programmers, and students have looked at. The flaws are not obvious, as it's initially unclear how "cracking" a large prime would work.

Also, a small sum of a billion dollars may be enough to convince a thousand residents of an island to leave.

At this point I feel bad for Scott Aaronson. Everytime a crackpot paper comes out (and I'm 97% convinced at this point this is one of them) he takes the time to refute it on his blog.

This isn't exactly Deep Dream's equivalent for video. It takes frames individually (smushing them together), rather than having a unified neural network that takes the entire video at once.

I wouldn't have much hope that its going to be addressed. I've been following another kickstarter scam, https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/181239886/jaesa/descrip..., promising legitimate AI far better than anything that actually exists that appears to be little more than ELIZA plus ads. Its had over 50k USD in funding and is 9 days away from its one year funding anniversery. Obviosly, no real progress towards an AI has been made but the group has managed to keep the scam, recently having claimed to be acquired by on of their backers who is in talks with multiple investors for funding " to the level of a global competitor".

Another example was the Goblins Comics board game, which featured the web comic writer teaming up with a supposed board game maker who than ran away with the money, scamming the board game maker and the comic writer. See more at the second to last post here on the writers continued attempts to help his backers despite being scammed by the board game maker: http://www.goblinscomic.org/the-blog/

That idea, if extended, could be rather entertaining.

"White House Gov Account Hacked, Please Help"

Wait, do they track who says what themselves? https://twitter.com/whispererly/status/615513760107732996

So, "a paper" and "a gigantic ostrich juggling American Space Kangaroo"?

Bonus points: What if only one of them gets a coin to flip and then they must both come to an agreement on what the result was. They can talk but the NSA overhears everything they say and can crack every cipher they use. Can you maximize the chance that the NSA can't guess who got that coin AND Alice and Bob agree on the correct result?

Note: An open problem. You can look up cryptogenography for current results.

I've met him a few times and I've seen him speak. He definitely seems to be the kind of change we need.

The end result of this is that I'm impressed with Virgin Media's quick responses on twitter.

This is really really fine for apple to do as they are just creating an option for a highly curated app store. I mean, if they were attempting to criminalize loading 3rd party apps/using alternative app stores then it would be horrible, but doing that would just be crazy.

I upvoted this and now I feel ashamed. This article has a provocative title but in the end all it does is try to make a dramatic situation where there is none. I will be reading fusion.net articles with increased suspicion in the future.

All of these systems are security by obscurity. Just suggesting them on a blog ruins them. Watermarking is not truly possible with current technology, which means you can't give someone something without given them control over it. Is that such a bad thing?

Standardizing a package manager across platforms is nice and making homebrew for linux does this without just creating another package manager to support packages.

I think rather than have a surprise objective they should remove the prizes, intense competition, and networking. Hackathons should be about coding something cool, not winning, networking, or partying.

Despite the optimistic tone in this article hackathons have definite problems. They have a contradiction between their party atmosphere and their high stakes. While they strive to provide an informal, fun event they also offer extremely large rewards (cash, internships, and even startup-funding are offered as rewards). Little seems to stand in the way of groups cheating and judging may seem incredibly subjective. Rumors abound as too how winners built their projects beforehand (a big no-no) or that the projects don't actually work. In trying to become both parties and job interviews hackathons are failing to be what they were meant to be, places to learn and create.

I'd be interested to know what type of programming competition is being talked about here. There is a world of difference between Hackathons and Algorithmic style competitions.

In this case I meant the bad press that results from a security leak.

Companies should be implementing good security not because of the good press it will get them but because of the bad press it won't get them.

The sad thing is that really cool, potentially world changing, crypto has been created in the past few years but its not the crypto that gets media coverage. Concepts like Fully Homomorphic Encryption and Secure Obfuscation may revolutionize security in the coming years, but nobody has heard of them precisely because they were published in scholarly journals instead of popular science magazines. Maybe cryptographers should create useless apps that claim to solve all security problems whenever they come up with actually important crypto :)

Despite my initial excitement at seeing a senator advocate for some patent reform a review of Senator Hatch's history left me less excited. He has supported copyright extension, and advocated for COICA. It seems he only cares about intellectual property abuse when it prevents people from making money.

I can't think of any use case for this that you can't already get with hardware random number generators that computers have built-in. For most people TRNG's are only useful for things like generating keys and such, something that not much entropy is needed for. Typing in random letters and hashing them would suffice.