it feels incredibly trippy to be reading about quantum physicists (an evil science) using group theory (a lovely beautiful field misused by the horrors) to do just their normal average everyday sort of evil as opposed to the horrors
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@hipsterelectron I am an evil scientist muahhahahaha
@jackielovescompchem32 you can do evil science without being evil. but you can also be evil without being bad
@jackielovescompchem32 i like lenstra's and schoof's papers a lot even if they specifically focus on factoring methods and the hellman paper where he advises the use of a prime q = 2p + 1 was also doing some evil math but it was necessary to demonstrate the good math
@jackielovescompchem32 i wonder whether/how slight deviations from periodic standing waves might manifest in quasiperiodic or intermittently high-period behavior. i suppose that would largely agree with the periodic-as-discrete view by e.g. briefly introducing the next largest prime factor
so i'm learning that neural nets are also precisely the kind of thing you would create to calculate discrete logs
also learning that the guy stallman fell over himself to defend against any allegation was potentially the most average MIT "AI" loser ever
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Minsky
While working at Bell Labs in 1952, Minsky proposed a design for a useless machine he called the "ultimate machine". When switched on, a device emerges from it to switch it back off. Claude Shannon, Minsky's mentor at the time, built the first working prototype.
@hipsterelectron
I wanted to defend the Useless Box, but I'll take “Death of the Author” for $100.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Minsky#Association_with_Jeffrey_Epstein
@dzwiedziu i cannot possibly express enough that this is a frighteningly recurrent theme among evil cryptographers
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@hipsterelectron I’m learning a lot about John McCarthy lately and it’s really not looking good for the “you can’t say all AI is bad” people
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_Neural_Analog_Reinforcement_Calculator
hmmmmm
Prompted by a letter from Minsky, George Armitage Miller gathered the funding (a few thousand dollars) for the project from the Office of Naval Research of the U.S. Department of Defense in the summer of 1951 with the work to be carried out by Minsky, who was then a graduate student in mathematics at Princeton University.
GRADUATE STUDENT IN MATHEMATICS AT PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
like this is so much more likely to be a cryptanalytic hardware module. in 1951???? that was barely out of world war 2. i don't know why that would need to be hidden
this is from the princeton dean in question and he specifically said einstein disproved this prof's theory about planetary orbits like that was einstein's fault. princeton is so bad dude this is like a parody
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He was an expert in mass spectrometry by which isotopes of an element could be separated according to their mass but not by any chemical means as they are chemically identical. A typical mass spectrometer consists first of a source in which the sample is ionized so that it has a charge and can be accelerated to form a beam. This beam is directed into a perpendicular magnetic field, which makes the constituent particles move in a circular path. The radius of the circle depends on the particle mass, so that the lighter ones move in a smaller circle than the heavier ones and are thereby separated.
he goes into this incredibly lengthy description of all the parts of the mass spectrometer except the one i care about which are the mechanisms to record ion counts since that's the one that lies to you and only returns an opaque statistical estimation
you can't possibly pretend to be a physicist and act like the part where it counts single fucking electrons isn't the coolest shit ever. we were going to start writing our own analyses at the cancer lab if we were able to get access to the counters
oh he made a corporation selling mass spectrometers no wonder he wouldn't mention that bit
he studiously avoids ever explaining any of the electron/ion measurement devices. what a strange quirk
oh my god dude this is in the new yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1981/12/14/a-i
I have known Minsky for more than thirty years. When I first met him, in the late nineteen-forties, at Harvard, it was not entirely clear what his major academic field was—or, perhaps, what it wasn’t. He was taking courses in musical composition with the composer Irving Fine. Although he was an undergraduate, he had his own laboratories—one in the psychology department and one in the biology department—and he was writing what turned out to be a brilliant and original senior mathematics thesis on a problem in topology.
i can't fucking believe this i didn't think he would actually be so radioactively obviously doing evil mathematics
i'm gonna find his thesis
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/321328.321337?download=true
Unrecognizable Sets of Numbers (1966)
and he literally cites our boy rabin too
The technique described in this note enables one to show that certain sets cannot be recognized by finite state automata
GOD FUCKING DAMN IT IS THAT WHY AUTOMATA THEORY SUCKS TOO
We consider here only the binary representation, so as to avoid pompous statements, but the same results can be obtained for any radix by changing all 2’s to r’s in the sequel. We warn readers not to confuse the statement that the primes written in binary form are not a regular set with the trivial statement that the set of strings of prime length is not regular.
this is just the discrete log problem?????
If
a_nis of odd length,2k+1, it has the forma_n = b_n 2^{k+1] + d 2^k + b_n, wheredis0or1.
this also gives the q = 2p + 1 relation??? this is also an actual analysis of the appropriateness of discrete log as a CSPRNG???
@hipsterelectron I mean... the whole CS base curriculum kinda sucks. to me, one main reason is that we do "CS" rather than "informatics" in the first place.
@promovicz well i recently learned that all of the people i hate who literally without exaggeration work for the israeli genocide apparatus (chomsky working for MIT means he is very much included, MIT is the problem) were all central to the development of "formal languages" as a field. it makes perfect sense how i was able to develop completely novel work without any prior expertise
@promovicz i fervently believe there was a concerted effort to deskill and disengage academic study in operating system development (worldwide!!!) after the late 90s and most certainly to do the same for cryptography and other forms of mathematics since well before then (it began around the late 70s but really took shape in the 80s with ECC created soon after RSA, because modular exponentiation alone was in act too powerful and easy to understand). but i'm actually more concerned about basic symmetric cryptography. NIST limiting AES to 128-bit block size while varying key size was an incredibly dirty trick and they knew it
@promovicz and of course this means parsing must be denigrated and discarded as a field of investigation or research, which means compilers and programming languages pass that on to their users, and it means vulnerabilities, everywhere, because parsing is definitionally the system's boundary with external input.
@promovicz there's very much a reason the turing machine employs a tape, and it's because it was expected to recieve input, and process it, and produce output, and this was supposed to go to the user. and mark rabin (who called dibs on formal languages, and cryptography earlier) would strike the first gruesome and contemptuous blow against the turing machine, with extreme prejudice
@hipsterelectron i would love to know the reason for TM construction "with tapes", or good modern arguments for the choice, because i've been wondering.
for my own models, i'm undecided whether input/output memory should be separate, or just seen as the same memory with different constraints on the in/out side.
@promovicz it's the simplest general model. the framing that a turing machine's purpose is to transform the tape is completely fucked. that's not the point at all. the point is that you have mutable state, some of which you can set aside, and other sections that can grow freely. the restrictive nature of the single tape works specifically for problems that work like implicit graph traversals. you can and should add on whatever else you want. a stack or two is always a good idea (although two stacks is really more useful for things that do parse strings)
@promovicz the problem comes when you start handwaving away logarithmic factors for larger machines and processes. in many cases you may have a problem that you can verify won't grow in memory past a certain amount: modular exponentiation in the forward direction is an example where the turing machine makes it excessively simple to make strong claims about runtime, particularly since bignum arithmetic conforms so naturally to the tape that moves one at a time.
you should not be feeling like the turing machine constrains you. make a better model if it works. you can do that too. the turing undecidability paper was to prove undecidability exists, similarly to how modular exponentiation is almost a kind of joke to demonstrate one-way functions (mostly) exist (i need to do more group theory to maintain safety everywhere).
hellman claims the choice of q = 2p + 1 is specifically to trade off between exponential computation and exponential memory. i haven't found a good proof for this yet, but the idea deeply compels me. you can make the enemy dance for you. they can't touch you.
@hipsterelectron yes - i don't feel constrained by the Turing model at all, because we have a reasonable understanding of its equivalences (imo). my open question on "programs as transforms" has its origins in information theory, and the idea that programs don't necessarily answer/solve specific problems (which is a traditional premise i'm poking at).
@promovicz i promise i'm not hating on you personally but i absolutely fucking hate the word information theory it just makes me too pissed off to use about my own work anymore. reading this paper about how much simpler kolmogorov's model had been for decades with painstaking work to piece together the pieces bell labs shit out was so important to me https://projecteuclid.org/ebooks/berkeley-symposium-on-mathematical-statistics-and-probability/Proceedings-of-the-Fourth-Berkeley-Symposium-on-Mathematical-Statistics-and/chapter/Mathematical-Problems-in-the-Shannon-Theory-of-Optimal-Coding-of/bsmsp/1200512168.pdf
@hipsterelectron *swoops file to ePaper tablet* - yes, i see the point that it's an unclear term, and it gets unseemly when discussing non-determinism in my discrete case. it also seems incomplete/incoherent when dealing with non-discrete mathematical objects.
i could maybe say "discrete information metrics"? have an idea?
@promovicz oh it's not about clarity, the word is clear enough. my issue with it is the misuse of it for half a century by bell labs and IBM and EVERYONE WHO WANTS TO MAKE A FILESYSTEM BECAUSE THEY LOVE HAVING POWER OVER OTHERS AND NOT SEMANTIC GUARANTEES!
@promovicz i also don't believe discrete is fully capacious
@promovicz i have heard somewhat convincing arguments (from kolmogorov, and another coding theory paper i have somewhere) that continuous information is often more capacious than the discrete.
i would say discrete is an appropriate representation of finite and fully reproducible capacity/memory.
to me, the thing being measured/tested/implicitly employed to send messages tends to take the form of a continuous representation. this may be more of a bias about keeping an open mind/etc, but i also believe it's necessary for any system existing in a physical universe with the arrow of time.
for example, while double ratchet does avoid requiring any auxiliary messaging back and forth to maintain chain state (good, since it's not forced to produce a known-plaintext attack), that also means the two users can be progressively starved of responses during an active denial of service, while continuing to generate new chain keys without any new external randomness from the expected DH inputs!
furthermore (and this is something i want to work with dr. sasha boldyreva on), the diffie-hellman secret being tied precisely to a single message (even without DoS/starvation in play) also means you can't "prepare" or "stock up". and it also means an attacker knows the exact times when you'll refresh your chain (i.e. when to influence your incoming or outgoing data/RNG). with that in mind, we might like instead to treat the diffie-hellman shared secrets not quite as discrete and ephemeral inputs, but as a mutual storehouse we can refer to, along with our own RNG to select from this.
this would entail thinking a lot harder about whether it would make it easier for one participant to sabotage the other, but the continuous representation is i think the right one in this case!
