Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Yay - I'm important?

I stumbled across something worthy of laughter this afternoon. A few years ago, I wrote a paper ridiculing various wireless router protocols, proposing an attacking method and even a couple of solutions. The paper wasn't fluff, but it wasn't a paper either. It was an undergrad class in research that prompted the article. Actually it was a power point presentation accompanied by a program I wrote to demonstrate statistical methods of cracking simple XOR encryption. This was turned into a paper (by me) and submitted to the Association of Computer Machinery Journal on my behalf (and of course with credit shared with my professor) without my knowledge. The content was cut to a 1/3 of the original size and i believe some grammatical changes were made but it was definitely my paper and sported my name (and Mario's ;). It seems however, that this article has been making the rounds.

Six months after publication, I was invited to present it at a University conference which I took as nothing more than a paper mill for people needing to be published. I declined. Shortly after that, I was asked over email for a brief technical interview regarding the contents of the original article. I initially declined the interview but strangely, after being insulted for declining decided to answer his questions. Today I found this http://www.dadblogit.com/articles/wifi.pdf. If you look on page 9, source 8, that would be me.

OK, it's not lost on me that this is also an undergrad research paper, but give me a break. So the lesson learned is be careful what you read and what you believe because academics are even willing to quote me in an undergrad paper that's over 2 years old and believe me, I don't know nothing 'bout nothing.

Ross Hytnen

6 comments:

Jennifer Josefy said...

haha i was SO confused, I thought the whole time i was reading that post that Sharon had written it... and I was like why didn't she dumb this down a little bit for me? She knows I don't know what this stuff means. And then I was like, oh, duh... it was Ross. and Ross you DO know lots of things about alot of things! give yourself some credit... you're married to sharon. you must be a genius.

Unknown said...

You can always tell the difference between my writing and Sharon's (regardless of obvious stylistic issues) because Sharon's keyboard doesn't have a shift key. That will always be a dead give away.

Evelyn said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Evelyn said...

hahahahha i like your response to jfer's comment. So I am now yet again catching up on months of missed entries. How cool that you are getting quoted! Now you can actually go around saying, "according to R. Hytnen" and just make up whatever you want someone to believe ;)

sorry I deleted above comment..somehow I wrote my google password on the actual comment and it got posted too...

CYNTHIA said...

i didn't understand a word of that post. but then, my shift key doesn't work either, and i am a "grown woman" reading harry potter. ;-)

Unknown said...

Sorry, my language must be cluttered. I was just amused at the unjust attention my "paper" has recieved especially since it's now being cited as a source.

Ross Hytnen