Science, Technology & Health: August 2013 Archives
Pedestrian Observations dissects Elon Musk's Hyperloop concept and decides that it's mostly nonsense. Along the way he laments the hubris of successful entrepreneurs:
There is a belief within American media that a successful person can succeed at anything. He (and it's invariably he) is omnicompetent, and people who question him and laugh at his outlandish ideas will invariably fail and end up working for him. If he cares about something, it's important; if he says something can be done, it can. The people who are already doing the same thing are peons and their opinions are to be discounted, since they are biased and he never is. He doesn't need to provide references or evidence - even supposedly scientific science fiction falls into this trope, in which the hero gets ideas from his gut, is always right, and never needs to do experiments.
Here's a fantastic piece by the Washington Post about the hazards of the Great Falls along the Potomac. The information about river hazards is interesting, but what really stands out is the superb use of graphics and animation that brings the content to life.
The modern information economy relies on cryptography for security, but what if the most widely-used cryptography algorithms are cracked in the next few years? RSA and Diffie-Hellman are everywhere, in every device you use, and their failure could bring the world to a stand-still.
Alex Stamos, chief technology officer of the online security company Artemis, led a presentation describing how he and three other security researchers studied recent publications from the insular world of academic cryptopgraphy research, which covers trends in attacking common encryption schemes."Our conclusion is there is a small but definite chance that RSA and classic Diffie-Hellman will not be usable for encryption purposes in four to five years," said Stamos, referring to the two most commonly used encryption methods.
Any hints that those methods could be undermined must be taken seriously, said Stamos. They are used to protect banking, online commerce, and e-mail, as well as the mechanisms that ensure that updates downloaded by operating systems such as Windows and OSX are genuine. The result of the two encryption methods being broken would be, said Stamos, "a total failure of trust on the Internet."
