One day when I was having lunch with Richard Feynman, I mentioned to him that I was planning to start a company to build a parallel computer with a million processors. His reaction was unequivocal, "That is positively the dopiest idea I ever heard." For Richard a crazy idea was an opportunity to either prove it wrong or prove it right. Either way, he was interested. By the end of lunch he had agreed to spend the summer working at the company.

Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine

A collection of observations, news and resources on the changing nature of innovation and the future of information technology.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger

Password-Authenticated Key Exchange (PAKE) studies how to establish secure communication between two remote parties solely based on their shared password, without requiring a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). Despite extensive research in the past decade, this problem remains unsolved. Patent has been one of the biggest brakes in deploying PAKE solutions in practice. Besides, even for the patented schemes like EKE and SPEKE, their security is only heuristic; researchers have reported some subtle but worrying security issues. In this paper, we propose to tackle this problem using an approach different from all past solutions.

Our protocol, Password Authenticated Key Exchange by Juggling (J-PAKE), achieves mutual authentication in two steps: first, two parties send ephemeral public keys to each other; second, they encrypt the shared password by juggling the public keys in a verifiable way. The first use of such a juggling technique was seen in solving the Dining Cryptographers problem in 2006. Here, we apply it to solve the PAKE problem, and show that the protocol is zero-knowledge as it reveals nothing except one-bit information: whether the supplied passwords at two sides are the same. With clear advantages in security, our scheme has comparable efficiency to the EKE and SPEKE protocols.

J-PAKE: From Dining Cryptographers to Jugglers

Abstract: The studies of the dynamics of topical dataflow of new information in the framework of a logistic model were suggested. The condition of topic balance, when the number of publications on all topics is proportional to the information space and time, was presented. General time dependence of the publication intensity in the Internet, devoted to particular topics, was observed; unlike an exponent model, it has a saturation area. Some limitations of a logistic model were identified opening the way for further research.

Dynamics of thematic information flows

In this article I'd like to present personal perspective of the evolution of the Internet over the last decade, highlighting my impressions of what has worked, what has not and what has changed over this period.

10 Years Later

OpenID was designed as a lightweight solution for “trivial” use cases in identity management: its primary goal is to enable Internet surfers to replace self-generated usernames and passwords by a single login credential, without needing more than their browser. Concretely, OpenID aims to enable individuals to post blog comments and log into social networking sites without having to remember multiple passwords. (Of course, local password store utilities already do that; more on this later.)

Beyond this, OpenID is pretty much useless. The reasons for this are many: OpenID is highly vulnerable to phishing and other attacks, creates insurmountable privacy problems, is not a trust system, suffers from usability problems, and makes it unappealing to become an OpenID “consumer.” Many smart people have already elaborated on these problems in various forums. In the rest of this post I will be quoting from and pointing to their critiques.

The problem(s) with OpenID

Look at your computer setup and imagine that you hooked up a 3D printer. Instead of printing on bits of paper this 3D printer makes real, robust, mechanical parts. To give you an idea of how robust, think Lego bricks and you're in the right area. You could make lots of useful stuff, but interestingly you could also make most of the parts to make another 3D printer. That would be a machine that could copy itself.

RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is the practical self-copying 3D printer shown on the right - a self-replicating machine. This 3D printer builds the component up in layers of plastic. This technology already exists, but the cheapest commercial machine would cost you about €30,000. And it isn't even designed so that it can make itself. So what the RepRap team are doing is to develop and to give away the designs for a much cheaper machine with the novel capability of being able to self-copy (material costs are about €400). That way it's accessible to small communities in the developing world as well as individuals in the developed world. Following the principles of the Free Software Movement we are distributing the RepRap machine at no cost to everyone under the GNU General Public Licence. So, if you have a RepRap machine, you can make another and give it to a friend...

RepRap

TagCrowd is a web application for visualizing word frequencies in any user-supplied text by creating what is popularly known as a tag cloud or text cloud.

What text do you want to visualize?

TagCrowd

If you haven't already read Sharon Steel's cover story on Steampunk in this week's Phoenix -- to say nothing of her Steampunk fashion piece in the current issue of SPIN -- then get thee clicking here-ish. She's got more anachronistic harpies, Victorian fashion references, PC mods, and totally insane industrial-age design throwbacks than you can shake a rivet gun and a pair of goggles at.

We also accompanied Sharon out to visit one of the Steampunk village's most recognizable faces: Massachusetts native Jake von Slatt. He was nice enough to invite us into his workshop and submit to an interview, which was conducted on board a school bus he's turned into a severely-retro RV. He's also working on modding a VW kit car so it can run on steam power. In the video above, we focused on a few of Jake's most famous projects: his Victorian all-in-one PC; a brass-etched custom Fender guitar; and a telegraph receiver that translates the internet into Morse code. Holy crap.

Jake Von Slatt's Steampunk Workshop

This qref is written for a semi-knowledgable UNIX user who has just come up against a problem and has been advised to use awk to solve it. Perhaps one of the examples can be quickly modified for immediate use.

Getting Started with awk