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.
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 [...]
You use passwords, possibly dozens of passwords, to authenticate to websites daily. Passwords are a useful authentication tool because they function as a “thing-you-know” (a shared secret between you and the server) and because passwords can be changed (in case of loss, unlike say, your fingerprints).
In a diatribe against OpenID titled, “Goodbye, Passwords. [...]
Part of my research has been investigating how to build storage systems that can provide availability and durability despite failures. It’s been interesting to see recent papers that characterize failures, such as Ethan Katz-Bassett’s NSDI paper about Hubble, or last year’s papers about drive failure characteristics from Google and from several high performance computing [...]
If you are in a small business that needs the occasional picture—for record-keeping, documenting events, or including in promotional material—having a digital camera on hand is definitely useful. A friend recently wrote:
We want something that isn’t too complex, but takes decent shots for print and web. Possibly with a good zoom [...]
Twitter provides RSS/Atom feeds of your posts; with these feeds, your posts can be easily tracked in news readers like Google Reader, monitored in aggregators like FriendFeed or SocialThing!, and cross-posted into other blog services such as Tumblr. This idea works fine, except for the fact that Twitter has been co-opted to be not only an ambient intimacy [...]
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