Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal

Yesterday Eran Tromer gave a colloqium talk at IBM HRL on Hardware Based Implementations of Factoring Algorithms. Eran’s talk dealt with the improvements leading up to the TWIRL device, which cleverly exploits the inherent parallelism of the Number Field Sieve algorithm via hardware design. The bottom line is that factoring 1024 bit RSA keys in reasonable time, using the hypothetical TWIRL device, will only cost approximately 10,000,000$. Previous estimates were in the trillions of dollars. For perspective, 1024 bit is the recommended RSA key size, and $10e6 is peanuts for a certain Fort Meade agency…. More details are available in the papers on Eran’s Weizmann home page.

After the talk Eran, Oleg, myself and another coworker whose name I don’t recall had lunch at the IBM cafeteria. Topics of discussion during lunch were suitably geeky for the company involved, and much fun was had. Earlier, Eran explained that parameters to one of algorithm’s steps are chosen so that a memory write will always occur to the memory cell preceding a cell we just read (which means a cache hit, which is a good thing). During lunch, I told Eran that it reminded me of the techniques used by Mel, a Real Programmer, and Eran said that he concurs, and must have internalized the story to use the same trick. Inspiration comes from unlikely places…

Written yesterday (Tuesday) morning, and left forgotten in an emacs buffer somewhere…

Sitting in my parents living room, waiting for the phone company technician to come by and replace their ADSL modem, I happened to read the newpaper.

– The single parents struggle for the reinstatements of their welfare is understandable, but Binyamin Netanyahu, the finance minister, is 100% right in my opinion. There should not be incentives for anyone to stay home and not work. Especially when those incentives come directly out of my hard earned tax money. Simplistic? maybe. Cold and unfeeling? maybe. As Heinlein once put it so aptly, There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. If one wants money, one should work for it.

It’s interesting to note that the paper (Ma’ariv, page 3) had a chart that showed that a one-parent family with two children, where the mother works part time, actually makes more than a married couple with two children, where the husband works full time, even after the recent cut in the single parent welfare allotments.

– The business supplement had an interview with an Israeli VP at Microsoft, who’s running their foray into the storage area. Now imagine the blue screen of death on your enterprise storage system…