I also find the naming of names in the article a bit … pitchfork-and-torch. Who cares? It could have happened to anyone. Let’s be thankful to people taking responsibility and thus the risk of making a mistake. The only message here is “cryptographers are humans”, which is not really news (to me 😜).

I am a bit surprised that this is so big news. Mistakes happen everywhere. It wouldn’t have happened if the IACR hadn’t used a cryptographic voting protocol, and IACR not using cryptography would be more reason for an article, IMO. It’s the first time this happened after many successful years.

Am unterhaltsamsten ist es übrigens, als Merz die Schuldenfrage aufmacht – das Ergebnis seiner Wandlung haben wir Anfang diesen Jahres erfahren.

Yes. It will be exciting to see how it will be in 5 or 10 years from now. I definitely wouldn’t have believed this 10 years ago.

(Btw., that is also why I like the alphabetical ordering of authors in mathematics and cryptology, for example. New insights are not made only by those finding the final answer, but also by those asking the right questions along the way.)

Isn’t research primarily about asking the right questions, anyway? If you ask the questions in the right way, you are often already very close to the answer.