Hilarious crypto-gibberish

Bruce Schneier's irregular "Doghouse" column features security companies making risible, redonkulous claims about their technology; the latest gang is from Singularics, who sound like unbalanced saucer-cultists who've spent too much time near the math department of their college:

Our advances in Prime Number Theory have led to a new branch of mathematics called Neutronics. Neutronic functions make possible for the first time the ability to analyze regions of mathematics commonly thought to be undefined, such as the point where one is divided by zero. In short, we have developed a new way to analyze the undefined point at the singularity which appears throughout higher mathematics.

This new analytic technique has given us profound insight into the way that prime numbers are distributed throughout the integers. According to RSA's website, there are over 1 billion licensed instances of RSA public-key encryption in use in the world today. Each of these instances of the prime number based RSA algorithm can now be deciphered using Neutronic analysis. Unlike RSA, Neutronic Encryption is not based on two large prime numbers but rather on the Neutronic forces that govern the distribution of the primes themselves. The encryption that results from Singularic's Neutronic public-key algorithm is theoretically impossible to break.

The Doghouse: Singularics

• [Takuan]

  I remember writing a term paper (due in seven hours) once like that. It made sense at the time. I really should have slept the three days before though.

• [Xopher]

  GOD’S BLESSING ON YOU.

  Dear Beloved Sir or Madam,

  I Am Writing to Implore your Aid on a business Venture, because You have shown yourself To be A kind and trustworthy Person. I am the Widow of the very wealthy nigerian mathematician Mbaro Mukambe, who was assassinated by stupid Academic educators who were jealous of his theories about nullity.

  My late husband’s debts amount to THRE EMILLION US DOLLARS, but the word animals at the bank won’t give me the money, which of course would cancel the debt. They are demanding a payment of three thousand dollars from me. If you could kindly supply it, this will release the millions my family owes the bank, and we can split the profits.

  GODS BLESSING,
  Mrs. Mbaro Mukembe

• [Anonymous]

  I used to be a 90 pound weakling until I discovered neutronics. Drinking neutronic shakes every day I have become KING OF THE BEACH!

• [gabrielm]

  “such as the point where one is divided by zero.”
  So they discovered null?

• [gabrielm]

  For those that don’t get the reference:

  This: http://www.bbc.co.uk/berkshire/content/articles/2006/12/06/divide_zero_feature.shtml

• [Elvis Pelt]

  Stop Math Now!

• [mikefinch]

  You mean people will use the internet to scam and deceive others??

  Who knew..

• [John Miles]

  I understand that these guys are a spinoff of Semagence, a so-called Web 3.0 consulting company.

• [Jeff]

  “…regions of mathematics commonly thought to be undefined,..”

  What’s undifined here is sematic content. As far as I can tell there isn’t any. It’s pure crap. Define “region.”

• [Slicklines]

  NOEN @ 10. Dude, I just wasted an hour of my life on Cook’s site. The nightmares have begun. Next time you gotta post some sort of warning about toxic links. Think of the children!

• [toxonix]

  OMG somebody finally solved teh 1/0 problem! Now we can have the future!

• [krollspell]

  Just a quick glance, totally random, and bingo! complete crap: equations 106 to 108, a classical bogus proof of 1=0. If you don’t understand it, just search for “complex logarithm” on wikipedia, and then “branch” and “principal value” in the article.

• [Snig]

  Can be used for hyperspace travel to avoid all that tedious mucking about with improbability drives.

  Also reminds me of this:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill

• [Slicklines]

  I put neutronics in my ride and now I get fifty miles to the gallon.

• [eustace]

  This just makes sense! Everyone knows the supply of prime numbers is inexhaustable – so if you can burn them as fuel, you have an infinite fuel supply! Previously, this was thought impossible – prime numbers being scattered throughout the domain of real numbers like bits of coal in sand. But now that these guys have found the secret of refining primes, anything’s possible!

• [noen]

  A partnership with Steorn should be their next move.

• [Anonymous]

  My advisor is an editor for several math journals and frequently gets what he calls “3 beer proofs” submitted. The joke is that you can have 3 beers and still find the error. I think that these guys wrote themselves a fifth of whiskey paper.

• [bardfinn]

  I suppose he figures that someone with money trusted some complex mathematics as a basis for their investment guidance, they’ll trust any complex mathematics as a basis for their investment guidance.

• [jahknow]

  Yo dawg, I herd u like cryptography, so I got you Singularic’s Neutronic public-key algorithm.

• [mdh]

  “The halo of bullshit surrounding Singularic’s Neutronic public-key algorithm is theoretically impossible to break.”

  Much better.

• [Anonymous]

  I started to write “are they claiming to have proven the Riemann Hypothesis?” Then I read the article. Facepalm!

• [rasz]

  sooo, who do you defraud with that kind of “technology”. I would suspect typical Venture capital has more brainzz. Old rich widows? Bored with life middle management? Artists? Gangsters?

• [noen]

  Oh it gets better. Jeffrey Cook is the CTO and his personal website, Jeff Cook is interesting.

  “Antigravity, Perpetual Motion & Aliens. Boo! Do those three concepts make you nervous, sketchy or perhaps simply out of your depth? Maybe you would prefer we re-phrase to Electrogravity, Zero Point Energy or Synthetic Life? No? Well hang on, this still might be the place you were looking for, though you certainly may exercise the BACK button at this time and freely continue on your way. No such restrictions here.”

  He also claims to have created synthetic life.

• [Hattmannen]

  @1: “So they discovered null?”
  Actually it’s called nullity.

• [TheMadCreator]

  @GABRIELM

  Actually, I think they discovered NaN

• [ProfKumAndGo]

  Now, pseudoscience is pretty common these days, but pseudomath is a new one. Looking at his website, I think this Jeff Cook fellow is actually a poly-pseudomath. I especially like his physics section where he gets the euler identity ridiculously wrong, but cautions that his theories “may be a hard thing to accept even for the greatest of mathematicians.” Good thing we’ve got Jeff to explain this stuff to us!

  Folks round these parts are pretty good at this sort of thing, but everyone should know the 7 signs of voodoo science:
  http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i21/21b02001.htm

• [Xopher]

  Hey Noen, if it weren’t for Zero Point Energy, we wouldn’t have intergalactic stargates, now would we?

  Oh wait.

• [Takuan]

  will XKCD cover this?

• [cleek]

  you should check out his other site where he claims to have discovered that:

  Educators are lying bastards. -1 x -1= +1 is WRONG, it is academic stupidity and is evil. The educated stupid should acknowledge the natural antipodes of +1 x +1 = +1 and -1 x -1 = -1 exist as plus and minus values of opposite creation – depicted by opposite sexes and opposite hemispheres.

  and that:

  All 4/24 hour days occur within 1 Earth rotation. You educated stupid word animals can’t fathom this greatest social and scientific math of creation.

• [TooGoodToCheck]

  You’d think breaking RSA (which they claim to have done) would be a big enough deal that they wouldn’t need to waste their time selling some low rent alternative. Hell, if half their pitch was true, we should be watching them collect the nobel prize for mathematics

• [A New Challenger]

  My online transactions are protected by Timecube, thanks.

• [nosehat]

  @24 Rasz:

  I was wondering the same thing: Who exactly are they trying to bilk? Naive clients? Naive venture capitalists? And how is this con supposed to work exactly?

  But then Occam’s razor suggested they might not be trying to con anybody. Rather, (a) they believe it themselves because (b) they are crazy.

• [Todd Charske]

  Yeah and I can run my car on water also!?!? Wake up America!

  Todd Charske

• [GuidoDavid]

  Cory:
  No, they have not spent enough time near the math section of their college. If they had, this scam would not be as lame as it is!

• [teufelsdroch]

  I kinda thought some of this had the ring of the Riemann hypothesis. It is NOT gibberish to say that the zeros of the zeta function are related to the distribution of prime numbers.

  And, yeah, neutronics is a sort of a free-association on real math:

  http://www.singularics.com/science/mathematics/OnNeutronicFunctions.pdf

• [Flying_Monkey]

  All u haterz r jus jelus.

  ;)

• [J Random Scribbler]

  @13: if even half their pitch was true, we should be watching them get swallowed by the NSA and their website being replaced by a piece of disinformation that makes them look like fools.

  Or, is that what ALREADY HAPPENED?!?!?!?!?!?!

  (Yes, I’m joking. I know my posting history is short, so I better make that clear just in case.)

• [I Like Cake]

  That paper is some absolutely top notch mathematical gibberish. It’s obvious that the guy has put a significant amount of effort into digging up a lot of math terminology and basic concepts, but it’s pretty clear he doesn’t even know what is involved in constructing even a basic proof, never mind analytic number theory.

  The best part is just how incredibly long it is. He must have actually thought he was writing something that meant… something. I really wonder what that thing was.

• [Chan Lee Meng]

  I have discovered a truly marvellous proof of the Riemann hypothesis, but unfortunately, I encrypted it using Twofish, and I have forgotten the password!

• [Patrick Dodds]

  Is Jeff spoofing everyone? Or perhaps he’s related to those Irish guys who some time ago claimed to have invented a perp motion machine.