OriginStamp in Lisp
As long as we’re sharing stuff…
There is a web service called
OriginStamp.org run by Prof. Bela Gipp in Germany. This is a web service that offers free trusted secure timestamps to anyone who wants one, by re-purposing the Bitcoin Merkel Tree hash chain. I sat down last weekend and wrote some Lisp code to take advantage of this, performing raw web POST/GET as per his instruction. He asked for permission to post my code on his website to share with others, which I do gladly. Just a small amount of code.
Why might you want a trusted, secure, timestamp? If you are an inventor and you need to furnish proof of an idea at a certain date and time, you would hash your writeup with SHA-256 and submit it to his website to become incorporated into the Bitcoin chain. Once 5 or more Bitcoin hash blocks have extended the chain containing your hash, it becomes essentially impossible to forge, and its presence in the hash tree chain serves as legal proof of your invention on that date.
Bela is involved, apparently, in producing automated plagiarism detection too, and time stamping serves a purpose there too. Bela’s insight in repurposing the Bitcoin hash chain removes any need for a central trusted time stamp authority, as the database is secured by the sheer number of participants all hosting a copy of the hash chain on their local computers. A very interesting social engineering platform.
If you have any interest in modern, free (as in free beer!), and useful tools to serve the public interest, I urge you to visit his website and try it out.
I don’t know where or when my code will appear on his website. He asked for permission this morning. If you want a copy from me, I’ll be glad to furnish it. It’s only about 50 LOC or so… Took a few hours to write because the HTTP protocol forces you into a “20 questions” in attempting to provide the right syntax and collection of arguments. My code might save you some time fighting this perverse system.
- DM
On Jul 17, 2015, at 1:37 PM, Pascal Costanza <
pc@p-cos.net> wrote:
Hi,
We have just published a paper about elPrep, a tool that can be used in DNA sequencing. It is originally implemented in LispWorks, and was later also ported to SBCL to have a full open source implementation. The LispWorks version is still significantly faster and requires no manual configuration of the Lisp image to deal with the large memory requirements, as opposed to the SBCL version. The benchmark numbers reported in the paper are based on LispWorks 64-bit (version 6.1.1 in the paper, although the code has now also been ported to 7.0.0).
See
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0132868 for the paper, and
https://github.com/exascience/elprep for the repository containing the open source code.
Pascal
--
Pascal Costanza
The views expressed in this email are my own, and not those of my employer.
_______________________________________________
Lisp Hug - the mailing list for LispWorks users
lisp-hug@lispworks.comhttp://www.lispworks.com/support/lisp-hug.html