Hanno's blog

Based on the XKCD comic "Up Goer Five", someone made a nice little tool: An online text editor that lets you only use the 1000 most common words in English. And ask you to explain a hard idea with it.

Nice idea. I gave it a try. The most obvious example to use was my diploma thesis (on RSA-PSS and provable security), where I always had a hard time to explain to anyone what it was all about.

Well, obviously math, proof, algorithm, encryption etc. all are forbidden, but I had a hard time with the fact that even words like "message" (or anything equivalent) don't seem to be in the top 1000.

Here we go:

When you talk to a friend, she or he knows you are the person in question. But when you do this a friend far away through computers, you can not be sure.
That's why computers have ways to let you know if the person you are talking to is really the right person.

The ways we use today have one problem: We are not sure that they work. It may be that a bad person knows a way to be able to tell you that he is in fact your friend. We do not think that there are such ways for bad persons, but we are not completely sure.

This is why some people try to find ways that are better. Where we can be sure that no bad person is able to tell you that he is your friend. With the known ways today this is not completely possible. But it is possible in parts.

I have looked at those better ways. And I have worked on bringing these better ways to your computer.

So - do you now have an idea what I was taking about?

I found this nice tool through Ben Goldacre, who tried to explain randomized trials, blinding, systematic review and publication bias - go there and read it. Knowing what publication bias and systematic reviews are is much more important for you than knowing what RSA-PSS is. You can leave cryptography to the experts, but you should care about your health. And for the record, I recently tried myself to explain publication bias (german only).