Some of my geeky tech jokes -- with explanations!

I know the line: explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog; you understand it better, but it dies. Still, not everyone will get these, and I figure I might as well have a place where you at least get a chance. So here are some of my own creations, explained.

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Girl, you make me feel like a fraudulent prover in a stochastic interactive zero-knowledge proof protocol ... because I really wish I had access to your random private bits!

Explanation: In a stochastic zero-knowledge proof protocol, there is a prover and a verifier, where the former wants to convince the latter of something. But for proof to work, the verifier must give the prover unpredictable challenges. Think of it like a quiz in school -- it's not much of a quiz if you know the exact questions that will be on it.

The information to predict the challenges is known as the verifier's private random bits Those with a legit proof don't need this, but a fraudulent prover does. Thus, a fraudulent prover in a stochastic interactive zero-knolwedge proof protocol wants access to the verifier's "random private bits".

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A historian, a geologist, and a cryptographer are searching for buried treasure. The historian brings expertise on practices used by treasure hiders, the geologist brings expertise on ideal digging places, and the cryptographer brings expertise on hidden messages.

Shortly after they start working together, the cryptographer announces, "I've found it!!"

The others are delighted: 'Where is it?'

The cryptographer says, "It's underground."

'Okay, but where underground?'

"It's somewhere underground!"

'But where specifically?'

"I don't know, but I know it's underground!"

'Slow down there. If all you know is that it's underground, then in what sense did you "find" anything? We're scarcely better off than when we started!'

"Give me a break! I just gave you an efficiently-computable distinguishing attack that separates the location of the treasure from the output of a random oracle. What more could you want?"

Explanation: In cryptography, an encryption scheme is considered broken if an attacker can find some pattern to the encrypted message -- i.e. they can identify telltale signs that it wasn't generated by a perfect random number generator, a "random oracle". Such a flaw would be called a "distinguishing attack". So in the cryptography world, they don't care if the attack actually allows you to decrypt the message; they stop as soon as they find non-randomness to the encrypted data. Applied to a treasure hunt, this means they would give up as soon as they conclude that the treasure location is non-random, which the cryptographer here things s/he's done simply by concluding that it's "underground".

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So, 16-year-old Johnnie walked into an Amazon Web Services-run bar...

"Welcome," said the bartender. "What are you drinking?"

Johnnie replied, 'What've you got?'

"Well, we have a selection of wines and the beers you see right here on tap. But if you prefer, we also have club soda and some juices."

Johnnie thought, Wait a second. Why is he telling me about the wines and beers? Does he even realize ... ?

'Okay, I'll take the Guinness.'

"Bottle or draft?"

'Draft.'

"Alright, and how will you be paying?"

Johnnie only had large bills from his summer job and gave the bartender a C-note.

"Sorry, but I gotta check to make sure this is real." The bartender took out a pen and marked it, then counted out the change. Johnnie reached for the beer.

"Hold on a second! Make sure to use a coaster!" The bartender slipped one under the glass. "Okay, now enjoy!"

Johnnie lifted up the glass to drink. Before he was able to sip, the bartender swatted it out of his hand.

"WHAT ARE YOU THINKING!?! Don't you know 16-year-olds can't drink!"

Explanation: On the AWS site, they will gladly let you click on the "Launch server" button and go through numerous screens and last-minute checks to configure it, and only at the very last stage does it say, "oops, turns out you don't have permission to do that" -- so it's like a bartender that takes you through a entire transaction, even verifying irrelevant things (like whether the money is real), while knowing the whole time he can't sell to you.

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How is a Mongo replica set like an Iowa voter?

In primary elections, they only vote for candidates they think are electable!

Explanation: Databases can have "replica sets" where there are multiple servers that try to have the same data; secondary servers depend on an agreed-upon "primary" to be the "real" source of data. Often times, the primary server goes down, so they have to decide on a new primary, known as a "primary election". But there are some restrictions on who they will vote for -- if they e.g. have reason to believe that a server can't be seen by other members, and in those cases it will regard that server as unelectable. So you can get funny messages about "server42 won't vote for server45 in primary election because it doesn't think it's electable".