Tag: thompson

  1. Porting Godwin's Law to the field of cryptography.

    19 August 2013

    On the Internet, there exists a meme called Godwin's Law. Simply put, "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one," (where probabilities are specified as floating point values between 0.0 (0%) and 1.0 (100%)). It is usually at this point that the discussion is considered completely derailed and no longer worth following.

    It seems that a similar phenomenon is occurring more and more often in the twenty-first century, in which online discussions of cryptographic or security software will eventually lead to someone bringing up Ken Thompson's famous paper Reflections …

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