Some security-related readings:
http://stakeventures.com/articles/2010/02/12/how-oauth-beat-chip-and-pin
http://hueniverse.com/2009/04/explaining-the-oauth-session-fixation-attack/
http://stakeventures.com/articles/2010/02/11/opentransact-a-tiny-payment-standard
http://stakeventures.com/articles/2010/02/04/the-sorry-state-of-payment-standards
http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2010/02/11/chip-and-pin-is-broken/
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/banking/nopin/oakland10chipbroken.pdf
The iPod touch 4G is a neat gadget. It’s sad knowing that it does not have something I would really like to have: an FM receiver, because I don’t really like listening to song after song. Some presenter chit chat or news from time to time is a lot better than a continuous playlist.
It turns out, however, that you can buy an external receiver from here (don’t trust the review; everything works OK). Neat! To begin listening to FM radios you just have to plug it in, and get the app here. The thing’s price is reasonable I think, and the app is for free!
So long boring long Sunday run!
But then my imagination comes into play. The touch doesn’t have UMTS/3G either. I searched for an external modem, just like the FM receiver, but it doesn’t seem to exist. Why can’t anyone out there devise such a gadget!
If you stumbled into this page and had the resources to actually build an external UMTS/3G modem for iPod Touch, please don’t forget about me, your idea-giver. A share of your patent’s royalty would be great 
(so desperate…)
… by Google Chrome:
just type “data”, the browser autocompletes the URL, press TAB, then type the RFC number followed by ENTER. Et voilà!
Excellent!
(of course for the first or second visit, you might want to type the complete URL yourself: datatracker.ietf.org)
Sparrow, Gmail client for Mac: http://www.sparrowmailapp.com/. Seems to be an email client hype.
Well, I use Gmail to subscribe to mailing lists. Sometimes hundreds of emails per day. An email client will download all those emails. On a disk-space-limited laptop (did I forget to mention that it’s also thin, light, and expensive?), it’s fundamentally incompatible.
Would be great if it simply “viewed” the emails. And perhaps integrate with Twitter or Facebook status updates. With no guarantee that it does, it seems quite risky to buy.
A rather short movie, with little talks and special effects, but quite deep. Impressive. And the flashbacks… Loneliness, family detachment, a strong will to survive, all in one package.
An inspiration on what a single, lonely, young man should do in his spare time.
The cut-out-your-hand DIY scene is an extreme, freaky nightmare though.
Had the event taken place in 2011, the story might have gone differently. With smartphones and all those social geolocations like Foursquare, Facebook and co., the story might have been even shorter. Perhaps no single hand had to be sacrificed.
The only catch is the cellular coverage. No idea though, how it is in the Canyonlands area. A smart satellite-phone would be great as a last resort, something like the one from TerreStar (neat idea; sadly they already filed for chapter eleven). Even then, a GEO satellite might not help a lot. Iridium or Globalstar needs to jump in here.
So the message is buy a smartphone. With a GPS receiver. And a data plan. When possible with a satellite transceiver…
The TrendNet USB-Ethernet adapter could be a cheaper alternative to Apple’s “original” version. Get and install the driver from here. Tried on Snow Leopard, works perfectly.
Very cool: http://www.cypherspace.org/rsa/org-post.html
Even cooler: http://www.cypherspace.org/rsa/
Everybody says that the security of RSA lies in the difficulty of factoring large numbers.
Bruce Schneier*) says that’s technically a lie. It is conjectured that the security of RSA depends on the problem of factoring large numbers.
Oh man, this is gonna be fun
*) Still don’t know who Bruce Schneier is? He’s the one debugging BSD operating systems. That’s why it’s called BSD; Bruce Schneier Debugged it.
(LOL)
… is probably the term I’ve been looking for… Probably the best way to describe the kind of design / solution to a particular problem, which requires too much workaround to implement the basic idea.
To be contrasted, perhaps, with “elegant” solution.
I must sadly admit this over-engineering has been taking quite significant part in my work.
Some links / readings perused during the end-of-year holiday, so far:
1) Helmut Schmidt by Maischberger. Interesting opinions on why Europe should rescue Greece, what the consequence of leaving the Euro zone, or dividing the currency into north-south Euros would be (he talks about speculation; the only counter argument to which I found only in another article at Der Spiegel).
2) Collection of interesting Der Spiegel articles (the links are TBD in about two weeks when the corresponding articles become available online):
- Report on Mecca; the story of the Wahabi’s unilateralism, how the Bin Laden family is involved, and why this will not last forever.
- Debate on how to deal with the Euro crisis: get out of the common currency, or introduce the Euro bonds.
- Euro crisis and Germany’s role.
- Research on altruism; altruism comes from the need to boost reputation, good reputation ease cooperation, and cooperation is essential for the evolution.
3) Finance/economy crash course. Again on money as debt, money creation process, exponential growth, compounding, etc. Interesting quote: “At a minimum, each year enough new money must be loaned into existence to cover the interest payments on all of the past outstanding debt”; finally grasp why “growth” is the pre-requisite for the fractional reserve system to work.
4) Some more about Euro crisis:
- Wikipedia: Irish financial crisis
5) Started reading Thilo Sarrazzin’s “Deutschland schafft sich ab”;
6) Cryptography:
- Diffie-Hellman key exchange
- RSA algorithm
7) Joined planethunters.org, started identifying signs of “transits” in Kepler telescope measurement data. Planned, just for fun, to regularly identify about 10 traces per week.
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