Protocol
Protocol
[Cueball is telling a story to a Computer Scientist who is seated at his desk.] Cueball: Alice sends a message to Bob saying to meet her somewhere. Computer Scientist: Uh huh. Cueball: But Eve sees it, too, and goes to the place. Computer Scientist: With you so far. Cueball: Bob is delayed, and Alice and Eve meet. Computer Scientist: Yeah? CAPTION: I've discovered a way to get computer scientists to listen to any boring story.

Alice, Bob, and Eve are role names traditionally used in describing cryptographic protocols. Rather than talking about "Person A", "Person B", "Person C", names beginning with each letter are used instead, and giving them different genders let pronouns be used to shorten discussions. For example: "Person A sends Person B a message encoded with Person B's public key" is much easier to parse when written as "Alice sends Bob a message encoded with his public key." Eve is short for "eavesdropper" - a person trying to find out what's being said in the conversations between the other people. The classic situation involves Alice wanting to send a secret message to Bob, while Eve (the eavesdropper), attempts to read the message, ideally without Alice or Bob ever finding out. Additional participants such as Carol (Person C) can be added if necessary. The list of names has become very standardised over time as described at Alice and Bob .
The joke here is that any computer scientist, hearing the names used, will think that they are listening to a cryptography problem. By changing the names in a story to these role names, you can induce them to listen carefully to boring stories. The fewer the interesting details, the more it sounds like a general problem, so very boring stories are actually the easiest.
The title text shows a more radical approach to the problem, for people who do not feel comfortable about lying. In this approach, you only make friends with people who have the appropriate names already.
The comic title also can be interpreted in two ways. First, the computer scientist thinks the conversation is about an encryption protocol. Second, the way the conversation is carried resembles a protocol used by many data communication systems, where one side sends data while the other sends back an acknowledgement upon receiving the data. In this case, the data are the lines of the boring story.
In comic 177: Alice and Bob these names are used in the same context. Instead of Alice and Bob being perfectly innocent people who just want to communicate in private, Bob is actually having an affair with Alice. Eve —his former partner— cracked the encryption to see what the message contained. Thus, this comic seems to continue the Alice/Bob romance, jealous-Eve plot, with Eve apparently confronting Alice over her text message to Bob.
[Cueball is telling a story to a Computer Scientist who is seated at his desk.] Cueball: Alice sends a message to Bob saying to meet her somewhere. Computer Scientist: Uh huh. Cueball: But Eve sees it, too, and goes to the place. Computer Scientist: With you so far. Cueball: Bob is delayed, and Alice and Eve meet. Computer Scientist: Yeah? CAPTION: I've discovered a way to get computer scientists to listen to any boring story.
