There have long been rumors, leaks, and statements about the NSA “breaking” crypto that is widely believed to be unbreakable, and over the years, there’s been mounting evidence that in many cases, they can do just that. Now, Alex Halderman and Nadia Heninger, along with a dozen eminent cryptographers have presented a paper at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (a paper that won the ACM’s prize for best paper at the conference) that advances a plausible theory as to what’s going on. In some ways, it’s very simple — but it’s also very, very dangerous, for all of us.

The paper describes how in Diffie-Hellman key exchange — a common means of exchanging cryptographic keys over untrusted channels — it’s possible to save a lot of computation and programmer time by using one of a few, widely agreed-upon large prime numbers. The theoreticians who first proposed this described it as secure against anyone who didn’t want to spend a nearly unimaginable amount of money attacking it.

Lost in transition between the theoreticians and practicioners was the distinction between “secure against anyone who doesn’t have a titanic amount of money to blow” and “secure against anyone,” and so many of our cryptographic tools use hard-coded and/or standardized large primes for Diffie-Hellman.

The paper’s authors posit that the NSA has undertaken a technological project on a scale “not seen since the Enigma cryptanalysis during World War II,” spending an appreciable fraction of the entire black budget to break the standard widely used primes.

 

The NSA sure breaks a lot of “unbreakable” crypto. This is probably how they do it. / Boing Boing

[An interesting — but disturbing — argument from Malcolm Gladwell about the social spread of school shootings. -e]

Between Columbine and Aaron Ybarra, the riot changed: it became more and more self-referential, more ritualized, more and more about identification with the school-shooting tradition. Eric Harris wanted to start a revolution. Aguilar and Ybarra wanted to join one. Harris saw himself as a hero. Aguilar and Ybarra were hero-worshippers.

Now imagine that the riot takes a big step further along the progression—to someone with an even higher threshold, for whom the group identification and immersion in the culture of school shooting are even more dominant considerations. That’s John LaDue. “There is one that you probably never heard of like back in 1927 and his name was Arthur Kehoe,” LaDue tells Schroeder. “He killed like forty-five with, like, dynamite and stuff.” Ybarra was a student of Virginia Tech and Columbine. LaDue is a scholar of the genre, who speaks of his influences the way a budding filmmaker might talk about Fellini or Bergman. “The other one was Charles Whitman. I don’t know if you knew who that was. He was who they called the sniper at the Austin Texas University. He was an ex-marine. He got like sixteen, quite impressive.”

Malcolm Gladwell: How School Shootings Spread – The New Yorker

“Into the Eye” by TRASH RIOT | Redbubble

A study from the International Journal of Medicinal Mushrooms reports thatDictyophora, a mushroom that grows on lava flows, induces spontaneous orgasms in about 1/3 of the woman who sniff it. From Wikipedia:

According to a 2001 publication in the International Journal of Medicinal Mushrooms, the smell of the fresh fungus can trigger spontaneous orgasms in human females. In the trial involving 16 women, 6 had orgasms while smelling the fruit body, and the other ten, who received smaller doses, experienced physiological changes such as increased heart rate. All of the 20 men tested considered the smell disgusting. According to the authors, the results suggest that the hormone-like compounds present in the volatile portion of the gleba may have some similarity to human neurotransmitters released in females during sexual activity. The study used the species found in Hawaii, not the edible variety cultivated in China.

This tropical mushroom gives women spontaneous orgasms from sniffing it / Boing Boing

#1 (Grand Prize) Takayuki Fukada, Japan / Courtesy IAPLC & Aquabase

The art of aquascaping is still a fledgling endeavor, first started in the 90s by Japanese wildlife photographer Takashi Amano. The annual IAPLC competition has grown dramatically since, with the 2015 contest seeing 2,545 entries from 69 countries. Japan, China, Brazil, and France dominate the top finalist spots (only 13 entries were from the United States). Finalists were announced in September.

#2 范博文, China / Courtesy IAPLC & AquaA3

#4 Paulo Pacheco, Brazil / Courtesy IAPLC & Aquabase

#8 タナカカツキ, Japan / Courtesy IAPLC & Aquabase

#16 张大东, China / Courtesy IAPLC & Aquabase

Awesome Aquariums: Winners of the 2015 International Aquatic Plants Layout Contest | Colossal

From the World’s Advanced Saving Project (WASP) comes the largest Delta-style 3D printer in the world, capable of printing homes out of mud.

Delta-style robots are those with three parallel arms, connected at the joint at the base.  In this printer, the joint is the printing mechanism.

This printer, called the BigDelta, is 40 feet tall and prints homes at nearly zero cost.  Inventor, Massimo Moretti, created WASP with the goal to “create a means for affordable fabrication of homes, and provide these means to the locals in poverty stricken areas.”  He saw the need for housing and noted the quality and almost endless supply of dirt/clay/fiber homes.  The machine is capable of producing highly insulated homes that cost next to no environmental footprint.

The world’s largest Delta 3D printer can print nearly zero-cost housing out of mud | Minds

Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is set to publish an alternative interpretation of the light pattern. SETI researchers have long suggested that we might be able to detect distant extraterrestrial civilizations, by looking for enormous technological artifacts orbiting other stars. Wright and his co-authors say the unusual star’s light pattern is consistent with a “swarm of megastructures,” perhaps stellar-light collectors, technology designed to catch energy from the star.

“When [Boyajian] showed me the data, I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,” Wright told me. “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”

This delightful Lovelace & Babbage Analytical Engine is gathering support on LEGO Ideas (formerly CUUSOO) where the community can up-vote fan-made play sets into consideration for production.

Featuring Lada Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, this set pays beautiful, Victorian tribute to their collaboration on the mechanical general-purpose computer of his design, including her pioneering work in creating the algorithm that would be used to program it.

What’s more, the lovely, monochromatic Analytical Engine model can be used to house a Raspberry Pi Linux computer.

Source: Help convince LEGO to produce “Lovelace and Babbage” play set / Raspberry Pi case / Boing Boing

Lee Griggs, whose macroscopic 3D topographies we covered earlier this week, released a set of abstract portraits rendered with Arnold for Maya this morning. The series includes a variety of a psychedelic (and, admittedly, a bit terrifying) faces that look like the digital lovechild of H.R. Giger and Alex Grey.

The lack of descriptions on the Spanish artist’s Behance page only adds to the creatures’ peculiarity. To be clear: we think the artworks are gorgeous, but these characters could appear in a horror movie set in some surreal, parallel universe withoutquestion. We hope to see the day where Ridley Scott or Wes Craven take note of Grigg’s skill—Halloween might never be the same again.

Source: These Digital Mutant Portraits Are Tripping Us Out | The Creators Project

For more than a decade, we’ve lived with personal technologies — video games and social-media platforms — that have helped us create alternate or auxiliary personae. We’ve also spent a dozen years in the daily grip of makeover shows, in which a team of experts transforms your personal style, your home, your body, your spouse. There are TV competitions for the best fashion design, body painting, drag queen. Some forms of cosmetic alteration have become perfectly normal, and there are shows for that, too. Our reinventions feel gleeful and liberating — and tied to an essentially American optimism. After centuries of women living alongside men, and of the races living adjacent to one another, even if only notionally, our rigidly enforced gender and racial lines are finally breaking down. There’s a sense of fluidity and permissiveness and a smashing of binaries. We’re all becoming one another. Well, we are. And we’re not.

NYT: The Year We Obsessed Over Identity