Category Archives: Computers

Miscellanious Computing

Elliptic Curve Cryptography

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An interesting article from LWN about Elliptic Curve Cryptography and Open Source.

ECC is based on some very deep math involving elliptic curves in a finite field. It relies on the difficulty of solving the Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem (ECDLP) in much the same way that RSA depends on the difficulty of factoring the product of two large primes. The best known method for solving ECDLP is fully exponential, whereas the number field sieve (for factoring) is sub-exponential. This allows ECC to use drastically smaller keys to provide the equivalent security; a 160-bit ECC key is equivalent to a 1024-bit RSA key.

As always though, there are the problems of patents..

The wild card in the ECC patent arena seems to be Certicom which claims a large number of ECC patents and has not made a clear statement of its intentions with regard to open source implementations. The NSA licensed Certicom’s patents for $25 million to allow them and their suppliers to use ECC, lending some credence to at least some of the Certicom patents. Other companies also have patents on various pieces of ECC technology.

Be interesting to see what happens..

Portable Applications – An Office on a (USB) Stick

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For those folks trapped using Windows here’s a really nice way to get access to all those free open-source applications in such a way that you don’t have to install them on your computer to be able to use them.

These can just be copied onto a USB memory stick and (apparently) run directly from there – you can even save your documents onto it, unplug it and move it to another computer and your virtual office should follow you!

The Portable Applications site has a heap of applications built for this, including:

and much much more!

Google Alternative To ‘DSH’ ?

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Looks like Mikal and Andrew have come up with an interesting take on the age-old cluster/distributed SSH tool, like LLNL’s good old pdsh. But the twist is this (from their FAQ):

You run a utility (cssh) giving a couple of server names as parameters, and then xterms opens up to each server with an extra “console” window. Anything typed into the console is replicated into each server window (so you can edit the same file on N machines at the same time).

It should work on any POSIX system (including, they claim, CygWin).

New WordPress Theme

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Just updated my blog to use the latest 3K2 theme which is exceedingly widget friendly and looks really nice – not to mention working much better with the Gallery2 plugins – no more wierd overlays!

The only oddity is the automatic archives page – I get a 404 for it even though it’s been created and the ELA plugin is installed and activated. Ah well!

National Archives of Australia Transitioning to OASIS OpenDocument Format

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This has been foreshadowed for a while now, but there’s movement on the National Archives of Australia transitioning to the OASIS standard document format OpenDocument (used by OpenOffice.org amongst others).

It’s not clear whether this will merge with or replace their existing open source XML archive file format Xena and how it will interact with the way that documents are currently imported into the repository.

OK – after reading through some of their docs it appears that Xena uses OpenOffice.org to do some of the conversions between file formats, so my guess is that they’re considering saving their documents with OOo inside a Xena container (presumably in addition to the binary blob that contains the original document format).