alt Hacker NewsHey, one of my university professors! GF2^8 is also great for RAID6+ and Reed Solomon codes.
Back in the day it was tractable to build AES lookup tables for computing MixColumns and SubBytes similar to the site's multiplication table. Then djb found a remote timing attack, so processors started implementing hardware AES instructions.
I was also pleasantly surprised to see a `uaf.edu` link on the front page of HN, and even more so when I saw it was written by Dr. Lawlor. His course on x86 assembly is easily one of the best classes I took in college.