Tod is giving a great talk here at Northern Voice on PodCasting. Tips on how to record, edit, mix. Hopefully he will post his hints somewhere. Here they are Tod is a great presenter, and I will be checking out his /Nerd blog.
Bruce Schneier, crypto expert extrodinaire, continues his analysis of breaking of SHA-1. He provides some history on hash functions and refers to an essay he did last September that quasi predicts the break.
In summary, SHA-1 was supposedly shown to be compromised in 2**69 rather than 2**80 operations. These are both really big numbers, although 2**80 is 2048 times bigger. Assuming Moore’s law of doubling computing power every 18 months continues, 2**80 will be as weak in 16 years. It would seem to me (yeah, like I’m expert in crypto - NOT!) that all we need to do is double the size of the hash so that theoretically it is 2**160 unique, which maybe is only 2**120 operations safe, but that means it will be 75 years before it is as weak. I’ll likely be dead by then and quantum computing technology may have made current cryptography obsolete.
Sitting here this morning listening to Tim Bray give a presentation about what blogging is all about here at Northern Voice. Inspiring me to get back into writing personal posts here.
Addendum: there is a HUGE spectrum of people in the audience. Someone in the audience had thought that Tim worked for the Sun newspaper (The Vancouver Sun). She did not know who Sun Microsystems was. Good for a chuckle.
Reid has finally launched something that might make some money over at LinkedIn. We are currently looking for some people at Sxip so we used the service. I have not done much with LinkedIn since I joined back when it first started (thanks Joi!) so thought, heh, perhaps I will flesh out my contact list. I was happy to see I did not have to type them in by hand and could export from my contact list.
7:00 PM PST. Looking at my contact list, I realized that it needed some serious pruning. A few hours later I had a list of people I wanted to stay in contact with and, presto, uploaded them to LinkedIn.
10:07 PM PST. People are accepting my invitations. Nice to be loved.
12:19 AM PST. People are still accepting invitiations. I have over 40 new connections. I guess lots of other people are fiddling with their machines on a cold, February night.
