This is short and to the point...

Decius wrote:
] ] Where does this leave us? MD5 is fatally wounded; its
] ] use will be phased out. SHA-1 is still alive but the
] ] vultures are circling. A gradual transition away from
] ] SHA-1 will now start. The first stage will be a debate
] ] about alternatives, leading (I hope) to a consensus among
] ] practicing cryptographers about what the substitute will
] ] be.
]
] Answer, not a 5 alarm fire, but if you write or maintain
] cryptography code you can still expect some work coming up.

Hal Finney has posted a nice writeup of Joux's SHA-0 result to the cryptography list. The implications are pretty significant for CHF design...

"Nevertheless, Joux's results cast doubt on the very strategy of building hashes out of iterating compression functions. It appears that there is no hope of creating hashes in this way which approximate the theoretical model of a random function, which is the usual design goal for hash functions. This will probably further motivate researchers to explore new directions in hash function design."

http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography%40metzdowd.com/msg02611.html

RE: Followup on SHA-1 break

] Generator for 2-dimensional barcodes that are
] popular in Japan.

The Japaneese have cellphones that tag pictures with GPS images and cellphones that will pull up URLs and email addresses from these bar codes. They have all the tech toys that I want to play with!!!@?#!

Is there software out for American phones that will read these standard barcodes?

QR Barcode Generator

] As most /.'ers know all to well, Copyright is
] increasingly being used as a means to suppress free
] speech these days. And the trend has not been lost on our
] 2004 US Presidential candidates. Both George and John are
] using copyright law to 'vaporize' information considered
] embarrassing or harmful to their campaigns.

This is Copyright Maximalism.

Slashdot | Using Copyright To Suppress Political Speech

This is neat. You can upload any photo and out pops real, honest to goodness U.S. postage stamps affixed with your picture. Memeing through boingboing because I think their examples are better then the ones on the real site. In particular, I'm a fan of the Bush Daughter Stamp. Unfortunately, these custom stamps cost twice as much as the real thing. I wonder what is in that 2d bar code. I wonder if I could write software that does this myself and save some cash...

Boing Boing: Print real US postage stamps with your own photos.

] Acidus writes "While researching for an embedded systems
] project (a magstripe enabled Coke machine), I was shocked
] by the lack of magstripe information: Programs/code that
] would run on a modern OS were all but nonexistant,
] articles that were 6-10 years old, etc.

Acidus is on Slashdot today.

Slashdot | Unlocking The Power Of the Magstripe

] A German startup company has developed a possible
] alternative to short-range communications technologies
] such as RFID, Bluetooth and Near Field Communications
] (NFC). In contrast to those processes, the company's
] Skinplex technology uses human skin as a transmission
] medium.

EE Times -Startup launches commercial Body-lan

] When Meng's dad, a radio frequency engineer, looked at
] the test-run data he said, "Oh my God. They might have a
] chance at this. They might actually have to go to Las
] Vegas."
]
] Not without Justin's father, however. Greg Rigling drove
] them across the country in a van, with the 10-foot
] satellite dish strapped to a trailer. Then he spent two
] days driving around Nevada's mountains helping them get a
] signal.

The wifi shootout concept is kind of silly. The guy who can buy the best antenna wins, and you've got a bunch of people running around with antennas that they constructed without reading anything about antennas. It ought to be obvious that parabolic dishes are the right answer.

However, the fact that these teenagers managed to get an unamplified consumer wireless card communicating across 55 miles of desert with old C-band dishes is cool in a DIY kind of way. It means that anyone with line of sight can build a long distance wireless backbone, and cheap.

Wired News: Wi-Fi Shootout in the Desert

Like the heads in a VCR, the ones in card readers can wear out. After all, they are reading cards at an extraordinary rate. The busiest turnstile in the subway system, turnstile No. 10 in the middle array by the escalators in the main entrance to the subway below Grand Central Terminal, reads a whopping 236,000 cards a month.

I thought that was a neat factoid. I can imagine New Yorkers saying to themselves, "I know that turnstile!"

The article is rich in trivia about heavy-duty magnetic card readers and the millions of people who (ab)use them.

Mastering the Art of the Swipe

The purpose of computers is human freedom.

Like "maturity" and "reality" and "progress", the word "technology" has an agenda for your behavior: usually what is being referred to as "technology" is something that somebody wants you to submit to.  "Technology" often implicitly refers to something you are expected to turn over to "the guys who understand it."

What we really need is software designs that go into realms that cannot be visualized on paper, to break ideas and presentations out of their four-walled prison.

Cyber means "I do not know what I am talking about" or "I am trying to fool and confuse you."

And please, Mr. Programmer, leave the choices to ME, not labyrinths of software outside my control, because I DO NOT TRUST YOU.

The Web is a foam of ever-popping bubbles, ever-changing shop windows.
The Web is the minimal concession to hypertext that a sequence-and-hierarchy chauvinist could possibly make.

If you haven't read Ted Nelson you're not really a hacker.

To anyone watching, it seems like magic. To a user, it becomes indispensable.

Basically the idea here is that you design a GUI in which UNIX style "do one thing, do it well" utilities could be plugged in to offer particular capabilities instead of having all of these separate monolithic applications like spreadsheets or word processors where the world has to be reinvented every time. The way spell checking works in the Mac is that its offered at the OS level, and every application gets it everywhere as a virtue of running on the OS, instead of having to have each application implement its own spell checking system. Now imagine taking that concept to a deeper level. Instead of that being on the periphery, for little things like spell check, make it the heart, for big things like browsers or editors or viewers... What COM would be if it didn't suck.

Crafting a Revolution with the Brother of the Macintosh