Special Interest Group on CRAP

I’ll take the opportunity to recommend the recent book by Susan Landau on wiretapping. Privacy is increasing in importance over time, and I’m noticing a lot of fuzzy thinking about how to respect privacy. One incident that recently came up is the fact that my car reports latitude, longitude, position, and speed whenever it downloads [...]

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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 decided to create a convenient link to the rss feed of facebook postings by my friends. Thanks to jwz for pointing out how to do this.

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The furor over facebook’s privacy problems has recently escalated. There are several parts to this: If you are logged into Facebook but then surf around the web, you will be transmitting personal details from your facebook presence to the other web sites When other people surf the web, they will be transmitting data about their [...]

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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 [...]

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Today I got a piece of spam sent to the email address that was only used for communication with allofmp3.com. In case you have forgotten, that was a shady music seller who sold MP3 music files by the megabyte, but was eventually shut down through pressure by the US trade representative. The spam had a [...]

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Everyone probably gets these emails telling you that you have a long lost uncle who was an official in Africa who left you $21 million, and if you’d just send $1,000 to them then they will wire you the money. They are called 419 scams. About once a year I also get an airmail letter [...]

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As I look around at what is happening in the world today, I keep seeing evidence that it all comes down to trust. As someone who spent a great deal of time working on information security, the subject of trust is one that I tried to design for, but I always regarded trust as a [...]

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I was having a hard time summarizing my thoughts from the Crypto conference. As always it was nice to see old friends and engage in discussions about the state of the art in crypto, but in retrospect I think the field of mathematical cryptography has dug itself into a hole and has a hard time [...]

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