...more recent posts
It's not officially official yet, but Bruce Schneier says that SHA-1 has been broken. This would be a rather large deal in the cryptographic world.
As usual, especially with technical topics, Wikipedia provides a great overview. (They already have this latest Schneier news in the write up!)
Nokia licenses Flash from Macromedia for cell phone use.
And Nokia has also licensed Microsoft's AcitveSync and WMA.
Google has offered to help host Wikipedia.
I saw some video projected from a Mitsubishi XL5U projector last night. Wow. I have no idea if this is a really good projector, or if they are all this good, but it looks great. And huge. And so bright. I was under the impression that you had to have a dark room, but that is most definitely not the case. The picture is blindingly bright. Why don't more people have these? There must be some downside I am missing.
I've mentioned the photo sharing site flickr many times as an example of how much is possible right now in terms of building very sophisticated application-like web interfaces.
Here is an interview with flickr CEO Stewart Butterfield that is a pretty good explanation of what the site is, and why it has grown so popular.
The Sonos Digital Music System is really cool. If you are a rich person with a big house you should buy this. And then let me come over and play with it. Wow.
I am tempted by this camera phone: Sony / Ericsson S710a.
Google Maps.
I used to equate Google with the ability to build huge data centers out of commodity PCs. But lately I find myself equating them with kick ass web application interfaces. That is a pretty powerful one two punch.
Homograph attacks allow for the spoofing of domain name URLs and SSL certificates thanks to a problem with International Domain Name [IDN] support in modern browsers. This is devastating.
Vulnerable browsers include (but are not limited to):Proof of concept. Damn. IE is safe because it doesn't have IDN support built in. Let's see how fast these vendors respond. They need to fix this immediately.
Most mozilla-based browsers (Firefox 1.0, Camino .8.5, Mozilla 1.6, etc)
Safari 1.2.5
Opera 7.54
Omniweb 5
A couple pieces of Apple (and Steve Jobs) history have been released recently. The first is a video from the original (1984) introduction of the Apple Macintosh. God he looks so young. You can see the RDF (the famous Jobs' Reality Distortion Field) already at work.
The second is of Steve demonstrating NeXTSTEP 3.0. NeXTSTEP is the operating system developed by NeXT, the company Jobs founded between his first and second stints as head of Apple. When Jobs returned to Apple he had them purchase NeXT in order to lay the groundwork for what was to become OS X. Insiders like to joke that this acquisition amounted to a NeXT take over of Apple since the influence was so pervasive. It is amazing to see what NeXT had in 1992! They were so far ahead of the curve it is amazing.