On Saturday, September 1, 2001, at 01:53 PM, Faustine wrote:

Tim Wrote:

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On Friday, August 31, 2001, at 11:43 AM, Faustine wrote:

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Consistent with your misconception about big computers being useful for brute-force cryptanalyis,

I never said that and you know it. Nice troll, though.

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You did indeed. Several times you alluded to what big and powerful computers the NSA must have, the better to blow our house down. When it was pointed out to you the nature of brute-forcing a big key, and how useless computers are, you seemed not to get the point.

Oh, well that might have a little something to do with the fact that I never made the point that brute-forcing keys was the way big and powerful NSA computers are going to blow our house down, mightn't it. The fact that "brute-forcing keys" was the only thing you could think of when you saw my phrase "interesting possibilities for cryptographic applications" and then chose to fixate on proving what a damn poopy head whippersnapper I am instead of deigning to bother over what methods I meant to refer to is indicative of your own limitations, not mine.

You are now backpedaling furiously away from your "common to newbies" claim that fast computers might be used to break ciphers. Here's a chunk of dialog from an August 8 post of yours: (comments after ">" are from Tim)

Except when was the last time you heard of a Cypherpunks-interesting cipher being broken with _any_ amount of computer crunching?

"Since when did people stop trying? The last time I heard a researcher talk about trying to break a Cypherpunks-interesting cipher was last Thursday." This, and similar comments you made about the Sandia and IBM supercomputers, clearly imply you think one of the uses of these supercomputers is to "try" to break what I called Cypherpunks-interesting ciphers. Many who are exposed to crypto to the first time, and who haven't thought about the issue of factoring large numbers, simply "assume" that a worthwhile goal is to "try" ("Since when did people stop trying?") to break such ciphers with faster computers. (To be sure, there are interesting projects on faster factoring methods, better quadratic sieves, searches for Mersenne primes, all that good number theory stuff. Some of it is even being done at Sandia. But this is a far cry from the common belief that Cypherpunks-interesting ciphers may fall to attacks with mere supercomputers. Do the math on what a trillion such Sandia computers could do if they ran for a billion years...then realize there are keys already in use today which cannot be attacked by brute-force (or probably any other direct means) with all of the computer power that the universe could ever support. Mind-boggling, but I realized this via some calculations just after starting to look closely at RSA.) You are now backpedalling, claiming you never meant this. Similar to the way you claimed "if someone else is convinced it's interesting enough to be willing to food the power bill (as I had anticipated would be the case)," well AFTER I posted an article pointing out that the power bill alone for running older Pentiums and G3s would pay for faster new CPUs to make the old DIY machines a waste of time. Fact is, you HADN'T "anticipated" this...you saw my calculations of watts and MIPS and only _then_ did you retroactively "anticipate" that power concerns make such arrays of old machines a lose. Check the archives. When some adds a gratuitous "As I had anticipated would be the case" under these circumstance we know we are in the presence of a faker. --Tim May