Category: IT

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ada rocks

ada is a great programming language. i started reading a tutorial a while ago and i’ve even made initial gentoo ebuilds of gnat therefore (unfortunately i’ve lost those and several other nice ebuilds prior to submitting them). now all ada-related stuff in gentoo is maintained by david holm (which is a good thing as he’s proficient in ada).

i’m still a bloody beginner regarding ada, but i’m looking forward to digging deeper.

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google.ch censors too..

..sadly (*). that’s the disadvantage (some follow-ups: 1, 2, 3) when using a us-based search engine from within switzerland where dmca fortunately doesn’t exist (yet?). at least google is clever enough to publish the complaint.

is there any more evidence needed why mr. stricker’s case is important to all of us who live in .ch?

(*) in german: “Aufgrund einer Klage, die sich auf den Digital Millennium Copyright Act bezieht, haben wir 1 Ergebnis(se) von dieser Seite entfernt. Wenn Sie wollen, können Sie die DMCA-Klage lesen, die zur Entfernung dieser Ergebnisse geführt hat.”

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huh?

ignorance is bliss..

..but it doesn’t change facts(*). sure, not all journalists do a good job. nevertheless let’s not ignore that only verifiable evidence counts when accusing renowned newspapers of bad journalism.

speaking about the ups and downs of journalism: encouraging people to do uptime comparisons (aka “schwanzlängenvergleiche” -> sorry, in german only ;) is pretty silly as a) you can’t compare apples with oranges and b) measuring uptimes of workstations/servers is very questionable unless there does not exist even a single known security hole in the system measured.

(*) such as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, ..

(bugs/security holes in complex software are inevitable with today’s software engineering technologies. however, not to release patches for known security holes within a reasonable amount of time is ignominious.)

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“security is always political” (w. diffie)

i thought whitfield diffie would give a presentation packed with cryptography theory. surprisingly (and slightly disappointing) there wasn’t any at all. instead he gave an overview of the emergence of cryptography, finishing with an outlook. the three key challenges in tomorrow’s cryptography research according to diffie (don’t cite this – it’s based on my memory, not speech recordings):

1. configuration control [dm: clear definition of a device’s configuration/state]
2. automated computer-to-computer economy [dm: think of web services, distributed systems, automated negotiation and (sub-)contracting]
3. trusted computing [dm: think of “tcpa” etc.]

and it’s all about “who will control information society” in the future (am i the only one who heard a gentle criticism here?).. not very exciting insights actually (most people probably knew this before already). seeing whitfield diffie (i’d call him a “living crypto legend”) in person (wearing long white hair and a beard – a bit like mage gandalf ;) was an impressing experience however.