Several examples in the past week show that while the Internet can be the source of unfounded rumours and ill-researched stories, it can also repair any such damage, in the end creating something more solid and substantial than is possible in any other medium.

"Unbreakable" encryption

Last Friday, I wrote about a teenage entrepreneur who had written an "unbreakable" encryption program. The point of the story was that the ease with which he was able to create such a product called into question whether governments should continue to try to control encryption.

I did check the story with sources who were knowledgable about encryption, but I had no way of checking quickly whether the program was indeed unbreakable - its author Peter Parkinson worked out that, in theory, this could take 30 billion years.

Enter the self-proclaimed nerds of slashdot.org. In a long discussion thread about the article, they lambasted my journalism, pilloried Peter's programming and set about proving the code could be easily cracked.

Coded challenge

I wish now I had quoted from the e-mails of the experts I first consulted on how extending the key length may weaken rather than strengthen encryption. But there was a deadline to meet and it was left out.

Reading the 18 pages of responses on slashdot.org though and the e-mails sent to News online, you could not wish for a fuller explanation of the intricacies of cryptoanalysis. Our site plans to render better this kind of feedback, in the meantime we will continue to link to it wherever we can.

Peter Parkinson himself responded to the criticisms in slashdot.org with a challenge. This weekend he posts up a simple message on his site encoded by his software. If anyone can read it, he may have to rethink the program's Unbreakable Encryption title.

ROFL about MS bug

Slashdot.org correspondents have also been debating a story I wrote on Monday about a possible date bug in Windows 98. Again, through this, a lot of very expert people are now busy trying to recreate it. Although, in this case, Microsoft have beaten them to it.

Most of those discussing the story though were ROFL at the idea of Microsoft making such a major error.

ROFL, in case you didn't know, means Rolling-On-Floor-Laughing in e-mail and chat speak. LOL, Laughing Out Loud, has made it into the New Oxford Dictionary of English (NODE).

My story on that yesterday has already prompted an e-mail querying the new definitions for hi-tech words. API is not Application Planning Interface but Application Programming Interface. ASIC is Application-Specific Integrated Circuit not Application of Specific Integrated Circuit, it has been correctly pointed out.

I remember how the multi-volume Oxford English Dictionary used to be compiled by scores of experts clipping newspapers and magazines and storing them in shoeboxes and such like to record the earliest usages of words in print and to track their nuances of meaning.