3 ms·

Ron Rivest explains himself that once in a while he gets an email from someone saying basically "I broke RSA": not everyday but it's a semi-regular occurrence.

Ron Rivest explains himself that once in a while he gets an email from someone saying basically "I broke RSA": not everyday but it's a semi-regular occurrence. And he always nicely answers by asking the person claiming to have broken it to solve a challenge (and it's not even a crazy high number of RSA bit keys he gives). Theory is nice but if you can find the solution to something, just do it and then brag once it's done : )

hinkley 6y ago
Way back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and comp.compression on Usenet was a place to be, usually we went beyond the pigeonhole principle by asking people to grab a megabyte from random.org, compress it, and then get back to us. Nobody ever did.
- capitol_ 6y ago
  I remember one of those exchanges, two people waged money about compressing random data so that the data + decompress program would be smaller than the original data. The other guy came back with a program that moved some of the random data into the metadata of the filesystem, in such a way so that the produced files did indeed become small enough. Don't know if the other guy ever paid out.
  - philsnow 6y ago
    When I was a kid I found some compression program on a BBS, that claimed to use "wavelets" to compress even more than was previously thought possible. It turned out it was using a similar trick (but this was in MSDOS, so it was just hiding blocks in unused parts of the disk and storing their addresses in the "compressed" file). I blithely used the tool on some things I had on hand that were taking up too much space, and predictably lost ~all of them. I learned a little bit about information theory that day, and my sneakernet bandwidth was saturated for a while afterwards.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    I think I remember that one too, or definitely one like it. That's a cheap trick. You gotta send someone the file, otherwise there's not much of a point.
  - fogof 6y ago
    He did not, full story, for the perspective of the metadata guy is here https://www.patrickcraig.co.uk/other/compression.htm https://www.patrickcraig.co.uk/other/compression.htm Excellent computer story, on a par with "We can't send email more than 500 miles" IMO.
plankers 6y ago
Isn't this a bit disingenuous though? If somebody had designed an algorithm capable of breaking RSA given supercomputer-level resources, that's still breaking RSA even if they may not be able to provide ironclad proof.

hinkley 6y ago

Way back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and comp.compression on Usenet was a place to be, usually we went beyond the pigeonhole principle by asking people to grab a megabyte from random.org, compress it, and then get back to us. Nobody ever did.

capitol_ 6y ago
I remember one of those exchanges, two people waged money about compressing random data so that the data + decompress program would be smaller than the original data. The other guy came back with a program that moved some of the random data into the metadata of the filesystem, in such a way so that the produced files did indeed become small enough. Don't know if the other guy ever paid out.
- philsnow 6y ago
  When I was a kid I found some compression program on a BBS, that claimed to use "wavelets" to compress even more than was previously thought possible. It turned out it was using a similar trick (but this was in MSDOS, so it was just hiding blocks in unused parts of the disk and storing their addresses in the "compressed" file). I blithely used the tool on some things I had on hand that were taking up too much space, and predictably lost ~all of them. I learned a little bit about information theory that day, and my sneakernet bandwidth was saturated for a while afterwards.
- hinkley 6y ago
  I think I remember that one too, or definitely one like it. That's a cheap trick. You gotta send someone the file, otherwise there's not much of a point.
- fogof 6y ago
  He did not, full story, for the perspective of the metadata guy is here https://www.patrickcraig.co.uk/other/compression.htm https://www.patrickcraig.co.uk/other/compression.htm Excellent computer story, on a par with "We can't send email more than 500 miles" IMO.

plankers 6y ago

Isn't this a bit disingenuous though? If somebody had designed an algorithm capable of breaking RSA given supercomputer-level resources, that's still breaking RSA even if they may not be able to provide ironclad proof.