Slashdot Mirror

Here are some high-res pictures of a non-working Bombe rebuild from Bletchley last year:

http://gallery.spacebar.org/f/a/photo/viewpic/1/52 2/1/
http://gallery.spacebar.org/f/a/photo/viewpic/1/52 3/1/
http://pictures.spacebar.org/f/a/photo/viewpic/2/4 91/1/

Here are some high-res pictures of a non-working Bombe rebuild from Bletchley last year:

http://gallery.spacebar.org/f/a/photo/viewpic/1/52 2/1/
http://gallery.spacebar.org/f/a/photo/viewpic/1/52 3/1/
http://pictures.spacebar.org/f/a/photo/viewpic/2/4 91/1/

Here are some high-res pictures of a non-working Bombe rebuild from Bletchley last year:

http://gallery.spacebar.org/f/a/photo/viewpic/1/52 2/1/
http://gallery.spacebar.org/f/a/photo/viewpic/1/52 3/1/
http://pictures.spacebar.org/f/a/photo/viewpic/2/4 91/1/

Amazingly, I just recently recorded a song about flying lawnmowers as part of the album-a-day project . I never thought it would be topical on slashdot...

You missed some digits at the end.

At Carnegie Mellon University, on March 14 (in celebration of the birthdays of Albert Einstein and Waclaw Sierpinski - famed for his factal gasket), we also celebrate "pi-day". It's an attempt to write pi out to as many digits as possible on the sidewalks of the campus. In 2003, a group of students managed to write pi out to 8192 digits...I'm not sure how many digits were calculated & written on the sidewalks this year, but i suspect they broke last years record.

Here are collisions for the real, off-the-shell MD5 algorithm.

C:\tmp> sha1sum x1 x2
a34473cf767c6108a5751a20971f1fdfba97690a x1
4283dd2d70af1ad3c2d5fdc917330bf502035658 x2

C:\tmp> md5sum x1 x2
79054025255fb1a26e4bc422aef54eb4 x1
79054025255fb1a26e4bc422aef54eb4 x2

C:\tmp> hexdump x1
0000000 31d1 02dd e6c5 c4ee 3d69 069a af98 5cf9
0000010 ca2f 87b5 4612 ab7e 0440 3e58 fbb8 897f
0000020 ad55 0634 f409 02b3 e483 8388 7125 5a41
0000030 5108 e825 cdf7 9fc9 1dd9 f2bd 3780 5b3c
0000040 82d8 313e 3456 5b8f 6dae d4ac c936 c619
0000050 53dd b4e2 da87 fd03 3902 0663 48d2 a0cd
0000060 9fe9 4233 570f e87e 54ce 70b6 a880 1e0d
0000070 98c6 bc21 a8b6 9383 f996 2b65 f76f 702a

C:\tmp> hexdump x2
0000000 31d1 02dd e6c5 c4ee 3d69 069a af98 5cf9
0000010 ca2f 07b5 4612 ab7e 0440 3e58 fbb8 897f
0000020 ad55 0634 f409 02b3 e483 8388 f125 5a41
0000030 5108 e825 cdf7 9fc9 1dd9 72bd 3780 5b3c
0000040 82d8 313e 3456 5b8f 6dae d4ac c936 c619
0000050 53dd 34e2 da87 fd03 3902 0663 48d2 a0cd
0000060 9fe9 4233 570f e87e 54ce 70b6 2880 1e0d
0000070 98c6 bc21 a8b6 9383 f996 ab65 f76f 702a

Here are collisions for the real, off-the-shell MD5 algorithm.

C:\tmp> sha1sum x1 x2
a34473cf767c6108a5751a20971f1fdfba97690a x1
4283dd2d70af1ad3c2d5fdc917330bf502035658 x2

C:\tmp> md5sum x1 x2
79054025255fb1a26e4bc422aef54eb4 x1
79054025255fb1a26e4bc422aef54eb4 x2

C:\tmp> hexdump x1
0000000 31d1 02dd e6c5 c4ee 3d69 069a af98 5cf9
0000010 ca2f 87b5 4612 ab7e 0440 3e58 fbb8 897f
0000020 ad55 0634 f409 02b3 e483 8388 7125 5a41
0000030 5108 e825 cdf7 9fc9 1dd9 f2bd 3780 5b3c
0000040 82d8 313e 3456 5b8f 6dae d4ac c936 c619
0000050 53dd b4e2 da87 fd03 3902 0663 48d2 a0cd
0000060 9fe9 4233 570f e87e 54ce 70b6 a880 1e0d
0000070 98c6 bc21 a8b6 9383 f996 2b65 f76f 702a

C:\tmp> hexdump x2
0000000 31d1 02dd e6c5 c4ee 3d69 069a af98 5cf9
0000010 ca2f 07b5 4612 ab7e 0440 3e58 fbb8 897f
0000020 ad55 0634 f409 02b3 e483 8388 f125 5a41
0000030 5108 e825 cdf7 9fc9 1dd9 72bd 3780 5b3c
0000040 82d8 313e 3456 5b8f 6dae d4ac c936 c619
0000050 53dd 34e2 da87 fd03 3902 0663 48d2 a0cd
0000060 9fe9 4233 570f e87e 54ce 70b6 2880 1e0d
0000070 98c6 bc21 a8b6 9383 f996 ab65 f76f 702a

(This troll would be more effective if not posted anonymously.)

Indeed this flamewar has been repeated many times. Safe languages do indeed provide protection from these kinds of attacks and typically at a fairly small speed penalty (depending on the language; the number-two language on that list is safe and places above C++!).

See the earlier slashdot discussion for loads of argument. ( here for my perspective--note, I am a tower-in-the-sky PhD student in programming languages, but I do write lots of code in many languages, including C and C++.) I am still boggled that programmers who claim to be interested in security (and who moreover claim to be uninfluenced by marketing and "cool", but rather by technical concerns) still choose C or C++ for their projects.

I would challenge the notion that there is a distinct category of books that are self-published. To some extent the categories of publisher and self-publisher are anachronistic.

I've made the argument that there is no such thing as self-publishing in more detail elsewhere, but to summarize:

• Many independent publishers publish the work of a small number of writers.

• Many writers establish "publishing companies" to distribute their own work.

• And at this point, technologies like Lulu.com make publishing accessible to anyone and everyone.

The real difference, insomuch as there is a difference, is in the branding. O'Reilly, for example, has a brand that information seekers trust. So an O'Reilly book by an author you've never heard of is probably more appealing than a Lulu.com book by an author you've never heard of. But what if an author develops his own brand?

Along those lines, last week I found myself in the middle of a back-and-forth with a prominent tech journalist. His position was in essence that most of what is written is crap and that the editorial control exercised by publishers is essential. Fair enough. Most of what's written is crap, (although that doesn't seem to stop people from buying it when it's put out by major publishers).

But the dilemma you allude to, as I see it, is comparable to the dilemma presented by the emergence of the World Wide Web itself. "If anyone can put up anything on the Web," railed skeptics, "the whole thing is going to be useless. If you can't find the worthwhile information in the mountains of rotten information, what good will it be?"

Venerable institutions like the New York Times (justifiably) shuddered that individual sites--Matt Drudge's, for example--could compete with their own as sources for information. And yet, it has come to be. The Internet provides the means by which authors can develop their own brands. Matt Basham (the CISCO prof), for example, is in the process of developing his.

Well, remember those IE extenstion freewares, such as CruftyBrowser, AwanaBrowser, and MyEyee2

The notice isn't short, mp3.com has been going down the shitter for over two years now. The last straw for me was when they limited non-paid artists to three songs, making the site totally unusable for the dozens of album-a-day projects that had been posted there. It would definitely be nice to have an internet music system that cared about free, underground music, though. I am of the opinion that there is plenty of bandwidth there, if it is used in creative ways (ie, peer-to-peer).

In the spirit of those people promoting their own stupid comic strips, I'll mention my established Album-a-day project , wherein participants are challenged to create an entire album in one 24-hour period. There's like 60 albums there.

Since mp3.com was bought by Vivendi, it has taken a nosedive into the shitter.

mp3.com used to be a place where low-budget hobbyists could get their songs on the internet and heard. That was great. They put ads on it to cover some costs, fine. They added some "premiere" services for bands that wanted to make it big, ok. They instituted dubious "payback" schemes where you get money when people listen to your music, but only if you pay them money first. Recently they capped free users to 3 hosted songs, which is when I stopped using them and moved my project elsewhere. Apparently, they are continuing to make the service less and less useful for hobbyists.

mp3.com, once upon a time, was a place that might have changed the future of music. People could make music at home, for very little money, upload it to the internet, and other people could download it and listen and enjoy it. The problem is that there's little need for record labels and radios in this future. Vivendi obviously knows this, and while it might not be a likely future, they sure aren't going to help it happen.

mp3.com today exists entirely to exploit hobbyists. Basically, if you're too small to get bilked by a real record label, they will screw you there. Sign up for their promotion tools, pay a subscription fee, start selling CDs on-line, and stop being any threat to the music industry. I wish I knew of a great place to upload your music for free, but the other sites like iuma and vitaminic are basically just up-and-coming mp3.coms.

The old VirtualIO I-glasses have 640x480 resolution (though it's interlaced so it's really 640x240), which is about as much as these. The new ones do even better... I have a pair of the old ones.

My boss gave me the I-glasses; they're a cute novelty. Two years I played FF7 with them, lying in my bed on my side (even with the covers over my head!). You don't even be upright to use your computer any more, heh.

Stereoscopic effect was neat, but I couldn't get it to work with my Voodoo. I did write some programs to interlace rendered images, which was kind of fun. (see cans.gif )

When the resolution on these becomes a lot higher (it's not really possible to do anything involving reasonably-sized text AFAIK), these will have a lot of cool uses.

I would suggest Matador and Merge records, two of the bigger "indie" record labels. These guys offer a lot of excellent music (as far as I'm concerned; check my CD List but more relevantly they are very artist friendly. 50% of CD sales go to the artist on Matador, for instance.

You'll also find that CDs from these labels tend to be a few dollars cheaper than RIAA stuff.

An RIAA boycott will be pretty easy for me to pull off... count me in!

Here's an mpeg of that scene:

http://spacebar.org/clip/strange-po kemon-clip.mpg

What's wrong with showing this to kids?