Fred’s Notes

NSA@home is a fast FPGA-based SHA-1 and MD5 bruteforce cracker. It is capable of searching the full 8-character keyspace (from a 64-character set) in about a day in the current configuration for 800 hashes concurrently, using about 240W of power. This performance is equivalent to over 1500 Athlon FX-60 CPUs, which would take about 250kW.

Yumi.

Cringley, as usual, with an interesting article (with the suggestive title, The Future is Cloudy: Google’s plan to host ALL our applications.):

Here’s the grand plan: By working with IBM to promote cloud computing to universities, Google is accomplishing two very important goals. It will first put them in touch with every graduate student doing work Google might find interesting. So it is first a hiring tool. But by teaching students about cloud computing Google and IBM are also seeding the technology in the companies where those students will take their first jobs after graduation. Five years from now cloud computing will be ubiquitous primarily for this reason.

But Google wants us to embrace not just cloud computing but Google’s version of cloud computing, the hooks for which will be in every modern operating system by mid-2009, spread not by Google but by a trusted open source vendor, MySQL AB.

This is a really good article explaining why ISP’s and operators most of the times don’t think about the consequences of packet inspection (DPI). False positives are very bad for business.

My view is that a lot of the more onerous terms-of-service for broadband (fixed or wireless), or heavy-handed traffic shaping, are going to evaporate under commercial & PR pressure over the next year or so. And I’m expecting quite a lot of Comcast-type attempts to be outed by people monitoring traffic flows and reverse-engineering what’s causing problems.

As I’ve said before – I can’t get especially exercised about Net Neutrality. Because anyone stupid enough to block benign traffic (even if they don’t like it for commercial reasons) is going to heavily burnt. I think the market will understand providers wanting to stop network integrity being threatened – but it will show zero tolerance for vindictive or accidental ‘collateral damage’.

Well, now that Gmail is offering IMAP in the near future, all the ISP’s or cheap meeto mail hosting companies will not have any advantage whatsoever to compete with Google. I think the future is on complete collaboration solutions like Zimbra. Via Pedro and Pedro.

Disclaimer: My company is selling Zimbra solutions. If you’re interested, drop me a mail.

In just one week Radiohead sold more than 1.2 million albums with an average $8 per album with a estimate of profit of 10 million. Who needs record companies? Of course, you have to be big enough to sell like this, but this is an eye opener to many people.

So, you’re behind the almighty corporate proxy and you have to work. You love ssh. You have deadlines. You don’t have time to loose. So, you go and install corkscrew. Then, create or edit your ~/.ssh/config with:

Host *
ProxyCommand /path/to/corkscrew big.corporate.fw 8080 %h %p

And life is good.

I really think that maybe there’s a reason behind corporate firewalls. To keep people away from doing real work. Oh well, running ssh over corkscrew over the almighty http proxy is not enough. Tomorrow I’ll go for OpenVPN over http and tunnel every piece of packet on top of it. Long live open source.

It’s all about Freedom, really.

Consumers now want the freedom to use their media as they wish. When it comes to music, they want to listen to songs in their cars, on their PCs and on their living room stereos. They want to create mixes and playlists and share them with friends; to rip apart songs and create mashups. They want to customize their experience of music.

Estou um pouco à parte de toda a discussão que se gerou em torno dos Radiohead terem decidido colocar à venda o último álbum (In Rainbows) directamente em formato mp3, do próprio site, sem intermediários pelo caminho. Sendo isto uma não novidade (não foi a primeira banda que o fez), já o preço do álbum é determinado pelo que o fã/consumidor estiver disposto a pagar, a partir de 0 libras. Não sei se foi publicity stunt ou não, só sei que pelo menos não se fala de outra coisa (com direito a entrada no Wikipedia). Só acrescento que já ouvi o álbum e provávelmente só compraria o Bodysnatchers e Jigsaw Falling into Place. E é por isso que gosto da loja iTMS e outros clones. Para mim, é-me difícil apanhar álbuns bons e que ache que os deva comprar a granel.

Now, that’s a t-shirt I would love:

It’s a Wi-Fi detector with battery-pack that displays via a decal on a T-shirt front. It’s $30, comes in S to XXL, and detects 802.11b and 802.11g. Requires three AAA batteries (not included). The washing instructions are particularly amusing; I have had silk shirts that required less care.

Hmm, and what about a LCD on it, displaying the SSID? Coolness.