Neil Hopcroft
A digital misfit
“An everlasting world and you’re here with me, eternally
Now that I’m here, now that you’re near in Xanadu”
So sad to see the home of the future rotting so.
Haverhill today (pronounced ‘averell’, if you’re a local). What a depressing town, no wonder they only charge 10p per hour for parking, surely that can’t cover the maintence cost of the meters? There was a market on, but it mostly sold cheap fake electrical goods, there was only one food stall I saw and they were desperately trying to shift their potatoes and apples. They stocked nothing else. How does a town like that support two computer shops?
I got back to discover a missed call from Magrathea (near wokingham) in my voip recent calls list – no idea how long its been there, but if you recognise that as a call attempt you made, you got the right number…leave an answerphone message next time.
I’ve been feeling a bit mortal lately, I think perhaps I shouldn’t eat toad-in-the-hole so soon before bedtime. But it made me wonder whether other people plan for death? I don’t mean in a suicide kind of way (although if you would like to talk about that I’d like to hear about it…comments screened just in case), rather ordered, having notes on everything that would need to be sorted. It occurred to me that actually my life is a whirlwind of incomplete paperwork at the best of times, and that if I wasn’t at the centre of it trying to juggle those overdue forms things would go fairly seriously awry, of course that wouldn’t be too much of an issue for me since I’d have more pressing matters to deal with in those circumstances.
The closest I got was my planning to move to Tokyo – in some ways I was planning that as a suicide, as a way to drop out of my responsibilities in the UK, in such a way that I didn’t have to actually face dying. Just more of my avoidant personality, I suppose. Maybe I should create a document, or a shell script, or something, that could be used after I pass away to help everything get sorted out. But is that tempting fate?
(this post has been brought to you thanks to ironing and 24 hour party people – not a combination I recommend, top film though)
“Alice Falbala is given full access to all confidential and secret information about GAUL. Sincerely, Julius Caesar”
md5sum – a25f7f0b29ee0b3968c860738533a4b9
Comparing files letter_of_rec.ps and ORDER.PS
00000053: 97 17
0000006D: A3 23
0000006E: 78 79
0000007B: 5A DA
00000093: C8 48
000000AD: D8 58
000000BB: 6F EF
This is an interesting attack. You’ll notice that the above bytes differ by only a single bit, and that there are only seven of them….that suggests that it is also concievable that this could easily be expanded to a class of attacks based on the same principle.
It also exploits some conditionality in the .ps format to achieve the switching of the percieved content – anyone examining the actual source of either file would see that something was amiss, but why would you examine the source?
Anyone using MD5 in security critical applications should have stopped a long time ago, this is the final nail in its coffin. And I doubt it would be difficult to expand this attack to SHA1, since they’re quite close relatives (but I don’t yet understand the details of the attack, so thats just a gut feel rather than an informed statement).
Edit: Its worse than that – you can just take the file(s) they’ve made and insert your content where Alices two letters currently live, you don’t even need to be cryptographically clever to exploit this vulnerability.
I’ve just been catching up on Creating Passionate Users – Is /your/ work remarkable? I’m not sure mine is, but I would like for it to be. That article describes something I’ve been thinking for a while, it asks you to ask yourself how you can make the life of those who use your products better. They limit their thoughts to books, technical manuals. But why? Theres no reason why your camera, your phone, your microwave shouldn’t be making you a better photographer, listener, cook.
Think about how power-users will benefit from what you are creating, then give everyone who uses it a chance to be a power user. This isn’t about a paperclip that tells you stupid things, its about making intuitive interfaces that make it easier to use the product as you use it more – what if you had predictive text that learned that you said ‘pub’ more often than you said ‘rub’, or better, what if it could figure out from the context what you meant? And without dropping you in at the deep end with the power of VI behind its arcane sequence of keystrokes.
Anyone got any handy tips on how to get the SGI kernel debugger to run on a PPC box?
World of beards – like the idea, not sure I feel eligible to participate.
Its not a panic stop, its the racing line.
47 missed calls
No wonder my Elvis detector was going crazy….faring better as an institution than marriage…
Its all falling apart: