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

  • Apple is Fighting for TSMC Capacity as Nvidia Takes Center Stage
    by msmash on 15/01/2026 at 4:07 pm

    Apple, which spent years as TSMC's undisputed top customer and helped the Taiwanese foundry become the semiconductor industry's most important manufacturer, is now fighting for production capacity as Nvidia's AI chip orders consume an ever-larger share of the company's leading-edge wafer supply. TSMC CEO CC Wei visited Cupertino last August to deliver unwelcome news: Apple would face the largest price increase in years and the iPhone maker would no longer have guaranteed access to production capacity across TSMC's nearly two dozen fabs. According to Culpium analysis and its supply chain sources, Nvidia likely overtook Apple as TSMC's largest customer in at least one or two quarters of 2025. TSMC's revenue climbed 36% last year to $122 billion, the company reported Thursday. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Wikipedia Signs AI Licensing Deals On Its 25th Birthday
    by msmash on 15/01/2026 at 3:20 pm

    Wikipedia turns 25 today, and the online encyclopedia is celebrating that with an announcement that it has signed new licensing deals with a slate of major AI companies -- Amazon, Microsoft, Meta Platforms, Perplexity and Mistral AI. The deals allow these companies to access Wikipedia content "at a volume and speed designed specifically for their needs." The Wikimedia Foundation did not disclose financial terms. Google had already signed on as one of the first enterprise customers back in 2022. The agreements follow the Wikimedia Foundation's push last year for AI developers to pay for access through its enterprise platform. The foundation said human traffic had fallen 8% while bot visits -- sometimes disguised to evade detection -- were heavily taxing its servers. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said he welcomes AI training on the site's human-curated content but that companies "should probably chip in and pay for your fair share of the cost that you're putting on us." The site remains the ninth most visited on the internet, hosting more than 65 million articles in 300 languages maintained by some 250,000 volunteer editors. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Anthropic's Index Shows Job Evolution Over Replacement
    by msmash on 15/01/2026 at 2:40 pm

    Anthropic's fourth installment of its Economic Index, drawing on an anonymized sample of two million Claude conversations from November 2025, finds that AI is changing how people work rather than whether they work at all. The study tracked usage across the company's consumer-facing Claude.ai platform and its API, categorizing interactions as either automation (where AI completes tasks entirely) or augmentation (where humans and AI collaborate). The split came out to 52% augmentation and 45% automation on Claude.ai, a slight shift from January 2025 when augmentation led 55% to 41%. The share of jobs using AI for at least a quarter of their tasks has risen from 36% in January to 49% across pooled data from multiple reports. Anthropic's researchers also found that AI delivers its largest productivity gains on complex work requiring college-level education, speeding up those tasks by a factor of 12 compared to 9 for high-school-level work. Claude completes college-degree tasks successfully 66% of the time versus 70% for simpler work. Computer and mathematical tasks continue to dominate usage, accounting for roughly a third of Claude.ai conversations and nearly half of API traffic. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • 'White-Collar Workers Shouldn't Dismiss a Blue-Collar Career Change'
    by msmash on 15/01/2026 at 2:05 pm

    White-collar workers stuck in a cycle of layoffs and stagnant wages might want to look past the traditional tech, finance and media job postings to an unexpected source of opportunity: the blue-collar sector, which faces a labor shortage and is seeing rapid transformation through private-equity investment. These jobs are generally less vulnerable to AI, and the earning trajectory can be steep, the WSJ writes. At Crash Champions, a car-repair chain that has grown from 13 locations in 2019 to about 650 shops across 38 states, service advisers start at roughly $60,000 after a six-month apprenticeship and can double that within 18 months, according to CEO Matt Ebert. Directors overseeing multiple locations earn more than $200,000. Power Home Remodeling, a PE-backed construction company, says tech sales professionals earning $85,000 to $100,000 could make lateral moves after a 10-week training program. The share of workers in their early 20s employed in blue-collar roles rose from 16.3% in 2019 to 18.4% in 2024, according to ADP -- five times the increase among 35- to 39-year-olds. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • AI Models Are Starting To Crack High-Level Math Problems
    by BeauHD on 15/01/2026 at 1:00 pm

    An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Over the weekend, Neel Somani, who is a software engineer, former quant researcher, and a startup founder, was testing the math skills of OpenAI's new model when he made an unexpected discovery. After pasting the problem into ChatGPT and letting it think for 15 minutes, he came back to a full solution. He evaluated the proof and formalized it with a tool called Harmonic -- but it all checked out. "I was curious to establish a baseline for when LLMs are effectively able to solve open math problems compared to where they struggle," Somani said. The surprise was that, using the latest model, the frontier started to push forward a bit. ChatGPT's chain of thought is even more impressive, rattling off mathematical axioms like Legendre's formula, Bertrand's postulate, and the Star of David theorum. Eventually, the model found a Math Overflow post from 2013, where Harvard mathematician Noam Elkies had given an elegant solution to a similar problem. But ChatGPT's final proof differed from Elkies' work in important ways, and gave a more complete solution to a version of the problem posed by legendary mathematician Paul Erdos, whose vast collection of unsolved problems has become a proving ground for AI. For anyone skeptical of machine intelligence, it's a surprising result -- and it's not the only one. AI tools have become ubiquitous in mathematics, from formalization-oriented LLMs like Harmonic's Aristotle to literature review tools like OpenAI's deep research. But since the release of GPT 5.2 -- which Somani describes as "anecdotally more skilled at mathematical reasoning than previous iterations" -- the sheer volume of solved problems has become difficult to ignore, raising new questions about large language models' ability to push the frontiers of human knowledge. Somani examined the online archive of more than 1,000 Erdos conjectures. Since Christmas, 15 Erdos problems have shifted from "open" to "solved," with 11 solutions explicitly crediting AI involvement. On GitHub, mathematician Terence Tao identifies eight Erdos problems where AI made meaningful autonomous progress and six more where it advanced work by finding and extending prior research, noting on Mastodon that AI's scalability makes it well suited to tackling the long tail of obscure, often straightforward Erdos problems. Progress is also being accelerated by a push toward formalization, supported by tools like the open-source "proof assistant" Lean and newer AI systems such as Harmonic's Aristotle. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Warhammer Maker Games Workshop Bans Its Staff From Using AI In Its Content or Designs
    by BeauHD on 15/01/2026 at 10:00 am

    Games Workshop, the owner and operator of a number of hugely popular tabletop war games, including Warhammer 40,000 and Age of Sigmar, has banned the use of generative AI in its content and design processes. IGN reports: Delivering the UK company's impressive financial results, CEO Kevin Rountree addressed the issue of AI and how Games Workshop is handling it. He said GW staff are barred from using it to actually produce anything, but admitted a "few" senior managers are experimenting with it. Rountree said AI was "a very broad topic and to be honest I'm not an expert on it," then went on to lay down the company line: "We do have a few senior managers that are [experts on AI]: none are that excited about it yet. We have agreed an internal policy to guide us all, which is currently very cautious e.g. we do not allow AI generated content or AI to be used in our design processes or its unauthorized use outside of GW including in any of our competitions. We also have to monitor and protect ourselves from a data compliance, security and governance perspective, the AI or machine learning engines seem to be automatically included on our phones or laptops whether we like it or not. We are allowing those few senior managers to continue to be inquisitive about the technology. We have also agreed we will be maintaining a strong commitment to protect our intellectual property and respect our human creators. In the period reported, we continued to invest in our Warhammer Studio -- hiring more creatives in multiple disciplines from concepting and art to writing and sculpting. Talented and passionate individuals that make Warhammer the rich, evocative IP that our hobbyists and we all love." 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