Poetry, Security

DeCSS in Haiku

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Not exactly what I would call haiku in spirit or form, but this work on Dave Touretzky’s site is at least mathematically correct as it follows the 575 pattern:

How to decrypt a
DVD: in haiku form.
(Thanks, Prof. D. S. T.)
————————

(I abandon my
exclusive rights to make or
perform copies of

this work, U. S. Code
Title Seventeen, section
One Hundred and Six.)

Muse! When we learned to
count, little did we know all
the things we could do

some day by shuffling
those numbers: Pythagoras
said “All is number”

long before he saw
computers and their effects,
or what they could do

by computation,
naive and mechanical
fast arithmetic.

It changed the world, it
changed our consciousness and lives
to have such fast math

available to
us and anyone who cared
to learn programming.

Now help me, Muse, for
I wish to tell a piece of
controversial math,

for which the lawyers
of DVD CCA
don’t forbear to sue:

that they alone should
know or have the right to teach
these skills and these rules.

(Do they understand
the content, or is it just
the effects they see?)

And all mathematics
is full of stories (just read
Eric Temple Bell);

and CSS is
no exception to this rule.
Sing, Muse, decryption

once secret, as all
knowledge, once unknown: how to
decrypt DVDs.

…

Poetry, Security

Snarkles Sneak

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Instead of translating your communication using something like babelfish, why not use sneak by snarkles and amuse your friends.

Here’s Matsuo Basho most famous poem in one-way DES:

CRAY67ihTYSbg

or perhaps you would prefer MD5:

bb5180417075141a9b354e24c066e3bf

and then there’s HEX:

41 6e 20 6f 6c 64 20 70 6f 6e 64 21 0d 0a 41 20 66 72 6f 67 20 6a 75 6d 70 73 20 69 6e 2d 0d 0a 54 68 65 20 73 6f 75 6e 64 20 6f 66 20 77 61 74 65 72 2e

Just worry about who snarkles really is and what s/he does with all the input…

Security

US Domestic violent crime wave

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A friend of mine used to have a joke (although it’s true) about the errors of correlative reasoning:

Did you know that as ice-cream consumption goes up there will be more crime? More ice-cream is consumed in the summer, more crime is committed in the summer (when it is warm). Therefore the cause of both ice-cream consumption and crime is actually the rise in temperature.

I suppose he also could have said as crime goes up people start eating more ice-cream. Anyway, here is a bit of disturbing news about crime statistics in America:

In a shift from trends of the past decade, violent crime is on the rise, fueling criticism of Bush administration policies as a wave of murders and shootings hits smaller cities and states with little experience with serious urban violence.

From Kansas City, Missouri, to Indianapolis, Indiana, places that rarely attract notice on annual
FBI crime surveys are seeing significant increases in murder. Boston, once a model city in America’s battle against gun violence, is poised to eclipse last year’s homicide tally, which was the worst in a decade.

Explanations vary — from softer gun laws to budget cuts, fewer police on the beat, more people in poverty and simple complacency. But many blame a national preoccupation with potential threats from abroad.

Or maybe it’s just changes to the environment and things are warmer than usual…which also just happens to be something you can blame the Bush administration for handling poorly. Another perspective is provided by places that show a decline:

In Miami, while overall crime is down, the use of semi-automatic weapons is growing.

“These things are dirt cheap,” Police Chief John Timoney told Reuters, estimating the street price at $250 each. “We have seen these assault weapons being used time and time again by drug gangs.”

Is there less crime due to the increase of assault weapons, or an increase of assault weapons due to the efforts to reduce crime? Either way, domestic violence seems is becoming a hot topic of concern.