young scientist winner?

PeakOutput

ok so i am interested in this programming lark and am thinking about going to college to study it next year but thats not the point of this post,

i keep earing alot about this guy who won the young scientist for making a program that can apparently crack any banks security system...............

first of all is this true???

second of all can you explain in laymens terms what he did and why no1 else has done it

thirdly how hard is actually to do(not that i wana do it myself) or is it just that its moderately difficult and its just coz he is so young that its a big deal

your own views on what was "invented"

DaSilva

PeakOutput wrote:

i keep earing alot about this guy who won the young scientist for making a program that can apparently crack any banks security system...............

first of all is this true???

Simply, no. This is media sensationalism. The media is well known for hype and bull****, but it's paticularly common in Science and IT.

PeakOutput wrote:

second of all can you explain in laymens terms what he did and why no1 else has done it

thirdly how hard is actually to do(not that i wana do it myself) or is it just that its moderately difficult and its just coz he is so young that its a big deal

your own views on what was "invented"

I can't give you a great explanation because I don't know enough, due too the absoloute lack of any decent information provided, other than "young boy cracks top level encryption.". This is false, what he did from my limited knowledge, is showed that combining two existing attacks proved usefull. Not quiet what the media talked about, but still no small feat, as it's hairy maths in the encryption world.

I think this year's winner safely falls into the room 101, the other years tech winners have. Along with the fastest web browser in the world, the new encryption algorythim the girl invented (that she didnt really invent), this attack will be either forgotten about, proved wrong or made redundant by something better.

This is Media hype, if you want Tech news, root around the web, do not believe for a second the tripe that they peddle on TV, especially TV3 News, eurg.

PeakOutput

thanks for info a few people had said it to me after i mention im thinking about doing something in computer science just wanted to clear things up

Khannie

If you're interested in learning about programming, you should start out with learning a simple language (HTML will give you some kind of idea what it's about, then you could progress to an actual programming language like Java (HTML is not a programming language because it has no variables, but is a very useful starting point)).

Computer Science isn't all about programming, but it's a large part of it.

cousin_borat

DaSilva wrote:

I think this year's winner safely falls into the room 101, the other years tech winners have. Along with the fastest web browser in the world, the new encryption algorythim the girl invented (that she didnt really invent), this attack will be either forgotten about, proved wrong or made redundant by something better.
.

These new encryption methods are manna from heaven for unimaginative Computer Scientists looking for a PHD topic. Any new one method that comes out you'll see a bunch of PHD papers devoted to cracking it

Webmonkey

Computer Science isn't all about programming, but it's a large part of it.

Yes and i think a lot of people who love programming don't know what they actually getting into.
I am doing a computer course and Well programming is definetely big part of it but there is far more involved.

Few examples of subjects in second year:
Maths
Telecommunications (Basically Electronics/Physics)
System Analysis & Design (Can be dreadful boring)
Networks (Well it is half networking course so this big)
Computer Architecture (Very interesting but not all programming and programming is Assembly)
Programming ( )
Operating Systems (Basically UNIX stuff and filesystems, lots of theory and shell scripting)

cousin_borat

Webmonkey wrote:

System Analysis & Design (Can be dreadful boring)

I was the same in university, you soon learn that this is THE most important skill of being a good programmer.

Webmonkey

I know that too but that doesn't mean it not boring! I do understand it is neccessary for large projects out in industry afterwards.

Civilian_Target

Woah! I know the new browser one was a pile of cheese but the encryption one was actually genuine AFAIK - she herself came up with the encryption algorithim but what she released was novel work, showing how encryption processes could be accelerated

DaSilva

Civilian_Target wrote:

Woah! I know the new browser one was a pile of cheese but the encryption one was actually genuine AFAIK - she herself came up with the encryption algorithim but what she released was novel work, showing how encryption processes could be accelerated

Maybe you're right, I'm not sure, since there isn't a lot of information about, but from the wiki entry it says;

wikipedia wrote:

During a work-experience placement with Baltimore Technologies, Sarah was shown an unpublished paper by Michael Purser which outlined a new public-key cryptographic scheme using non-commutative multiplication. She was asked to write an implementation of this scheme in Mathematica as part of her duties during her placement.

....Sarah asked Michael Purser for permission to include work based on his cryptographic scheme....

....On advice from her mathematician father, Sarah decided to use matrices to implement Purser's scheme....

She might have come up with the code algorithm, but I don't know how much that really is, if the math version was done for her.

Civilian_Target

If what I heard at the time was correct, its actually a fairly simple solution to a complexity problem that no-one had seen, and while her solution at the time wasn't 100% correct, it was quickly formulated into something that was correct and has led to quicker encryption into certain classes of encryption systems.

Webmonkey

Her father teaches at CIT, where i go. She works for the Mathamatica (sp?) creators at the moment i think and she was promoting that software. Father thought her well, she used to be taught maths at the dinner table every day after school!.

Martyr

DaSilva wrote:

She might have come up with the code algorithm, but I don't know how much that really is, if the math version was done for her.

sarah probably didn't have much to do with the algorithm overall, but she'll do well for it and maybe surprise us all in future with some work completely independant...although i doubt she will get as much attention as she did for winning the esat compo.

its fair to be cynical of the award, simply because it takes many years of researching existing cryptographic algorithms in order to develop new ones, without weaknesses. Then some 16 year old girl "revolutionises" the way its done after reading a copy of Applied Cryptography by Bruce.S

if she doesn't develop any new ciphers/techniques in future, then i guess she just got lucky, and good luck to her.

sometimes, women get more attention from the media when
they accomplish something usually associated with men, whatever it may be.

for example, a woman i know who just happens to play pool and is part of the all ireland womens team gets offered interviews quite alot, whereas fellas not so much.she is a great player though, no doubt.

i recall a woman being interviewed on national radio many years ago, because she was only female in some engineering course..for whole of ireland.

in computers, joanna rutowska, rootkit researcher, gets alot of media attention, and rightly so, some say..but many also say because she is a woman, and its rare to have women researching science, in particular this area of computing, thats all media are interested in..

a man in same situation probably wouldn't get half as much attention for the same work.

another example was "Gigabyte" a belgium girl who claimed to write viruses.
there were loads of interviews..too many.

even though her programming skill was below-average, many media hacks reported her as some kind of dangerous elite hacker, which is probably what eventually led to her arrest, even though her programs were harmless.