I've moved my blog over to bramcohen.com. See you all there!

The book 'Practical Cryptography' is perfectly good for giving an overview of basic concepts in cryptography, but its immediate practical advice to implementers is not terribly to the point or accurate. Here is much more to the point and accurate advice.

• For a block cipher you should use AES-128. If you don't understand your protocol well enough ( Read more... )

This post complains about Git lacking eventual consistency. I have a little secret for you: Git can't be made to have eventual consistency. Everybody seems to think the problem is a technical one, of complexity vs. simplicity of implementation. They're wrong. The problem is semantics. Git follows the semantics which you want 99% of the time, at the ( Read more... )

Now that the moratorium on Python language features is over, I'll put in my thoughts on what new stuff the language could use. I don't have much to suggest, and what I do have to suggest is fairly minor. This is because I'm happy with the language.

new on default parameters

One of the gotchas in python is that default parameters are reused, so if ( Read more... )

Related to the recent Haystack hubbub, here's a basic overview of censorship resistance tools, of which Haystack was an example (unfortunately a fairly broken one ( Read more... )

Rebasing is a controversial feature, with some people declaring it the greatest thing since sliced bread and others declaring it the spawn of the devil (okay I exaggerate, but you get the idea). I will now set the record straight by explaining The Truth ( Read more... )

There's no coherent explanation of what the advantages of Patience Diff are, so I'll explain now. First, a quick overview of how Patience Diff works -

1. Match the first lines of both if they're identical, then match the second, third, etc. until a pair doesn't match.
2. Match the last lines of both if they're identical, then match the next to last, ( Read more... )

Chatroulette is an interesting concept. On the plus side, it reliably provides people to talk to (especially if you're a hot babe), and leads to some actual conversations. On the downside, it has too many (literal) wankers, and feels lonely and disconnected while at the same time feeling like it's always just about to give you some real social ( Read more... )

I came up with a new card game the other day. It's been play-tested a bunch, and is a lot of fun ( Read more... )

Game designers in general think of themselves as performing a valuable service for humanity. Aside from simply entertaining, they have the goal of making their users smarter, more disciplined, and all around better than they were before playing. In large part they can succeed in doing this. Unfortunately the freemium business model doesn't ( Read more... )