Small world

[maradydd]

There's a post up on BoingBoing today (ok, yesterday for me) about open vs. closed search algorithms, suggesting that the search algorithms used by Google, Yahoo et al are bad because of their lack of transparency. It invokes a comparison to an important concept in computer security: "security through obscurity" is dangerous because an effective encryption scheme should be equally hard to break whether you know the internals of the algorithm that generated the ciphertext or whether you don't.

I think comparing this to search is a bad (or at best misleading) idea, and expounded on this in the comments. But I'm far more entertained by the fact that the two best comments on the post so far come from two sources with whom I am tangentially familiar, albeit from totally different directions: jrtom and radtea. Small damn world!

Comments

[enochsmiles.livejournal.com]

It occurs to me that we're running up against something I see in academia/industry time and time again. One field knows that something is trivially breakable, while another field has no notion that there's anything wrong with it. But the two fields don't talk, because field A doesn't see anything interesting in field B, and field B doesn't see how field A applies (because, likewise, field A is uninteresting to field B.)

A lot of my success in research has simply been the putting-together of an insight from field A, a problem from field B, and an observation from field C to answer a question in field D. I sort of think that's cheating, but hey, it tends to advance the fields involved, either by leading them to better answers, or showing them what research has utility (gasp) to other fields.

And this is all within the field of computer science! Science in general has gotten too big, too fragmented, and too specialized to do anything but continue to build more narrow tunnels toward nothing. It's quite frustrating, but I'm getting well off topic here.