aildours's comments

You're looking for functional encryption (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_encryption). It lets you compute exactly an encryption of a pre-specified function of the input message and nothing else.

This will be my last comment in this chain since this is going nowhere. Patronymics and matronymics are used by some south Indians, who are at the most 20% of the population. The simple point made in the OP is essentially that caste-based surnames are typical in India, and which you have not refuted.

No, you don't have to fill your caste but you are typically expected to tick one of the SC/ST/OBC/General boxes (these being the categories of reservation), and then provide a proof if required. The sentence you quote refers to this, and not on how they were hired, which is what you are saying. RTI queries can absolutely answer things of this kind, please just read the question the OP asks in the linked pdfs.

Consider reading [1] (also linked in OP) for a detailed article about a very talented lower caste person who gets hired at IIT Kanpur, only to be met with overt caste-based discrimination and harassment. You'd find it hard to claim caste-based discrimination doesn't exist after reading it. On a perhaps unrelated note, the author is Manindra Agarwal, who you may know as the A in the AKS primality test.

[1]: https://kafila.online/2019/04/10/the-saderla-story-courage-i...

> I can assure you that the vast majority of upper-caste people here don't use a caste-based surname anymore.

Oh, I don't need assuring for this, this was the point I was making! Basically, some south Indian upper castes use their father's first name as their surname. And this in itself is a strong signifier that the person is from the upper caste!

And yes, some surnames like Bulsara are linked to a place, some are neutral like Kumar, or some are rare enough to not signify caste unless you really know. So what? Even now, a large chunk of the Indian population uses caste-linked surnames, and it is one way they get discriminated. This is the point he makes when he says "Typically, one's surname (last name) is a giveaway".

> RTI responses will only tell you the number of candidates who were hired through caste-based reservation.

No, the RTI responses that he has linked is for the "breakdown of faculty members in the respective category of reservation..." (see the linked pdf for IITD, for example), not if they were hired through caste-based reservation. The category of reservation being information that every Indian citizen is asked to provide in government forms.

Complete bs.

>Caste-based surnames are extremely uncommon in South India (20% of India's population), and it's not even a recent thing.

No, caste-based surnames are uncommon among some upper caste communities. A significant chunk (Gowdas, Reddys, Nairs etc.) have surnames strongly linked to castes. And what you might refer to being a "recent thing" is having a western style surname at all.

>FWIW, as someone who has spent considerable time in Indian academia, this article reeks of BS. No one cares about your caste in Indian academia. The languages you speak, the part of India you come from, etc., cause a bigger divide than caste.

I've also spent time in Indian academia (and left it, for unrelated reasons) and can say that caste matters a lot, in a very insidious way. Respectfully, if you can't tell that Bulsara is a Gujarati surname (which means it could be a Hindu, Parsi or a Muslim surname, so may not even be linked to a caste as is the case with Freddie Mercury), then you may not know enough to comment on caste.

>How exactly did the author find their castes?

Perhaps try reading the article? He has even linked the RTI responses if you doubt him so much.

Thanks!

The bit about RG Collingwood sounds very interesting. Could you provide some examples?

It does not seem to have a direct impact. See https://nitter.it/ChrisPeikert/status/1553410345330524160#m

Wouldn't you then have to send out multiple ciphertexts (for articles >100 KB)? Which would leak something about the size of the article...

Here are some books that I've read with some remarks which you may find useful.

- "Cryptography: A Very Short Introduction" by Piper and Murphy - This is a book in the Very Short Introduction series, so is a bit light on the math. If that's what you are looking for though, this is a good resource.

- "Cryptography Made Simple" by Nigel Smart - The choice of topics is quite eclectic (in the best way possible!). For ex. it is the first general crypto book I've read which talks about lattices (most post-quantum world crypto schemes are lattice based) and things like commitments and zero-knowledge proofs. Develops just the right amount of math to talk about a lot of different things.

- "Cryptography: Theory and Practice" by Stinson and Paterson - adequate, covers the usual topics (plus a chapter on post-quantum crypto).

- "Introduction to Modern Cryptography" by Katz and Lindell - basically a reference for the theory side of crypto. Quite math heavy (or to be more accurate, notation heavy, like theoretical crypto tends to be).

- "Real-World Cryptography" by David Wong - I have not read another crypto book which tackles as many topics, it has chapters on e2e encryption, cryptocurrency and hardware crypto. Is a bit too hand-wavey and doesn't properly explain the math sometimes, but it is great for self-learners and people who are looking for a book on topics not covered in other books.

- "Serious Cryptography" by Jean-Philippe Aumasson - from the No Starch Press stable. The exposition is quite good, and finds a decent balance between making it approachable and getting the details right.

- "Understanding Cryptography" by Paar and Pelzl - decent coverage of fundamental primitives (block/stream ciphers, public key encryption, hashes, signatures etc) but feels a bit outdated. For ex. there is a whole chapter on DES.

This is not specific to Hindi though, almost all Indian languages (except for maybe Urdu), use this arrangement known as the Varnamala. This collation order has to do with these languages using scripts descended from the Brahmi script.

This is the webpage of TFHE, a recent and quite fast FHE scheme - https://tfhe.github.io/tfhe/ . They have a (surely incomplete) list of applications. I work in a somewhat related field, and I know that current FHE schemes can be used for things like voting and computing basic statistics when the data size is smallish.

As KenoFischer says, they are not the same ciphertext, even if we consider a non homomorphic encryption system. Enc is basically a random algorithm, and we need it to return different ciphertexts for the same plaintext, otherwise it would be easy to break - if I know Enc(1) and the scheme is additive, then I'd know Enc(n) for all n...