Started out making steel and fibreglass fishing rods in the 1950s. Pivoted to making high-performance antennas in the 1960s. This move makes a lot of sense when you think about it, but most people's initial reaction is surprise.
Without experimental data to back it up (e.g. implementation and benchmarks), I'd consider this claim veeeery dubious - regardless of who it came from.
Extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence, and in this case it would be easy to provide such evidence - by cracking appropriately-sized challenge primes in a transparent way that can be independently verified.
On the other hand, the theoretical approach in the paper is quite complex and hard to follow - even for professional cryptographers.
There are some approaches that seem difficult to implement at first view, but that can be improved when more people work on the difficult pieces. The most important thing in a paper like this is the general strategy. Even if there are small issues or if the implementation is too complex, if the general ideas are right we can find a better way to solve these problems over time.
Depends of the claim.
For the theoretical result, the evidence is the paper. (I have no clue whether it’s correct.) Nothing else is needed.
For “RSA is broken”, it depends what broken means. If it would rely on a claim that is now provably false, it is indeed broken. If we are talking about the claim of breaking RSA in the real world, I agree with you. But it all depends on the claim.
"This giant prime number will keep your information totally unreadable to anyone who doesn't have this other giant prime number" is no less of an extraordinary claim, just one that we all believe in (myself included).
There's a nice research article from 2016 by doctors in northern Norway about resuscitation of frozen patients:
“Nobody is dead until warm and dead”: Prolonged resuscitation is warranted in arrested hypothermic victims also in remote areas – A retrospective study from northern Norway
> NEVER nail a stuffed bunny to a cross and put it up in front of the Battalion Headquarters sign as an “Easter Desecration.”
This is made all the more disturbing by the fact that, when I was in college, I witnessed a friend's roommate actually crucify a dead rabbit and stake it out outside... somewhere around Easter.
And, no, it wasn't a dead rabbit they randomly found lying around either. He and some buddies of his went Wabbit Hunting with Airsoft guns one day, and then they settled on crucifixion when they were debating what to do with their newly-acquired dead rabbit. Not so fun fact: around a decade after this, one of the guys involved in the hunting party got killed in a mass shooting. I still wonder if anyone told this story at his wake.
This all happened when my friend and I were studying on his couch, by the way. It was very hard to concentrate on the physics textbook when we kept hearing the whack whack whack of his roommate nailing a rabbit to the cross on the kitchen floor.
Edit: Because it's telling me I'm posting too fast, I can't reply directly to the person replying to me suggesting I'm victim-blaming Tony, so I'll post a clarification here:
I'm not saying that he deserved to get killed or anything. The shooter was a despicable excuse for a person who was upset his ex-wife was moving on with her life and enjoying herself, so he killed her and almost everyone attending her party. None of the people who got shot that day deserved it in the slightest.
I only mentioned he got killed in a mass shooting because it's a really fucked-up coda to an already fucked-up story. Like this story is fucked-up to begin with, and it's even more fucked-up that he got murdered. Honestly, if I was at his wake, I would've told the story not to make him out to be a bad guy or something, but to add some levity and remind everyone what a... shall we say, dynamic guy he was.
Lol, sounds like a waste of good stew, but clearly it had the desired effect if you are still telling stories about it years later. Kind of insensitive to victim blame no matter your feelings.
