crackers
Last week, a group challenged the Internet to crack Agrippa, which was an art-book-with-self-destructing-diskette. The program, which ran on Macs, slowly scrolled a poem by William Gibson (of Neuromancer fame) and wrote over part of the disk with a sequence of As, Gs, Cs, and Ts like an ASCII chromosome, after which the program would never run again. The challenge was to work with a salvaged disk image, before and after, and try to determine what kind of encryption was used, if any. A puzzle that nobody had solved for twenty years; surely it must be hard.
Not hard enough; 5 people have cracked it as of today according to the Cracking Agrippa website. It's reported to be a modified RSA public-key algorithm using a 12-bit key. Technical details are available "soon". I guess the right people didn't really care enough before. Not being a crypto guy or a Mac coder, I was assuming it would take a long time, so I was putting together a disassembler that would let me poke around the resource fork and see what was what. Guess I can cut that shit right out.
Speaking of crackers, my informal 35 year high school reunion is coming up soon. It should be fun, but I am going to need to bite my tongue a bit around the tea bag contingent. Western New York is pretty redneck turf, and there are more than a few folks there who vote straight Rethuglican. Not because it's tradition, but because they think it's the right answer. It may have once been the home of Susan B Anthony and Frederick Douglass, but it's also the place where school kids harass bus monitors and put the videos on YouTube, so it's gone way downhill. (Hell, it's a place where they apparently need to put adult supervision on school busses and metal detectors in schools, how good can it be?)
I'd prefer to vote for a liberal in November, but there aren't any on offer. Black Reagan is the only choice left. I might have to make a donation to help that happen. I don't like to do that, because giving once opens the floodgates to telemarketing phone calls, and I've already given them notice that I would never give again if they called me more than once a year. (Which they did. Of course.) Given the choice between eating crow and seeing Willard Romney taking the oath of office, though, I'll get a fork.
Not hard enough; 5 people have cracked it as of today according to the Cracking Agrippa website. It's reported to be a modified RSA public-key algorithm using a 12-bit key. Technical details are available "soon". I guess the right people didn't really care enough before. Not being a crypto guy or a Mac coder, I was assuming it would take a long time, so I was putting together a disassembler that would let me poke around the resource fork and see what was what. Guess I can cut that shit right out.
Speaking of crackers, my informal 35 year high school reunion is coming up soon. It should be fun, but I am going to need to bite my tongue a bit around the tea bag contingent. Western New York is pretty redneck turf, and there are more than a few folks there who vote straight Rethuglican. Not because it's tradition, but because they think it's the right answer. It may have once been the home of Susan B Anthony and Frederick Douglass, but it's also the place where school kids harass bus monitors and put the videos on YouTube, so it's gone way downhill. (Hell, it's a place where they apparently need to put adult supervision on school busses and metal detectors in schools, how good can it be?)
I'd prefer to vote for a liberal in November, but there aren't any on offer. Black Reagan is the only choice left. I might have to make a donation to help that happen. I don't like to do that, because giving once opens the floodgates to telemarketing phone calls, and I've already given them notice that I would never give again if they called me more than once a year. (Which they did. Of course.) Given the choice between eating crow and seeing Willard Romney taking the oath of office, though, I'll get a fork.