That, exactly, was the question. The research paper is the answer.

It is incredibly difficult to get a proper representative sample online, so some self-selection effects will usually be there. This is a better selection than using a topic-specific website.

Thank you. I've wanted to run an experiment like this for years, but couldn't figure out to get a good sample audience.

The result is completely non-surprising. Security Awareness training is 90% pointless waste of money, and I regularily make enemies at conferences when I say it, because there's a ton of money in this snake oil, mostly because you can repeat it ad infinitum, once you've sold a client you can do one every year or twice a year or even get a whole "ongoing awareness process" going.

There are a big number of problems with the whole thing, most of them more psychological than technical. But both from the experience of people doing social engineering pentesting and from empirical data on actual breaches, it is clear that training or not makes not very much difference. Most companies would be a lot better off with extreme basic training to a) satisfy regulatory requirements and b) give the employees the absolute essentials, basically the IT security equivalent of "don't look into laser with remaining eye". Everything beyond that is a waste of money.

If you want help convincing your boss, CISO, etc. to spend that money on something that actually has an effect, and you're in Europe, let me know. Consulting companies out of instead of into pointless expenditures is great fun.

1: Talk to a notary.

2: Digital methods can and will fail. Either on your end or because the recipient doesn't know how to use them properly.

Talk to a notary. These people have been handing over sensitive information about bank accounts, secret swiss safe deposit boxes and other stuff from one generation to the next for centuries, and you have a human who can work around any failures.

Sure, you can find 10 possible digital solutions on the pages of Applied Cryptography, but... goto 2

throw new Exception("you failed to follow the goto");

Someone has read too much Mage: The Ascension ;-)

I do not agree that the question is difficult.

I do agree that a lot of people consider it difficult, because they are trapped in category mistakes and cannot properly seperate their levels of abstraction.

Once you get that right, it isn't all that hard anymore. You just need to go beyond the word, into meaning. What is it, exactly, that you mean by the word "algorithm"? Is it

a) the particular formula in particular mathematical notation?
b) the operations described by that formula?
c) the process described by those operations?

Looks like someone needs to learn that ad hominem attacks do not an argument make. :-)

seriously, slashdot ?

It's 2014, not 1994. Fucking get some Unicode support.

From that page:
Although most mathematicians and physicists (and many philosophers) would accept the statement "mathematics is a language", [...bla bla... it's not as simple, but the more we think about it... ] that the distinction between mathematical language and natural language may not be as great as it seems.

There's actually a more specific article right on WP, but as always, never believe anything you read on WP without checking it against other sources.

You do realize that these two things are not nearly equivalent, yes?

Finding if a combination of words satisfies all semantical and grammatical requirements is not the same as verifying if some combination of symbols has been published before, no matter which language you talk about.

Math certainly is a very special language in that it strictly obeys the rules of logic, and thus can be used to derive and formulate proofs in such a clear and unambigious way that computers can be used for the purpose. I would certainly not say it's a language like English or Spanish.

If you need help to bridge the gap, think about computer and other functional languages. They inhabit the space between mathematics and human languages and have elements of both.

You make the exact category mistake that I wrote about in my original post. You confuse the word "Russia" with the physical area on the planet that we describe with that word. Of course the land area with all its rivers and lakes and mountains exists independently. But it is not "Russia" until someone creates the English language and invents this word to describe it (or, if you want, until someone invents Russian and invents the word ÐоÑÑÐÑ).

Likewise, the fact that you have 2 stones in your hand if you have 1 stone in it and then put another stone into it as well is an objective fact. 1+1=2 is mathematics and was invented. Other ways of describing the same fact are imagineable, just like names for countries are pretty much arbitrary combinations of sounds.

You mean like Latin didn't have a word for computer or laser or neutron star?

Because words are added to languages when they are needed. Languages are not created in the "a designer sits down and invents it" sense, but in the sense of continuous improvement.

Really? Maybe it's because the answer is so simple, no one serious has bothered tackling it.

Mathematics is a language. As such, it is created.

The things that mathematics describes are where it gets interesting. Much like in other languages, you have tangible things (easily verified as existing independent of the language), intangible things (dreams, emotions, forces) that are generally accepted as existing independent of language. And then you have two classes of things that are not entirely independent.

You have categories or groups. "Animal" is not an intangible thing, because it doesn't describe anything that actually exists, it is a term for a collection of things that exist. The term itself is semantics, but most categories have an objective component that exists independent of language.

The final category is pure language constructs. Rhymes, sentences, grammar, poems, etc. - while you can argue that they are linked to some biological or neurological element of human nature, a rhyme or a poem is very much a language construct and does neither describe a thing nor a group of things, it's a self-referential language construct.

And if you look closely, you find the same in mathematics.

ROTFL. Maybe in an article about a porn star or manga character. Even articles about entire countries are largely edited by less than a dozen people. On more specific topics that require expertise, there are many pages that have two or three editors. Many articles are so much pets of individual editors that even spelling corrections get reverted - a quite common complaint of casual WP editors.

Once more, we've believed in this "enough eyeballs" shit in Open Source software for many years, and Heartbleed was a rude awakening, but by far not the only or first case proving it wrong.

I thought I had made it very clear in my first post that this is from research done on how it could be done. If I were actually working in this field, I certainly wouldn't be posting my methods on /. would I?

Your faith in humanity is large. Mine not. Larger stunts have been pulled in plain sight of the public and nobody so much as shrugged.

fix:
Life can exist because the entropy reduction it accomplishes is paid for by increasing entropy elsewhere.

sorry.

When your assumption is wrong, all of your argument is bullshit, so I'll ignore everything after this because it is a flat out lie.

The 2nd law of thermodynamics actually states that the entropy in an isolated system never decreases.

Keyword being "isolated system". You can absolutely decrease entropy within parts of a system. In fact, life is pretty much a system for reducing entropy locally. But here's the catch: Life requires energy input from the outside. Sunlight for plants, food for animals, to put it simply. That's just a fancy term for entropy exchange. Life can exist because the entropy reduction it accomplishes is paid for by decreasing entropy elsewhere. Breaking down your food accomplishes that for you.

So, please fix your understanding of entropy and then try again. Your argument is false because you ignore an important part of the law. That's like leaving out parts of the bible and concluding that "you shall murder your neighbor" is part of the 10 commandments. Uh... yeah... those words are in there, in that order, but there are some other words in there are well which kind of change the overal meaning.