Special Interest Group on CRAP

The time is approaching for delivery of my Nissan Leaf. Today they invited me to sign up for the Telematics service through Carwings. As far as I can tell, this offers very little and requires me to consent to data uploads from the car. If I could get access to the data that was uploaded [...]

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Here are two 512-bit inputs whose MD5 hashes are identical. The 512-bit inputs differ in only two bits. Nice work mentioned in http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/643 MD5(6165300E87A79A55F7C60BD034FEBD0B6503CF04854F709EFB0FC034874C9C65 2F94CC4015A12DEB5C15F4A3490786BB6D658673A4341F7D8FD75920EFD18D5A) = CEE9A457E790CF20D4BDAA6D69F01E41 MD5(6165300E87A79A55F7C60BD034FEBD0B6503CF04854F749EFB0FC034874C9C65 2F94CC4015A12DEBDC15F4A3490786BB6D658673A4341F7D8FD75920EFD18D5A) = CEE9A457E790CF20D4BDAA6D69F01E41 xor 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000004000000000000000000 0000000000000000800000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000

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I took the plunge today and ordered a Nissan Leaf electric vehicle. This is the second car that I have bought online, but the process this time was pretty weird. Once I got an offer I was willing to take, I clicked on “Place order” and got the following disclaimer. I never thought that there [...]

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I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none [...]

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For the last few months I have been carrying two smart phones: Motorola Droid on Verizon HTC Nexus One on T-Mobile I’ve been thinking about the relative advantages and disadvantages of the two phones, and it’s a close call. The Droid has a few advantages. The physical keyboard is very welcome, but I find myself [...]

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During my lifetime, there have been several major paradigm shifts in computing. The personal computer Graphical user interfaces (mouse and windowing) The Internet The World Wide Web Laptops (they started out as computers called “luggables”) 802.11 wireless networking Each of these brought tremendous change to the ways that we think about computing. One of the [...]

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There were a lot of things happening 40 years ago this week. You all know about the moon landing – a great achievement for all of mankind, and a lot has been said about it. I find it irritating that people push to go to Mars next, considering that we haven’t even explored the bottom [...]

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One of the most overlooked achievements by man was the landing on the surface of Venus in 1975 by the Venera 9 lander. The conditions on Venus are incredibly harsh, with a surface temperature of 485 degrees. It is still amazing that a spacecraft landed there and lasted for 53 minutes, in time to send [...]

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I have been growing increasingly insistent that scientific publishing should move toward open access. This is caused in part because, as an employee of Google, I have very little access to commercially published literature, in spite of the fact that we drive most of their traffic. For example I have access to almost none of [...]

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I recently visited the Blackhawk Auto Museum and I was reminded of how artistry and engineering can complement each other.

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