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"I understood the importance in principle of public key cryptography but it's all moved much faster than I expected. I did not expect it to be a mainstay of advanced communications technology."
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"While we are curling down in our comfort zone, the perverted talents of connectivity-designers drive us surreptitiously into a blind alley of addiction. If, however, we succeed in impeding mobiles' unlimited rule, we may be able to relish the fragrance of the 'moment' but also sense the vital spark and spirit of "otherness. ['Even if the world goes down, my mobile will save me']"
"When all is said and done, the invention of writing must be reckoned not only as a brilliant innovation but as a surpassing good for humanity. And assuming that we survive long enough to use their inventions wisely, I believe the same will be said of the modern Thoths and Prometheuses who are today devisingcomputers and programs at the edge of machine intelligence."
"To a man with an internet connection, every thought and every movement sounds like a tweet or status update."
"I think it's fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we've ever created. They're tools of communication, they're tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user."
"At the beginning of that interval a type-machine was a curiosity. The person who owned one was a curiosity, too. But now it is the other way about: the person who doesn't own one is a curiosity."
"Our television signals leave this planet and go out into space...the signals spread out from the earth in spherical waves, a little like ripples in a pond. They travel at the speed of light, 186,000 miles a second, and essentially go on forever. The better some other civilizations receivers are, the farther away they could be and still pick up our tv signals. Even we could detect a strong tv transmission from a planet going around the nearest star.' President: 'You mean everything? You mean to say all that crap on television - the car crashes, wrestling, the porno channels, the evening news?"
"Technology forced me to divorce a pixie and remarry a pixel."
"There are as many opinions as there are experts."
"A smartphone is an addictive device which traps a soul into a lifeless planet full of lives."
"Technophillia is our natural state: we love our object and follow where they lead."
Explore more quotes by Whitfield Diffie
"Some people make sharp distinctions sort of between their recreational musings and their professional work. I don't make that distinction very much."
"I thought cryptography was a technique that did not require your trusting other people-that if you encrypted your files, you would have the control to make the choice as to whether you would surrender your files."
"People meet in bars after work all over the world and talk about the great problems of life and death and the world and politics and they don't take themselves seriously. They can do nothing else except chat about these things in bars after work."
"If you have ambition, you might not achieve anything, but without ambition, you are almost certain not to achieve anything."
"We in science are spoiled by the success of mathematics. Mathematics is the study of problems so simple that they have good solutions."
"Lots of people working in cryptography have no deep concern with real application issues. They are trying to discover things clever enough to write papers about."
"I liked Berkeley tremendously, Berkeley was a very leftist campus. I came to love that city as much as I love Paris or the south of France or New York."
"I understood the importance in principle of public key cryptography but it's all moved much faster than I expected. I did not expect it to be a mainstay of advanced communications technology."
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