At 12:48 AM 1/28/96, Anonymous wrote:
A short 'rant' on techno-dinosaurism... ... Cypherpunks or crypto relevance? Sometimes high-tech can be a weakness.
The canonical story being Arthur C. Clarke's "Superiority," said at one time to have been required reading at MIT.
I've heard that the Soviets, not having the luxury of sexy Crays and whatnot, were adept and using hundreds of PCs to do their cryptanalysis... and so may have a lot of interesting parallel processing algorithms.
I'm skeptical. Sun Microsystems did indeed buy up a bunch of Russian programmers, a couple of years ago. Haven't heard anything come out of this. And loosely-coupling PCs, for a task such as Anonymous describes, does not sound like terribly good preparation for other tasks. No point in speculating further, as the speculations and counter-speculations are underdetermined. --Tim Boycott espionage-enabled software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 - 1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."