Do Cryptographers burn?

[Dave Howe]

Hadmut Danisch wrote:
> - He didn't find any single mistake. He just says that everything is
>   already known and taken from literature.
certainly possible - if he didn't know (or deliberately ignored) that it had
been written in 1988 :)
How much of it is *still* new or at least hard to find in the literature?
how much of it would be known *today* out of hand by someone who was
familiar with the state of the art?  If the university had instructed him to
take a look at your work in that context, he may well not have found
anything new or novel in there - because your work had since been
duplicated, and after 16  years I would expect it to have been duplicated
several times.  If he had been instructed to find pre-1987 published work
that duplicated yours, that would be different - but I would assume the
university neglected that direction while instructing him.

> Maybe it's a minority writing false expertises. But it's a majority
> accepting that.
We have the same problem with expert witnesses in court here in the uk -
after a while, prosecutors learn which experts can be relied on to give the
answer they want rather than admit it is a matter of opinion and either case
could be correct - such experts get a lot more work from the prosecution for
their "unbiassed" opinions than those which gave an "unbiassed" opinion the
prosecution didn't like (it isn't unknown for the prosecution to approach
three or four experts and take the most favourable return to court)

> So my doubt is not so much about that someone found the magic way to
> factorize. It's about someone intenionally selling snake-oil or
> backdoors and other's keeping their mouth shut and tolerate this as
> they do it here.
no, it isn't.
it is about someone deliberately choosing to concentrate on the worst
aspects of a 16 year old dissertation (almost certainly, that it is 16 years
out of date) and ignoring the context. I am sure if I paid 100 experts to
evaluate *anything* I could find at least one I liked the resulting report
from.
I am not too surprised either - for the reasons I have detailed above. I
know it is hard to have fought this way though the legal system to find the
university has tried to throw money at the problem to make it go away - but
it happens, and I can only assume you will eventually prove it in court.
what you have here is a legal problem with some individuals, that their
employer has chosen to back against a student, and in doing so bent any or
all rules it could to win. This says little about the individual who wrote
the new examination and more about your opponents in the university's legal
team.  BTW is there any way you can find out how many "experts" were asked
to evaluate your work before they found one whose answer they liked?

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