April 10, 2008 • 12:14 am 0
Is this the next thing to worry about?
Technology security firm sounds alarm over VoIP phone vulnerabilities
National Post
08 Apr 2008
The latest telephone systems that rely on the Internet to make calls are easily breached by hackers and the bad guys are just beginning to attack, an Ottawa technology security firm says. More than 100 vulnerabilities have been found in VoIP (voice… read more…
Filed under: Security, Technology, in the News
April 5, 2008 • 1:13 am 1
My colleague Aiden Bruen sent me an e-mail comment on a recent news article (“Burning down the house” Globe and Mail, March 8, 08) concerning the newly released movie 21.
He says:
[the article] is somewhat misleading, as is the plot of the movie.
Counting cards in blackjack goes way back to a paper entitled “Fortune’s Formula: a winning strategy for blackjack” presented by mathematician Ed Thorp in January 1961. The paper explained how card-counting improves the odds and how much should be bet. Many backers offered to finance Thorp who went to Reno to try out the system during Spring Break at MIT in 1961. The system worked perfectly. Eventually however, Thorp and his associates would be asked to leave. Most casinos then also adopted the “professor stopper” which allowed dealers to shuffle multiple decks together, thereby sharply reducing the edge afforded by “card counting”. Details are nicely described in the book by W. Poundstone.
The mathematics is based on the work of the great Claude Shannon on information theory [see our book]. The ideas, fundamental in communications, are still used prominently in finance and gambling using the so-called Kelly formula.
A quick search on the internet turn out this other article (“Getting a hand”) and many references to the Four Horseman who were pioneers in devising an optimal strategy for beating Blackjack. Their insights were later formalized and corrected by Edward Thorp in his book “Beat the Dealer”. John Kelly made an important contribution to the information theoretical aspects of the optimal betting strategy problem.
Filed under: Infomation Theory, in the News
Data Security and Information Theory are essential to modern life. Far from being the exclusive domain of academics and geeks, the fundamentals and its application are easy to understand for most people. Here, my modest attempt to bring some of the issues to the public discourse and spread the knowledge to make the internet a safer place for your virtual self.
Click below to find out more
ScienceDaily: Computer Security News Wired: Commentary
