Tech news of the week 2-8 September
Summer holidays are over, which is sad. But autumn is here, which means way more great tech articles! (Which is amazing.) (I like to give emotional cues to people, yes.)
So last week there has been a lot of talk on password and password protection. The Daily Dot rocked the previous week when it announced that „the free password cracking and recovery tool oclHashcat-plus released a new version, 0.15, that can handle passwords up to 55 characters.” The tool works at a mind-blowing 8 million guesses/second, and its dictionary included popular quotes, Bible phrases, online discussions. In June, Schneier on Security put together a great guide on how and why to choose long passwords. The main point is, the best solution is to think of a sentence, and remember it. (I usually put together the first letters of lines of poems I know, and add a random number, but that’s because Eastern-European public education puts too much emphasis on learning poems by heart.) The Schneier article is an amazing fountain of related links, most recommended. What makes choosing the right password so much harder is, as Scheiner and Josh Sherman at JoshTronic both point out, that many websites limit the format of passwords, which seems especially unsensical coming from institutes like banks. Stackexchange also had a conversation about the relative (?) merits of longer passwords, so if you feel unconvinced, that you should use a long password, check that out to convince you.
Staying ont he topic of security: last week the question of the safety of TOR was really big on the news. First, ArsTechnica broke the news (it’s debatable to call it that, but more on it later) that using Tor does not mean that no one will ever find out who you are:
„An adversary that provides no more bandwidth than some volunteers do today can deanonymize any given user within three months of regular Tor use with over 50 percent probability and within six months with over 80 percent probability.”
Basically, if an entity is big enough to upkeep a lot of nodes, they can figure out who you are. I said it is debatable to call it news, because the opposite (i.e. Tor is 100% secure) was never said.
A day after the Arstechnica article, the Washington Post raised the very timely question: can you trust Tor if 60% of its development is paid by the Feds? While Roger Dingledine, founder of the Tor Project says the support from the Department of Defense and from the Department of State is a research grant/coming from people who know the project needs to be kept safe from „backdoors”, but he does seem to suggest they might try to change it. When writing about how they have also said they would fight requests for such „back doors”, he says
„now we’re reading about more and more companies and services that have tried to fight such a request and given up. The architecture of the Tor network makes it more complex (there’s no easy place in the deployed network to stick a backdoor), but that doesn’t mean they won’t try.”
This was also the week when it turned out that the US and UK intelligence agencies are able to decode most of the internet traffic (which should be secure, because there’s so much encryption going on, SSl, TSL, even HTML5). The reporting on the issue was fairly short on technical details: according to Arstechnica, it is most probably possible by
„compromising the software or hardware that implements the encryption or by attacking or influencing the people who hold the shared secrets that form one of the linchpins of any secure cryptographic system”
The article explains a great deal of how encryption happens: if you read one article, let it be this.
On the heel of these news came another Washington Post article on how Google is „racing” to encrypt the data that is flowing to its data centers, to make government snooping hopefully impossible, probably just harder. I am unsure on how effective and useful (for whom?) could that be.
- Sustainability questioned:
„three times as many raw materials are used to process and export traded goods than are used in their manufacture.”
- In the age of Google, let us all remember that we don’t know, basically, anything: What is the universe made of? When did life begin? What is on the bottom of the ocean? As I just read Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies, „The 20 big questions in science” came at the right time.
- „A "window to the brain" implant which would allow doctors to see through the skull and possibly treat patients has been devised by US researchers.” That pretty much sums it up.
- The History of Skype. Can you believe Skype is ten years old?
Cocktail party debate (if you go to cocktail parties where you can metion orgies. If these are not the kind of parties you go to, you might wanna consider getting some new friends.)
- The fight over what appears on Google Search – Max Mosley, the former president of the International Automobile Federation, is asking Google to remove links that describe his 2008 sadomasochistic sex-party as „Nazi”. Mosley claims it had nothing to do with Nazis, Google says free speech.
- On Facebook acquiring Parse (back-end development technology stack for apps) for these benefits:
Giving Facebook the first cue ont he fastes-growing apps
- Life of an http request – really precise and informative
- When trying to get links from Google Search, right clicking it and receiving a jumbled up email, how to stop that? Greasemonkey Scripts!
- You can actually try quantum computing online. I have not figured it out how to use it yet, but will let you know.
- Also, you can search Tweets now here. I wonder if that will change the scenery of Twitter: even if the tweets don’t disappear (only if you want to), there are too many of them to remember, and I always felt that gave Twitter a very fleeting sense. Now that the tweets are searchable, will that change how people use it?
