Tag: Technology

Google Voice Rocks

OK I just received an invitation to Google Voice and set it up. I’ve only played with it for a few seconds but it’s fucking awesome. For those of you who haven’t heard of it Google Voice is a service (invitation only at the moment sadly) where you receive a phone number from Google (you can select the number you want from a desired area code). You then enter in your phone numbers. When somebody dials your Google Voice number their service attempts to contact you by ringing all of your phones sequentially.

But the coolest part so far is if you can’t be contacted the caller is prompted to leave a voice mail. Google Voice then transcribes the voice mail to text and does two things. First is sends you an e-mail containing the transcribed message and it sends you a text message with the first part of the transcribed message. This means you don’t have to listen to the voice mail and honestly the transcription service is pretty bloody good.

It also allows you to send free text messages to people. Granted that isn’t much of a win for me since I have unlimited text messages on my plan, but still cool none the less.

Google once again surprises me with their cool services that don’t end up costing no money. I guess they do get free advertising from me via this post in the process to boot but really I don’t reach enough people for them to care.

AES Encryption Explained with Stick Figures

As most of you guys have figured out by now I like security. Being I like security I find the AES encryption scheme to be very useful as it’s a scheme that, as of yet, doesn’t have a practical attack against it. This is rather funny considering how simple the implementation of AES is (the algorithm itself, implementing it in code correcting isn’t quite so easy do to unforeseen attack vectors being introduced by poor implementation).

So how simple is it? Simple enough where the entire algorithm can be explained with a stick figured comic strip. A hat tip goes to Bruce Schneier’s blog for this one.

The Ultimate No Shit Statement of the Day

OK everybody who is reading this have a seat and take a deep breath. Prepare yourself for the ultimate surprise of surprises. The BBC is reporting that Iran has a secret uranium enrichment facility that they have been concealing from the United Nations. I know shocking isn’t it? Who would have guessed that Iran would defy the orders of the non-proliferation act. It’s almost like a treaty written on a piece of paper isn’t work anything.

Of course the typical people are calling for heads to role. The typical people would be the United States, United Kingdoms, and France. Apparently nobody is happy that the genie still hasn’t been shoved back into it’s bottle. You know now that I think about it calling the facility a secret one really doesn’t work:

“This installation is not a secret one, which is why we announced its existence to the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency],” Ali Akbar Saleri, head of Iran’s nuclear agency, told the AFP news agency.

Yeah once you tell somebody about it I don’t think you can call it a secret.

Quantum Computers Aren’t Magic Either

Let me it shown that “super intelligent” talk does occur on gun forums. And by “super intelligent” I mean buzz word laden talk about theoretical topics that really have no bearing on modern society yet. In the computer science world quantum computers are the big next thing buzz word. They are based on a technology few have any understanding of (quantum theory) and therefore are perfect devices to make insane claims. One of these insane claims is that quantum computers will instantly destroy all modern cryptography methods and instantly make the entire security structure of the universe collapse causing the world to end.

Case in point Secure Socket Layer (SSL) is a security scheme used by most finical institutes to prevent prying eyes from seeing what you’re doing while on your banks web site. More or less it just sends normal Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) data through an encrypted tunnel which should be impossible for an outside person to see. In actuality this isn’t the case and there are functional attacks against SSL but they involve vulnerabilities in the protocol itself not the encryption being used. The perviously mentioned end of the world claims would be direct attacks again the encryption itself.

Well like most over the top fear mongering done about poorly understood theoretical technology, the fear that quantum computers will make modern encryption scheme useless is far from factual. An article I found via Bruce Scheier’s blog does the math for us and shows that quantum computers aren’t anything to fear.

Quantum computers could in fact speed up the time it takes to decrypt modern encryption schemes but there are two major things to note. First of all quantum computers are in their pre-infancy, meaning they are still in the extremely experimental stages. The post I liked to in Scheier’s blog is about how they were able to finally factor the number 15 using a quantum computer. Note the number 15 was chosen because it is a special case and can be represented by a specific form (discussed in the Emergent Chaos article I linked to). Factoring the primes of any number is not currently feasible with quantum computers.

The second thing to note about quantum computers is that they will start out slow and have to build up speed so to speak. The first quantum computers will be extraordinary slow at performing the tasks given to them just like modern semi-conductor computers once were. They will have to be developed over time and make them faster and better suited to perform the tasks put before them.

Currently RSA keys of 4096-bits in length are the largest supported by most software programs. According to the linked Emergent Chaos article if everything advanced as quickly in the quantum computer field as it has in the semi-conductor field 4096-bit RSA keys wouldn’t be broken until 2053. Assuming quantum computers advanced much quick these keys would still be viable for 25 years.

Likewise with current computing technology 4096-bit RSA keys are calculated to be safe until 2060. That means if quantum computers advance as quickly as current computers they would be able to break 4096-bit RSA keys only 7 years ahead of modern computers. This demonstrated that getting our knickers all in a bunch over emerging technologies is once again premature at best. Computers are not magical machines capable of any feat put before them, they are machines based on the reality they have been built in meaning they can only do tasks in the realm of their capabilities. The sooner people realize this the better.

When States are Poor it’s a Tax Dodge

OK I’m not a fan of Microsoft’s business practices in general but I’m becoming less of a fan of this whole desire to clamp down on so-called tax dodges. See it’s only in a time of economic downturn does the government start to consider legal business practices tax dodges. Let’s take Microsoft for instance.

Microsoft’s main headquarter is in Redmond, Washington. This is the location a majority of their development work is done. But development work isn’t their money maker, licensing their developed software is. Washington state charges a .484% software royalty tax, meanwhile Nevada charges no such tax. Microsoft, being a large business who knows how to handle tax codes, built their license center in Nevada. The license center is the arm of Microsoft that actually deals with licensing the software which is considered the sale.

This is how the United States works, if you don’t like one state you go to another. Washington knew they could generate revenue by establishing a software royalty tax since they had the worlds largest software company in their state. This means the state created an environment hostile to its largest company to make some more money. Microsoft realizing they are getting a bad deal moved their software sales department somewhere less hostile to their business.

Well some guy has decided that the way to fix Washington’s current budget problems is to charge Microsoft the software royalty tax anyways. These are the types of ideas that really piss me off honestly. The writer proclaims Microsoft is getting preferential treatment and is dodging taxes. I’ll be totally honest if I owned a business and after some time the state enacted a tax aim specifically to make money off of my company I’d have done the same thing as Microsoft. It’s probably not feasible to move the entire company due to having to move all the employees but if it were feasible I’d move the entire operation.

I’m not a fan of Microsoft, in fact they really don’t make any products beyond the XBox 360 that I like. But I get pissed off when somebody who doesn’t like a company decides that we should attack it via labeling them with some arbitrary title. In this case that title would be tax dodger, which as we know is becoming the boogeyman label given by our government.

1984 Just Gets Closer Every Year

OK I understand parents wanting to keep track of their kids but there really has to be a limit. I think that limit is crossed once you strap GPS tracking devices to your children and follow their every move. Well a company called Lok8u has a device called the num8 for those overly paranoid parents. It’s a wrist watch that lets you track your child’s every move because that’s better for their development or something I guess. Here’s their excuse:

Speaking to the Daily Mail, Steve Salmon, from Lok8u, said: “Losing your child, if only for a brief moment, leads to a state of panic and makes parents feel powerless. The overriding aim of num8 is to give children their freedom and parents peace of mind.”

Yeah so your saying that if parents lose track of their kid for even a moment it leads to panic? I wonder what was wrong with my parents because they did become paranoid every time I left the house to go do something. And this device doesn’t give children freedom beyond being able to roam where mom and dad say.

Of course people will bring up the whole “if you child is kidnapped you can find them” argument which is bullshit as well. See being this is a wrist watch you can just pull it off a child. For that matter a child can just pull it off, put it somewhere they are supposed to be, and go do what they want. Seriously this surveillance society thing needs to be put to death now.

I don’t see how a child can develop independence while be tracked everywhere they go. You need to let your children get out and explore on their own otherwise they’ll never develop that good old exploratory desire.

Wow Windows Vista Really Failed

I never liked Windows Vista but it just dawned on me how big of a failure it was. There is a story on Slashdot about how Microsoft wasn’t going to back port a patch made in Vista and Server 2003 to XP. My first reaction was to complain how they won’t support their operating system even though their new one isn’t out yet.

Yeah I totally forgot there was a version between Windows XP and Windows 7 called Windows Vista. Yup it was so bad I suppressed the memory of it’s existence.

Awesome Gmail Feature

Yeah I’m probably behind the times as I’m a pretty vanilla e-mail user but I just discovered an awesome feature in Google’s Gmail.

If you want to sign up for an account or any other thing that you don’t want to receive e-mail from simple enter your Gmail address with a plus sign and extra junk at the end of the name. For example if my e-mail address was fakeaddress@gmail.com I could sign up for a web site using fakeaddress+anygibberish@gmail.com and the confirmation e-mail from the site would reach my fakeaddress@gmail.com inbox.

You can than block all mail sent to fakeaddress+anygibberish@gmail.com so it all gets sent straight to the spam folder. Many Google thinks up some amazing features.

Movement to Get Britain to Apologize for Persecution of Turing

If you’re in the computer science circle you will know the name Alan Turing. Mr. Turing is considered by many to be the father of computer science. His claims to fame are laying the ground work for computing in general, helping defeat the Nazi enigma cipher scheme, and coming up with a scientific method to determine if machines can think (call the Turing test).

But he was gay and back in the era of World War II that wasn’t considered acceptable. After helping win World War II this is how he was treated:

In 1952 Turing was prosecuted under the gross indecency act after admitting to a sexual relationship with a man. Two years later he killed himself.

Of course when there is prosecution there is punishment:

Alan Turing was given experimental chemical castration as a “treatment” and his security privileges were removed, meaning he could not continue work for the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

Well there is now a movement to get the British government to apologize for their persecution. I don’t know if it will go through but I’d like to see those British royals have to apologize for treating a war hero this way.

And yes I call him a war hero even though he didn’t fight on the front lines. He was paramount in breaking the Nazi communication cipher scheme. Breaking this scheme ultimately helped us win the war since we were able to decipher and read their communications. An apology by the British government for persecuting somebody who helped saved their little island is the least they could bestow upon Mr. Turin.