Hal Finney presents rough notes taken from a talk by Ron Rivest (1.5M PPT) about the MD6 hash function. MD6 will be a SHA-3 candidate and is tree-based and thus highly parallelizable (while remaining serializable). It appears to be designed to resist known forms of attack.
Wuala uses erasure codes and crypto over a p2p network (backed by managed servers) to provide “social” storage. The crypto builds on work by Kevin Fu and others. One nice idea is that you can trade local storage for remote storage. I wonder how good the latency is when reconstructing data fragmented across [...]
Amazon’s EC2 now has persistent storage as part of the Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS). Similar to how S3 built on DHT research, EBS turns ideas from research systems like Petal or the Expandable Network Disk into a massively scalable commercial product.
Pierre-Evariste Dagand developed Opis, an OCaml-based framework for developing distributed systems. It includes yet another Chord implementation, tested in ModelNet against Macedon and MIT Chord. While I still think OCaml is kind of ugly, it appeals to me more than P2 or Macedon did. (via Anarchaia)
Mark Jaquith presented Secure Coding with WordPress at WordCamp 2008. Skimming them, I have to wonder if there’s any hope at all for security in WP plugins. We need Coverity for PHP. Is Movable Type any better? How about Habari? Can we fix this with simple software design or do [...]
I have been a big fan of the Mercurial version control system since migrating the Chord project from CVS almost two years ago. Mercurial offers a comfortable command-line experience, good performance and a module based architecture for expansion. Since graduating, I have had to interface with Subversion and Perforce servers at work and [...]
Congratulations to Athicha Muthitacharoen, Bryan Ford, Max Krohn and Russ Cox on their recent thesis defenses!
Exploring facets of microblogging: Twitter, identi.ca, Facebook/LinkedIn status, or something self-hosted?
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