[Cryptography] People vs AI

[Christian Huitema]

On 4/10/2025 7:01 PM, Bill Stewart wrote:

> On 3/17/2025 12:26 AM, Peter Gutmann wrote:
>> arxlight <arxlight at arx.li> writes:
>>
>>> It must have been within hours of that when we had the conversation 
>>> about the
>>> strange single point of failure it was to have a substantial slice 
>>> of the
>>> world's crypto (in the original sense of the word) expertise on the 
>>> same boat
>>> in the immediate vicinity of a semi-active volcano during a total 
>>> eclipse.
>>
>> Something similar happened at Usenix Security in (from memory) San 
>> Antonio,
>> where the first major flight out the next day was full of conference 
>> speakers,
>> organisers, attendees.  Someone commented that "if this flight 
>> crashes, it'll
>> set Internet security back ten years".
>
> Bell Labs travel dept used to have rules about "no more than N 
> employees on any given airplane flight."
> (That was separate from the private aircraft rule, which was "No, 
> nope, absolutely not, you can NOT fly your private plane on company 
> business, don't even try, not even if you're not vouchering it!". Of 
> course anybody who had a license or plane tried to find ways around it.) 


An accident like that did happen in France in 1971. Six officers and 
seven engineers of the CEA - Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique (Central 
commission for nuclear energy) were on board a turboprop that crashed in 
the Massif central mountains, killing them and a crew of 8. That was a 
major blow for the organization. See: 
https://www.baaa-acro.com/crash/crash-nord-262a-34-near-mezilhac-21-killed

-- Christian Huitema