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matt blaze Profile picture
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8 Nov, 4 tweets, 1 min read
“Why did you block my other account? You must be an asshole.” You might not be learning the intended lesson here.
For the record, I block people for a variety of reasons, my being a capricious asshole being only one of them. Mostly I block people for being abusive or excessively tiresome.
If you’re unhappy about this, please feel free to make a first amendment complaint about me to your nearest police precinct. They’ll be glad to help you. Or complain to my employer (that’s George Mason University, remember).
Seriously, the block function is AWESOME. It makes annoying people simply disappear. It’s like a “will no one rid me of this troublesome priest” button without the murderous part.

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More from @mattblaze

matt blaze Profile picture
8 Nov
If you’re a computer scientist and you’ve not read this seminal work, you owe it to yourself to do so. (Un)fortunately, it’s become hard to find platforms on which the attack can be reproduced in the form described, but it’s a transformative experience when you do.
Mastery of the buffer overflow attack - not just understanding it conceptually, but actually being able to execute it - is like developing a terrible superpower. You start to understand the problem of security in an entirely different way. @aleph_one’s paper made that accessible.
Anyway, @aleph_one’s paper, and an exercise based on it, is assignment #1 in every security course I teach.
Read 10 tweets
matt blaze Profile picture
7 Nov
So, “cryptocurrency technology" means digital signatures and hashes, at a minimum. So, which public key signature schemes do we teach 11th graders? Something based on elliptic curves, maybe? And where in the curriculum do we introduce chosen prefix attacks against hash functions?
Also, we’ll really need to start these kids with a good foundation in number theory and finite fields, not to mention the basics of differential and linear cryptanalysis. Better start in the 8th grade or so.
Or maybe they mean things like securing digital wallets. Which means we better getting them started in serious hardware reverse engineering techniques by the 9th grade or so.
Read 10 tweets
matt blaze Profile picture
7 Nov
Out of context, this sounds like the sort of thing that should cause one’s friends to stage an intervention. In context, too.
Maybe vaccines are “communist” because of their side effect of protecting not just recipients, but also those with whom they come into contact. Perhaps a proper capitalist vaccine should be developed that protects recipients while creating extra risk for everyone else.
But of course, if the market wanted such a vaccine, it should exist already.
Read 8 tweets
matt blaze Profile picture
24 Oct
Apropos of nothing in particular, pedantic insistence on a particular usage of some relatively unimportant technical term is invariably uninteresting. I’m reminded of a few years back when…
… some random stranger here made a big deal about how obviously I didn’t know what I was talking about when I used “cryptography” when I “clearly” would have used “cryptology” if I knew anything at all about the subject...
The truth is that while cryptography and cryptology can be narrowly distinguished (the former refers to encryption, while the latter to the study of the field broadly), virtually no one actually working in the field finds the distinction important, and uses them interchangeably.
Read 6 tweets
matt blaze Profile picture
24 Oct
It’s thew time of year to remind people that mass-emailing faculty from a list is NOT an effective way to apply to graduate school. We have an application process. Spamming professors with your transcript/CV will just annoy people and will achieve the opposite of what you want.
If there’s a professor doing work that you’re specifically interested in or you have a specific question about something, by all means contact them, of course. But mass email doesn’t will not help your chances, and the people advising students to do it are harming them.
Around this time of year I get at least several emails -with lengthy attachments- every day from prospective students who are obviously mass-emailing from a list. So do many other faculty members. Stop telling people to do this. Get better advice if you’re being told to do this.
Read 25 tweets
matt blaze Profile picture
23 Oct
Gun people getting all mad at me because I (correctly, as far as I can tell) used the term “prop gun” to refer to a gun (whether fake or real) that was a prop in a film production.
Presumably the same people who get all huffy about calling them “firearms”.
“You don’t know how to field-strip an AK47, so you have no business claiming that being shot can hurt a person”.
Read 5 tweets

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