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Datalog is a logic programming language, based on Prolog, which is seeing something of a resurgence in interest in recent years. In particular, several recent approaches to authorization (working out who can do what) have used Datalog as the logical basis for access control decisions. On the face of it, this seems like a perfect […]
over a year ago

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More from Neil Madden

The square roots of all evil

Every programmer knows Donald Knuth’s famous quote that “premature optimization is the root of all evil”, from his 1974 Turing Award lecture (pdf). A fuller quotation of the surrounding context gives a rounder view: I am sorry to say that many people nowadays are condemning program efficiency, telling us that it is in bad taste. […]

4 months ago 24 votes
Digital signatures and how to avoid them

Wikipedia’s definition of a digital signature is: A digital signature is a mathematical scheme for verifying the authenticity of digital messages or documents. A valid digital signature on a message gives a recipient confidence that the message came from a sender known to the recipient. —Wikipedia They also have a handy diagram of the process […]

6 months ago 15 votes
Machine Learning and the triumph of GOFAI

I’ve been slowly reading Brian Cantwell Smith’s “The Promise of Artificial Intelligence” recently. I haven’t finished reading it yet, and like much of BCS’s writing, it’ll probably take me 3 or 4 read-throughs to really understand it, but there’s one point that I want to pick up on. It is the idea that “Good Old-Fashioned […]

9 months ago 17 votes
Galois/Counter Mode and random nonces

It turns out you can encrypt more than 2^32 messages with AES-GCM with a random nonce under certain conditions. It’s still not a good idea, but you can just about do it. #cryptography

10 months ago 15 votes
SipHash-based encryption for constrained devices

I see a lot of attempts to define encryption schemes for constrained devices with short authentication tags (e.g., 64 bits) using universal hashing. For example, there’s a proposal in CFRG at the moment for a version of AES-GCM with short tags for this kind of use-case. In my (admittedly limited) experience, these kinds of constrained […]

11 months ago 12 votes

More in technology

This student made his own odds with a DIY slot machine

Today’s digital slot machines are anything but “fair,” in the way that most of us understand that word. There is tight regulation in most places, but the machines can still adjust their odds of payout in order to maintain a specific profit margin. If the machine thinks it has paid out too many wins recently, […] The post This student made his own odds with a DIY slot machine appeared first on Arduino Blog.

19 hours ago 2 votes
The Rapture

It’s fascinating how these vascular bundles, containing xylem and phloem, are arranged in a ring located beneath the skin (periderm) and the cortex.

17 hours ago 2 votes
Peanut butter toast

You never know what moments have staying power until they hit you.

an hour ago 1 votes
The government should stop worrying about the Daily Mail Test

You can't fix the Civil Service by penny-pinching

yesterday 3 votes
Benchmarks from M2 Pro to M4 Pro

Long story short, I picked up a new MacBook Pro this week. I got the M4 Pro version with the higher core count and 1TB of internal storage. It's the exact same model in the lineup as the M2 Pro I've been using for the last

2 days ago 2 votes