> So you see Alice has a whole bunch of problems to face. Oh yes, and there is one more thing I forgot so say - Alice doesn't trust Bob. We don't know why she doesn't trust him, but at some time in the past there has been an incident.
> Now most people in Alice's position would give up. Not Alice. She has courage which can only be described as awesome. Against all odds, over a noisy telephone line, tapped by the tax authorities and the secret police, Alice will happily attempt, with someone she doesn't trust, whom she cannot hear clearly, and who is probably someone else, to fiddle her tax returns and to organize a coup d'etat, while at the same time minimizing the cost of the phone call.
> A coding theorist is someone who doesn't think Alice is crazy.
> By the time you land an engineering gig at Apple, you are a twitchy, tinfoily mess. When your giggling date pokes you in the side and asks your favorite color, you shout: “WHO WANTS TO KNOW?!”
> But at work, you’re in good company. Your peer code reviews look like a meeting of the Flat Earth Society:
> What if they steal our data using electromagnetic waves or focused ion beams?
> What if they cut power at the exact instant our security kicks in?
I recently went to a conference presentation that attributed this CS in joke as indicative of how the field is deeply gendered. This paper isn't by the researchers I saw, but speaks to that. https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3017794
Would it not be the exact opposite of "deeply gendered" since it it has 50/50 gender representation, presents Bob and Alice as equals trying to communicate and contains exactly zero references to gender sterotypes?
> One time I got really mad at it. Like all computers, it knew precisely what I wanted it to do. It knew exactly what I MEANT. So why does it have to go and DO what I SAID?
> How do you get even with a dumb machine like that?
> First I tried slapping it around a little. I pushed its buttons a bit hard. I threatened it. "How would you like a busted display" I said.
> But it did no good. It just said "I am virtually unbreakable - and I'm not going to take any notice till you enter the data nicely, like you used to do."
This is beautiful. I loved how it explained processing delay with "real" world examples. Funny and interesting speech.
> Pocket calculators! Now there's something.... has sines, cosines, tangents, logarithms ... It translates from one language to another.... It is, in fact, a multiprocessor system... It has a full color, wraparound wide screen, liquid crystal, three-dimensional holographic display.... Its audio facilities include Dolby Digital Decaphonic surround sound. On the way here I watched "The Labyrinth" on it.
Meant to be tongue-in-cheek in 1984, but sounds surprisingly like a smart phone.
There comes a time when people at a technical conference like this need something more relaxing. A change of pace. A shift of style. To put aside all that work stuff and think of something refreshingly different.
So let's talk about coding theory. There are perhaps some of you here tonight who are not experts in coding theory, but rather have been dragged here kicking and screaming. So I thought it would be a good idea if I gave you a sort of instant, five minute graduate course in coding theory."
About to read it, so not sure, but if I had to guess from Alice and Bob it's something to do with Diffie-Hellman key exchange, some variation thereof, or some other security fundamentals explanation.
Edit: So, much more meta than that. Looks like a fun read though. :)
> Perhaps it would be a better idea if we looked for strong keys. In fact, why not look for THE STRONGEST POSSIBLE KEY. Then we could all standardize on it.
I think that's what Debian did with their OpenSSL :-)
It's a funny after-dinner speech (where some of the attendees aren't experts in coding theory), providing a somewhat tongue-in-cheek biography of Alice and Bob.
Maybe is interesting only for the right kind of people. Dunno. In case it's worth something to you I didn't understand the joke either and stopped reading after several paragraphs.
if you have never read papers on cryptography you can't understand, there's typically 2 people, the intended users of the protocol, and Eve some attacker of the protocol, since these roles re-occur in different problems, the scientific community has settled on this lingo such that the reader can immediately understand which problem for whom we are trying to solve. I.e. a cryptographer reading about a new protocol would immediately understand the paper tries to solve Alice and Bob's problem...
> Now most people in Alice's position would give up. Not Alice. She has courage which can only be described as awesome. Against all odds, over a noisy telephone line, tapped by the tax authorities and the secret police, Alice will happily attempt, with someone she doesn't trust, whom she cannot hear clearly, and who is probably someone else, to fiddle her tax returns and to organize a coup d'etat, while at the same time minimizing the cost of the phone call.
> A coding theorist is someone who doesn't think Alice is crazy.