brainwagon

Interesting link of the day, courtesy of Boing Boing: FM 34-40-2 Basic Cryptanalysis. The truth is this kind of cryptography is pretty much of historical interest only, but I find historic codes to be, well, interesting.

All you have to do is rely on directions from MSN and you’ll be well on your way. This would be slightly amusing, but is elevated by the apologies of Robert Scoble, who once again rises to the level of apologist for all things Microsoft.

This EFF-funded project sounds very interesting. It attempts to provide anonymity by making traffic analysis difficult by using something called an onion router. I’ll have to read more about it. Tor: An anonymous Internet communication system Tor is a toolset for a wide range of organizations and people that want to improve their safety and […]

The GCHQ has a bit of a Christmas challenge: break the code they have on their website, and be entered in a drawing for winning a copy of Simon Singh’s latest book. Cool. Check it out! Jeff and I might have something to do over the new year.

Here is an interesting early paper on the justification, implementation, analysis and use of random number generators, written in 1959. The resulting machine generated about 5000 bits per second, not bad! Via Boing Boing. By the way, random numbers are still cool.

Not to be outdone, Matthew Skala one-upped Ed by creating MoleSter – a tiny file-sharing application. I wonder if it works… 🙂 Addendum: As my wife points out, it’s not a very attractive name. What’s really amazing is that I didn’t pick up on it.

Ed Felton of freedom-to-tinker has released a tiny 15 line Python program called TinyP2P which allows you to create a simple (if not secure or scaleable) file sharing network. Get the code here. It’s cute, and might not be bad for tiny bits of file sharing. Addendum: Actually trying to run it, I got localhost […]

The Goldfish Online has an extended treatise on building NOT, OR, NOR, And and NAND gates using everyone’s favorite building toy.

Lambda the Ultimate has a link to a cute (if somewhat basic) tutorial on LISP programming. It shows how you can construct a rudimentary text adventure game in just a few lines of LISP code. Neat.

Tom Duff pointed me at Traditional (?) Implementations of a Phase-Vocoder: The Tricks of the Trade by Götzen, Bernardini and Arfib. Useful Matlab code included.

My perusal of freshmeat today turned up a link to the ill-named Anti-Lamenessing Engine (ALE), an image processing program that contains (among other things) an implementation of Irani and Peleg’s super resolution technique. The idea of super-resolution is to use multiple low resolution scans to generate a single improved high resolution scan. I first got […]

Boing Boing mentioned a paper by Markus Kuhn on reconstructing the contents of a screen by measuring the reflected light in a room with a fast photosensor. Cool stuff, reminiscent of Ross Anderson’s work with Soft Tempest, which I experimented with briefly.

In a previous lifetime, I actually knew something about the compilation of functional programming languages. Hence, I found this presentation about writing a Scheme to C compiler by Mark Feeley to be rather familiar, and yet still useful and inspiring.

In the 1960s, computer scientists at American universities and in the U.S. Department of Defence devised a plan for a network of computers that could all communicate with each other. After the hardware was put in place, researchers at UCLA attempted on Oct. 29, 1969, to log in to a computer at the Stanford Research […]

As part of my dose of IT Conversations recently, I listened to this interview with Stephen Wolfram, author of the book A New Kind of Science. Wolfram is an odd duck, but I found his talk to be suprisingly good, and he raised an interesting question: do random programs do anything interesting? He decided to […]