blogwaffe

I’ve long hated slashdot. The articles that make it to the front page are typically pretty good, but the summaries are sometimes misleading, poorly worded or written by someone who clearly had no idea what the article was actually about. Worse, and the actual source of my hate, are the comments each submission acquires.

Whenever I read the comments on an article about Quantum Information (or some other field I actually know something about), I find the number of comments which contain pertinent information to be small, and those that contain accurate information to be entirely negligible. Reading the comments of such articles is infuriating. Why people read a naive explanation of some physical principal and then assume they know all there is to know about it, I don’t understand. Why they claim this knowledge and then publicly demonstrate their ignorance is further beyond me. Extrapolating, I long ago decided that comments on all of the articles were, with high probability, similarly misinformed, so I simply stopped reading slashdot. A better solution might have been to stop reading the comments, but knowing just how terrible the comments were, I lacked the will power to stay away from them; I was the moth, they the flame.

To get my nerdy news fix, I started reading digg. The technical articles there are of a narrower scope, but it’s worth it for the comments which typically come in only two varieties: “no digg” and “I also like cheese. digg++”.

Refreshing. Useless, but refreshing. I never get sucked into reading digg comments because I know ahead of time that they contain identically no information. In particular, there’s nothing there to raise my blood pressure.

Until recently.

A few days ago, I saw an article on digg titled Prof says there’s no hacker he can’t foil. I scoped it out and saw that it was a poorly written bit of science journalism about Hoi-Kwong Lo’s most recent paper: Simulation and Implementation of Decoy State Quantum Key Distribution over 60km Telecom Fiber.

The result is a nice practical demonstration. The article, however, makes the great mistake of confusing an eavesdropper (someone attached to the medium through which you’re sending information from one place to another) and a hacker(/cracker, a person with far more tools at his or her disposal, e.g. social engineering). This error on the part of the journalist made for some really disappointing comments on digg: exactly the sort of comments I try to avoid by steering clear of slashdot. I don’t know if the digg culture is changing, if quantum information brings people out of the woodwork who should remain there, or if this was a statistical aberration. In any case, I’ll have to be more careful from now on.

spamdies

oddly enough I read an article about a month ago on how to spoof a photon. This proff needs to catch up to the times.

no digg.

malkav

Of course this protects against sniffing/mitm attacks etc.. but if a ‘hacker’ just broke into the computer connected to the network, they could probably extracted the data from the network card after it has been decoded, or even from disk if it isn’t encrypted.

FYI, the actual result doesn’t claim otherwise, but digg++.

metman

To allude that your infoilable, clearly is a act of arrogance. Silly human.

Your spelling, then, is clearly not an act of arrogance.

snowbooch

its gonna be open season on this guy

Perhaps. If the “hackers” out there demonstrate a level of reading comprehension on par with that of your own. Or if they feel like punishing a happily innocent scientist for having a ‘sensationalized to the point of misinformation’ article written about him. I admit either as a possibility.

kiwifireball

This is all well and good. It’s not a surprise that this overly “intelligent” physics geek made such an outrageous claim. I suppose he didn’t take into consideration that this system could still be “hacked” with good old social engineering.

So close. You see the problem, but miss the source. I’ll give it a ‘I thought about digging it but decided to abstain in the hopes the aggregate would know better than I do’ for potentially leading people in the right direction and allowing some future commenter to correct your misconception.

barkie

I read about quantam crypography two years ago. Old shit. No digg.

Ah… this one might be my favorite. Dumb shit. No digg.

madjack3

dugg for the comments more than the article! haha.

I also like cheese.