It was Singh's book got me interested in crypto when I read it in 9th grade, but it really made me smile to revisit this!
Since leaving GCHQ, the NSA, and a hedge fund, Nick works as a genetic anthropologist at the Broad Institute. Last year I had the distinct pleasure of haranguing Nick Patterson with all manner of technical questions, mostly with regards to Hidden Markov Models. He never did mention his role in public-key cryptography. The NYTimes did a bio on him a few years back, it's a great read about an amazing person and intellectual giant.
Simon Singh: It would have meant that whenever somebody
typed “Simon Singh” into a Web search, it would say,
“science journalist found guilty of libel.” People could
dismiss anything I’d ever written about alternative
medicine. But more important, it would have implied that
there is some validity to these claims that chiropractic
can help with things like asthma and colic. And that
would have an impact on parents and their children. Faced
with that, I couldn’t apologize. If you’ve written
something that you believe is true, and if you can afford
to defend it, then you’ve got to defend it.
This http://www.relfe.com/media_can_legally_lie.html I think turns it on its head. Its trajectory was quite the opposite of Singh's libel lawsuit. Zenger side of Atlantic isn't any rosier.
It was established that, deliberate falsification of the news (by Fox) is the agency's legal right, and so is firing reporters not willing to lie on purpose (about health effects).
Law totally beats me. Thankfully I am not a lawyer.
I wonder if Clifford Cocks was the inspiration for the passage in Neal Stephenson's book Cryptonomicon, where the rookie NSA employee finds the (zeta?) function that is seeded with the word "COMSTOCK"? Either way, the real history of cryptography is often just as interesting as the fiction written about it.
Definitely. And the "rookie solves a seemingly impossible math problem without knowing it's supposed to be difficult" is a pretty common archetype, but it seemed like enough details matched that maybe there was a connection.
Cocks did not fully appreciate the significance of his discovery. He was unaware of the fact that GCHQ's brightest minds had been struggling with the problem for three years, and had no idea that he had made one of the most important cryptographic breakthroughs of the century. Cocks's naivety may have been part of the reason for his success, allowing him to attack the problem with confidence, rather than timidly prodding at it.
-- Exhibit B --
In 1951, David A. Huffman [...] hit upon the idea of using a frequency-sorted binary tree and quickly proved this method the most efficient. In doing so, the student outdid his professor, who had worked with information theory inventor Claude Shannon to develop a similar code.
--
In other words, as we can clearly see here, it pays to be ignorant :-)
I was at Cocks' talk, which was held, appropriately enough, at Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing and others cracked Nazi Enigma codes. It is really worth a visit if you are in London and have a day to travel. Whit Diffie also shared with me some fascinating stories about his strange relationship with James Ellis, his counterpart in the classifed shadow world.
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[ 0.30 ms ] story [ 46.2 ms ] threadSince leaving GCHQ, the NSA, and a hedge fund, Nick works as a genetic anthropologist at the Broad Institute. Last year I had the distinct pleasure of haranguing Nick Patterson with all manner of technical questions, mostly with regards to Hidden Markov Models. He never did mention his role in public-key cryptography. The NYTimes did a bio on him a few years back, it's a great read about an amazing person and intellectual giant.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/12/science/12prof.html http://www.broadinstitute.org/blog/five-questions-nick-patte...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=380332
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=498494
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1646727
He's also a nice guy, and says nice things about my presentations.
It was established that, deliberate falsification of the news (by Fox) is the agency's legal right, and so is firing reporters not willing to lie on purpose (about health effects).
Law totally beats me. Thankfully I am not a lawyer.
http://cryptome.org.nyud.net/ukpk-alt.htm
-- Exhibit A --
Cocks did not fully appreciate the significance of his discovery. He was unaware of the fact that GCHQ's brightest minds had been struggling with the problem for three years, and had no idea that he had made one of the most important cryptographic breakthroughs of the century. Cocks's naivety may have been part of the reason for his success, allowing him to attack the problem with confidence, rather than timidly prodding at it.
-- Exhibit B --
In 1951, David A. Huffman [...] hit upon the idea of using a frequency-sorted binary tree and quickly proved this method the most efficient. In doing so, the student outdid his professor, who had worked with information theory inventor Claude Shannon to develop a similar code.
--
In other words, as we can clearly see here, it pays to be ignorant :-)
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.04/crypto_pr.html
I was at Cocks' talk, which was held, appropriately enough, at Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing and others cracked Nazi Enigma codes. It is really worth a visit if you are in London and have a day to travel. Whit Diffie also shared with me some fascinating stories about his strange relationship with James Ellis, his counterpart in the classifed shadow world.