On Fri, Dec 27, 2013 at 7:54 PM, Levi Pearson <levipear...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Is helping someone further along the wrong path > really helpful?
It sounded to me like he was experimenting, which is great. I don't feel like that's a wrong path. The collision attacks I've studied all were discovered through iterations of analysis and experimentation. Let me reiterate, lest I seem discouraging towards people who are > earnestly trying to feel their way around a very interesting problem > they don't quite know the right questions to ask about yet. There was > nothing wrong with asking the original question; it's very common to > not even know the right way to explore unfamiliar terrain, and it's an > inescapable part of being a novice at something you're trying to learn > on your own. Many of the answers were given with good intentions and > probably a similar unfamiliarity with the surrounding problem domain. > But the fact remains that the answers were *unhelpful* and I'm sure > some of of the answerers would have realized this with a bit of > thought. > > I'm fairly certain that I'm not the only one on this list with more than a hobbyists knowledge of cryptography. If he simply wanted to know about the correctness of an implementation of SHA-256 he probably could have asked and gotten the answer. I'm not saying that anything you have said about cryptography is wrong. I just find it ironic that you are calling everyone out for their inability to answer the question when it seems to me like you've tried to answer a question he never had. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
