Special Interest Group on CRAP

Matt Blaze’s blog is always interesting, but he hits the nail squarely on the head with this one. It even gave me the inspiration for my blog. http://www.crypto.com/blog/copywrongs/.

[Read more →]

If I rank my activity in social networking sites, it probably is proportional to the number of friends that I have on these accounts. In decreasing order this would be: my corp buzz friends on my google.com account my facebook friends my public buzz friends on my gmail account my twitter account. my quora account [...]

[Read more →]

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

[Read more →]

I saw a photo posted on Facebook that was tagged with Andrei Broder and Prabhakar Raghavan (both of Yahoo research). It’s ironic that both have worked on algorithms for contextual advertising, but the ads on Facebook next to the photos were hilarious. One of the ads is for “rich dads”. I’m not sure if that [...]

[Read more →]

It’s always sad news when someone you know dies. Regrettably, Sam Roweis died last night, apparently by taking his own life. It is always difficult to comprehend the situation that could lead to this, and my heart goes out to his family and friends. I had the pleasure of working with Sam on the Google [...]

[Read more →]

I went back to look at the spam that is sent out by ACM trying to get me to buy a membership. It turns out that it is sent out on the 11th of each month, right on schedule. I guess that means there is a cron job someplace that is firing off these things. [...]

[Read more →]

The impending demise of geocities.com reminded me of an event from 2004. In that year a former colleague named Larry Stockmeyer died from pancreatic cancer. I remember thinking at the time that those of us who knew him would always have our memories to appreciate his humanity and his intelligence. Other computer scientists need to [...]

[Read more →]

Today I got another spam from ACM, plus a spam from “World Scientific Publishing” that tries to look like they are acting on behalf of Purdue University. I have appended the one from World Scientific Publishers in the hopes that it will shame them into avoiding spam in the future. Why would Purdue University consent [...]

[Read more →]

Today I received spam from Cambridge University Press, using an email address that I used to register for the ACM Electronic Commerce Conference in 2006. It appears that even supposedly reputable organizations cannot resist the temptation to send spam.

[Read more →]

Today I got spammed from ACM. There were several annoying things about it: The fact that they use direct mail marketing in the first place. The email address they used is the one I used to register for SIGIR 2006, so at least they are using the “existing business relationship” loophole. They are still a [...]

[Read more →]