![]() The word comes from the Medieval Latin influentia, which means “influence”. The word flu, short for influenza, crossed the Italian borders and first appeared in England in 1743, following the spread of the influenza pandemic. Meaning: An acute contagious disease of the upper airways and lungs, caused by a virus, which rapidly spreads around the world in seasonal epidemics. Wanna read more about pandemic-related terms and how these last year affected us? Check out this other post and this one too on Blogwig. ![]() Let’s focus on some pandemic-related words we still use, and on some Covid-related (not so) new entries. The creative process hasn’t stopped: during these last years so many new words related to Coronavirus have seen the light, and in some cases, terms that weren’t so popular were brought into the limelight. Every cloud has a silver lining though (wanna know more about this idiom? Check out our post about it!), however thin it may be: at least we inherited plenty of words that were created in those dreadful times. These days, Asian people, migrants, people of colour, the working and the poor keep being blamed when infections spike. The need for a tangible cause, a simple explanation, led to the search for a scapegoat: in medieval Europe, Jews were blamed so often, and so viciously, that Jewish communities were wiped out, their inhabitants accused of spreading contagion or poisoning wells. They have always triggered sharp turns in political beliefs, generating extremist movements and waves of mistrust of authorities. Pandemics left a huge mark on societies and their languages since the beginning of time. "Nat McHugh: The Magic Words are Squeamish Ossifrage - factoring RSA-129 using CADO-NFS". , Supplementary Material to the 1995 edition of his Cryptography Theory and Practice, see web page. "RSA, Factoring, and Squeamish Ossifrage". ^ RSA Laboratories, RSA-200 is factored!.^ Thorsten Kleinjung (), We have factored RSA200 by GNFS Archived at the Wayback Machine."A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-key Cryptosystems" (PDF). "The Magic Words are Squeamish Ossifrage" (PDF). Computational Number Theory and Modern Cryptography. ^ Atkins, Derek Graff, Michael Lenstra, Arjen K.The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy From Ancient Egypt To Quantum Cryptography (First Anchor Books ed.). In 2015, the same RSA-129 number was factored in about one day, with the CADO-NFS open source implementation of number field sieve, using a commercial cloud computing service for about $30. There was a US$100 prize associated with the challenge, which the winners donated to the Free Software Foundation. The memory requirements of the newer algorithm were also a concern. While the asymptotically faster number field sieve had just been invented, it was not clear at the time that it would be better than the quadratic sieve for 129-digit numbers. used the quadratic sieve algorithm invented by Carl Pomerance in 1981. However, efficient factoring algorithms had not been studied much at the time, and a lot of progress was made in the following decades. In their original paper they recommended using 200-digit (663 bit) primes to provide a margin of safety against future developments, though it may have only delayed the solution as a 200-digit semiprime was factored in 2005. Ron Rivest estimated in 1977 that factoring a 125-digit semiprime would require 40 quadrillion years, using the best algorithm known and the fastest computers of the day. The decryption of the 1977 ciphertext involved the factoring of a 129-digit (426 bit) number, RSA-129, in order to recover the plaintext. While it is not known whether the two problems are mathematically equivalent, factoring is currently the only publicly known method of directly breaking RSA. The difficulty of breaking the RSA cipher-recovering a plaintext message given a ciphertext and the public key-is connected to the difficulty of factoring large numbers. The 1993–94 effort began the tradition of using the words "squeamish ossifrage" in cryptanalytic challenges. Ossifrage ('bone-breaker', from Latin) is an older name for the bearded vulture, a scavenger famous for dropping animal bones and live tortoises on top of rocks to crack them open. The coordination was done via the Internet and was one of the first such projects. More than 600 volunteers contributed CPU time from about 1,600 machines (two of which were fax machines) over six months. It was solved in 1993–94 by a large, joint computer project co-ordinated by Derek Atkins, Michael Graff, Arjen Lenstra and Paul Leyland. The problem appeared in Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games column in the August 1977 issue of Scientific American. " The Magic Words are Squeamish Ossifrage" was the solution to a challenge ciphertext posed by the inventors of the RSA cipher in 1977.
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