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Domain: technion.ac.il
Stories and comments across the archive that link to technion.ac.il.
Stories · 13
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Dan Shechtman Wins Chemistry Nobel For Quasicrystals
Stirling Newberry writes with word that Dan Shechtman of Israel's Technion has won the Nobel prize in chemistry for his discovery of quasicrystals, and provides a short description of why quasicrystals are exciting: "Quasicrystals fill space completely, but do not repeat, even though they show self-similar patterns, the way pi has order, but doesn't repeat. That is, they tessellate in an ordered way, but do not have repeating cells. In art, Girih tiles showed the essential property of being able to cover an infinite space, without repeating. In mathematics, Hao Wang came up with a set of tiles that any Turing Machine could be represented by, and conjectured that they would eventually always repeat. He turned out to be wrong, and over the next decades, tiles that did not repeat, but showed order, were discovered, most famously, though not first, by Penrose. Physically, when x-rays diffract, that is are scattered, from a crystal, they form a discrete lattice. Quasicrystals also have an ordered diffraction pattern, and it tiles the way ordered non-repeating tiles do. Quasicrystal patterns were known before Shechtman labelled them. So why care? Because crystals have only certain symmetries, and that determines their physical properties. Quasicrystals can have different symmetries, and do not bind regularly, and so different physical properties – which means new kinds of materials. Some examples: highly ductile steel, and, in something that is a bit of a by-word among people who study them, cooking utensils." -
Printf Debugging Revisited
gsasha writes "After long nights spent in debugging, w e have developed a C++ logging facility geared for debugging - and an article that describes our debugging methodology. The article consists of two parts: the first one describes the basics of the method, and the second one presents advanced techniques (to be completed if there is enough reader interest).
Happy debugging!" -
Printf Debugging Revisited
gsasha writes "After long nights spent in debugging, w e have developed a C++ logging facility geared for debugging - and an article that describes our debugging methodology. The article consists of two parts: the first one describes the basics of the method, and the second one presents advanced techniques (to be completed if there is enough reader interest).
Happy debugging!" -
Printf Debugging Revisited
gsasha writes "After long nights spent in debugging, w e have developed a C++ logging facility geared for debugging - and an article that describes our debugging methodology. The article consists of two parts: the first one describes the basics of the method, and the second one presents advanced techniques (to be completed if there is enough reader interest).
Happy debugging!" -
Printf Debugging Revisited
gsasha writes "After long nights spent in debugging, w e have developed a C++ logging facility geared for debugging - and an article that describes our debugging methodology. The article consists of two parts: the first one describes the basics of the method, and the second one presents advanced techniques (to be completed if there is enough reader interest).
Happy debugging!" -
Printf Debugging Revisited
gsasha writes "After long nights spent in debugging, w e have developed a C++ logging facility geared for debugging - and an article that describes our debugging methodology. The article consists of two parts: the first one describes the basics of the method, and the second one presents advanced techniques (to be completed if there is enough reader interest).
Happy debugging!" -
Printf Debugging Revisited
gsasha writes "After long nights spent in debugging, w e have developed a C++ logging facility geared for debugging - and an article that describes our debugging methodology. The article consists of two parts: the first one describes the basics of the method, and the second one presents advanced techniques (to be completed if there is enough reader interest).
Happy debugging!" -
Printf Debugging Revisited
gsasha writes "After long nights spent in debugging, w e have developed a C++ logging facility geared for debugging - and an article that describes our debugging methodology. The article consists of two parts: the first one describes the basics of the method, and the second one presents advanced techniques (to be completed if there is enough reader interest).
Happy debugging!" -
Introducing RMS-Lint
Shlomi Fish writes "There's a new tool called RMS-Lint that aims to check and correct documents for their compliance with correspondence rules from Richard Stallman. If you plan on sending RMS an E-mail, you may actually need it." -
Spoofing URLs With Unicode
Embedded Geek writes: "Scientific American has an interesting article about how a pair of students at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology registered "microsoft.com" with Verisign, using the Russian Cyrillic letters "c" and "o". Even though it is a completely different domain, the two display identically (the article uses the term "homograph"). The work was done for a paper in the Communications of the ACM (the paper itself is not online). The article characterizes attacks using this spoof as "scary, if not entirely probable," assuming that a hacker would have to first take over a page at another site. I disagree: sending out a mail message with the URL waiting to be clicked ("Bill Gates will send you ten dollars!") is just one alternate technique. While security problems with Unicode have been noted here before, this might be a new twist." -
Another Audio Watermark Scheme Wins TI DSP Contest
CaptainTylor writes: "Texas Instruments' DSP and Analog Design Contest Challenge is over, and the winner is a group of students from Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, who presented yet another scheme for digital-audio watermarking, and got US$100,000 for it. Here is a Dallas Morning News article on the winners, which is of course light on the tech details. Abstracts of the winner and the other two finalists are available, but I couldn't find the full submissions. It's worth noting that the competition was not specifically about copyright protection, just about using the TI TMS320 DSP in interesting ways. Wonder how long it'll take before someone cracks this scheme..."And speaking of schemes, cracking, audio and contests, Logic Bomb writes: "According to an article from the Associated Press, the United States National Archives are holding a contest of sorts to see if anyone can finally figure out what was erased on the infamous Watergate tape that pushed Nixon's downfall over the brink. It would be amazing to have this national mystery put to rest."
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Skipjack Analyzed
For one last article to round out a day of crypto, Python sent us a link to an important story for you encryption advocates out there. "Eli Biham, Alex Biryukov, Orr Dunkelman, Eran Richardson and Adi Shamir have conducted an initial cryptanalysis of the SkipJack (of clipper fame) algorithm. In short, they say "SkipJack does not have a conservative design with a large margin of safety." In IMHO, this is just another example of why you can't trust big brother to dictate what crypto we can and can not use. The entirety of their research is available at: link " I don't know if I'm more surprised or disgusted. It very much reminds me of the "cathedral" style of development. Other than that, I think Python said it all... -
Skipjack Analyzed
For one last article to round out a day of crypto, Python sent us a link to an important story for you encryption advocates out there. "Eli Biham, Alex Biryukov, Orr Dunkelman, Eran Richardson and Adi Shamir have conducted an initial cryptanalysis of the SkipJack (of clipper fame) algorithm. In short, they say "SkipJack does not have a conservative design with a large margin of safety." In IMHO, this is just another example of why you can't trust big brother to dictate what crypto we can and can not use. The entirety of their research is available at: link " I don't know if I'm more surprised or disgusted. It very much reminds me of the "cathedral" style of development. Other than that, I think Python said it all...