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An anonymous reader writes "Bruce Schneier and company have created a new hash function called Skein. From his blog entry: 'NIST is holding a competition to replace the SHA family of hash functions, which have been increasingly under attack. (I wrote about an early NIST hash workshop here.) Skein is our submission (myself and seven others: Niels Ferguson, Stefan Lucks, Doug Whiting, Mihir Bellare, Tadayoshi Kohno, Jon Callas, and Jesse Walker). Here's the paper."

Mhrmnhrm writes "After totally closing off public access to documentation for their chips roughly five years ago, Hifn is again offering them, but with an invasive registration requirement. Needless to say, Theo de Raadt and the rest of the OpenBSD team were not amused, and following a Hifn manager's missive, the gauntlet has been thrown. Either open the docs fully, or be removed from the system. This wouldn't be the first time... the same thing happened to both Adaptec and Intel following similar spats."

As seen on the OpenBSD -announce list, OpenBSD now has hardware cryptographic support to boost IPSEC performance. "Currently, only cards using the HiFn 7751 chip can be used. This Hifn chip is an IPSEC-oriented DES/3DES and SHA1/MD5 hmac engine; ie. only symmetric cryptography..&nbsp.we are getting 63.12Mb/s 3des/sha1 ESP IPSEC. That's documented as the top performance the chip can provide. In other words, we're pretty damn impressed at ourselves." Read on for more from the message, or go straight to the OpenBSD Hardware Crypto page.

"Further work will now happen. We wish to support other products (ie. IRE, Bluesteelnet, perhaps even 3COM or PCC-ISES if they would open their minds). Some crypto chip vendors are being extremely friendly to us. If anyone wants to help write drivers, get in touch."

We also hope to add more parts to our cryptography framework so that it can supply RSA/DSA type operations for chips that support that, so that OpenSSL can use the framework, and thus enhancing everything from https to ssh performance. We have grand schemes in mind."

"If you order a card from www.powercrypt.com, tell them you intend to use it with OpenBSD. I have heard rumours they are allowed to export it."

"Most of this work was done by Jason Wright and Angelos Keromytis."

Greyfox wrote in to say that a chunk of gnew gnome stuff is up. Full set of 0.99.3 tar balls for those livin' on the edge. In a related bit, GVeloper wrote in to mention the new cross referenced gtk documentation at GTK Dev Central Several other folks have commented that yet another Linux Kernel 2.2 prerelease is out. Hit the mirrors if you want it. My favorite BSD Equal Time activist, Jesse Shrieve wrote in to tell us that you can get metal FreeBSD squares to attach to your cases. maphew sent us a link to milo which claims to be a telnetable TRS-80. "I remember when" yada yada. That was my first programming experience. Next, a few Slashdot bits: Epitaph sent us a interesting little piece of Evidence of the Slashdot Effect in Effect: The results of a Petition against Canadian CD-R Tax. rive submitted a simple perl script that converts Slashdot Headlines to Window Maker Menus. Clever. DGibson wrote in to tell us that Slashdot rated Coolest site at Planet Click. Last of all, insanity never stops:An anonymous joker sent us a link to The All Squirrels Must Die page. and William Tanksley sent us a link to the shrunken heads HOWTO. Be afraid.

Here's a challange for everyone out there: Rob Williams has a a Sparc Station without a CD ROM drive, and asks "How do I remote boot and install SunOS 4.1.4 on an OSless Sparc from a machine running Linux? The RARP and bootparm stuff sounds doable, but how do you layout the tftp directory and exports to allow a full install of SunOS on the Sun disk? Is the SunOS disk even fully readable by Linux? Are there other considerations for serving diskless client SunOS machines from a linux box?" (Note:If you have a question for Slashdot, send them to Cliff Wood. Don't be shy!)