A couple of years ago Jutta Degener and I became the first people to solve James Randi's $1,000,000 paranormal challenge. We derived, from thousands of miles away, the secret contents of a locked box held in Randi's offices set up to test whether psychic "remote viewing" was possible. Not being actual psychics, we had to exploit a weak home-brewed cryptographic commitment scheme that Randi had cooked up to authenticate the box's contents rather than the paranormal powers he was hoping to test for, but we did correctly figure out that the box contained a compact disk. And being nice people, we never formally asked for the million bucks, although we did have a bit of fun blogging about the cryptologic implications of psychic testing, which you can read here.

Our feat of "psychic cryptanalysis" got a bit more attention than I had expected given that our earthly cryptographic abilities are anything but paranormal, but you never know where the Internet will take things. But I was even more surprised when someone recently sent me a link to this final exam from a contracts course at the Stetson University College of Law [pdf].

Now, my mother definitely didn't raise me to be a law school exam question, and yet there we are, playing a starring role in the question on the fourth page. I have no idea whether to be flattered or horrified, but for the record (especially in case the IRS is reading), we never asked for or received the million dollars. And I've definitely never been been to an Alaskan psychic's convention.

The one thing I'm sure of is that Prof. Jimenez (who I've never met) will be making a guest appearance on some exam of mine in the near future. In a perfect world, he might play a role in a question involving copyright infringement, defamation, and false-light privacy, but since I teach computer science, not law, something about operating systems will probably have to do instead.