Cryptographers

"Like Helen, Sarah is wonderously fair and ageless. ...Like Helen, Sarah's name means "princess" in normal Hebrew, and "queen" in Akkadian. It is conceivable that (like David afterwards, whose name dāvîd means "leader, chief") her title came to be used as her name."

"The [Judaic] Patriarchs are depicted as Arameans as long as they remained in their native lands."

"Scripture makes it clear that unlike the conceptions of Abraham and of Jacob, Isaac was conceived through divine agency. Like the Mycenaean Greek heroes, Isaac could claim paternity at two levels; the human and the divine. ...Normative Judaism has divested itself of this approach to the paternity of heroes, in spite of the tell-tale text in Genesis. Midrash does not hesitate to call Moses half-god and half-man. ...The Church tradition that connects the sacrifice of Isaac with the sacrifice of Christ apparently rests on a sound exegesis, for the sacrifice of Isaac would have meant not only the sacrifice of Abraham's son but of God's."

"The Samaritans (whose beginnings were pre-Josianic) have a Pentateuch quite similar to the familiar Jewish Pentateuch. ...our Pentateuchal text was fairly well established before the rift between the Samaritans and Judeans."

"The function of reciting (actually chanting—for Scripture and national epic were sung, not read) Pentateuch and Homer at national reunions is the same in both cases. The narrative knits the segments of the nation together telling how they achieved their place in history in the course of a great event (The Exodus or the Trojan War). All of the tribes and their leaders are heroic. The text brings in each tribe by name. ...there must be an honoured place for all."

"The Conquest of Joshua could not have been a primitive assault, because a civilized land like Canaan with well-fortified cities could easily have repulsed an attack that was militarily naïve. ...Spies were sent to search out the land and lay the groundwork."

"Battles ended with sunset or dusk; so heroes, on special occasions when they needed more time, were vouchsafed victory by the stoppage of the sun in Greek as well as Hebrew saga."

"Aristocrats (among Hebrews and Greeks) often had harems that included women of common or even servile origin, as well as well-born aristocratic ladies. Normally, the successors would be chosen from the sons born by ladies; but on occasion those born by servile or common wives achieved the ascendency. In the latter case, tradition could dwell on the phenomenon as "worthy of saga.""

"The prevailing view is simply that the Judges were inspired, not hereditary leaders. But this misses the point; the Judges were normally from the ruling aristocracy, quite like the kings in Homer. ...The kings did not necessarily inherit rulership from their fathers but sometimes did, like Odysseus from Laertes, or Abimelech from Gideon. ...the kings came from the fighting and landed aristocracy..."

"If archeology had yielded only the Epic of Kret, we would have enough to bridge the gap between the Iliad and Genesis. But... our new sources are so rich that we have only begun... The years ahead bid fair to be the most fruitful in the annals of Classical and Biblical scholarship. Our debt to the Bible and Classics is so great that this type of research will deepen our understanding of our culture and of ourselves."

"Cyrus Gordon is a brilliant linguist and one of the greatest living Semitists. Despite attempts by his enemies to replace it, his pioneering Ugaritic Grammar remains the standard work on the first new Semitic language to be discovered this century. Nevertheless, for the past thirty years he has been on the fringes of academia and most scholars consider him to be a crank. This is partly because his sins or errors are not ones of omission – towards which academia is extremely lenient – but of commission, which are considered irredeemably heinous. Moreover, his attempts to demonstrate the existence of Phoenician or even early Jewish influence on America are so far from conventional wisdom as to make him appear ludicrous. This means that all his original work can be, and has been, brushed aside with contempt."

"Dr. Gordon... contended that Hebrew inscriptions many centuries old had been found at two sites in the southeastern United States. Frank Moore Cross said... that Dr. Gordon was "in many ways a great scholar" but that this belief "simply did not make sense.""

"In 1894 Cyrus Thomas, a Smithsonian Institution archeologist, identified the Bat Creek site as a Cherokee burial ground. That identification has been challenged in the twentieth century by various writers including the irrepressible Cyrus Gordon, professor of Semitic languages. They claim that the Bat Creek inscription is Hebrew and related to the Bar Kochba rebellion that took place during AD 135 in Roman Judea. Gordon attempted to bolster the theory by pointing out that the Bat Creek inscription ties in quite nicely with various finds of Roman and Bar Kochba coins in the Kentucky and Tennessee area. Unfortunately, experts consider these finds to be fakes. Gordon's willingness to consider the possibility that these inscriptions were made by refugees from the defeat of the Jewish Revolt in AD 70 does not help his case because the arguments against it are almost as strong as those against the Bar Kochba rebellion."

"During the 1960's Cyrus Gordon, a respected professor of the Semitic languages and an ardent diffusionist, revived the Paraíba Stone's claims to authenticity. Basically Gordon asserted that the Paraíba inscription contained Phoenician grammatical constructions unknown in 1872. These same constructions were originally used in the 1870's to argue against the stone's authenticity. Subsequent research during the twentieth century, Gordon said, revealed that the anomalous grammatical usages in the Paraíba Stone were genuine. Other equally qualified specialists disagree with his conclusions and continue to declare the Paraíba Stone a hoax. That opinion remains the judgement of archeologists and historians in general."

"Professor Gordon has made himself at home in both the Semitic and Indo-European compartments of philology. This makes it possible for him to do things and to see things that are beyond a single compartment scholar's horizon."

"There may be occasions when it is best to behave irrationally, but whether there are should be decided rationally."

"The minimum I. Q. necessary for one to grasp the concepts of Statistics required for the undergraduate degree is 120.(paraphrased)"

"Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an "intelligence explosion", and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control. It is curious that this point is made so seldom outside of science fiction. It is sometimes worthwhile to take science fiction seriously."

"The natural flow of technology tends to move in the direction of making surveillance easier."

"At no time in the past century has public distrust of the government been so broadly distributed across the political spectrum, as it is today."

"If privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy."

"A few years ago I heard a quotation, and I am going to modify it here: If you think technology can solve your security problems, then you don't understand the problems and you don't understand the technology."

"The lesson here is that it is insufficient to protect ourselves with laws; we need to protect ourselves with mathematics. Encryption is too important to be left solely to governments."

"Attacks always get better, they never get worse."

"There are two kinds of cryptography in this world: cryptography that will stop your kid sister from reading your files, and cryptography that will stop major governments from reading your files."

"Anyone, from the most clueless amateur to the best cryptographer, can create an algorithm that he himself can't break."

"In China, programs have to be certified by the government in order to be used on computers there, which sounds an awful lot like the Apple store."

"Only amateurs attack machines; professionals target people."

"Technical problems can be remediated. A dishonest corporate culture is much harder to fix."

"Not being angels is expensive"

"Well-designed security systems fail gracefully."

"The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act. And we're doing exactly what the terrorists want."

"We can't keep weapons out of prisons; we can't possibly expect to keep them out of airports."

"… if anyone thinks they can get an accurate picture of anyplace on the planet by reading news reports, they're sadly mistaken."

"The very definition of news is something that hardly ever happens. If an incident is in the news, we shouldn't worry about it. It's when something is so common that its no longer news – car crashes, domestic violence – that we should worry."

"More people are killed every year by pigs than by sharks, which shows you how good we are at evaluating risk."

"When my mother gets a prompt 'Do you want to download this?' she's going to say yes. It's disingenuous for Microsoft to give you all of these tools [in Internet Explorer] with which to hang yourself, and when you do, then say it's your fault."

"Chaos is hard to create, even on the Internet. Here's an example. Go to Amazon.com. Buy a book without using SSL. Watch the total lack of chaos."

"Beware the Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse: terrorists, drug dealers, kidnappers, and child pornographers. Seems like you can scare any public into allowing the government to do anything with those four."

"It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state."

"I mean, the computer industry promises nothing. Did you ever read a shrink-wrapped license agreement? You should read one. It basically says, if this product deliberately kills your children, and we knew it would, and we decided not to tell you because it might harm sales, we're not liable. I mean, it says stuff like that. They're absurd documents. You have no rights."

"Elections serve two purposes. The first, and obvious, purpose is to accurately choose the winner. But the second is equally important: to convince the loser."

"Against the average user, anything works; there's no need for complex security software. Against the skilled attacker, on the other hand, nothing works."

"Every time I write about the impossibility of effectively protecting digital files on a general-purpose computer, I get responses from people decrying the death of copyright. "How will authors and artists get paid for their work?" they ask me. Truth be told, I don't know. I feel rather like the physicist who just explained to a group of would-be interstellar travelers, only to be asked: "How do you expect us to get to the stars, then?" I'm sorry, but I don't know that, either."

"Digital files cannot be made uncopyable, any more than water can be made not wet."

"It's certainly easier to implement bad security and make it illegal for anyone to notice than it is to implement good security."

"To each computable sequence there corresponds at least one description number, while to no description number does there correspond more than one computable sequence. The computable sequences and numbers are therefore enumerable."

"It will be useful to put... tables into a... standard form. ...The lines of the table are... of form m-config. | Symbol | Operations | Final m-config. In this way we obtain a complete description of the machine. ...This new description of the machine may be called the standard description (S.D). ...[W]e shall have a description of the machine in the form of an arabic numeral. The integer represented by this numeral may be called a description number (D.N) of the machine. The D.N determine the S.D and the structure of the machine uniquely. The machine whose D.N is n may be described as \mathcal{M}(n)."

"If an ɑ-machine prints two kinds of symbols, of which the first kind (called figures) consists entirely of 0 and 1 (the others being called symbols of the second kind), then the machine will be called a computing machine."

"In this paper I deal only with automatic machines, and will therefore often omit the prefix ɑ-."