The Alice and Bob After Dinner Speech (1984)
urbigenous.net
urbigenous.net
> Now most people in Alice's position would give up. Not Alice. She has courage which can only be described as awesome. Against all odds, over a noisy telephone line, tapped by the tax authorities and the secret police, Alice will happily attempt, with someone she doesn't trust, whom she cannot hear clearly, and who is probably someone else, to fiddle her tax returns and to organize a coup d'etat, while at the same time minimizing the cost of the phone call.
> A coding theorist is someone who doesn't think Alice is crazy.
> By the time you land an engineering gig at Apple, you are a twitchy, tinfoily mess. When your giggling date pokes you in the side and asks your favorite color, you shout: “WHO WANTS TO KNOW?!”
> But at work, you’re in good company. Your peer code reviews look like a meeting of the Flat Earth Society:
> What if they steal our data using electromagnetic waves or focused ion beams?
> What if they cut power at the exact instant our security kicks in?
> How do you get even with a dumb machine like that?
> First I tried slapping it around a little. I pushed its buttons a bit hard. I threatened it. "How would you like a busted display" I said.
> But it did no good. It just said "I am virtually unbreakable - and I'm not going to take any notice till you enter the data nicely, like you used to do."
This is beautiful. I loved how it explained processing delay with "real" world examples. Funny and interesting speech.
> L for Leather
> U for Mism
> Y for Lover
The last one took me a while, I had to say it out loud a few times.
> Pocket calculators! Now there's something.... has sines, cosines, tangents, logarithms ... It translates from one language to another.... It is, in fact, a multiprocessor system... It has a full color, wraparound wide screen, liquid crystal, three-dimensional holographic display.... Its audio facilities include Dolby Digital Decaphonic surround sound. On the way here I watched "The Labyrinth" on it.
Meant to be tongue-in-cheek in 1984, but sounds surprisingly like a smart phone.
"Good evening Ladies and Gentlemen.
There comes a time when people at a technical conference like this need something more relaxing. A change of pace. A shift of style. To put aside all that work stuff and think of something refreshingly different.
So let's talk about coding theory. There are perhaps some of you here tonight who are not experts in coding theory, but rather have been dragged here kicking and screaming. So I thought it would be a good idea if I gave you a sort of instant, five minute graduate course in coding theory."
Edit: So, much more meta than that. Looks like a fun read though. :)
> Perhaps it would be a better idea if we looked for strong keys. In fact, why not look for THE STRONGEST POSSIBLE KEY. Then we could all standardize on it.
I think that's what Debian did with their OpenSSL :-)
It's a coded in-joke about en-coded jokes.
Pretty funny if you've read any crypto papers.
And that is a GOOD story!!!
> and Alice is a two-timing speculator.
Oh how I laughed at this line!!