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Quantum cryptography without the quantum?

Laszlo Kish at Texas A&M has announced a scheme for doing something very much like "quantum cryptography" without the need for messy individual-photon apparatus. Here's a PDF of the paper. Since this is the sort of thing that my readers are interested in and I know a bit about, I thought I'd comment even though it has run on Slashdot already.

(10 December 2005)

Stateless gaming

I had another of my late-night ideas this morning.  We've spent a lot of time talking about how to manage property in MMORPGs.  Many of the articles in my MMORPG category are on that theme.  Some people don't like the idea of players being able to sell game property; on the other hand, the fact that it's impossible to prevent such sales suggests that rather than trying to catch and punish people who do it, game operators might do better to simply allow sales and try to design games that will continue to be fun when sales are occurring.  I've written a bit on the technical aspects of a system to allow sales while reducing centralization; and I recently saw an interesting article considering the causes and effects of item sales in economic terms (note:  I haven't read this article carefully and at first glance I think the assumptions it makes simplify the problem too much for the conclusions to be useful; but it's worth at least a skim).  My rule is to challenge assumptions, though, and I've realised that there's still one assumption I haven't seen anyone challenge yet. (4 May 2005)

The monster with ten thousand secrets

On thinking some more about the hash cash for virtual real estate idea, one possibility I imagined was that it could be applied to possession of items as well as real estate.  I imagine a game something like Legend of the Red Dragon (LORD), which was very popular back in the BBS era. (21 March 2005)

Hash cash for virtual real estate

I've been thinking a bit more recently about peer-to-peer MMORPG systems à la Kosmos Online.  Here are some thoughts on that. (20 January 2005)

A Limited-Diffusion Algorithm for Blind Substring Search

Resources and links on my paper A Limited-Diffusion Algorithm for Blind Substring Search, from CITSS'98; Best Student Paper award winner. (1 June 1998)