Pete's Log: bonanza, commitment schemes, and oblivion

Entry #1748, (Life in General)
(posted when I was 33 years old.)

The Thursday before last, I found myself at Molly's with Tony, Tim, and a couple of Joes (Arizona Joe and Kentucky Joe). One highlight of the evening was Arizona Joe telling me that he'd been spreading the word that Bonanza is the chemotherapy of songs, which apparently I had told him about the last time I saw him.

That evening I also discussed my checksum storage idea with Tim, who is wise in the ways of security. We had an interesting talk about how you can only prove that you knew something at a certain time if you have a trusted third party involved. We also came up with the idea of a service that creates a new public/private key pair every day and discards the private key at the end of the day, but makes all public keys available with dates. If you send a checksum to this service, it will sign it with the private key of that day. Again, this is a trusted third party sort of service.

But Tim told me to look up non-repudiation. This was a search term that actually led to relevant results. And then through a random and unrelated sequence of web-o-something, I stumbled upon commitment schemes, which is pretty much the problem I was wanting to solve.

Here, by the way, is how I came across commitment schemes: last Monday's XKCD referenced the Waterman butterfly projection, which had a comment on its discussion page by Strebe, who has a SHA-512 commitment to his real life identity on his user page. Very random sequence that led to me discovering more on this topic.

The moral of the story is: you will generally have more success if you know terms related to the problem you are trying to solve instead of terms related to your personal solution to the problem. Since odds are that people smarter than yourself have already solved the problem.

So yeah. Non-repudiation commitment schemes.

I bought the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion off Steam. For 5 Euro. Since Skyrim is getting so much hype, I figured I'd opt for the cheap predecessor. And once Elder Scrolls VI comes out, maybe I'll buy Skyrim.

This past weekend involved a couple birthdays. So Friday and Saturday both involved late nights out. But I still made it to Frisbee on Sunday. In five degree weather we managed 6 on 6. Not bad.