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"The authors are well-known theory researchers at a major university, not NSA double-agents." I don't understand. Isn't this like the family of someone accuse
by dave2000 10y ago
"The authors are well-known theory researchers at a major university, not NSA double-agents."
I don't understand. Isn't this like the family of someone accused of spying saying "he's not a spy, he's a teacher"?
- swordswinger12 10y agoDave Zuckerman has been doing theoretical CS research for about twenty-five years. Are you saying you think it's likely that either (a) he was an NSA double agent this whole time, or (b) he recently started doing clandestine work for the NSA inserting backdoors into abstract theoretical results about Ramsey graphs and two-source extractors?
- dave2000 10y agoI'm not saying anything about this particular person; just amused as to people's attitudes towards people who might be engaged in secret work on behalf of a government, as if detecting such a person is straightforward, or that people have "spy" on their passport, etc. If you look at the history of spying, leakers and double agents you can see people do it for all sorts of reasons; money, blackmail, belief that your country is doing something wrong or that you need to help your country defeat another country's ideology etc.
- mywittyname 10y agoI think the general consensus is that it doesn't matter whether or not he is some clandestine NSA agent because his paper is just a theoretical proof that is almost entirely removed from any implementations based on his work. If there is some fundamental flaw in his work, then it's likely to be discovered before RNGs based on this work come into wide-spread use. It would be much easier to just code a flaw into the actual implementations of RNGs based on this.