Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by stjohnswarts 1406 days ago
This is a place where Hanlon's razor applies much better than assuming they want weak encryption.
1 comments

It really isn't, when the annual budget for states crippling cryptographic standards dwarfs the salaries and tuition of everyone in the global academics maths community combined.
There is seemingly random interconnectedness in math, meaning that governments probably can't just throw money at some problem and force themselves much deeper than academia. For example you can hire 100 number theorists and ask of them to solve factorization (stupid example, i know), but it just might happen that the key insight to solving it comes from some random dude working in some seemingly disconnected problem in combinatorial algebra or something.