Archive for March, 2008

Is Robot Evolution Mirroring the Evolution of Life?

According to some scientists, robot creations are evolving similar to how life on Earth evolved, only at warp speed. By some calculations, by mid-century no human task, physical or intellectual, will be beyond the scope of robots.

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Disk Encryption in notebooks vulnerable

A team from Princeton University has developed ways to break disk encryption, including Bitlocker, Truecrypt, Apple encryption, and Linux encryption, if the computer is in sleep mode or sitting at a password prompt, or even if it’s just been turned off.

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Google Code University - Free Training from Google

Want to learn how to program? Develop in mySQL? Enhance your skills as a developer or programmer or just learn the lingo. Tutorials, lecture slides, and problem sets for a variety of topic areas including AJAX, Distributed Systems, Web Security, Languages and a ton of other great classes - at no cost!

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Biggest Unix Cheat Sheet

A collection of Unix/Linux/BSD commands and tasks which are useful for IT work or for advanced users.

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Digital Fortress: COMPUTER SCIENCE ACCURACY.

Digital FortressAlex: Even though it turns out in the end that there was no real unbreakable code, the reader (and a bunch of cryptography experts in the story) are supposed to believe in it at least for a while, but it makes no sense as described. The existence of the unbreakable code is confirmed when the NSA’s super-powerful computer is unable to decode a sample message that the genius gave them. They don’t seem to consider the possibility that he just gave them a garbled mess which cannot be decrypted. If they are so easily convinced, it would be very easy to blackmail the NSA. Moreover, the explanation of how the unbreakable code works either makes no sense or is beyond me. I don’t see how it could ever be decoded, making it useless.

Igor Fedchunov: can you imagine a (super)computer blasting because of overheating due to cooling malfunction? Oh, boy! Ok, let go straight to the crown jewel: we have got a foolproof encryption algorithm. Everyone wants to see it. But its description is encrypted! Great! Its encryption employs THAT algorithm, and you will never know the algorithm’s sectrets unless you have the key…. wait a minute! When you enter the key - the encrypted file will open up, and THAT means that there is a program there that takes the key and makes the decryption - so we can look at the program code and get the algorithm from there ! One does not have to decrypt the file to get the algorithm !

And the last straw - in author’s view a 64-bit key is represented by 64 character string. AND it is implied that it is NOT a binary string. Now that is really gross. Probably the author did not do ANY research for his so-called-book. That’s why I would call this book a [EXPLETIVE DELETED].
Continue reading ‘Digital Fortress: COMPUTER SCIENCE ACCURACY.’




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