User talk:Davidgothberg/Crypto steps

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Contents 1 Reason for this article 2 Article name? 3 Help wanted! 4 Some observations

[edit] Reason for this article

The reason I am making this article is that people (programmers) new to encryption always have a problem to find out which steps should be done and in which order when making encrypted messages. So there seems to be a big need for a brief step for step description. --David Göthberg 15:47, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Article name?

What should we call this article? Any suggestions? I have not come up with a good name for it yet. --David Göthberg 15:47, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Help wanted!

Feel free to edit and change the article. This article is hopefully going to be a real Wikipedia article soon. --David Göthberg 15:47, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Some observations

You've made a good start. Some typo and usage quibbles, ... But you've a problem. What you're aiming at is something of a combination of crypto system design and crypto system user procedure, both aspects of crypto engineering. I think such an article (perhaps example of a crypto system design and use) is useful. However there will be objections along the following lines: does not belong on WP because not encyclopedic because (imaginary, if illustrative, example), is not the workings or any real crypto system, is too detailed, is not detailed and realistic enough, is too long, ...

Your purpose in writing this, presumably explanation of obscurity for the Average Reader, will be deemed insufficiently encyclopedic and therefore troublesome. See Talk:Padding (cryptography) for a recent example of this sort of thing. My contributions to the crypto corner have substantially diminished over these 4 years as a result of that sort of thing.

I think you're attempting something worthwhile; I think there will be fewer than you might imangine who will agree to permit you to do it. ww 00:40, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

Yeah, I see what you mean and I thought the same. I took a look at that padding discussion, not an encouraging reading experience. I like that you tried to explain padding well, but I did not like their reactions to it... The main reason I did not make this an ordinary article from starters but only a subpage of my user page was that I think there are more then a 50% risk that the article would not get accepted and get deleted. That is also the reason why I did not put much work in it, but just made a rough draft to test the reactions. But I wanted to write the text anyway since at least I can publish it some where else and point people that ask me about these things to it. This article tries to explain what is one of the more common things we have to explain for every new chatter in the irc.freenet.net #crypto chat and that I have had to explain to all my security students back when I teached security. And this is for some reason not explained in most crypto books. But it seems many people here seem to think that Wikipedia should only contain explanations of words and names of things and of famous events. I prefer to see it as a general repository of knowledge and thus rather see too much information then too little information. --David Göthberg 04:22, 4 November 2005 (UTC)