cute puzzle site

I found a cute puzzle site: http://www.braingle.com/

Some puzzles are nice. I liked the following. Enjoy :).

"In a far away land, it was known that if you drank poison, the only way to save yourself is to drink a stronger poison, which neutralizes the weaker poison. The king that ruled the land wanted to make sure that he possessed the strongest poison in the kingdom, in order to ensure his survival, in any situation. So the king called the kingdom's pharmacist and the kingdom's treasurer, he gave each a week to make the strongest poison. Then, each would drink the other one's poison, then his own, and the one that will survive, will be the one that had the stronger poison.

The pharmacist went straight to work, but the treasurer knew he had no chance, for the pharmacist was much more experienced in this field, so instead, he made up a plan to survive and make sure the pharmacist dies. On the last day the pharmacist suddenly realized that the treasurer would know he had no chance, so he must have a plan. After a little thought, the pharmacist realized what the treasurer's plan must be, and he concocted a counter plan, to make sure he survives and the treasurer dies. When the time came, they king summoned both of them. They drank the poisons as planned, and the treasurer died, the pharmacist survived, and the king didn't get what he wanted.

What exactly happened there?"

Privacy

This was my response to Lance Fornow's privacy blog:
http://weblog.fortnow.com/2006/08/privacy.html
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As a cryptographer, I should be outraged by this post. And, to some extent, I am :). But I have to admit that I personally also take very little effort to ensure my privacy.

What I think is important, is not whether one is personally paranoid about its own privacy, but whether one CAN be paranoid if one chooses to. I live in Manhattan, and I have to admit that I am very far from exploring all the exciting things that happen here everyday :). Still, the few times I do, and the fact that I always CAN if I choose to, makes me extremely happy to live in the City. I think the same thing is true about privacy. I think it's your choice how private you want your life to be. But one should have options.

Of course, the above thing is not very deep, but it does have an implication. If one is using mainstream services like Gmail, Yahoo!Mail, Amazon, EBay, etc., their default privacy policy should be acceptable and not to invasive from the privacy perspective. Because if it's not, and I want to be paranoid, I am severely limiting my choices in terms of popular services which have little variety on the web. Thus, even if we currently do not care about own own privacy, the fact that someday we may want to care, or some people we want to interact with already care, means that we MUST be outraged by obvious violations of privacy.

Additionally, when you said you don't care about privacy, I think you really meant you don't care about a PASSIVE observer who just records what are doing. I am sure, however, the moment the passive observer turns into an active attacker, your attitude would change. Spamming is a perfect example. I don't care if people know my email. In fact, I want them to. But I don't want to be bombarded with spam. Thus, we all take elementary precautions like using a spam-filter and non publishing our email in clear text. So even the most boring of us actually care and at least somewhat enforce privacy, without perhaps explicitly admitting it :).

To sum up, I am with Lance regarding my personal "non-private" lifestyle, but I think not worrying about privacy --- because one currently (thinks that one) doesn't enforce it,--- is too big of a leap, which I am not willing to make.

Finally, as a researcher in cryptography, working on privacy-related problems is pretty exciting from a technical perspective. So, even I never get to use it, it's too much fun to give it up :).

PS. As a proof of my lack of privacy, the above blog by itself should easily reveal my identity :).