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University of Washington's Crypto Course

xml-dev.com — Who wants to pay for Stanford's Crypto Course, when University of Washington has made the whole Cryptography Course available on-line for free. Yes, all the presentations, videos (mp3, WMV), homework, quizzes etc. are available on-line. The material seems pretty decent, and is intended for advance audience.

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  • Aidenag, on 10/12/2007, -15/+5i gotta digg it, cause i live a mile from the building this class takes place in..
  • shiningsea, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5If nothing else, do watch the last three videos on DRM, and Politics of Crypto etc. They very interesting, and cover recent topics.
  • RichPowers, on 10/12/2007, -13/+345 9826510

    (If you use your crypto decoder ring, you'll see the above is code for "Go Huskies"...or just some random numbers I mashed on the numpad)
    • Celeron, on 10/12/2007, -12/+1The mascot for my former high school was the Huskies.
    • gh02t, on 10/12/2007, -11/+0Nicely done, no repeat letters. Too bad you repeated some numbers
    • flynntastic, on 10/12/2007, -12/+1*cough*go cougars!*cough*

      oh excuse me, my allergies must be acting up today.
    • triikan, on 10/12/2007, -11/+0gh02t, he repeated the letter 'S', huSkieS.
  • SP33DFR34K, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/csep590/06wi/lectures/slides/Manferdelli_030706.pdf

    Go to the last page of the .pdf file, its awesome. Take that DRM!
    • iheartspyware, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13Oh come on now Digg user!
      Foxit Reader should already be installed ;)
      http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php
    • olliholliday, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5my adobe reader has a "rotate clockwise" button, it looks like it's an "export page" button though, the icon is *****.
      i'll represent it in the glorious medium of ascii for you.

      []
      -> []

      (and yes both pages in the real icon have the same aspect ratio)
    • VXMirage, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1teqman:

      For Reader 7.0.7 (inlined into Fx)--
      Right click on the main toolbar (Acrobat, not your browser's), and select Rotate View.
  • mikesty, on 10/12/2007, -1/+19Be ... sure .... to ... drink .... your .... Ovaltine...

    Ovaltine? A crummy commercial? Son of a bitch!
    • SP33DFR34K, on 10/12/2007, -6/+3Great Christmas Story reference.
    • isny, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4My mom actually told me that she fell for the same thing as a kid. Bummer.
  • aThing, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Are WMVs supposed to accessable?
  • crl620, on 10/12/2007, -1/+14MIT's crypto courses have been online for a long time:
    http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer-Science/6-897Spring-2004/CourseHome/index.htm
    http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer-Science/6-876JSpring-2003/CourseHome/index.htm
    http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer-Science/6-875Spring-2005/CourseHome/index.htm

    The course home pages have even more data.
    • bieber, on 10/12/2007, -4/+1Holy *****! As soon as I clicked that link, the Firebug error counter started flying up, and Firefox froze for a second. The final tally? 246 errors.
    • habibcs, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0report it to FX
  • wkinney, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Their first course has over 200 slides?? I had no idea the CS degree at washington was that intense...
    • gaberowe, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1UW CS is a great program, but one thing most people don't know is that its heavily supported by Microsoft and Paul Allen (independently). Half of the stuff in the Paul Allen Center (the CS building) has Gates on it or Allen, but the point is, they are well supported financially so no matter how funding seems to go, they are always doing well. Its a very hard program to get into at UW. But of course, MIT's program is better--but that goes for just about everything.
    • BluParadox, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Washington's CS department is one of the best in the nation...
    • Trevahaha, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Just because it's heavily sponsored by Gates & Allen doesn't mean it's influenced in the course work. I never had any MS type of bias in my courses.
    • burd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2This particular course is a "professional masters" course. This is a program that is offered for part-time students holding down jobs in local industry (read: Microsoft). Some of these "CSEP590TU" courses have been fantastic, pulling in speakers that are experts at the top of their game. They are in no way canned material being taught for the Nth time, and in that sense often exceed the quality of the courses in the fulltime graduate program.

      With regard to the effect of Microsoft money, it's hard to miss the fact that there is such support when the building itself is the "Paul G Allen Center." Allen's fortune is indeed a Microsoft fortune, and Microsoft and Gates and other top Microsoft execs have also contributed large chunks of money. There is, however, not a lot of pressure to put Microsoft software into either the classroom or the server room. What is true is that there is a lot of collaboration between our students and researchers and Microsoft Research and that a lot of UW CSE students intern at Microsoft.

      As far as rankings are concerned, there are four top Computer Science programs: MIT, Stanford, CMU, and UC Berkeley. UW CSE nor any other program seems close to displacing a member of or joining the ranks of those four. But it's one of the four or five buzzards circling that crowd looking for signs of weakness. Anyway, rankings, schmankings. What counts for a student is the quality of the experience. UW CSE undergrads are largely taught by UW CSE faculty members, something not always true at the top four. To judge from the instructor ratings, that experience is top notch.

      I'm staff at UW CSE.
  • cIprO, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1What do you guys think of a Computer Science degree is it still valued in the industry? I'm thinking about majoring in computer science with emphasis on security. I kinda need a second opinion ...
    • mikesty, on 10/12/2007, -0/+16Do what you love and never work a day in your life.
    • HisTumness, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5To answer your question, clprO, yes. It is. If you're interested in getting a serious job in the field, it is certainly worth it to get a bachelor's or possibly even a master's degree.
    • vertigoblue, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4getting a degree in computer engineering is better, for the real world, for job market, and for starting pay.
      unless your planning on making your own quantum programming language or actually designing cryptography schemes


    • nailbunny, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3computer science, computer engineering, software engineering, information systems

      these are all degrees that will get you lucrative jobs, and there is a great lack of engineering graduates in the US, so the floor is open. however, be forewarned, they may not teach you all (or any) of what ends up being required for your first job.

      for this reason i suggest that you peek around monster.com or dice.com or whatever, find a job that you could imagine yourself doing, the words "junior" or "entry level". you look at teh skills required, and you match that up with your program, and fill in the holes in your own time.

      for instance, i'm getting a CS degree. i wanna be a programmer. they taught me the basics of software engineering and java, but any employer that is looking for a java programmer (and a lot are) is looking for someone specialized with web dev and/or sql, stuff that my major didn't cover.

      i see lots of demand for programmers, unix system administrators, security specialists. there's a lot of servers in the US that can't be moved, so maintenance of them can't be outsourced.
    • jambarama, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3The first commentor gave the best advice - do what you love. I really like computers, I have my own FreeBSD fileserver which uses NFS to my Debian laptop. There is alot of time I've spent configing everything and I love the time I spend configging, compiling, and editing source. But I didn't major in CS, I majored in Economics because it was... well... more interesting. I like to learn CS on my own because I can. Economics I love because it is so applicable. Unless you are going to be a programmer, CS may not be terribly useful. If you are really interested in security, a math major may be more applicable.

      Another thing to consider if you are worried about pay. CS and engineering type jobs pay well right out of college but here is the big secret: they don't move much from there. Maybe your salary will have doubled in real dollars near the end of your career, but don't expect too much more. Many of the majors which don't pay terribly well straight out of college have higher long term potential.

      But do what you love regardless of money. If you are the best at what you do - no matter what it is - you will always do fine.
    • nox327, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3It is true that most engineering degrees get the best salary at the start, but ask them a couple years down the road, and they will probably have the same salary. Why, it's because engineers work in the background and most managers don't notice them. I think that a Business degree is much better, not economics, but Business. Try getting a job with an economics degree, virtually impossible. Maybe if you want to replace Greenspan, then yeah you study Econ.
    • nailbunny, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1ben bernanke already did that, nox. i like how the non-econ disses the econ major, the econ major disses the cs major. seems that we should be talking about what we know.

      from being an engineer slave, you can move up to be a pointy haired manager. while there may be an upper ceiling for salary, it is high enough to allow flexibility in investment.

      if i wanted to make ***** you money, i'd stack an mba on my cs degree in order to expedite upward mobility, and then go into real estate, where the money (also) is.
    • wilsoniya, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I'm a CS student at the University of Wisconsin, but I've also been through the info-sys program. After two summer internships, I've learned that many software related jobs end up requiring more IS/IT type skills (OO sys analysis, RDBMs, and especially specific software platforms (e.g. J2EE, .NET)). That being said, I find IS work to be laborious, and less creative than that of CS (I've come to know IS/IT work as 'data-plumbing'). But It really comes down to what you have a passion for. I will take the risk of saying that a CS degree affords one more options than does an IS/IT degree. I feel that anyone willing enough to complete a CS degree will have no problem learning the finer points of specific technologies used in IS/IT jobs.
    • nailbunny, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1from my experiences, i feel wilsoniya is dead on.

      at my school, it seems that information systems prepares you well for specific jobs, cs prepares you not very well for a wide range. except of course for jobs that specifically request a computer scientist.

      cs tends to drift towards the math and the science of it, what with your algorithms, crazy data structures, and reduction of computer theory down to turing machines and hardware architecture. this leads to careers in research, education, bioinformatics, really meaty crazy stuff that actually requires background in algorithms.

      fat lot of good that does when most folks want web devs and database managers though, you know? its an imperfect fit that requires extracurricular homework.
    • Trevahaha, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0@wilsoniya -

      You should have checked out the Informatics (http://www.ischool.washington.edu/informatics/) program -- I just feel that the Business School's Information Systems major is not intended to be technical and CS lacks the human side of computing (building a system for functionality vs building a system for people to use). Informatics is just a great balance between the two.
    • BradMW, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I feel like 90% of the classes I took for my CS degree were unnecessary. Data Structures (as an entry level course), Algorithms, and the graphics electives I took (General, Animation, Real Time Rendering, and Image Synth) would have sufficed just fine. Everything else was fluff I really didn't find interesting enough to build a career around. Really just data structures, algorithms, and specialization would be fine. Just break those courses apart and go into more detail. Not every Computer Scientist needs to know the ins and outs of an operationing system or how to build a processor. People who want to build kernels and develope programming languages would, but most people who go into CS just want to program applications.
    • nailbunny, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1this stems from a misunderstanding of what computer science entails, which is what i had.
      there are careers where the training is highly valid, they just are not common.
      google, for instance, loves them some computer scientists.
  • rtimmons, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3CS is one of the most competitive majors at UW (which is itself not easy to get in to), but it's also among the top ten in the nation. It's..not easy.
    • olliholliday, on 10/12/2007, -5/+2be prepared for people on sociology, journalism, psychology etc. degrees to class yours as "learning how to use word" though.
    • cyrix, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I don't know why you're getting dug down olli. I've had EL ED majors trying to tell me that their major was harder. They all seem to think: "Oh computers, I could learn what you do in a weekend and do it just as well."
  • PCheese, on 10/12/2007, -6/+2The Stanford comment is unnecessary.
    • Inoko, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7And yet -- they still made it! Welcome to the wonderful world of the internet, where personal views are a dime a dozen, like yours, and like mine!
  • bieber, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Hot damn. Wget's gonna be busy tonight!
  • lotusleaf, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1This was also mentioned on Bruce Schneier's blog FWIW:
    http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/06/university_cryp.html#trackbacks
  • perilousone, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2LOL...is the favicon a Romulan bird of prey? Ah brings back memories of playing netrek in the ACC lab at the UofW. :-)
    • BluParadox, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1It's a black circle with "CSE" on it, but the C is writen using negative space.
  • nox327, on 10/12/2007, -4/+1What the hell is Crypto? How about someone explain it to those that are not into CS

    any UW Business school students here
  • ummagummas08, on 10/12/2007, -5/+1Can you say: slow digg night? lawl this is like the oonly story on digg for the past like 3 hours
    • WaterDragon, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2yeah Saturday night in the US, and many are out, wth various other interests--abandoning their internet buddies. Half-assed geeks! lol

      (I just got back)
  • wxman, on 10/12/2007, -5/+2GO DAWGS!!!
  • WaterDragon, on 10/12/2007, -6/+1I'm too old to study the modern cryptography courses....so I'll have to rely on a complete education, and years of independent research, in higher mathematics and topology -- along with being a friggin' 'genius' (or so they say)!

    I can make unbreakable codes -- you have no idea ...(hint:they might switch to analog for a time, then back to digital) ...but I have no need to right now, unless I find a worthy enterprise.)

    When we get rid of the fascists who took over the US government, then I might help.



    • mcarolan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2wow. modest AND a genius
    • spooq, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Its cool that you're smart enough to use nested parentheses, but devil-may-care enough to not notice if they match... pure genius, man.
  • xr56n44, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1i downloaded the whole course and all related material: 4,273,961,576 bytes
    • WaterDragon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+24 Gigabytes? O Rly? Damn! I may have to get yet another harddrive, as it would take up some of my movie space. (a fifth harddrive!)
  • reldren, on 10/12/2007, -5/+0Submitter should try a remedial English class first. As should most of you other stinking mongoloids.
  • PeeOnYou, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Holy crap. I clicked on the first homework assignment and found out I don't belong in college :(

    I was planning on going back for psychology too :-(
  • voodooatl, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I did the stanford course, I can't put the UofW on my CV and who wouldn't want Stanford on theirs
  • sunimit, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1You can listen to Steve Gibson's Security Now Podcast and get a basic understand of Cryptography. I don't think the average person needs to take the entire course on the subject.
  • I82Much, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0This is a great link, thanks so much. I took CS 101 last semester and an introduction to mathematical reasoning course, so I had exposure to encryption twice. I wrote about RSA encryption for my final research paper in Math, so this stuff makes a little more sense to me than it otherwise would have.

    Definitely going to be watching and reading this for awhile
  •  

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