LookIt

A Simple Twist of Fate

Bob Dylan wrote it and and put it on Blood on the Tracks. Joan Baez put it on Diamonds and Rust the next year. The Grateful Dead played it a few times, and Jerry Garcia had it as one of his standards.

But, if you want to twist more than just your fate, consider this live version by Tim Curry from 1979. This song didn't appear on any of his three albums.

A very sweet Jerry Garcia tribute

This show has helped me in the past few weeks get over the ten-year-dread. If you're missing Jerry, it is well-worth the 1.4 gigs of grabbing. If you're generous, it's well worth keeping your BitTorrent window open after you're done to share the music. If you're BitTorrent-challenged, drop me a line and I'll B&P or trade or something.

Support our troops?

Driving around the Bay Area and in New Jersey recently, I have noticed that many of the "Support Our Troops" ribbon-esque magnets have faded seriously. I guess people who bought the magnets don't feel like buying new ones just because the war has taken much longer than it was supposed to. The maybe-not-humorous result of this is that many of the magnets are now surrender white instead of we-remember-you yellow.

And then there is this cartoon...

Vassar Clements, RIP

Vassar Clements had a colorful ride on the fringes of popular music. Deadheads know him as the fiddler on Old and In The Way, but those of us who branched out after hearing him there know that he did lots more with lots of other folks. You could hear him smile on almost all his tunes, even the sad ones.

If you want to hear him from just last year, here's a torrent for an excellent show with Peter Rowan and Sam Bush, among others.

Update: For those of you who don't use BitTorrent, or want a taste of Vassar and Jerry Garcia bouncing off each other, here's a song that Vassar wrote: Lonesome Fiddle Blues. It is off of a wonderful live Old and In the Way album, That High Lonesome Sound. If you want to own just one live bluegrass album, consider that one.

SHA-1 collision strength is now apparently 2^63

For cryptographers who didn't get to watch last night's Crypto 2005 rump session, Xiaoyun Wang, Andrew Yao, and Frances Yao announced (through Adi Shamir, because my inane government kept Professor Wang out of the country) that they have a new method for creating collisions in SHA-1, better than their previous method. From what I could hear (the video was bad on my end), the new method should cause some collisions in 2^63 tries, which is 64 times better than their previous method.

According to the very short presentation, this probably puts SHA-1 collisions into the feasible-to-create range. On the other hand, MD5 was always in that range (at 2^64 effort, at least until Wang et. al. whacked it a year ago), and no one actually tried.

It will certainly be interesting to see the full paper and compare the two methods. It will also be interesting to see if the second method can be back-ported to MD5 in such a way to both further reduce the work effort there and get collisions that can be used for more realistic attacks.