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Comment Re:RSA = out of date (Score 1) 282

Whoops, was working from memory and it has been a looong time. DH key exchange is indeed completely different to what I said above - as you've said it is an alternative way to set up a secret channel. Certifying trust on a public key is indeed the important issue, and solved in a different way.

I'm guessing the alternative issues on IBE are the need to trust the CA, which puts it roughly in the same level of messiness as using digital signatures on public keys anyway. Is that Matt Palmer at the National Archive?

Comment Re:RSA = out of date (Score 1) 282

What you have described is true when both parties hold the relevant keys, and they believe that the keys have not been compromised - this is when I can trust that I really have your public key and not one substituted by an adversary. To solve this problem of key distribution the DH key exchange algorithm is normally used, and this relies on the hardness of discrete logs. If the DH problem is weak (which now appears to be the case) then RSA would be borken in the sense that you could not exchange keys to use it.

Comment Re:What about new talent? (Score 1) 1501

If you do not have the knowledge to express that you are right and they are wrong, then how do you know that you are?

What you have written comes across as "but can't we all be inclusive and respect each others feelings so that I can play too". It really isn't about that - either you know your stuff so that you can explain why you are right on an issue, or you do not. Ultimately most engineers do not want to get sucked into "did everybody get included and take part" as it almost always destroys "was this the best result we could make".

Comment Re:Buzzword-heavy (Score 1) 54

Your phrasing is kind of hard to parse - I actually can't tell if you are agreeing with what I wrote, or arguing in a passive-aggressive way. This implies that I have had too many arguments with passive aggressive people recently and I need to learn to read things more neutrally again. But yes, that is what I was pointing out: tweaking the frequency in the fast sequential part is still covered by Amdahl's law, contrary to their wild hyperbole.

Comment Re:Buzzword-heavy (Score 2) 54

How dare you criticise the author - he is a physicist and he has stooped to coming and telling us computer science types how to do it properly!

There is a deeply appropriate xkcd but I cannot be bothered to find it. Decoding the garbage in the pcworld story tell us that he is going to break Amdahl's Law by dynamically partitioning the workload between a fast single threaded processor and many slower parallel processors. I would guess that my failing to make a fair comparison they can claim that the portion running under the boosted clock somehow beats the bounds predicted by Amdahl's law. Sadly it does not as the law is worded in the proportion of the code that can be executed on the parallel architecture.

It is quite possible that much of the hyperbole was added as sales pitch, which is a little unfortunate as the dynamic partitioning and the toolchain support are far more interesting anyway.

Comment Re:themes. (Score 2) 262

How? I've got a Mac mini plugged into a 40" TV and changing font sizes doesn't fix the size of non textual buttons, default image sizes, hit-zone size around window borders, scroll bars or any of the other UI elements that are not tied to the font size.

Comment Re:Transactional Memory support (Score 1) 189

Are you assuming that all programmer are working on simple 1:1 transformations of data? It is impossible to encode anything with a summation term without using a gather operation. If there is a projective transformation in the algorithm (i.e. a change of representation onto different axes / number of dimensions) then it is impossible to encode efficiently without a scatter. Perhaps there are more algorithms out there that are suitable for vector architectures that you are familiar with?

Comment Re:Not too long until an iceberg attack is reveale (Score 5, Insightful) 192

The real key here is that there is no advantage to the device at all.

In the cryptographic protocol that the authors (all physicists) believe to be novel, but which every cryptographer is aware of:
1. The authors have a perfectly secure channel (separate from the one established in the protocol).
2. They exchange as much information over that channel as the device stores.
3. The later established channel can only use that number of bits.

For real excitement they xor together their OTPs. Sorry guys but this is called a pre-shared key and the crypto world is quite aware of it. Good luck with the window dressing getting you past the PC of a physics venue.

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