Category: cryptography
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Foam Kernow crypto ‘tea party’
Last night we ran an experimental cryptoparty at Foam Kernow. We’d not tried something like this before, or have any particular expertise with cryptography – so this was run as a research gathering for interested people to find out more about it. One of the misconceptions about cryptography I wanted to start with is that…
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A cryptoweaving experiment
Archaeologists can read a woven artifact created thousands of years ago, and from its structure determine the actions performed in the right order by the weaver who created it. They can then recreate the weaving, following in their ancestor’s ‘footsteps’ exactly. This is possible because a woven artifact encodes time digitally, weft by weft. In…
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Quipu: further experiments in Dusseldorf
A report on further experimentation with Julian Rohrhuber and his students at the Institute for Music and Media in Dusseldorf during our coding with weaves and knots remote seminar this week. As we have so little idea what the Inca are telling us in their Quipu, it seems appropriate to add a cryptanalysis approach to…
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Coding with knots: Inca Quipu
This week I’m teaching at IMM Düsseldorf with Julian Rohrhuber which has given me a chance to follow up a bit on Inca Quipu coding with knots, a dangling thread from the weavecoding project. Quipu are how the Incas organised their society, as they had no written texts or money – things like exchanges (for…
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How to back up your encryption keys
Without really noticing it I’ve gradually acquired more and more encryption keys without understanding how to back them up properly. Until fairly recently I lazily assumed that remembering the passphrases would be enough in case of my laptop catching on fire, but this is not the case. I use GPG keys both for authenticity over…
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Some post-Snowden thoughts
One of the most interesting outcomes of the the Snowden revelations for me are that they have exposed to the light of day an awful lot about how different groups of people relate to technology and authority. There are the side that worries about the internet becoming the “worst tool of human oppression in all…