Even though EBT would have probably been the only person to appreciate this, I though I'd post anyway, since it was on my mind.

I was just reading about the so-called "Birthday attack" on Wikipedia earlier today over lunch. I personally found it quite interesting.

This is an attack on hash/one-way encryption algorithms named after the famous birthday trick (you've done it before -- ask everybody in a room of thirty or so people their birthdays, and its likely there'll be a duplicate, or a "collision"). One-way encryption produces a fixed-length (some number of digits) hash-key for any given datum. Since the hash-key is of some fixed length and the data is not necessarily of a given length (likely being larger than the hash key), "collisions" inevitably occur, where two different data produce the same hash when encrypted. The birthday attack relies on these collisions to possibly pass some data (e.g. a digital signature) as something other than it is.

You can read more on Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_attack
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http://www.againstmonopoly.org/ http://www.maplight.org/ http://change-congress.org/

Wow. I actually pretty much understood that. And it was interesting.
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"Murdered by pirates is good!"

"Actors. Act-or. Act, or else." -Myself

I didn't even attempt it. lol

You should have. It was interesting, and it gave my brain a little exercise.
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"Murdered by pirates is good!"

"Actors. Act-or. Act, or else." -Myself

There's no chance. School hasn't started yet.

Once it does, I'll still avoid any extraeneous thinking about math. I have Calculus four days a week at 8:15 (for the third term in a row. WHy can't they make the Sociology majors suffer? They don't have to think in class anyway.)

Ouch!
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"Murdered by pirates is good!"

"Actors. Act-or. Act, or else." -Myself

Dude that's sweet!
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"I'm out of it for a little while, and everybody gets delusions of grandeur."

I'm sorry, I was replying to the topic (ie, your first post), not the random conversation above us.
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"I'm out of it for a little while, and everybody gets delusions of grandeur."

Yay posts from 2 years ago!

Yeah, I don't know why nobody else appreciates math. It's amazing! And that actually is really interesting. If anyone doesn't understand the math, (or because none of you understand the math?) at least read the "Digital signature susceptibility" section. That is, if you didn't read it... 2 years ago... Yeah...

So... I am thinking of going into cryptography, that would be really fun.
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5 minutes a day...

You should seriously go into crypto. My brother is working on his PhD in cryptography / computer science in fact, and is doing all sorts of totally sweet research in that field.

My only advice for you is to make sure that the cryptography you go into is not a cryptographic hash, or else you may never come out...
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http://www.againstmonopoly.org/ http://www.maplight.org/ http://change-congress.org/

So the first time I read this I understood most of it, but after learning about hashing last week in my Data Structures class, this makes even more sense.
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5 minutes a day...

Ah, are you in a CS data structures class now? Cool. That and an intro to programming class are probably the two fundamental classes for useful programming skills.

And most of it being the article, or my awesome joke in the previous post?
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http://www.againstmonopoly.org/ http://www.maplight.org/ http://change-congress.org/

"Most of it" referred to the article. And maybe your joke. But yeah.

And yeah, I took an intro to programming class and data structures class over the summer. It was fun. I'm probably going to minor in CS, but I still am not sure.
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5 minutes a day...