I got a flyer in the mail for the RSA Conference 2008. Since I enjoy cryptography - and despite the fact that I know next to nothing about it - I was interested.
But I'm not going to lie, I'm really put off by the advertising. This year's theme for the conference is Alan Turing. How this conference has been going on for 14 years and ignored him up to now is a mystery to me. (They made a carrier pigeon the theme in 1997. That's right, a carrier pigeon apparently did more for security than Turing.)
But now that RSA has finally decided to recognize the man, they're doing some stupid advertising around it: What Would Turing Do? Which, frankly, would make a cool bumper sticker, and I would have been impressed... if they had just asked the question and not tried to answer it.
Instead, they give some odd answers that show that their marketing department never bothered to talk to a developer - or even a read a Turing biography. Their answers are frequently bizarre and have nothing to do with Turing: he would "have a raging sushi addiction", "be a huge Dr. Who fan" and would "collect rare Phillip Glass vinyl". (Yes, they also didn't bother to google "Phillip Glass" to realize that they misspelled his name.)
This is the company that was founded by three math PhDs who invented the RSA public key algorithm the RC block ciphers, and the MDx hash functions. And they're suggesting that he would "recite the far reaches of imaginary numbers to pass the time"? I'd like to think that would be beneath Turing... hell, it would be beneath me. (A googleplex times i. A googleplex plus one times i. See, not very satisfying is it?)
Very disappointing.
Especially since it's obvious that really, Turing wouldn't care about sushi or Bill Gates. He'd be far too busy enjoying the liberal sexual mores of this fine time we live in.
