Hash Collisions

Just about every Windows program prompts a user to select a file for some purpose, such as through the Open File dialog window:   I’ll call this kind of window “Opie” for the rest of this article.  Occasionally, a program will prompt a user not for a file, but for a folder.  In such cases [...]

I am shocked by the recent winning bid for Nortel’s patent portfolio.  4.5 billion U. S. dollars.  In cash! More than shocked, I am saddened to see such a large sum squandered like this.  These patents won’t spur on innovation.  They won’t make their new owners into better companies.  At best, they’ll serve as (unreliable) [...]

(Caution: Amateur security research ahead.  Using it in a live system is not recommendable.) I recently read “How to Safely Store a Password”, an article by Coda Hale. For years I’ve thought that salting and hashing passwords with MD5 or SHA-1 prior to storage was sufficient to thwart password-cracking efforts (in cases where the user-account [...]

Last night I watched Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief on TV.  (Beware, spoilers ahead.) This moderately-entertaining movie cleverly incorporates a number of elements from Greek mythology.  One of them is the island of the lotus-eaters, reimagined as a casino. Percy Jackson and his two sidekicks need to visit this casino to look for [...]

In recent months, I’ve read of the following scenario playing out on a couple of different occasions [1]: Person “So-and-So” chooses “CleverName” as their username on social-media service “Socialr” [2]. CleverName is So-and-So’s favorite pseudonym, a word or phrase with a personally-significant meaning. So-and-So starts using Socialr, and over a period of time builds up [...]

As is evident to anyone checking in, I’ve so far failed to keep up with my initial, modest goal of writing once a month.  Last year was a demanding year…  We’ll see about this one. As happened with my inaugural article, strong sentiments drew out an article from me, this very night.  I’ll post it [...]

Hello, world!  My name is Andrés Cabezas Ulate.  Yesterday, as I was reading one of my favorite blogs, I came across the straw that broke the writer’s block.  Long have I waited to share various ideas with the world.  I’ve been inching along with my methodical publication plans.  Today, though, I decided to go for [...]