I started working on cryptography as a way to do something more practical than pure mathematics. Waaaaaaay back in 1985 I discovered the Crypto conference in Santa Barbara at UCSB, and I was enthralled because I could interact with computer scientists, electrical engineers, business people, and other mathematicians on a subject that seemed to make [...]
Entries Tagged as 'security'
The Annual Pilgrimage
August 15th, 2008 ·
The birthday of spam
May 2nd, 2008 ·
Sadly, today is the 30th birthday of spam. I seem to remember that you should never trust anyone over 30. Email providers are largely distinguished today by their ability to accurately filter out spam. There is a huge of amount of absolute crap that is sent, but most of this is easy to handle. The [...]
Tags: security · The internet
When hackers have offspring
March 27th, 2008 · 1 Comment
Disclaimer: this is unrelated to my own child (I think) I recently came across the following cartoon, which is a joke that is so obscure that few people will get it (you need to know what sql injection attacks are). Still, if Frank Zappa could name his daughter “Moon Unit” (sister of Dweezil), and David [...]
Tags: Amusements · security
PageRank as economic utility function
February 28th, 2008 ·
I’ve written in the past about the interpretation of the PageRank probability distribution as an economic utility function. Recall that one interpretation is PageRank(url) = probability that a random surfer arrives at the url. This can be used to estimating monetary value for advertising on the page, because it is correlated to the number of [...]
Tags: Research · security · The internet