Planet SoC

news, security
17:09 -0500

No, not that kind of hash. The NIST is holding a contest for a
new cryptographic hash function.
Vulnerabilities have been found in the most commonly used hash functions, MD5
and SHA-1, and the contest is for the new SHA-3 standard. The deadline for
submissions was last Friday, so if you missed it, too bad.

Schneier et al. have submitted their algorithm, called
skein, and Rivest et al. have submitted
MD6.

personal, jobs, technical
17:11 -0500

It’s probably about time that I blogged about this…

Starting last week Tuesday (October 28), I started working at
Open Knowledge Technologies (a.k.a. OKTech). They
mainly do custom development on Moodle, which is an
online learning/education platform.

personal, technical
13:50 -0400

It appears that on October 8,
VPSVille got hacked,
which resulted in data loss for many of their customers, including me. I have
a copy of my own website, since I edit it on my own computer, then copy it to
my server, but a lot of other stuff has been lost, including my brother’s
website.

bookmark, news, security, privacy
20:11 -0400

URL:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10059987-38.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

Tags:

news, security, privacy

bookmark, technical, jabber
20:38 -0400

URL:

http://www.speeqe.com/

Tags:

technical, jabber

Web-based chatrooms. Thanks to the magic of
XMPP/Jabber, BOSH, JavaScript, etc. it works just like
regular chatrooms, except that it’s all in the comfort of your web browser.
You can create your own room, set themes, etc. You can even join Jabber

news, technical, security
12:52 -0400

URL:

http://blog.thc.org/index.php?/archives/4-The-Risk-of-ePassports-and-RFID.html

Tags:

news, technical, security

(see also:
PC Pro,

technical, jabber, personal
16:44 -0400

I have created a new project, which I have dubbed
“Talk-to-me”, which is a web-based instant
messaging client designed for the sole purpose of enabling website visitors to,
well, talk to me via my Jabber account. Well, not to me, per se. I’m
not conceited enough to think that anyone would want to talk to me… But
perhaps there are others out there who are.

technical, networking
16:33 -0400

Apparently, Apple’s Bonjour (a.k.a. mDNS/ZeroConf/Rendezvous) does not work
over OpenVPN’s default configuration (as much as
OpenVPN can be said to have a default configuration); mDNS does not work over a
point-to-point IP tunnel.

But you don’t need to use Ethernet Bridging
to get it to work - as long as the only Bonjour-advertised services that you
want to use are on the OpenVPN server. Just use “dev tap” instead of
“dev tun” in both the server and client configuration files. This
will make OpenVPN use a level 2 device instead of level 3, which Bonjour is
happy to use.

personal
20:35 -0400

We got back from our travels on Thursday. New York was
crowded, busy, noisy,… While we were there, we (in semi-random order):

personal
17:33 -0400

The past week has been fairly crazy. And the next couple of weeks will be
somewhat busy too due to job interviews.

Interviews so far: