Tag Archives: Society

RSA: 99.8% Security

The folks over at École Polytechnique of Lausanne have published a very interesting paper titled “Ron was wrong, Whit is right“. This is not too mathematical for a cryptanalitical paper and understandable even to someone without crypto background. It is more of an investigation into the properties of the public keys available publically on the internet. The guys explain how by collecting a large number of keys from the internet in very proper and official ways and analyzing them they were able to find collisions that basically allow one person to impersonate another not to mention some basically weak keys that offer no security at all. Fascinating stuff.

A cool comment is all the way at the bottom says:

“The lack of sophistication of our methods and findings make it hard for us to believe that what we have presented is new, in particular to agencies and parties that are known for their curiosity in such matters. It may shed new light on NIST’s 1991 decision to adopt DSA as digital signature standard as opposed to RSA, back then a “public controversy”.

Which is probably true, you know…… -->

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WiFi on WD TV Live Plus

It is a very rare occasion when I want to endorse a product in a public way. However, now I am just in such a mood. I bought a WD TV Live Plus box a couple of months ago to hold my videos and photos at home. Unfortunately, it did not come with a wireless network connection so it had to stay off-line until yesterday.

And yesterday I had a crazy idea to stick a nano-WiFi (whatever that means) USB stick into it. The box has two USB slots to connect two USB hard drives. So I just put the wireless network stick into the second slot. I expected nothing, I was sure it would check that it is not a disk and then I would just put the WiFi stick back to the desk drawer whence it came. Imagine my surprise…

I open the settings menu and I see the wireless network settings staring back at me. To say I was dumbfounded does not even begin to describe my state at that point. After recovering my thoughts and a cup of tea I went about setting it up and 30 seconds later the thing was happily connected to my home network.

This is brilliant. I sincerely congratulate WD engineers on this piece of hardware. Not only it works great as a video player and a photo viewer but it recognized and used a piece of obscure hardware thrown at it without so much as a backward glance. Way to go, guys!

P.S. If you go and use it, make sure you have the HDMI interface, the “normal” video quality sucks.… -->

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Traveling light

Some people take security seriously by traveling light to China and Russia. An excellent routine is to erase the devices when you travel somewhere at all. Why carry all the important things that can get stolen? Keep it at home and take only the necessary – that is not only for security but a common sense too.

But you can get too paranoid. When the article mentions that “a thermostat in one of its corporate apartments were still communicating with an Internet address in China” you cannot help going like “yeah, right!” A healthy amount of paranoia is, well, healthy but this is taking the fear levels too far. Not to worry, soon your refrigerator will be reporting to China what you ate for breakfast back in California. Be scared.… -->

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Love cannot be halved!

“Where it becomes threatening is when [partners] think love implies exclusivity,” says Veaux. “It’s the starvation model of love. That is, if you love two, each gets half of the love. That’s not true. Every single person is absolutely unique. Because of that, it means my partners can never be replaced.” (from The Truth About Open Marriage)

I always felt so daft trying to explain to people that you can love more without giving less love to each loved. It is such a simple concept to me but it seems to baffle infinitely others. Look, I’ll tell you in technical terms :) Love is a very special resource. Love can be applied in any quantities and to as many targets as you want. It does not diminish or spread thinly if you spread it over more people. In fact, it appears to become stronger and larger as you spend more of it. I know that other resources are mostly not like that. That’s why love is special. So go ahead and have that second kid – you will not love the first one less for that!… -->

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Counter-productivity

How true:

Although we might all like to imagine that we can work happily through the night, once again the data’s all against us. Lose just one night’s sleep and your cognitive capacity is roughly the same as being over the alcohol limit. Yet we regularly hail as heroes the executives who take the red eye, jump into a rental car, and zoom down the highway to the next meeting. Would we, I wonder, be so impressed if they arrived drunk?

Read more in the original article.… -->

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