A Celebrated Cryptography-Breaking Algorithm Just Got an Upgrade

This is a job for LLL: Give it (or its brethren) a basis of a multidimensional lattice, and it’ll spit out a better one. This process is known as lattice basis reduction. What does this all have to do with cryptography? It turns out that the task of breaking a cryptographic system can, in some … Read more

Don’t diss the pigeons: How nature’s algorithm rivals AI

Dethan Punalur/Getty Images There is a scene in the Michael Winterbottom-directed film ’24 Hour Party People’ that charts the emergence of British New Wave music and also exemplifies our attitude toward pigeons. Two young men head to the rooftop of a building, where hundreds of pigeons come to roost, and they proceed to shower the … Read more

Fei-Fei Li Started an AI Revolution by Seeing Like an Algorithm

Early in the pandemic, an agent—literary, not software—suggested Fei-Fei Li write a book. The approach made sense. She has made an indelible mark on the field of artificial intelligence by heading a project started in 2006 called ImageNet. It classified millions of digital images to form what became a seminal training ground for the AI … Read more

Anti-Instagram photo-sharing app Daylyy has no vanity metrics, filters or algorithm

While social media has its perks, it can also be a toxic wasteland crawling with hate comments, unrealistic body standards, scammers and spam bots. As this toxicity continues to infest the digital landscape, new social platforms emerge, determined to remedy our distorted online world. Daylyy is a photo-sharing social app where you can only snap … Read more

What is Amazon’s [redacted] ‘Project Nessie’ algorithm?

The FTC’s lawsuit against Amazon alleging anti-competitive practices is largely full of things we already knew in a general sense: price hikes, pressure to use Amazon fulfillment and so on. But then we get to a sea of redactions and the mysterious “Project Nessie.” What is it, and could it possibly be as alarming as … Read more

Bcrypt, a Standard Password Hashing Algorithm, Begins Its Lengthy Goodbye

When knowledge breaches went from being an occasional menace to a persistent reality of life through the early 2010s, one query would come up repeatedly as sufferer organizations, cybersecurity researchers, regulation enforcement, and common individuals assessed the fallout from every incident: Which password hashing algorithm had the goal used to guard its customers’ passwords?  If … Read more