Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Cryptography Pioneers Win Turing Award: Martin Hellman, Whitfield Diffie
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/02/technology/cryptography-pioneers-to-win-turing-award.html?_r=0
Cryptography Pioneers Win Turing Award
By JOHN MARKOFF
MARCH 1, 2016
SAN FRANCISCO — In 1970, a Stanford artificial intelligence researcher named John McCarthy returned from a conference in Bordeaux, France, where he had presented a paper on the possibility of a “Home Information Terminal.”
He predicted the terminal would be connected via the telephone network to a shared computer, which in turn would store files that would contain all books, magazines, newspapers, catalogs, airline schedules, public information and personal files.
Whitfield Diffie, then a young programmer at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, read Mr. McCarthy’s paper and began to think about the question of what would take the place of an individual signature in a paperless world. Mr. Diffie would spend the next several years pursuing that challenge and in 1976, with Martin E. Hellman, an electrical engineer at Stanford, invented “public-key cryptography,” a technique that would two decades later make possible the commercial World Wide Web.
On Tuesday, the Association for Computing Machinery announced that the two men have won this year’s Turing Award. The award is frequently described as the Nobel Prize for the computing world and since 2014, it has included a $1 million cash award, after Google quadrupled its size.
<snip>
The privacy protection technology that is now used extensively to protect modern electronic communications is based on Mr. Diffie’s and Mr. Hellman’s original research that led to the creation of “public-key cryptography” technology.
<snip>
Mr. Diffie and Mr. Hellman have long been political activists. Mr. Hellman has focused on the threat that nuclear weapons pose to humanity, and he said in an interview he would use his share of the prize money to pursue work related to the nuclear threat. He said he also planned to write a new book with his wife on peace and sustainability.
Mr. Diffie, who has spent his career working on computer security at telecommunications firms and at the Silicon Valley pioneer Sun Microsystems, has been an outspoken advocate for the protection of personal privacy in the digital age.
He said in an interview that he plans to do more to document the history of the field he helped to create. “This will free me to spend more of my time on cryptographic history, which is urgent because the people are quickly dying off,” Mr. Diffie said.
Cryptography Pioneers Win Turing Award
By JOHN MARKOFF
MARCH 1, 2016
SAN FRANCISCO — In 1970, a Stanford artificial intelligence researcher named John McCarthy returned from a conference in Bordeaux, France, where he had presented a paper on the possibility of a “Home Information Terminal.”
He predicted the terminal would be connected via the telephone network to a shared computer, which in turn would store files that would contain all books, magazines, newspapers, catalogs, airline schedules, public information and personal files.
Whitfield Diffie, then a young programmer at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, read Mr. McCarthy’s paper and began to think about the question of what would take the place of an individual signature in a paperless world. Mr. Diffie would spend the next several years pursuing that challenge and in 1976, with Martin E. Hellman, an electrical engineer at Stanford, invented “public-key cryptography,” a technique that would two decades later make possible the commercial World Wide Web.
On Tuesday, the Association for Computing Machinery announced that the two men have won this year’s Turing Award. The award is frequently described as the Nobel Prize for the computing world and since 2014, it has included a $1 million cash award, after Google quadrupled its size.
<snip>
The privacy protection technology that is now used extensively to protect modern electronic communications is based on Mr. Diffie’s and Mr. Hellman’s original research that led to the creation of “public-key cryptography” technology.
<snip>
Mr. Diffie and Mr. Hellman have long been political activists. Mr. Hellman has focused on the threat that nuclear weapons pose to humanity, and he said in an interview he would use his share of the prize money to pursue work related to the nuclear threat. He said he also planned to write a new book with his wife on peace and sustainability.
Mr. Diffie, who has spent his career working on computer security at telecommunications firms and at the Silicon Valley pioneer Sun Microsystems, has been an outspoken advocate for the protection of personal privacy in the digital age.
He said in an interview that he plans to do more to document the history of the field he helped to create. “This will free me to spend more of my time on cryptographic history, which is urgent because the people are quickly dying off,” Mr. Diffie said.
2 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
