Turing completeness, weird machines, Twitter, and muddled terminology by halvar.flake.
From the post:
First off, an apology to the reader: I normally spend a bit of effort to make my blog posts readable / polished, but I am under quite a few time constraints at the moment, so the following will be held to lesser standards of writing than usual.
A discussion arose on Twitter after I tweeted that the use of the term “Turing-complete” in academic exploit papers is wrong. During that discussion, it emerged that there are more misunderstandings of terms that play into this. Correcting these things on Twitter will not work (how I long for the days of useful mailing lists), so I ended up writing a short text. Pastebin is not great for archiving posts either, so for lack of a better place to put it, here it comes:
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No apologies necessary for this highly entertaining and useful post!
Our misuse of “Turing completeness” and “weird machine” is harmful and confusing (emphasis in original)
Corrections of public ignorance rarely succeed but at least within exploit research, it’s worth a try. Watch for mis-use of Turing complete and weird machines and cite halvar.flake‘s correction.
PS: Personally I would not correct such misunderstandings by government sponsored researchers. Their ignorance and confusion doesn’t trouble me. Your call.