06-April-1999 [Artur Marques]
Today: #1) The secure qubit; #2) Porno for REAL!; #3) 8 MB 3COM / US Robotics Palm V?!; #4) Mozilla suffering; #5) Deep Forest & FREE MP3
I am very sick... I am sorry for not having updated the website yesterday, but I was burning in fever :-(
We all know bits, bytes, Kbytes, Mbytes... and so on. But do you know about the qubit?
A qubit [quantum bit] can simultaneously be 0 and 1, and it has been very much promoted by the http://www.almaden.ibm.com/ IBM's research center. The qubit is based on quantum physics and was born after vast cryptography investigation. The problem with current cryptation techniques is that brute force strategies will break them, even if that takes months or even years. So, some computer science investigators are introducing a new security layer to current public-key schemes, by coding the key in qubits, whose state changes according to a very complex algorithms.
IBM is not alone @ the qubit algorithm race. http://www.ntt.com/ (Japan NTT), http://www.lanl.gov/ (USA's Los Alamos National Laboratories) and http://www.bt.co.uk/ (British Telecom) are all doing hard research into these algorithms.
But with PGP doing up to 2048 bits keys and with the current REAL problem being on authentication, it is somewhat dangerous to place bets on the qubits...
Everyone who surfs the web knows about the famous "locker room" cameras that film "innocent, unsuspecting girls"... but everyone that knows it, also knows that these girls are everything but "innocent and unsuspecting"... Right?
Wrong! It's incredible, but the FBI is investigating web xxx sites that post REALLY hidden cameras footage. That is very, very surprising!
8 MB 3COM / US Robotics Palm V?!
A new Palm V? Can it be? No, it is the same "good old" one. But with 4x the original memory, due to some very clever hardware hacking!
Please do not visit http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~TG7T-KSWG/newpalmve.htm since it describes the operations needed to void your warranty :-)
Jamie Zawinski, one of the 20 originals of the Mozilla project (open source for the Netscape's Internet browser) gave up on the adventure.
It is a very cruel letter, that you can read @ http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html, and where Jamie recognizes that the browser war was not lost to Microsoft in early 1998, and that the Mozilla affair failed due to people confusing between Netscape and the Mozilla organization, as if they were the same, and due to some lack of commitment of the many people involved.
The Internet is changing.
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Hard to describe. It's a mixture of electronics with epic and world sounds. Very, very good listening, with relaxing properties :-) Here is a fine link to some GREAT music not from Deep Forest, but not less advisable. It's from "The Higher Intelligence Agency", and it's called "Colourform". You can't buy this one on CD, so do grab it! http://ftp.audiohighway.com/mp3files/music/TheHigherIntelligenceAgency_Colourform_01.mp3 |