So, I've learned about Fourier every year in my bachelor of Mathematics and I'm learning about the efficient algorithm dealing with the Fourier Transform in my class of Algebra right now.
I found a really nice video explaining really quick what it is, concretely.
Here's wikipedia way of showing that 
made by LucasVB, this crazy guy doing all those math gifs you've probably seen before :) more here
There's also a visualization in d3.js here: http://bl.ocks.org/jinroh/7524988
A great article from AskAmathematician about true randomness.
The question is actually geared towards physicists and the tl;dr is: true randomness exists. Take that causality believers.
And as I expected, the experience to prove this is done with photons:
http://www.askamathematician.com/2009/12/q-do-physicists-really-believe-in-true-randomness/
Bitcoins
posted April 2014
I just gave a talk about bitcoins at my uni, here are the slides
The editor I'm using the most is Sublime Text 3. It's just super easy to use and super useful when you combine it with the right plugins and snippets.
But I love switching editors. I've used Frontpage, Dreamweaver, PHP Designer, Netbeans, Notepad++... and others I can't remember. I've recently tried the beta of Light Table and Brackets (that is truly amazing!), and I am eagerly waiting for Atom the open source IDE of github.
I also love spending time with Emacs. It's hard to master but I dig the "you don't need a mouse" aspect. One thing I found really annoying though is that most software use Vim by default. Wanting to master emacs, I didn't want to spend time learning Vim as well and I started tweaking the settings so that software X would use emacs by default. And that works well until... But then you run into some complications, for example I'm still trying to figure out how to do a git diff with emacs, or you run into a machine without emacs, and then it's either nano, which is shitty, or something else that is installed on the machine... and vim is (almost?) always installed by default.
So I decided to just learn Vim. And it was actually easier than it sounded and I feel like I'm going to avoid a lot of headaches now. Sometimes it's better to learn and adapt rather than try to use our own tools.
And if you're like me, you'll actually have a lot of fun learning vim :)
I run into a lot of great reads these days, so let me share one more with you,
Jean-Baptiste Quéru tries to explain how deep it goes when you just query google.com in your browser.
https://plus.google.com/+JeanBaptisteQueru/posts/dfydM2Cnepe
great read!
Wife: You mean http like the beginning of what I type into the browser?
Ryan: Yeah. That first part tells the browser what protocol to use. That stuff you type in there is one of the most important breakthroughs in the history of computing.
http://www.looah.com/source/view/2284
I was very confused when I was introduced to signatures and macs because I thought they were just Hashes. I got to understand what it was and... it's actually super simple.
Here's a great explanation on the crypto stackexchange but here's mine:
- I have a huuuge message that I want to transfer to a friend. I'm scared some of the words would change during transit. Solution? I just hash it and send the hash with the message.
hash = Hash(message). A hash is pretty small (for example a md5 hash is 32 characters) so it's no trouble.
My friend then receives the message and the hash, he can Hash(message) it and see if it gives him the same hash. If it doesn't then he knows that the message was changed and he can ask me for a new copy.
You can also call that an unkeyed hash, simply because it doesn't use a key. You just apply the algorithm to the message, no other arguments are given to the hash function.
- Okay now, We had some problems because some bad guy has sent numerous bad messages to my friends pretending he was me. I still want to hash my message but I also want to tell my friend it was me who wrote it.
So, like a symmetric cipher, I generate a key that I share with my friend. And I hash my message with that key
Hash = HMAC(key, message). My friend can now hash it with the same key when he receives the message and see that we have the same hash.
We just used a (symmetric) keyed hash or a HMAC (Hash-based message authentication code). Note that we could have used a MAC based on a Cipher as well (CMAC).
- So me and my friend have been writing many messages to a community of coders. We want to sign each messages with our name, but that's not enough, another bad guy is posting bad stuff signed with our names on different websites. So let's use a Hash that people can verify, like an asymmetric cipher, we generate both a secret key and a public key, we hash the message with our secret key and we post the message, the hash and the public key.
Hash = Sign(secret_key, message). People can then verifiy that Hash with the public key. Voila ! We just used a Signature or how I like to call them a asymmetric keyed hash. It allows for integrity of data, thanks to the hash, authentification of the authors, thanks to the secret key (this is a MAC), non-repudiation thanks to the public key (and now we have a signature).
So if you got it right, Hash < Mac < Signature. They're all useful and you should use the one relevant according to the context.
I'll just copypasta the table on the stackoverflow answer, because it's a real nice summary:
Cryptographic primitive | Hash | MAC | Digital
Security Goal | | | signature
------------------------+------+-----------+-------------
Integrity | Yes | Yes | Yes
Authentication | No | Yes | Yes
Non-repudiation | No | No | Yes
------------------------+------+-----------+-------------
Kind of keys | none | symmetric | asymmetric
| | keys | keys
A video I found about Elliptic Curve Cryptography that talks about the Discreet Logarithm Problem and the Diffie-Hellman Handshake with ECCs. Class is in english, with bits of german and even some french :)
Such a nice lecture, Christof Paar makes me think of a younger Gilbert Strang, seems to be a great professor. I was captivated until the end and I started liking ECCs again :)
