RSA says "No!" to NSA fingered random bit generator

Uh... yeah! Way to go RSA :-)

The Third Industrial Revolution

Here's a thought-provoking article that makes me wonder about what the near future will hold. Will we see an idealistic world of increased freedom from menial toil and labor, or a dystopian society where displaced workers and their families struggle to survive? Will the gap between rich and poor become so great that social upheaval and struggle is unavoidable? Or will we be able to provide opportunities for all to survive and prosper? As a society and culture, I think we must challenge ourselves to seek and shape the best possible outcome now.

Windows Sysinternals Tools

Windows Sysinternals is an incredibly useful tool suite for Windows devs, admins, and IT pros available for free from Microsoft Technet.

Using openssl to encrypt/decrypt text

Here's a simple example of using the Linux openssl command to encrypt typed text data into a file and then extract it back from the file afterwards. We'll use the AES-128 encryption algorithm for this example and ask openssl to base64 encode the encrypted data afterwards, so it can be happily stored in a text file.

First, let's encrypt a test string into the file /tmp/myEncryptedData.txt:

$ openssl enc -aes128 -a -out /tmp/myEncryptedData.txt
enter aes-128-cbc encryption password: your-desired-password-here
Verifying - enter aes-128-cbc encryption password: your-desired-password-here
This is the data I'm protecting ya know!

Note: To terminate the input type a couple of Ctrl-D characters.

Now, let's read the encrypted text from /tmp/myEncryptedData.txt and display the original string back:

$ openssl enc -d -a -aes128 -in /tmp/myEncryptedData.txt
enter aes-128-cbc decryption password: your-desired-password-here
This is the data I'm protecting ya know!

Cool, huh?

Privacy in the digital age

A favorite author of mine has posted an interesting perspective on privacy that's worth a read. The topic's been on my mind, too. I'll be adding some discussion about it ahead, too.

I'm so happy someone else wonders about these things, too

It's occurred to me on multiple occasions that if a hacker or agent can spoof software update processes, they can easily gain complete control of an end user system. So far, no such exploits have been seen to my knowledge, though.

Anyway, here's a serious yet ultimately humorous discussion of potential software update system exploitation - and how it might perceptually relate to cloud computing.

Functional Programming

Saw a great presentation by one of our interns today on Functional Programming (ala. Haskell). How practical will it prove to be and in which scenarios will it prove compelling? Hard to tell right now, but I'm pretty sure an impact will occur. There sure are a lot of related languages out there including OCaml, Haskell, Scala, F# and maybe more.

eTextbooks - Who's working on what

Interesting recap of eTextbook players and directions in the Sri Lankan Sunday Times. Much more going on in this area than meets the eye.

Industries experiencing disruptive change

Locating disruptive change is a big deal when investing for growth; it's become a catch-phrase for investors and a holy grail of sorts for the shrewd. From my perspective, I see a number of industries undergoing disruptive change and with the spread of technology, there will be others, too.

Some to watch right now:

• Learning - What it means to get an education, how it happens, availability to learning resources, and cost are all factors ramping up disruptive change in the learning industry. MOOCs (massively open on-line courses) are gaining traction (Coursera, Khan Academy, and Udacity). Helping students connect to colleges, learning resources, experiences, and each other is another area to watch (Chegg, AfterCollege, Zinch, Facebook, etc). Publishers and distribution networks (No Starch Press, Packt Publishers, O'Reilly, Amazon, Apple, etc) are experiencing and injecting change, too.
• Ticketing and Entertainment - the high cost tickets and events is another area ripe for change; new players such as Brown Paper Tickets are taking a fresh approach, which will inject change in this marketplace.
• Nanotechnology and Materials - There are so many emerging possibilities that it's hard to appreciate them all. The implications to the medical field (diagnostics, treatments, prostheses, augmentation) and industrial fields (electronics, batteries, sensors, solenoids, monitoring devices, 3D printing) are staggering, not to mention what will happen as small amounts of intelligence get added, too; enabling devices to report, confer, and decide.
• Food production, distribution, and nutrition - Initiatives to buy and eat locally (farm to fork), to take control of preparation, to use fresh and simple ingredients, etc are all introducing positive changes. New styles of farming (smaller scale, organic, specialized, and strategic) are making a difference, too. Some examples: Farm Fresh to You, Polyface Farms, Full Circle, Jacobs / Del Cabo, local farmer's markets, etc.
• Software Development and Computing - How it happens and the tools to make it efficient, productive, inherently secure, and sustainable continues to evolve. The Agile Manifesto started a revolution that's still in progress, as it requires dedicating significant resources (an organization must maintain a continuous integration / delivery process, implying significant computing and staff resources, although I suspect virtual machines and cloud computing are lowering cost barriers, too). The tooling now available to software developers is amazing (Eclipse and other IDEs, build management, defect tracking and database systems, testing frameworks, native language presentation and translation technologies, and multi-platform support). Where I think growth is needed is seamless support for multiple displays (web, mobile, and tablet) and efficient and affordable team management tools.

Netflix rates ISPs for their streaming speeds

Netflix now provides on-line info about how well ISPs perform with streaming media - organized by country, check it out.