1/4     "Mo. Researchers Find Largest Prime Number"
        http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060104/ap_on_sc/largest_prime_number
        Why are people interested in finding large prime numbers?  They already
        know that there are infinte number of primes, so what's the point of
        finding them?
        \_ because they are there.  finding more may help with proving
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6/3     What kind of encryption scheme is used in the German Enigma Machine?
        Is it symmetrical encryption? Why was it so hard to crack in the 40s?
        \_ I believe it was a poly-alphabetic cypher that changed on each
           letter (therefore, yes it was symmetric).  So, the first
           letter in a mesage would use one cypher, the next would use
           another. The standard machine used 3 wheels, so the opertator
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8/20    using gpg i want to associate someones public_key with a wildly
        different alias that they also use to mail me encrypted text.
        I skimmed the long man-page but didn't find it.
        \_ you really think the nsa cant read your text in real time?  get
           real.  they can spot the gpg signature and flag your packets to
           make certain a human reads the messages.  sheesh.  dont you know
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5/3     If I want to learn about error correction, compression, and cryto,
        which class would I take?                            crypto? _/
        \_ Info theory at Stanford.  Berkeley does not teach ugrad info theory.
        \_ Information theory.  Read Thomas & Cover.  There is an information
           theory class using that book at Stanford.  Berkeley does not
           teach information theory to undergrads.
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12/19   Why is EULER-PATH not as important as HAMPATH? (seriously, what is the
        main diff between "edges only once" and "nodes only once")
        \_ Euler path is a linear problem- O(V+E).  Hamiltonian circuit is
           NP-Complete, which means that it's at least as hard as
           thousands of other problems.  Produce a polynomial time
           algorithm for Hamilton and you can crack nearly any public-key
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9/20    In Netscape for NT, how do I find out whether it's a 56-bit or 128-bit
        version?  Thanks.
        \_ about: doesn't work for you?
           \_ It says" This version supports U.S.  security with RSA Public Key
              Cryptography, MD2, MD5, RC2-CBC, RC4, DES-CBC, DES-EDE3-CBC."
              Does it mean 56-bit or 128-bit?
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6/19    Here is another question for all you knowledgable crypto people.
        How bad is the ability of a PC to generate random numbers for
        cryptography?  Is this at all a limiting factor in PC based
        encryption?  If someone were to build a little box that made
        random numbers based on a physical process that was provably
        uncorrelated, would that interest people?
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6/18    I have a question about diffie-hellman. After going through the initial
        key exchange and generating the session key k', how do you use this key
        with 3des or blowfish? Do you just trucate the key to the appropriate
        length (doesn't seem right) or is there some other method?  tia.
        \_ Probably feed the key into a one way hash function (i.e. MD5) that
           outputs the appropriate number of bits.
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5/29    I'm looking for a list of 512bit or larger primes I can use
        for a diffie-hellman implementation I'm working on. Google
        didn't produce many workable matches. Anyone know where I
        might be able to find a list?
        \_ How many do you need?
           \_ A dozen or so should be more than enough. My understanding
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