January 2012
2 posts
“Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries, and yet it is...”
– Blaise Pascal
November 2011
8 posts
Neil Degrasse Tyson on faster-than-light neutrinos
bluengreen7: What are your thoughts on the reports of neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light?
neiltyson: Three options:
1) Mistake in the data
VERY DISTANT 2) New particle traveling backwards through time. No need to modify relativity.
EVEN MORE DISTANT 3) Need to modify Relativity.
Amazon War Story #1: Jeff Bezos →
People like Jeff are better regarded as hyper-intelligent aliens with a tangential interest in human affairs.
“Remember: sometimes the people who are not on the same page as you have simply...”
– Not on the Same Page
How to Break XML Encrypttion →
We show that an adversary can decrypt a ciphertext by performing only 14 requests per plaintext byte on average. This poses a serious and truly practical security threat on all currently used implementations of XML Encryption. In a sense the attack can be seen as a generalization of padding oracle attacks (Vaudenay, Eurocrypt 2002). It exploits a subtle...
“the old is dying and the new cannot be born”
– Antonio Gramsci
October 2011
2 posts
“By the way, nice sig; mind if I steal it? :P
> > A: Yes.
> >...”
– Someone’s sig. !
The security impact of a new cryptographic library... →
AES-128, RSA-2048, etc. are widely accepted standards.
Obviously infeasible to break by best attacks in literature.
Implementations are available in public cryptographic libraries such as OpenSSL.
Common security practice is to use those implementations. But cryptography is still
a disaster! Complete failures of confidentiality and integrity
We have designed+implemented a new...
September 2011
1 post
I Know Where You are and What You are Sharing:... →
In this paper, we show how to exploit real-time communication applications to determine the IP address of a targeted user. We focus our study on Skype, although other realtime communication applications may have similar privacy issues. We first design a scheme that calls an identified targeted user inconspicuously to find his IP address, which can be done even if he is behind a NAT. By calling the...
August 2011
2 posts
“To farishte poochhenge mehshar mein paakbaazon se
Gunah kyoon na kare, kya...”
– Aziz Mian, “Milegi Sheikh Ko Jannat”
July 2011
3 posts
“defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool NO;...”
– Disable Lion’s New Window Animation (via)
June 2011
1 post
April 2011
3 posts
“I lay down in the empty street and parked
My feet against the gutter’s...”
– Advice from The Experts by Bill Knott
“after the carnival suddenly
mysteriously burnt down they
stirred the...”
– Bill Knott
Slow Reading: The affirmation of authorial intent →
(…) we are utterly preoccupied with deciding what the sentences we read and hear MEAN to us. Even more than that, we are preoccupied with deciding whether WE agree or disagree with what we take the sentences to mean, whether WE approve or disapprove. And, because we are so preoccupied. we generally do not pause to take note of what the sentences we read actually SAY. This rush to...
March 2011
5 posts
“There are things
I have done
There’s a place
I have gone
There’s...”
– This Night - by Black Lab
“Whatever we are, whatever we make of ourselves, is all we will ever have – and...”
– Philip Appleman
FF4 Panorama shortcut
Ctrl-Shift-e (⌘-Shift-e) for Mac
Turn Off Spaces Animation in OS X
If you find the animated transition between Spaces on OS X unnecessary, you can switch it off like so:
defaults write com.apple.dock workspaces-swoosh-animation-off -bool YES && killall Dock
To revert the change, swap that YES for a NO.
November 2010
1 post
Christopher Hitchens: 'You have to choose your...
“So now I know that there’s another life in my body that can’t outlive me but can kill me, it’s the perfect moment to gratefully acknowledge that I’m a product of a cosmic design? Who thinks up these arguments? Actually it’s an insulting question: ‘I hear you’re dying. Well wouldn’t it be a good time to get rid of your beliefs?’ Try it on...
October 2010
5 posts
““Hello, wo…”
“ACCESS DENIED - world does not accept...”
– /. comment on a story about a programming language specifically for security. Context “Everything in Fabric is an ‘object’ labeled with a set of policies on how and by whom data can be accessed and what operations can be performed on it.”
Macnamara Fallacy
The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is ok as far as it goes.
The second step is to disregard that which can’t be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading.
The third step is to presume that what can’t be measured easily really isn’t important. This is blindness.
The forth step is to say that...
“Ek fakir bheek maangne ke liye masjid ke baahar baitha tha
Sab namaazi aankh...”
“If a tiger had sex with a tornado and then their tiger-nado baby got married to...”
– SUPERSTAR Rajinikanth!: The biggest movie star you’ve probably never heard of. - By Grady Hendrix - Slate Magazine
August 2010
1 post
Proofs, Proofs, Who Needs Proofs? →
I have recently spoken to a number of reporters, as you might expect Some were from the on-line media and some from the print media. Both types of reporters asked good questions and in general we had an interesting discussion. But one or two asked a question that I really had trouble answering. The question was not an obvious ones like: what is polynomial time, or what is NP. The question...
June 2010
1 post
Solitude and Leadership →
My title must seem like a contradiction. What can solitude have to do with leadership? Solitude means being alone, and leadership necessitates the presence of others—the people you’re leading.
(…)
But it seems to me that solitude is the very essence of leadership. The position of the leader is ultimately an intensely solitary, even intensely lonely one. However many people you may...
April 2010
2 posts
"Caprica" →
Can a machine accumulate enough information about your patterns of communication to create an effective digital doppelgänger? Could we use the data left behind on Google’s servers and our own hard disks to effectively replace ourselves with an artificial intelligence born and bred of our online conversations and quirks? What might it be like to have a conversation with a past representation...
March 2010
5 posts
Breaking Provably Secure Systems →
VMWare Guest to Host Escape Story (pdf) →
Presented at Black Hat USA 2009
“To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the...”
– Buddhist proverb
Security Assessment of the IPv4 →
This document contains a security assessment of the IETF specifications of the Internet Protocol version 4, and of a number of mechanisms and policies in use by popular IPv4 implementations.
WatchTED: Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory
February 2010
4 posts
WatchDavid Blaine: How I held my breath for 17 min
The Rules of Beeping: Exchanging Messages Via... →
This article explores the practice of “beeping” or “missed calling” between mobile phone users, or calling a number and hanging up before the mobile’s owner can pick up the call. Most beeps are requests to call back immediately, but they can also send a pre-negotiated instrumental message such as “pick me up now” or a relational sign, such as...
January 2010
2 posts
"India's model of reflective patriotism" →
“All around the world, rising prosperity and rising patriotism go hand in hand. But what sort of patriotism is India’s going to be? “
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent...”
– Not Darwin
December 2009
2 posts
