Suggested readings week 27/2022
Candy Codes! Identification of objects
Secure identification of identical objects is a concern for all industries: from coffee makers to car batteries manufacturers. Virtually identical products out of the factory need to be distinguished once they reach the consumer, for multiple reasons.
Advanced and applied research recently raised attention to cryptography and Physical Unclonable Functions, but this beats everything with ingenuity.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-11234-4
Exponential progress: bitcoin and blockchain
Ray Kurzweil (now chief engineer of Google) might have been a bit too visionary, but playing with the future of technology is a dangerous game
Today, we laugh at the poor technical performance of the actual Bitcoin protocol just as we grinned yesterday at the emerging web. However, we forget that it is immersed in this very same area where progress is exponential.
https://medium.com/@Instit_Sapiens/bitcoin-totem-and-taboo-synthesis-403f60d3dee6
Bruce Schneier and electromechanical cyberattacks
The world first keylogger was deployed by Soviet spyes inside IBM Typewriters. Discovering it was a lucky break.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/10/soviet_spying_o.html
The Limits to Growth and remediations
The Limits to Growth report was published by Club of Rome in 1972. Dennis Meadows was one of the young authors (then 29), all of them researhers at the Massachusets Institute of Technology.
The Limits of Growth was based on computer simulations, which showed that without substantial changes in resource consumption, “a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity” would be the likely outcome by 2100.
It was largely rejected at that time, it proved to be largely surpassed by the events.
https://www.newstatesman.com/environment/2022/06/end-economic-growth-inevitable