From ArsTechnica . . .
Alleged "Snake Oil" Crypto Company Sues Over Boos at Black Hat:
Grant's presentation, entitled "Discovery of Quasi-Prime Numbers: What Does this Mean for Encryption," was based on a paper called "Accurate and Infinite Prime Prediction from a Novel Quasi-PrimeAnalytical Methodology." That work was published in March of 2019 through Cornell University's arXiv.org by Grant's co-author Talal Ghannam—a physicist who has self-published a book called The Mystery of Numbers: Revealed through their Digital Root as well as a comic book called The Chronicles of Maroof the Knight: The Byzantine. The paper, a slim five pages, focuses on the use of digital root analysis (a type of calculation that has been used in occult numerology) to rapidly identify prime numbers and a sort of multiplication table for factoring primes.
[...] The Black Hat talk did not go smoothly. People had to be ejected from the room by security because they were heckling and booing Grant.
[...] Cryptographers were extremely skeptical, with some referring to the talk as "snake oil crypto." Even before the event, Mark Carney, a PhD candidate at the University of Leeds, wrote a paper refuting the claims Grant and Ghannam had made in theirs.
Well that could have gone better. Maybe the court trial will be more orderly.
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What started it all:
On 2019-08-24 13:02:01 UTC an accusation (https://soylentnews.org/meta/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=33244&page=1&cid=884682#commentwrap) was made that a Journal Entry "It would have been posted before 6 hours ago" (i.e. posted at approximately 2019-08-24 07:00:00 UTC) was deleted by a member of the staff at SoylentNews. The circumstances surrounding the making of the Journal Entry are elaborated upon in this comment. (https://soylentnews.org/meta/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=33244&page=1&cid=885191#commentwrap)
I have been with this site since before it went live. Its founding principal has been the making available of a forum whereby the community can submit stories — and post comments — to predominantly tech-related items. Further, each logged-in user has been made available the ability to post entries to their Journal.
As Editor-in-Chief I took this allegation seriously and performed an independent and in-depth investigation. My findings are presented below.
Note: It is not lost on me the futility of trying to prove a negative. It is for good reason that the criminal justice system in the US is founded on the principle of "innocent until proven guilty." It is not up the the accused to vindicate themselves, but for the accuser to bring sufficient evidence to bring about conviction.
NB: In the course of writing this, I discovered a bug in how the site displays wide elements contained in an ECODE element. It incorrectly wraps the text onto the next line (leading to a jumbled mess) when it should, instead, provide horizontal scroll bars. Please accept my apologies for its current appearance.
Executive Summary:
An in-depth investigation making use of: external resources, the UI presented by SoylentNews, and ad-hoc queries of the site database (DB) failed to locate a "smoking gun", i.e. found no clear proof that a Journal Entry was posted to the site and subsequently deleted by anyone other than an author.
It is my estimation that the user submitted an entry, but the site failed to receive and save it correctly. In other words, the user tripped over some kind of bug be it in the site's code, communications between the user and the site, or something else.
Recommendation: When a user completes making a Journal Entry and submits it to the site, the code should respond by using the newly-created journal parameters in conjunction with the normal journal-loading code to present the Journal Entry to the user as confirmation that the entry was properly received and saved. That is to say, affirmative feedback of receipt, storage, and accessibility of the Journal Entry.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @05:39AM (1 child)
No cipher ever is secure enough against a clairvoyant attack. Beware of Seekers.
(Score: 2) by BsAtHome on Saturday August 24 2019, @09:35AM
Clearly, the clairvoyant have closely looked at and verified the 7.5 million year calculation and saw that the answer is 42.
Just waiting for the seekers to find out the makeup of the universe so that it may vanish and reappear with a new set of rules.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @09:59AM
Yeah, yeah, what do I know, right? Well, don't be so dismissive of something you don't understand. Just because it's based on numerology, and possibly even traffic patterns on the NJ Turnpike, doesn't mean it isn't groundbreaking work.
I consulted my Official Harry Potter Spell and Conjuring Book (the real one, with the stitched binding and gold leaf inlay). And right in the back, just past the "Dragons - Free To Good Home" ads, it says that there are five dimensions. It even notes that the band "The Fifth Dimension" was purposefully created to ease acceptance of the concept of the existence of five dimensions.
For those naysayers who aren't familiar with encryption, I'll simplify it for you. Think of encryption as a game of numeric scrabble. You have a bunch of tiles, each with a single number on them (0 - 9). You have to arrange them into two very long number sequences (you get to pick because there's no wrong answers in encryption). Once you do that you put one number sequence into the bag with all the letters of your data, and shake it up really good. When you empty the bag you have encrypted data. You save the other numbers to decrypt your data, which is a little too complicated to explain in this post. But I can give you a hint: that's where the numerology and praying comes in.
So give these Royal Scammers a chance. And if they ask you to help them by signing up for their version of SETI At Home, do them a solid. You could be just one alien civilization away from proving them right.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Saturday August 24 2019, @11:43AM
How dare anyone say that the Emperor is naked!
I'm surprised by one little thing, though. Apparently, they're not trying to hide the details behind claims that it would be insecure to tell how it works. All this suggests that they really believe their stuff. Snake oil peddlers typically try to keep their marks in the dark, because, deep down, they know they're full of crap. In most hard sciences, it's impossible to maintain such an illusion, as there's no excuse for keeping things secret. It's not an excuse in cryptography either, but there, a lot of lay people can still be fooled into accepting such an excuse,
Over and over, I've seen that if your fantastic new method implies something incredible, like that P=NP after all, or that the principles behind the new method could be used for RSA busting, fast prime factoring or, heck, Perpetual Motion, you'd better be very, very skeptical. Don't be in a hurry to go public. Check your work for mistakes, check your programs for bugs. When you find the error, it's simultaneously unpleasant to see your dreams implode even though you suspected it was all too good to be true, and a relief that you didn't try to tell the world and end up embarrassing yourself.
(Score: 3, Informative) by FatPhil on Saturday August 24 2019, @12:38PM (8 children)
Best example of which is probably this:
"
For example, having number 1 as the last digit for
the number we are trying to factorize informs us
regarding the last digits of its two prime factors;
namely that they can only be 3 and 7 or both are
equal to 1. This will further restrict the size of the
Q-grid requiring search analysis.
"
To which I offer the lengthy counter-argument:
"
551
"
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Funny) by BsAtHome on Saturday August 24 2019, @02:02PM
You are not supposed to debunk this shit^H^H^H^H finely digested residue. This stuff is required to prevent the aliens from attacking. We need hummmms and yadayadas to counter the modern factual baseline.
I am just hoping that these guys will be making a new kind of numero(il)logical GPS device and let them drive straight into the pond. All their followers will automagically fill the pond for recycling. When it ends well, all is well.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @05:09PM (6 children)
my counterargument is shorter: "81".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @05:26PM (2 children)
But the prime factors of 81 do all end in the digit '3' because they are 3.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @02:13AM (1 child)
Math is hard.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @03:08AM
The dumb fucks can't spell either: "The number 5 is also excluded lest the number is devisable by 5 and hence not a prime."
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Saturday August 24 2019, @06:53PM (2 children)
Did you read the paper?
I hope not, because I debunked it enough, I hope, such that you shouldn't.
If you did - you're a fucking idiot, because you didn't understand it (sub-retard, very bad class to fall into)
If you didn't - you're a fucking idiot, because you're talking out of your arse.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @07:10PM
well. at least you didn't call me a masturbating idiot. I may have sued.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @11:30PM
I shouldn't read a paper because some idiot on the internet said he already debunked it? Ha! I think now I just have to read it!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @06:47PM
Maybe my google-fu sucks today but I can't seem to find the video of the talk in question (I want to see the audience reactions, not the splashy promo video). Conference organizers admit scrubbing their site/youtube of the Crown Sterling talk so could this be the main complaint of the lawsuit (they paid for promotion and Blackhat violated the contract by removing the video/slides?) I seriously doubt anyone could win damages simply from being mocked/booed while presenting their ideas. Surely the attendees reactions can not be considered to be part of the sponsorship package.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @01:33AM
Let's try this instead:
I have no idea if this paper is valid or useful. It probably isn't. But debunkers need to do better.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @06:48AM
If I multiply two large prime numbers and give him the product can he then tell me what factors I used to create that product within a reasonable period of time? If he can then he just broke all of public key cryptography and deserves a Nobel prize.
If he can't prove that he can factor prime number products faster than the next guy then is he just wasting our time?