@bdegnan Unfortunately, what you said is spot on: "...it seems that you can do pretty well on SE just by answering, regardless whether it is actually factual." That is why I don't waste my time on English Language and Usage--there are so many people who have no idea what they are talking about that the website sometimes descends into a strange, pathetic comedy. Moreover, one rotten apple above 20K spoils the bunch. And it looks as if people who give good answers can be attacked.
It is a mess.
The unfriendliness of that site is pronounced. This site is quite different.
@FutureSecurity @forest @bdegnan Let's keep each other in line in a good-spirited attempt to keep this excellent website pleasant and professional. Let's avoid ad hominem arguments. At the same time, we should stand up and let people know when they are wrong (doing it in a respectful manner that encourages them to improve).
I am on vacation, and so I will do some editing over the next few days, but soon I am going to go silent because of my job. And I am focusing on math. I need to get a strong foundation in the maths behind cryptography, and the only way to do that is daily hard work. I started about two weeks ago, and it has just been wonderful.
@Paul Uszak If we are going to talk about cryptography, no matter the depth of our experience in using cryptographic equipment and cryptography per se, we must do maths and recognize just how crucial they are to seeing what is what. Some people talk about English sentences on SE, but they don't understand grammar. It looks like the same kind of problem to me. Without a strong foundation in cryptographic maths and respect for it, we can only see so far and we are going to make mistakes.
So, the OLD PII that I used to do automated test died. I then found a XEON from 2004 which will be new automated test machine. Life is weird when your requirements are to have space for 4, Full length PCI cards.
@Patriot I believe I'm careful to stick to saying what Paul does, not what he is.
Also ad hominem when you target the person instead of arguing against the problem. Paul is the subject. He is a problem.
Not that I agree with 100% of the things he says. I can debunk the stuff I don't agree with though. I can and have explained why he's wrong.
Actual ad hominem examples include when Paul says other people are motivated to counter what he says because they don't like him, that they are conspiring against him, or that they are NSA plants.
@forest What's the weirdest thing Paul has said about you?
* "Not that I [disagree] with 100% of the things he says." ^^^
I would guess that national-level attention onto this website is high. If you use this website, and especially if you are doing cutting-edge cryptographic research, it is reasonable to assume that you are very much on someone's radar screen. Whether or not it is actually someone's job to spread misinformation on this particular website is hard to guess. We certainly live in a time of distrust, that much is clear.
I'm sure that we're being watched. The thing is that when people make bad suggestions, we get explanations in the comments for why they're bad. Usually someone else posts the right answer if the only answer to the question is bad.
It's a lot more productive to target the standards bodies and the people in companies also targeted by sales people.
I commented on a different stack exchange one time. Someone wanted to know how to optimize something when they were using the wrong tool for the job. I told them what kind of tool they should use with that specific task. They told me that the sales agent for the software assured him that their product was so good that it didn't matter that it wasn't suited for the task.
"Well the sales guy from ____ told me that [...]" You're going to blindly trust the salesperson? Why didn't you ask him how to optimize this thing if he has all the answers?
Someone who does not speak English well has a question about English grammar which they ask in English. The question then gets answered by several good folks whose English is just as bad. Then someone who dislikes grammar joins in. It's clown shoes.
It was one of those situations I learned to eject myself from as soon as possible. Where a person had already made up their mind on what the answer is before they even ask the question. You can't out argue on the internet over the friendly representative that spoke to someone gullible in person.
When the responder does not know what he is talking about, he does not approach the question properly. The answer may make some sense, but it will not go to the heart of the issue. After seeing this so much on one SE site, it dawned on me: I have to start eating maths for breakfast so I can understand cryptography in a deeper way. Math is to cryptography as grammar is to good writing.
Interestingly, computer science deals with grammar and language on some ways. They of course apply math to the subject. It's not exactly the same. CS isn't concerned with memorizing a bunch of rules and exceptions for some particular language/dialect. But it's interesting how language can be formalized and how linguistics doesn't seem relevant to computing at first.
The question is, do mathematicians make the subject boring just by virtue of their involvement? Or do they make an already boring subject more interesting?
@FutureSecurity I agree with this part too as something as simple as creating a hash digest might not be apparent to a math person as they are looking a particular piece of data such as a pre-image as distinct, but a computer science person might think that the same data could be potentially various pre-images depending on how the data is formatted (i.e passing a string to a hash function versus passing the same data as bytes) and that could help their math calculations.
Ancient languages were indeed cryptic to those who didn't understand them, so I think there is a strong connection as as cryptography is like a vessel/channel on communications.
p.s. In an article I published today (blockchainassociation.io/expert-opinion/…), I described cryptography as the "an evolving science of secret writing at the intersection of cybersecurity, math and computer science."
If I put a star on a question, could I retrieve it easily?
