

The Alternative History of Public-Key Cryptography (1999) - gnosis
http://cryptome.org/ukpk-alt.htm

======
bhickey
It was Singh's book got me interested in crypto when I read it in 9th grade,
but it really made me smile to revisit this!

Since leaving GCHQ, the NSA, and a hedge fund, Nick works as a genetic
anthropologist at the Broad Institute. Last year I had the distinct pleasure
of haranguing Nick Patterson with all manner of technical questions, mostly
with regards to Hidden Markov Models. He never did mention his role in public-
key cryptography. The NYTimes did a bio on him a few years back, it's a great
read about an amazing person and intellectual giant.

<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/12/science/12prof.html>
[http://www.broadinstitute.org/blog/five-questions-nick-
patte...](http://www.broadinstitute.org/blog/five-questions-nick-patterson)

~~~
srean
<http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/mf_qa_singh/> Wired article about how
the British Chiropractic Association went after Singh.

    
    
      Simon Singh: It would have meant that whenever somebody
      typed “Simon Singh” into a Web search, it would say,
      “science journalist found guilty of libel.” People could
      dismiss anything I’d ever written about alternative
      medicine. But more important, it would have implied that
      there is some validity to these claims that chiropractic
      can help with things like asthma and colic. And that
      would have an impact on parents and their children. Faced
      with that, I couldn’t apologize. If you’ve written
      something that you believe is true, and if you can afford
      to defend it, then you’ve got to defend it.

~~~
bhickey
The UK really needs to backport the Zenger Trial.

~~~
srean
This <http://www.relfe.com/media_can_legally_lie.html> I think turns it on its
head. Its trajectory was quite the opposite of Singh's libel lawsuit. Zenger
side of Atlantic isn't any rosier.

It was established that, deliberate falsification of the news (by Fox) is the
agency's legal right, and so is firing reporters not willing to lie on purpose
(about health effects).

Law totally beats me. Thankfully I am not a lawyer.

------
steven
I wrote about this in Wired some time ago. Here's the link. It's also the
subject of the last part--a sort of epilog--to my book Crypto.

<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.04/crypto_pr.html>

I was at Cocks' talk, which was held, appropriately enough, at Bletchley Park,
where Alan Turing and others cracked Nazi Enigma codes. It is really worth a
visit if you are in London and have a day to travel. Whit Diffie also shared
with me some fascinating stories about his strange relationship with James
Ellis, his counterpart in the classifed shadow world.

------
huhtenberg
Clifford Cocks, meet David Huffman...

\-- Exhibit A --

 _Cocks did not fully appreciate the significance of his discovery. He was
unaware of the fact that GCHQ's brightest minds had been struggling with the
problem for three years, and had no idea that he had made one of the most
important cryptographic breakthroughs of the century. Cocks's naivety may have
been part of the reason for his success, allowing him to attack the problem
with confidence, rather than timidly prodding at it._

\-- Exhibit B --

 _In 1951, David A. Huffman [...] hit upon the idea of using a frequency-
sorted binary tree and quickly proved this method the most efficient. In doing
so, the student outdid his professor, who had worked with information theory
inventor Claude Shannon to develop a similar code._

\--

In other words, as we can clearly see here, it pays to be ignorant :-)

------
mnutt
I wonder if Clifford Cocks was the inspiration for the passage in Neal
Stephenson's book Cryptonomicon, where the rookie NSA employee finds the
(zeta?) function that is seeded with the word "COMSTOCK"? Either way, the real
history of cryptography is often just as interesting as the fiction written
about it.

~~~
RickHull
Comstock is a recurring name throughout Stephenson's works.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baroque_Cycle> in particular comes to mind.

~~~
mnutt
Definitely. And the "rookie solves a seemingly impossible math problem without
knowing it's supposed to be difficult" is a pretty common archetype, but it
seemed like enough details matched that maybe there was a connection.

~~~
mzl
One nice instance of the archetype is George Danzig:
<http://www.snopes.com/college/homework/unsolvable.asp>

------
ikuygtyuiouy
That's the problem with government research - same problem with the air
forces' 1968 moon landing.

------
jmg
this is gonna sound silly, but is anyone else scared to visit cryptome? same
with wikileaks.

~~~
lambda
No. Why would I be scared?

