LookIt

God is great

Ekr gives a good analysis of the latest news on intercessory prayer. "Deciding who should be healed based on how hard they pray rather than, say, how virtuous they are or how hard they believe seems awfully... transactional."

There are few popular religions today where the written scripture says "God will do the thing you want, but only if you pray for the specific thing you want in this particular way". There is plenty of spoken support for that view, but rarely anything written, probably because writing it down makes it clear how odd it sounds when put next to the rest of the written canon.

The sky is not falling...

...but ICANN's foundation is visibly crumbling.

Creating collisions in MD5 hashes, now even faster

MD5 is even more prone to collision attacks. This site, from a grad student at TU Eindhoven, has a new paper and source code for a fast MD5 collision generator. "Our attack can be done in an average of about 1 minute (avg. complexity 232.3) on a 3Ghz Pentium4 for these random recommended initial values. For arbitrary random initial values the average is about 5 minutes (avg. complexity 234.1). With a reasonable probability a collision is found within mere seconds, allowing for instance an attack during the execution of a protocol."

Update: And another, different attack on MD5 gives similarly fast results. In this case, the technique may be extensible to SHA-1 and SHA-256.

Of course, that is only useful in protocols that are susceptible to collision attacks, and we have not found many that are (unless you consider non-repudiation, which most of us don't). Still, it is very impressive. Let's see what happens next to SHA-1.

Rock is dead!

Long live scissors and paper!

(Stolen from a bumpersticker that I saw this morning and am still chuckling over...)

Feed icons

I now have one on my blog page, and you can get one too.

Personal playground

Mike Langberg coins a new term: personal playground. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo no longer aim to confine you in a "walled garden" -- the online equivalent of a gated community where you only use the owner's services. Instead, they are now pursuing a more subtle approach I'm going to call a "personal playground." This is the best of the internet: getting people to stay at your site by giving them as much good content as you can, not by trickery or technical manipulation.