[4951] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Bridge
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David Jablon)
Wed Jun 23 23:03:31 1999
Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 18:26:05 -0400
To: "Steven M. Bellovin" <smb@research.att.com>
From: David Jablon <dpj@world.std.com>
Cc: cryptography@c2.net
In-Reply-To: <19990623164707.3F22D41F16@SIGABA.research.att.com>
At 12:47 PM 6/23/99 -0400, you wrote:
> With all due respect, I think many posters are missing the point. From
> a cryptographic perspective, the problem is *easy*. The hard part is
> the verifiable procedures, hardware, and software. That's why gross
> physical randomness is so attractive to lotteries -- anyone can see (to
> a first approximation, at least) that the mechanism is fair. But even
> that isn't foolproof; a number of years ago, an insider at one state
> lottery weighted some of the balls, to shift the odds in his favor.
Yes.
I recall the Pennsylvania lottery scandal, where fluid was injected
into all the ping-pong balls numbered "4" and "6", and the
perpetrators went bar-hopping, betting on appropriate
combinations, 446, 646, 666, ...
> Now -- how would you prevent that sort of thing in a bridge tournament?
> Do you *really* know what code is running on your machine today?
This seems like another good case for a verifiably pure
open-source implementation.
... By the way, their number came up 666.
Darn that luck. It only fueled suspicions which led to
the arrest of the perps. Even with random systems, life
can be unfair.
-- dpj
---------------------------------------------------
David Jablon
dpj@world.std.com
www.IntegritySciences.com
