CryptoDox: Encyclopedia on Cryptography & Info 47
xorgb writes "CryptoDox is an online encyclopedia on Cryptography and Information Security. The data is being made available under the GNU Free Documentation License. The site is powered by MediaWiki and in the few months that it has been online it has got some good articles on the basics of cryptography. It is currently looking out for contributors to enhance its database of articles. Check it out!"
PGP Decryption key (Score:1)
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Inferior (Score:1, Insightful)
- too many not found errors
- slow db query
- indentical wikipedia article superior
- only enough information to whet appetite for advertised books
- lame (as in crippled)
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Subject to US Export restrictions [wikipedia.org]. Funny thing is, they expired a few years ago...
Planning to submit? (Score:5, Informative)
The project in the article is rather limited, conflicts with other worthy projects, and made me feel that I was browsing the amazon cryptography book section, what with all the amazon adverts on it.
Compatible licensing means room for both (Score:4, Insightful)
I would hope that the CryptoDox people would at least start by using what's been written in Wikipedia, and that Wikipedians would feel free to borrow back improved content that was worked on at CryptoDox.
I think this is similar to the greater argument between a totally open, encyclopediac-style information source, and a more specialized source with slightly higher barriers to entry. (Not an 'expert system' per se, but just because it's dedicated to a particular topic, it means that only people interested in that topic will probably join.) I think there's room for both, and by using compatible licenses, both can benefit.
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Cryptodox, however, is not a viable alternative to Wikipedia.
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To the second part of your comment, I agree, and never meant to imply otherwise. Information certainly is easier to access when it's all in one place. However, and what I was questioning earlier, is whether that's the best way for it to be created.
I think that infor
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Neal wouldn't let them use 'Cryptonomicon'? (Score:2)
I wonder why they didn't go for the obvious coinage-- the fictional Cryptonomicon was supposed to be a collection of crypto wisdom, much as the Necronomicon was supposedly Lovecraft's book of occult and death.
Always made me wonder... (Score:2)
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Cryptographic hashes and public key signatures do exactly that. Hashes ensure the integrity of messages, and signatures authenticate them.
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Short answer: Yes (Score:2)
Even longer answer: There is a mathematical problem, called "The Byzantine General's Problem", which asks a similarish question: "If there are N people in a group, and M of them corrupt any communication that takes place, what is the smallest ratio of honest people to corrupt people that would allow accurate communication to take place?" This is very closely related to crytography and secure comunications. A variant of this problem is used to describe how you would divide a key into fra
Security implies access (Score:3, Funny)
Did anybody bother to check that link? (Score:2)
This is the result of visiting http://www.cryptodox.com/ [cryptodox.com] which is the link given in the article. Either none of you who are commenting have bothered to check that site (big surprise huh), or the site has just recently decided to pull its index page, perhaps as a result of being slashdotted.
Either way, I find it hard to believe that no one else has noticed this.
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http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/8683271eb1a7b9c4
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Must...ban...info...arrgh! (Score:2)
Why Is This Article On Slashdot? (Score:3, Informative)
Last week we had advisories from the OpenSSL project and the Mozilla team that the two most popular open-source implementations of RSA, probably accounting for the majority of all deployed RSA code, were so badly broken that an arbitrary attacker could generate a valid SSL certificate for Wells Fargo offline and sell it.
This got no coverage on Slashdot. Ok, fine. Maybe it's a bit esoteric.
Today, an amateur wiki site on cryptography, with (apparently) fewer articles than even the Wikipedia crypto collection, does get coverage.
What am I missing here?
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I think these are just signs that Slashdot has grown to where the left hand knows not what the right hand is doing.
Now sit back and watch while both of us are modded "Offtopic" into oblivion, even though there is no other place to discuss these things.
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I'd just like to point out that when you said, "with (apparently) fewer articles than even the Wikipedia crypto collection", that pretty much every comparable work has fewer articles than the Wikipedia crypto collection; Wikipedia has over a thousand articles on the subject. Now, I'll grant you that the majority are pretty poor, but that's twice as much any other crypto encyclopedia (not that there's a
WikiProject Cryptography (Score:4, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProjec
CryptoDox seems to be doing the same thing: creating an encyclopedia about cryptography using MediaWiki. To be honest, I don't really understand why this guy wants to do it outside of Wikipedia -- I've asked him, but he's never given any reason for it . Still, he's quite welcome to do what he likes, of course, and since he's now using the GFDL (he was using Creative Commons Non-Commercial last week), we can copy material back and forth between Wikipedia and CryptoDox. So, if you're into crypto and fancy helping out, feel free get involved with either project -- it's a win for both.
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It's the same case here - if you're looking for info on cryptography, and weren't already knowledgeable that wikipedia had a good crypto project going, you'd probably look for a website that was specifically about disseminating info about cryptography. It's importa
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Sure, but most people would start with a Google search:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=cryptograph y [google.co.uk]
First result is a Wikipedia article.
I'm all for getting information out to the greatest amount of people, I just don't think that rebuilding a section of Wikipedia in a separate location (and from scratch) is a particularly good way of doing that.