Skip to content
I T S S
  • Welcome
  • Hardware
  • Internet
  • Networking
  • Security
  • Data Recovery
  • Support
  • Contact
  • Webmail

A Nice Little Cryptography Primer

By itss | 28/06/2021
0 Comment

Pun Intended.

Category: Technology
Post navigation
← pfSense / Wireguard / Bad Code / Close Call Why Quake3 was so fast : Fast Inverse Square Root →

Recent Posts

  • Hardware Exploits?
  • Why Quake3 was so fast : Fast Inverse Square Root
  • A Nice Little Cryptography Primer
  • pfSense / Wireguard / Bad Code / Close Call
  • Apple Continues Its Trip To The Dark Side With The Release of MacOS 17 (Big Sur)

Slashdot

News for nerds

  • IBM is Getting Ready to Scale Quantum Computing
    by EditorDavid on 28/06/2026 at 4:34 am

    IBM spent a decade "building, testing and improving" quantum computing, reports the Wall Street Journal. "This year, the company is laying the groundwork to turn that technology into a fully-fledged, scalable business from an expensive science project." IBM said last month it plans to form a new independent subsidiary called Anderon, a foundry to produce the silicon wafers needed to make quantum-computing processors. The venture is seeded by a $1 billion investment from the Trump administration and another $1 billion of IBM's own cash. Anderon will give the company a new line of business in selling wafers to other quantum-computing companies. It will also provide a steady stream of wafers to continue developing its own quantum technology, positioning IBM to capture part of what the Boston Consulting Group projects will be a $90 billion to $170 billion market for quantum-computing providers by 2040... The company also plans to spend an additional $9 billion over five years to advance the final stages of its quest to build a quantum-mechanics-powered computer capable and reliable enough for widespread use, a goal known as fault tolerance. That computer, named Starling, is being targeted for 2029. With Anderon, IBM is thinking beyond Starling, or even a more powerful quantum computer planned for 2033. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Renewable Energy Just Hit 30% of America's Electricity Generation
    by EditorDavid on 28/06/2026 at 1:34 am

    America generated 10.06% more energy with renewables in the first four months of 2026 than it did in the same period the year before. That's according to new figures from America's Energy Information Administration, cited in this report from Electrek: The growth was led by utility-scale solar (+21.3%), hydropower (+15.7%), small-scale solar In April alone, wind and solar each produced more electricity than US coal plants, while the combination of solar and wind produced 57.0% more electricity than nuclear power. The mix of all renewables, including biomass and geothermal, accounted for 30.0% of total US electrical generation during the first third of 2026 — up from 27.8% a year earlier... EIA reported that, in April, utility-scale solar capacity surpassed wind capacity for the first time (160,208.1 MW vs. 160,100.6 MW). Further, utility-scale battery energy storage capacity increased by 17,703.5 MW, or 58.1%. Nuclear added just 18.4 MW. The combined capacity growth of all utility-scale renewable energy sources for the 12-month period (55,980.3 MW) is two-thirds more (i.e., 67.6%) than that added during the previous 12 months (33,392.0 MW). "EIA projects no new nuclear generating capacity and a net decline of 5,200.5 MW in fossil fuel capacity." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • How a Seemingly Harmless Image Can Jailbreak Vision-Language AI Models
    by EditorDavid on 27/06/2026 at 10:52 pm

    Slashdot reader BrianFagioli writes: Florida International University researchers have developed a technique called JaiLIP (Jailbreaking with Loss-guided Image Perturbation) that uses subtle image modifications to bypass AI safety guardrails. Unlike traditional jailbreaks that rely on carefully crafted prompts, the attack works through images that appear normal to human viewers. The researchers tested the technique against BLIP-2, a multimodal AI model, and found that manipulated images significantly increased the likelihood of harmful responses. According to the study, the approach outperformed previous image-based jailbreak methods and nearly doubled the number of unsafe outputs generated during testing. The findings highlight a potential security risk for businesses deploying AI systems that process both images and text. While most discussions about AI safety focus on prompts, the research suggests that seemingly harmless images may also serve as an attack vector. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • France's Heat This Week Was Worse Than a Dire Scenario Imagined For 2050
    by EditorDavid on 27/06/2026 at 9:48 pm

    There's a deadly, record-breaking heat wave spreading east across Europe, reports the Washington Post — and it's even worse than a dire earlier forecast: The forecast was recorded in 2014 as part of a campaign coordinated by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) that invited about 60 presenters worldwide to imagine a weather report from the year 2050. In one clip, Ãvelyne Dhéliat from French television network TF1 presented a hypothetical scenario of high temperatures 36 years into the future — during a heat wave in a warmer climate in 2050... One of the maps that Dhéliat shared was lit up in shades of orange, filled with temperature predictions of 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit), reaching as high as 43 degrees Celsius (109.4 degrees Fahrenheit). But it turns out, it didn't take 36 years for those imagined temperatures to be reached — and even exceeded. The heat on Wednesday alone, when the temperature soared as high as 112.3 degrees Fahrenheit (44.3 degrees Celsius), exceeded the 2050 projections in 19 out of 34 locations across mainland France — far sooner than some may have expected. Some places surpassed those hypothetical future temperatures by more than 20 degrees Fahrenheit. It's part of a dramatic shift in heat wave frequency across the country. Half of the heat waves observed since 1947 have occurred since 2010. "By 2100, heat waves could last up to two months continuously," the country's weather agency, Météo-France, said this week. It was hotter in France on Wednesday than in Las Vegas and Phoenix and just two degrees Fahrenheit shy of what was observed in Death Valley, California. An estimated less than one percent of the planet was hotter than France's hottest place... [T]he heat dome, which will linger into early next week, is only part of the story. This type of extreme heat is becoming more common as the planet warms, especially in Europe. Climate scientist Robert Rohde said in a post explaining the heat wave's causes that France and Western Europe should expect many more heat waves like this over the coming decades. "This isn't a fluke, but simply part of the new normal," he said. Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the news. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Max Planck Slapped With Two Paper Retractions By Suspected Rogue Algorithm
    by EditorDavid on 27/06/2026 at 8:43 pm

    Max Planck won 1918's Nobel Prize for physics. Yet two of his papers were retracted — a move now being criticized by Yves Gingras, a historian of physics at the University of Quebec and Mahdi Khelfaoui, a fellow historian of science at UQ Trois-Rivières. Science reports: The papers, both quietly retracted in 2011, originally appeared in the early 1940s in Naturwissenschaften, a German journal now owned by publishing giant Springer Nature. After some sleuthing, Khelfaoui determined one of the Planck pieces, a philosophical essay from 1942 titled "Sinn und Grenzen der exakten Wissenschaft" ("Meaning and Limits of Exact Science"), about how to achieve certainty in scientific knowledge, had also appeared in two other journals and been reprinted twice in books. Repackaging the same work multiple times is considered "self-plagiarism" and frowned upon today — the practice produces copyright conflicts and inflates scholars' publication records. The Naturwissenschaften site gives "copyright violation" as the reason for the retraction. Yet publishing identical material in multiple journals was widespread before the internet. "Science was more fragmented" then, Khelfaoui says. "You wanted different audiences ... to have access to your work." The practice was especially common for luminaries like Planck. Albert Einstein did the same (but escaped retractions). Springer Nature's "anachronistic" application of modern standards to a 1942 paper "distort[s] the historical record," Gingras and Khelfaoui argue in a preprint posted last month on arXiv. Any concerns about copyright violations are largely moot anyway: Because Planck died in 1947, his works are in the public domain in most countries. Gingras was especially incensed that Springer Nature deviated from the normal practice of merely slapping the word RETRACTED across the digital version of the paper while still allowing scholars to read the text. Instead, the publisher posted a blank white page with the cryptic phrase, "This article has been withdrawn due to article violation." Springer Nature is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95. Suzanne Scarlata, a chemist and biochemist at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute and editor-in-chief of The Science of Nature, as Naturwissenschaften is now known, had not heard about the retractions before being contacted for this story... Scarlata suspects Springer Nature's internal policing software removed the paper and posted the retraction notice unilaterally, without human supervision: "I think it just happened with their algorithm," she says. "It's a mistake they should probably rectify." A second Planck paper was apparently removed because its response to a 1940 paper had used an identical title. Thanks to our long-time Slashdot reader He Who Has No Name for sharing the article. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Scroll Burned in 79 AD Volcanic Eruption Finally Deciphered Using AI
    by EditorDavid on 27/06/2026 at 7:34 pm

    When Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D., it buried hundreds of papyrus scrolls. They were rediscovered in the mid-1700s, remembers Smithsonian magazine, "the only surviving collection of its kind from the Greco-Roman world..." "But when scholars tried to unroll them, the carbonized manuscripts crumbled to dust." Every generation that followed faced the same dilemma: They could wait for technology to advance, abandoning hope of reading the ancient texts in their own lifetime. Or they could try to open the scrolls themselves — and risk destroying them. In recent years, researchers have settled on a third option. Using advanced imaging and artificial intelligence, they're deciphering the scrolls without needing to unroll them at all. The Vesuvius Challenge has accelerated the process by turning it into a public competition, complete with cash prizes. In 2023, a student won $40,000 for deciphering a single word — "purple" — from an unopened scroll. Later, contestants would identify 2,000 Greek characters from one scroll ($700,000) and the title of another ($60,000). Now, for the very first time, researchers have recovered all surviving text from a single scroll. The nearly five-foot-long segment includes roughly 20 columns of ancient Greek philosophy, accessible for the first time in nearly 2,000 years. "The tech actually does look like magic, but it's not," Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, said at a press conference. (The article points out that Seales partnered with two Silicon Valley investors in 2023 to launch the Vesuvius Challenge, and is now hailing "the restoration of lost voices from the ancient world." Seales has been working on virtually unwrapping the scrolls since the early 2000s. The process involved imaging the bundles of papyrus using technology similar to CT scanners, isolating thin layers and then stitching them together.... "We've developed a systematic and a repeatable approach," Seales told the audience. "Now it's only a matter of time until we read all of the scrolls." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Archives

  • September 2022
  • November 2021
  • June 2021
  • March 2021
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • October 2019
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • April 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • August 2015
  • May 2015

Categories

  • Innovation
  • Security
  • Software
  • Technology

Tags

backdoor cisco coding json laziness patterns public information announcement security vulnerability
© 2017 IT Sales & Services Ltd
Quality IT solutions in Tanzania since 2010
Iconic One Theme | Powered by Wordpress