that is all.
Archive for January, 2007
Muse is awesome
Monday, January 22nd, 2007Self Improvement
Tuesday, January 16th, 2007Some Days I get on these kicks of self improvement; I want to start eating healthier and reading more and exercising better and practicing guitar more and such. I wish I could ‘corall’ some of that energy for later release when I slack off in those departments.
DRM and Cryptography (again)
Friday, January 12th, 2007I mentioned this once a while ago but I just made the same argument on slashdot.
If you take a look at DRM from the point of cryptography, you begin to see how silly it really is. Normally in cryptography, alice wishes to send a message to bob, and neither alice nor bob wishes eve to be able to read the contents of the message. This is NOT easy to do, but it’s possible if you design your system well enough.
The ‘DRM’ problem is as follows: Alice wishes to send a Message To Bob, without Eve seeing the Message. Bob however, would like to show Eve the message. In this case, Alice is a Media Producer, Bob is a Media Consumer, and Eve is a would-be pirate. You can’t even begin to argue how any system could be provably secure. All current DRM systems are based upon security by obscurity, which cryptographers have known for years doesn’t work.
The legal system must accurately reflect the portions of reality which it is intended to govern. The concept of a functional DRM system is becoming more and more an imaginary thing.
Go Me
Friday, January 12th, 2007Hopefully, I haven’t managed to screw myself over completely. I finished all my grad school applications way ahead of time, and all I had left to do was tell ETS to send in my GRE scores to all of the schools I applied to (they only let you specify four on your little sheet). For some reason I managed to put this off untill late December, which would have been fine, except apparently ETS decided NOT to send my scores for whatever reason. I have no idea why i didn’t put the same pressure on myself to make sure I got the scores in on time, but there you have it.
Luckily, Anneliese told me I should just email the departments I applied to and explain the situation; I can’t believe I didn’t think of that on my own. It appears to have been affective. Hopefully, I’ll be OK.
All I really want to do is play my new guitar. I was going to take lessons at school, but it’d cost like $500. No thanks.
I’m sick right now, and that’s no fun. When I try to get some sleep, my nasal drip just gets terrible, and all I dream about is this project I’m doing at work right now. It is actually pretty cool but I can’t talk about it because it has to do with software security >_>
I plan to have a relaxing evening tonight, but I always ‘plan’ that and it never happens. Oh, the perils of an overactive social life.
Hello again perhaps
Thursday, January 11th, 2007So I haven’t writte on this thing in a while. It’s not for want of ideas to write about or goings on in my life or what have you; I just got fed up with all the spam and such on here. My friend chris says he’s going to change this server around and move my blog over to some sort of ruby on rails app. I should post more at that point.
Right now I’m just working, waiting for grad school applications to return, playing a lot of guitar, and thinking about crazy things, like I always do.