SirMarth01 - Slashdot User

Comment Re:links to NIST (Score 2) 134

by SirMarth01 on Tuesday December 25, 2012 @05:31PM (#42390137) Attached to: BLAKE2 Claims Faster Hashing Than SHA-3, SHA-2 and MD5

NIST's comments on their selection of Keccak to be SHA-3: (PDF)

Additionally, KECCAK complements the existing SHA-2 family of hash algorithms well. NIST remains confident in the security of SHA-2 which is now widely implemented, and the SHA-2 hash algorithms will continue to be used for the foreseeable future, as indicated in the NIST hash policy statement. One benefit that KECCAK offers as the SHA-3 winner is its difference in design and implementation properties from that of SHA-2. It seems very unlikely that a single new cryptanalytic attack or approach could threaten both algorithms. Similarly, the very different implementation properties of the two algorithms will allow future application and protocol designers greater flexibility in finding one of the two hash algorithms that fits well with their requirements.

So, Keccak wasn't necessarily chosen because it was "superior" to the other finalists (note that it's slow when implemented in software, especially in comparison to the other finalists), but because it was different enough that, should SHA-2 be found to be fundamentally broken, SHA-3 should remain unaffected.

An optimized version of BLAKE would be useful because it can run faster than SHA-3 in software, while also being (theoretically) stronger than SHA-2 (or other older algorithms).

Mind you, I'm not an expert in cryptography; regardless, it probably wouldn't be the greatest choice to use BLAKE2 right away. It's still not been held up to the level of scrutiny that something like SHA-2 has. (Although I'm certain that being a finalist has helped it come under much closer scrutiny than if it hadn't been one.)

As for why a fast cryptographically secure hash function is desirable, others have already answered that question better than I can.

Comment Re:Too late (Score 1) 480

by SirMarth01 on Friday November 16, 2012 @09:19PM (#42008853) Attached to: German City Says OpenOffice Shortcomings Are Forcing It Back To Microsoft

Or like Google Chrome 5 or Firefox 3.6.

The Unity shell hadn't been introduced to Ubuntu at that point, either. GNOME 3 was still about a year away.

The most recent version of Android at the time was 2.2.

Two-and-a-half years is a pretty significant amount of time in terms of software development.

Comment Re:And then you circle back around (Score 1) 505

by SirMarth01 on Monday July 23, 2012 @09:46AM (#40735749) Attached to: Finding Fault With Anti-Fracking Science Claims

Or, as The Political Compass divides the axes (the proper plural of "axis"), it's simply labeled Left/Right and Authoritarian/Libertarian.

There are other charts with different names for the axes, but they all amount to the same idea. It doesn't really matter how you label the axes; it's far more important that the distinction is made clear: there's a difference between a person's political standing on personal freedoms and economic structure.

Submission + - Did the Titanic Sink Due to an Optical Illusion?

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens writes

on Sunday March 04, 2012 @04:52AM

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "According to new research by British historian Tim Maltin, records by several ships in the area where the Titanic sank show atmospheric conditions were ripe for super refraction, a bending of light that caused a false horizon that concealed the iceberg that sank the Titanic in a mirage layer preventing the Titanic’s lookouts from seeing the iceberg in time to avoid collision. According to the new theory, Titanic was sailing from Gulf Stream waters into the frigid Labrador Current, where the air column was cooling from the bottom up, creating a thermal inversion with layers of cold air below layers of warmer air creating a superior mirage. The theory also explains why the freighter Californian was unable to identify the Titanic on the moonless night because even though the Titanic sailed into the Californian’s view, it appeared too small to be the great ocean liner. The abnormally stratified air may also have disrupted signals sent by the Titanic by Morse Lamp to the California to no avail. This is not the first time atmospheric conditions have been postulated as a factor in the disaster that took 1,517 lives. An investigation in 1992 by the British government's Marine Accident Investigation Branch also suggested that super refraction may have played a role in the disaster (PDF See page 13), but that possibility went unexplored until Maltin mined weather records, survivors’ testimony and long-forgotten ships’ logs."

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