“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.

the perfect digital cam? ;)

talking about latest gadgets. that’s the one i’ve ordered on the same day (thanks to stephan for hints):

sanyo xacti vpc-j1 ex (original page), ordered at byteline.ch with quite an amazing discount. further i’ve ordered the fastest sd-memory card currently available at panashop.ch. using this 256 mb 10 mbyte/s chip the cam will even be able to shoot short movies at 30 fps (vga resolution 640×480, including sound)

the other features are impressing as well:

– fastest camera of its category (wake-up 1.2 s, shutter-interval 1.6 s, playback 0.6 s, shutter delay 0.05 s)
– 2.8x optical zoom using a prism (= internal zoom)
– super-macro mode (2 cm)
– usb direct printing
– cross-platform image transfer (simply recognized as a usb storage device)
– 3.2 mpixel
– li-ion battery (accu) with very long runtime
– durable magnesia case
– last but not least: the first digital cam that actually *talks* to you ;) (-> talking navigation menu system)

the thing i’m rather sceptic about is the quality of the lenses and mechanics. sanyo clearly lacks the reputation of zeiss or leica just to name two. nevertheless i’m confident as i got told that sanyo is actually the world market leader with digital cameras if one also counts the rebranded (oem) cams. i’ll post my experiences regarding image quality. tbc..

mt modules/plugins?

need to get some useful moveabletype plugins. for blogrolling and such. any recommendations by chance?

further i should review my mt setup. some valuable features apparently still don’t work (e.g. e-mail notification upon posting, pinging sites(?)).

i need at least:
– blogrolling (or similar functionality)
– plugin to integrate some feeds such as those by /. or the lkml

watchdog

i’ve set up a “watchdog” to watch http://people.redhat.com/mingo/ using a cron script i’ve written a while ago. it checks ingo’s patch site for changes once per day and notifies me by email about updated patches. like this, i can better follow the changes and keep my kernel current (always using ingo’s latest patches).

actually i could easily further automate the thing. it wouldn’t be difficult to write a script that checks if there are any new patches, if so, automatically downloads them, reverts similar earlier patches (in the right order), applies the new patches (in the right order), configures and compiles the kernel, if successful installs it and reboots the box. hmm.. perhaps i’ll do this later. would need to take special care about potential security issues (ingo doesn’t sign his patches yet).

the current watchdog script would also be suitable to minutely watch and track even minor changes on e.g. blogs (remember recent disputes about dave winer’s blog being tracked closely). of course i’m not big brother, so i won’t do this anyway (i wouldn’t want my blog to be watched that precisely myself as i often publish temp/unfinished entries i might want to remove, correct or finish later).

regarding the script: yes, push would be better than pull, but automated pull is at least better than manual pull. currently, it’s basically a faked push service (change/time-triggered e-mail msg) which could be made almost as accurate as a real push service by decreasing the interval at which the sites are watched. effectively transforming pull to push.. and generating page hits like crazy.. gee, darn numlock.ch-effect ddos’ing ;)