Also described as a traditional Yiddish folktale (a rabbi suggests responding to stress by moving a series of animals into the home, and then at the end they're removed and everything seems great by comparison!).
22,894 karma · joined August 19, 2012
I'm Seth, previously of EFF, more previously of Linuxcare. Also https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/letsencrypt-ccs19.pdf and https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/coldboot-sec08.pdf (both with Alex Halderman) and some other stuff.
I'm currently working at Blockstream https://www.blockstream.com/, and I'm not posting here on their behalf unless I specifically say so.
In Simplicity (and in a sense in Bitcoin Script) there's a broader concept of "if you show you know information X, you're entitled to this money", but it has this specific issue that if the information or the entitlement to receive money for knowing it isn't unique to a specific recipient, there will automatically be a witness swiping or front-running risk for architectural reasons.
https://www.gokyaysatrancvakfi.org.tr/en/chess-museum/
Somewhat unexpectedly, I thought it was one of the best museums I've ever visited in my life. It's the world's largest collection of chess sets, and is basically a museum of the chess set as an artistic genre, not of chess as a game. As you can see a bit from this site too, the artistic genre is quite broad and deep.
In the Gökyay Museum there were lots of questions raised by this genre:
* What historical events do people feel comfortable treating as distant history, versus something that you have to show respect or deference about?
* How would you make a chess set for blind players?
* Do chessboards have to be physically flat, not just topologically two-dimensional? Do they have to be horizontal rather than vertical?
* What events or activities can be metaphorically represented as a "battle"?
* How would different sculpture and painting traditions from around the world translate into a highly stylized chess set? How about different availability of materials?
* How do commercial marketing and pop culture leak into the comparatively culturally elite or refined realm of chess?
Anyway, it's just awesome and you should definitely go if you can.
Since Simplicity runs on Bitcoin-like blockchains, someone can swipe the witness data from the legitimate winner's proposed transaction, and create a new transaction (perhaps with a higher fee) using the same claim data and sending the prize to a different address.
Anyway, I ended up implementing a two-phase commit mechanism in which you pay a deposit to temporarily lock the prize so that it can only be paid out to your address. If you then make a valid claim, the prize can be paid to you; if you don't, you forfeit your deposit.
https://community.simplicity-lang.org/t/running-prize-contes...
(I think this was suggested by Russell O'Connor, the inventor of Simplicity, but it may have been a widespread idea in the smart contracts world. I don't know whether there's a straightforward way to implement it with Bitcoin Script, which is what this older prize would have needed.)
https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2004-June/00...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res
Lots of novels start off with "the gardener put down the gun" or "the elephant was never recovered" or "the money was meant to be in the shoebox" or something as a way of arousing the reader's curiosity, or making the reader feel like an active participant in some larger story that's already underway, even though this is technically bad pragmatics in the sense that it isn't cooperating with the reader's assumed desire to understand the context of the utterance.
In turn, perhaps some AI systems have learned this trick as a way of increasing engagement, even though it can feel manipulative.
"The street vendors have decided to oppose the ordinance."
"But I thought Mike and Jacob said they support the ordinance. And Julia! Aren't they vendors?"
"They are some vendors, but most vendors take the opposite position."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bodies_of_water_by_sal...
"This water is so dense that you can't even sink in it" is a pretty weird experience.
I think not all of them categorically refuse to be pets, but they're noticeably more aggressive and less affectionate compared to housecats.
About 4-6 years earlier, depending what you want to count, although the inventors may also have been less clear on its importance or applications compared to the later public inventors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography#Classi...
I guess that's kind of a long time in computer technology terms.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...
In many of the daughter languages it does regularly include saltwater connected to the world ocean (certainly the Latin "Mare Nostrum" for the Mediterranean!); it just seems uncertain from this description whether it necessarily had that sense in PIE.
That doesn't seem like "had no ... word for ... 'sea'" is a very clear or helpful description of the situation, though.
The definition of solving a cipher must be something like getting a highly meaningful result (like intelligible natural language text) by applying a process with relatively low Kolmogorov complexity relative to the length of the output. If you don't have a constraint like that, it could literally be meaningless what should count as a solution. For example, a cipher that was encrypted under a one-time pad can be successfully decoded to any plaintext just by choosing the appropriate key; there's no reason to prefer any plaintext over any other unless you have external knowledge that constrains the plaintext and/or the key. (That's what it means for the one-time pad to be information-theoretically secure, which is the lack of a constraint that helps distinguish a "good" solution from a "bad" solution.)
Basically you could say that every cipher is a transformation of a plaintext with some kind of computer program. (The human who invented the cipher may not have thought of it as a computer program, perhaps because computers hadn't even been invented yet, but there should be an equivalent program to the encipherment and decipherment process.) A good solution in that Kolmogorov complexity sense is like "a short program produced a meaningful decryption". There are statistical methods to recognize some kinds of plaintext, and there are statistical methods to recognize properties of specific ciphers (for example, to guess the most likely length of a Vigenère key), but it doesn't seem that this can inherently generalize across "all possible programs".
But if you want to limit the family of ciphers to specific things like Vigenère or Playfair or something, then yes, there are good statistical tests. It's just that it creates a higher-order question of how much flexibility the cipher creator could have had to choose a cipher method, conceivably including one that isn't attested anywhere, or one that has more good security properties of some kind than other classical ciphers did.
It seems like this will intersect with historical research, like "well, I don't think that so-and-so was actually sophisticated enough to literally create an interesting new kind of cipher from scratch, so therefore if this is a real message, it's probably one of these methods that would have been known in that cultural environment at that time and place", which maybe is enough of a constraint to have decent statistical tests. But we still have some idiosyncratic things like the Voynich Manuscript where experts have been fighting for decades over the baseline question of whether it's actually an enciphered human language plaintext!
The worst case problem is not even an error in encipherment but the idea that the apparent ciphertext could literally be random (chosen by throwing dice or spinning a wheel or drawing letter tiles or something), so there's no form of meaningful decipherment possible by any means, even with the original creator's knowledge.
So if you delete a file from the filesystem that's open by PID 12345, you can find a reference to that file still present in /proc/12345/fd, and you can actually make a new copy of the file with cp or something.
Many of those are traditions or ritual behaviors that decrease the chance of poisoning, sometimes subtle chronic poisoning rather than obvious acute poisoning.
This means that the idea that idle compute would have gone to waste is just no longer true on modern devices.
Now there is certainly compute that couldn't be sold to a paying cloud customer because it's too fragmented in some sense, but it still has some amount of energy cost, and, in a data center, corresponding cooling cost attributable to the marginal heat production. How can one actually say that there is literally no marginal cost at all? I just can't imagine a device that literally has the same power draw regardless of load factor!
* in the course of a court case, a judge (or multiple judges from multiple courts) are asked to make many different decisions on many different legal issues; most of those don't end or determine the outcome of the overall case
* indeed, some of the decisions are about minor issues and others are about major issues
* some of the issues presented in a case may be "questions of first impression" where no court has ever addressed them before; these are potentially very important as a matter of precedent because they might affect how similar questions are viewed in other cases
* other issues may be very longstanding or familiar ones
* lawyers may be willing to bring cases with different degrees of novelty (e.g. relying entirely on an untested theory, or not!), and with different likelihoods of success
* legal standards will often have many different elements, and one party may lose under a standard even though it met most of the elements (but not all of them)
All of these are more complex from the natural impulse to say "hooray, the court made a decision in favor of the people I think are the good guys!" or "boo, the court made a decision in favor of the people I think are the bad guys!".
https://classes.matthewjbrown.net/teaching-files/philtech/be...
I was always struck that one of the letters in opposition to Berry's view was written by Nathaniel Borenstein, the co-inventor of MIME.
It was an odd experience for me because it was coming from such a different worldview that I generally felt I couldn't relate to what Berry was saying at all. (I could contrast that with some of Cliff Stoll's writings about his skepticism of computers, which are always coming from a culturally familiar place and are at least readily comprehensible for me.)
I also have a book Berry wrote as a rejoinder to E. O. Wilson's Consilience (called Life is a Miracle). I put the two next to each other on my bookshelf!