sicherheitsschwankung.de - some things I do for free

Today the long awaited lecture videos have been releases here. We have a complete mirror available.

If you want to create a public mirror, please contact me. I'll give you access to a non-public server with all the files for mirroring.

Thanks to FeM e.V. for creating the recordings!

The code needed to create two bitstreams with the same hash is public. It takes about 45 minutes to find a MD5 collision. This does not allow to create a bitstream which maps to a given hash, so md5 is still safe for signing cleartext. However you can make two different documents in PostScript/PDF which have the same hash (more details). Use SHA-256 or SHA-512 (not SHA-1). MD5 collisions could also be used as "watermarks" for mp3 files (players skip invalid data) to track their distribution on p2p networks.

Joey has blogged about thread patterns in mailing lists and how to select interesting mails based on these patterns.

I use evolution, which could learn some things from mutt about threaded display. It would be nice if one could sort threads not by the date of the original mail but by the last reply.

Maybe it would be a good idea to start a community-based service to tag mails. That would allow slashdot-like filtering based on tags by people whose votes correlate with ones own. I should probably look into writing a plugin for evolution :)

Vernor Vinge - Accelerating Change 2005 on IT Conversations - In this keynote address from Accelerating Change 2005, Vernor Vinge discusses the potential for a "technological singularity" - the event at which the creation of artificial superhuman intelligence changes the world so dramatically that it is impossible to imagine the world after that point. He explains that the singularity is not a given, nor is it necessarily a positive event. Many factors could arise that prevent the singularity from occurring and there is a potential for it to be a catastrophic event rather than a positive revolution.