Well, this is discouraging. How in the world does someone smart enough and lucky enough to become a billionaire decide to donate most of it to a far, far right-wing organization dedicated to sending the US back to the 1880s? $1.6 billion to the Federalist Society? The Federalist Society has always been a keystone of the conservative movement’s long game, a strategic force. With this kind of backing, they can wreak havoc for another 50 years. Sigh.
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NPR reports that “House of the Dragon’ is the most watched premiere in HBO history“. I watched it, and…meh. I think we may have hit Peak Dragon.
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The BBC coins a term – presenteeism. Yet another micro-aggression, I suppose.
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More politics. Here’s a cringeworthy advertisement from Florida’s asshat Governor. Hard to believe people actually vote for this guy.
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From the Max Planck Institute – OUR BRAIN IS A PREDICTION MACHINE THAT IS ALWAYS ACTIVE. No wonder I’m tired a lot. But this is seriously interesting.
Our brain works a bit like the autocomplete function on your phone – it is constantly trying to guess the next word when we are listening to a book, reading or conducting a conversation. Contrary to speech recognition computers, our brains are constantly making predictions at different levels, from meaning and grammar to specific speech sounds. This is what researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Radboud University’s Donders Institute discovered in a new study. Their findings are published in PNAS.
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Finally today, insights from the Grand Old Man of cybersecurity, Bruce Schneier – at least one of NIST’s final four new post-quantum encryption techniques is tragically broken.
One of the most popular algorithms, Rainbow, was found to be completely broken. Not that it could theoretically be broken with a quantum computer, but that it can be broken today—with an off-the-shelf laptop in just over two days. Three other finalists, Kyber, Saber, and Dilithium, were weakened with new techniques that will probably work against some of the other algorithms as well. (Fun fact: Those three algorithms were broken by the Center of Encryption and Information Security, part of the Israeli Defense Force. This represents the first time a national intelligence organization has published a cryptanalysis result in the open literature. And they had a lot of trouble publishing, as the authors wanted to remain anonymous.
Post-quantum refers to a time when we actually have quantum computers that can be used for breaking encryption. We’re not there yet, but criminals and governments (is there a difference?) are quite concerned that all their secrets will be revealed if/when someone builds a viable quantum computer. This is fascinating stuff, and there’s no one better than Schneier to give you the straight story.