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Comment by taspeotis | Hacker News Reader

    Problems with Bruce Schneier's “Solitaire” (ciphergoth.org)

There's no year in the title, which raised my ire. It's an old article. But it's hard to tell how old this article is. The end of the article has an update dated "2001 August 13" and the Last-Modified header is "Wed, 19 Jan 2005 00:12:22 GMT".

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Yes, I agree that would have been wise, sorry about that! These days I'd use blogging software that would date things automatically. However I'm sure this dates from 1999 or before, because it was as a result of writing this that I ended up going to crypto conferences like FSE in 2000.

Nothing wrong with your article, it's the submission title I'm referring to.

Without my article saying it, the submission had no way of knowing I think.

Given that Cryptonomicon was published in 1999, I'd guess the article wasn't published before then.

So... 1999?

That would make sense :)

So most modern webservers, for caching purposes, will return the last modified date for any HEAD request. For old school html, this is the actual results of stat(2) on the html file. You can do this quite trivially with curl or telnet ala:

    $ telnet www.ciphergoth.org 80
    Trying 80.68.89.15...
    Connected to www.ciphergoth.org.
    Escape character is '^]'.
    HEAD /crypto/solitaire/ HTTP/1.1
    Host: www.ciphergoth.org
    
    HTTP/1.1 200 OK
    Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2016 14:06:23 GMT
    Server: Apache/2.2.22 (Debian)
    Last-Modified: Wed, 19 Jan 2005 00:12:22 GMT
    ETag: "174125-164f-3edfc78a8c580"
    Accept-Ranges: bytes
    Content-Length: 5711
    Content-Type: text/html

So my educated guess, is that this article is from 2005. Mods/dang, mind changing the title of the article to reflect that?

Does an article really needs to be "fresh"? Are they tomatoes, that may become rotten?

No, I don't think so, but knowing when something was written is useful. For example, the article doesn't make mention of any other hand ciphers except for one attempt by the author. Is the lack of alternatives because none exist, or because the article was written a long time ago?

FWIW I still don't know of any good hand ciphers.

The US Army sometimes uses DRYAD. [1] It's not very good, but if you use a new code sheet every 6 hours and don't send much, it's OK.

The military views secrecy as a short-term issue. The most important secrets are "we're going to attack X at 0500 tomorrow". After tomorrow morning, it doesn't matter if the enemy can read the message. A cryptosystem only has to slow the enemy down enough that they can't react until it's too late. Classic Navy line: "Where the ship was last week is UNCLASSIFIED. Where the ship was yesterday is CONFIDENTIAL. Where the ship is now is SECRET. Where the ship will be tomorrow is TOP SECRET."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRYAD

I wonder if Web Archive will be able to tell its age.

Wayback machine's oldest archive is February 2002. https://web.archive.org/web/20020220073637/http://www.cipher...

What's with this recent rise of people being angry about titles on HN? I don't recall it being so strong in years gone by.

Well I read the article thinking that there might be some exciting new crypto news and then bam! "Update 2001 August 13".

But still, why angry?

It's all about context, in a temporal sense, which I think is important when discussing certain subjects.

I don't think GP comes across as "angry", the article title quite rightly should have [2001] tacked on the end.

"Ire" is a synonym for "anger." GP (GGP?) literally said that it made them angry.

I meant written with uncontrollable anger, rather stating in a calm and coherent manner what they're angry about.

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