In 1949, Shannon published the paper ”Communication theory of secrecy systems”. This constituted a foundational treatment and analysis of encryption systems. He transferred the methods of information theory, originally developed as a mathematical model for communication over ”noisy” channels to the setting of cryptosystems. We give a brief introduction into his most outstanding ideas, such as t...

A simple yet remarkably powerful tool of selfish and malicious participants in a distributed system is “equivocation”: making conflicting statements to others. We present TrInc, a small, trusted component that combats equivocation in large, distributed systems. Consisting fundamentally of only a non-decreasing counter and a key, TrInc provides a new primitive: unique, once-in-alifetime attestat...

This paper traces the development of technology as a discourse and as a way of understanding human activity. In our everyday activity, the notion of technology is often consumed by its purely practical, equipmental, interpretation. Such an interpretation assumes the cultural neutrality of technical things, fully justifying the equivocation of the technical with the technological. Since the 1950...

Many philosophers accept the following three theses: (1) that probability is amodal concept; (2) that, if determinism is true, therewould still be objective modal facts; and (3) that if determinism is true, there are no genuine objective probabilities (chances). I argue that these 3 claims are inconsistent, and that their widespread acceptance is thus quite troubling. I suggest, as others have,...