The wonderful 3A1

Most people are familiar with Amazon. Jeff Bezos' Amazon has played a major roll in the growth of e-commerce, and brought us products such as AWS, the Kindle and the Echo. However, I believe that the most utilitarian and overlooked item sold from Amazon is the 3A1.

Amazon 3A1

The Amazon 3A1 is a fully featured device that is appropriate for the younger members of your family, and this is a strong differentiator in the age of technology. The 3A1 is larger than the competitors; however, at 31" x 20.5" x 10.5", the extra space is something that you'll learn to love. The 3A1 comes from the factory with emotionally pleasing bubble wrap, and often other stuff that I cannot currently recall. The bubble wrap is the critical to the user experience of the 3A1. A picture of the 3A1 in action:

Come on Jeff, let's make this happen

A person cannot just own one 3A1. There are just too many appropriate uses. I believe that this superior Amazon product should be available through a subscription model. It is worth the money. Come on Jeff, let's make this happen.

SIMON and SPECK Ciphers, where they got their name.

I had the pleasure of talking with Doug Shors at a conference. I asked him about the origin of the SIMON and SPECK name for the ciphers. His answered that "simon" is from Dr. Seuss and "speck" is because he likes bacon. There you have it.

Acronym list for cryptography.

I have an issue with acronyms, and simple descriptions. Everyone is correct in all statements but you need to understand their assumption set. I have found that cryptographers are particularly fond of acronyms, to the point that I am unsure if they know what they are talking about. You get sentences such as "CBC requires an unpredictable IV".

Acronym	Meaning	Example
IV	Initialization Vector	You often see this in relashionship to one-way hash functions.
ECB	Electronic Code Book	For block ciphers, when a stream is divided into blocks and each block is encrypted separately.
CBC	Cipher Block Chaining	Like ECB for block ciphers, but each block is XOR'd with the previous block before encryption.
CTR	Counter	Counter Mode turns a block cipher into a stream cipher by adding a counter to the blocks in a stream sequence.
AEAD	Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data	Block cipher mode (based on CTR) that creates an output and an authentication tag.
SIV	Synthetic Initialization Vector	A vector based on a dependency sequence, the best description is this paper.
ARX	Logic Design	A structure of cipher based on Additions (a ∧ b), Rotations (a >> i), and XORx (a ⊕ b).

I will add more to this list as I get frustrated with them.