Alice's Algorithm

2020-12-01T03:42:10Z

This song is called “Alice’s Algorithm”
It’s about Alice, and the algorithm
But “Alice’s Algorithm” is not the name of the algorithm
That’s just the name of the song
That’s why I call the song “Alice’s Algorithm”

You can send anything you want with Alice’s algorithm
You can send anything you want with Alice’s algorithm
Send a syn, you’ll get an ack
Two prime numbers are hard to hack
You can send anything you want with Alice’s algorithm

Now it all started two Thanksgivings ago, two years ago, on Thanksgiving
When my friend and I wanted to send a message to Alice with an algorithm
But Alice doesn’t get mail through the algorithm,
She gets mail on a server running the algorithm,
In the home directory, with her copy of RSA and Carol the sysadmin
And livin’ in the home directory like that, they’ve got a lot of room in /var where the spool used to been
Havin’ all that room (seein’ as how they deleted all the spools)
They decided that they didn’t have to take out their garbage for a long time
( Read more... )

Context for non-computing folks: computer messaging protocols are often described with Alice, Bob, and Carol sending messages and Eve trying to eavesdrop. There's also a lot of Unix references in there.
Context for non-American-folk-music folks: Alice's Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie is one of the greatest satirical songs ever performed. Listen to it first to get the guitar portion rolling around your head while you read these filk lyrics.

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This Is Just To Say

2020-04-28T16:40:09Z

I have collected
the garbage
that was on
the heap

and which
you were probably
caching
for latency

Forgive me
it was delicious
so large
and so old

(with apologies to William Carlos Williams)

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From the Mind of Trevor Stone

Alice's Algorithm

This Is Just To Say