[this post has been partially damaged during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004, and it has been possible to recover only a part of it]
[further parts of this post were recovered on 13 October 2018]
Now here’s an interesting article [security.itworld.com].
It seems that the European Union is investing €11 million over four years into developing a secure communication system based on quantum cryptography.
For those of you not in the know, quantum cryptography (for passing crypto keys) works like this:
Quantum Cryptography For Dummies
- Alice wants to send Bob secret message, confessing her undying love, but doesn’t want anybody else to know how she feels.
- She fires some photons out of a special tube, so that some of them spin in different directions.
- Numbers are assigned to the different directions of spin, and she multiplies these together – along with a few prime numbers, for good measure – to get a Really Big Number.
- Then, Alice does some clever sums on the letters in her love letter, using the Really Big Number.
- Alice posts the first line of the new love letter to Bob (the line that says “Dear Bob,”). This is known as the ‘message header’. If Bob sends a message back saying that he got
this, Alice will send the rest of…
Claire and I stayed up late and played multiplayer Civilization 3: Conquests together. When the Carthaginians picked on her, I stuck up for her and razed one of their cities. We’re
hoping that by working together, we might be able to get a spaceship to Alpha Centauri before 1900.
We played until it started to get light. Then we went to bed and rolled around, laughing. Then we had sex as the sun rose.
A long multiplayer games session followed by a shag. Is there anything more romantic?
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's
reposted.
This repost was published in hindsight, on 11 March 2019.
Ruth wrote:
Today we have been…
…testing Dan. Earlier I sent in to ask how many times the big Panda said ‘nice’ in Panda Ko Panda (12, 5 times referring to bamboo). When we were getting food at the Chinese, Dan
accused Bryn of having sent that in (he was logged on at the time), I might have got away with it but I burst out laughing.
Then just now, Bryn and I were wondering how many cups of coffee you could make using all the water in the pacific ocean. In case anyone wants to try it, the answer is 259 million
cups, using 518 million tablespoons of ground coffee. That’s a lot of caffeine!
Bryn: “Can you imagine the size of the coffee filter?”