drisden84

I did 1k (0.1 percent) then figured I'd done my job. No scripts, just human labor/algorithm.

Could I boost it to 2-5x time with a simple JS script? Sure. However I figured rate limits were in place/that wasn't the spirit of...whatever this is.

Reminds me of Peter Molyneux's Curiousity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity%3A_What%27s_Inside_t...

Basically if a machine recommended it to you, its probably trash.

Goes for search results, AI, product recommendations, etc.

"When you don't have a need for a cryptographic digest, it's important to think of the channel's bit error distribution in selecting a checksum algorithm."

Important real-life-facts.

There was no "give-me-an-appropriate-hash" function.

There was:

md5sum yourfile.txt

Nobody wants to think about "channel's bit error distribution" in a non-security critical context. In fact, its irrelevant, and possibly a usability issue.

MD5 has/had a well-known "media" surface - lawyers/genomics folks had heard of it. Libraries had it as an accessible function (command line utilities, even).

Sure, there are better non-cryptographic hashes, but, again the concern of lawyers and genomics folk is neither security nor efficiency - simplicity and "works most of the time" are the two metrics at stake.

If either laywers or genomics folks cared about document forgery of this nature (spoiler, they don't), they would move to something like SHA3. If they had a need for high-scalability hash algorithms (spoiler, they don't), they would switch to another faster algorithm.

This is a concept I understand security folks struggle to understand - sometimes we _just don't care_. And we never should.

Maybe, something a struggling security enthusiast could understand - a video game.

If you implement e.g. a caesar cipher, you can have fun, accessible puzzle. Implementing AES in your game as a puzzle, while much harder, fails desperately at the "accessibility" metric. In your single player game, if you want to see some "identifying hash", if you see an md5 one, that's enough. No, you should not worry about people forging documents for your ad-hoc identification system, if you don't have people attempting to forge in-game items. Maybe its even a feature that you need to forge such a hash, as a way to solve a puzzle.

I am curious as to your perspective as a physicist, do you think it is feasible to have a QC computer from an energy perspective?

There is the cost to consider, yes, there is also an energy cost to a stable QC system. Asymmetric/symmetric are not unbeatable, they have an energy cost. Shors algorithm is theoretically great, but rarely if ever have I seen an associated energy cost...even outside of the answer "will we build one" the question is "can you efficiently build one" or not, i.e. what does a QC capable of executing shor's algorithm look like, a small planet or star perhaps?