book

Handbook of Applied Cryptography

The Handbook of Applied Cryptography by Alfred J. Menezes, Paul C. van Oorschot and Scott A. Vanstone is available free online for download. This is an important book – in my discussions with online activists I try to explain the importance of them doing all they can to protect themselves. This is certainly a step in the right direction.

  • Chapter 1 – Overview of Cryptography ps pdf
  • Chapter 2 – Mathematics Background ps pdf
  • Chapter 3 – Number-Theoretic Reference Problems ps pdf
  • Chapter 4 – Public-Key Parameters ps pdf
  • Chapter 5 – Pseudorandom Bits and Sequences ps pdf
  • Chapter 6 – Stream Ciphers ps pdf
  • Chapter 7 – Block Ciphers ps pdf
  • Chapter 8 – Public-Key Encryption ps pdf
  • Chapter 9 – Hash Functions and Data Integrity ps pdf
  • Chapter 10 – Identification and Entity Authentication ps pdf
  • Chapter 11 – Digital Signatures ps pdf
  • Chapter 12 – Key Establishment Protocols ps pdf
  • Chapter 13 – Key Management Techniques ps pdf
  • Chapter 14 – Efficient Implementation ps pdf
  • Chapter 15 – Patents and Standards ps pdf
  • Appendix – Bibliography of Papers from Selected Cryptographic Forums ps pdf
  • References ps pdf
  • Index ps pdf

The book is not under a particularly generous license but it is available. Make sure you read the copyright notice.

Posted on by mklang

Doris Lessing on the power of books

Last night Doris Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Read her Nobel lecture online, it was delivered on Friday 7 December at the Swedish Academy by Nicholas Pearson, Doris Lessing’s publisher in the UK. In her speech she points to the importance of books and reading for the creation of literature and she also takes a swipe at the banality of the Internet compared with the depth of literature. But the part I enjoyed the best came towards the end…

The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise … but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us – for good and for ill. It is our stories, the storyteller, that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, what we are at our best, when we are our most creative.

Posted on by mklang

Things undone

For those of you who, like myself, live in a state of denial it’s time to face reality. It is soon the end of 2007! No way! We all want more time! I have not finished all of the 1001 things I planned to do before the year ends.

Some of the stuff which is hanging on a thread right now:

  • Interviews (Urgh! I am failing bigtime here)
  • One more article (almost done)
  • Admin (always more admin)
  • Complete journal proposal (on time)
  • Finish book review (must finish reading book first)

Actually this list was supposed to be a way of organising my thoughts but the more things I write the more things I discover and the more stressed I get. Suffice to say that I’m late

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photo: J. McPherson

Posted on by mklang

A personal computer

Ever since this summer when I got my shiny new laptop I have been longing to personalise it. I knew that I wanted to engrave it with something eye-catching and symbolic. Since I really liked my last engraving I decided to go with the same again.

My image of choice is based on a wonderful drawing of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza Reflections by Gene Colan from 1998.

(Larger version)

Since I want to accentuate the Don Quixote and Sancho Panza I removed the background and their reflections in the water. What is left is the two riders. I contacted Mr Colan to tell him of my plans to modify and engrave the image onto my computer. This is not a question of copyright law but I wanted to have permission from the artist as a mark of respect.

So I took my powerbook to the engraver (a firm called Brion) and this is what happened – for a full set of large images check out my flickr account. Many people who choose to modify there powerbooks in this way tend to go with the lazer engraving but I prefer the effect of the diamond drill engraving since it makes for a very nice finish based on shiny lines – very classical.

First strap it in

The outline

Drilling Quixote

Drilling details

The finished product

Posted on by mklang

Utility of Force

The University of Bath has a podcast with General Sir Rupert Smith. Sir Rupert is the author of the insightful book The Utility of Force: The art of war in the modern world (amazon). His main thesis is that war is changing from the tradition industrial war into a war amongst the people.

The essential difference is that the use of force is no longer used to win a battle but to create a condition  in which the strategic result is achieved in other means. The strategic object is to alter the opponents intentions as opposed to win over him or to remove him.

Posted on by mklang

Book, bug crusher & hat or why ebooks fail

Ok, so I have already written about my lack of enthusiasm in the newest ebook reader. That’s putting it mildly. But when I read Steven Poole’s 14 point list about what the ebook  of the future must be able to do in order to beat the book I laughed out loud – so since it is Friday I thought that we all needed a laugh at Amazon’s expense…

So the ebook of the future:

1 It will have an inexhaustible source of energy and never need recharging.

2 It will have resolution as good as print. (No, Amazon, really as good as print.)

3 It will be able to survive coffee and wine spills, days of intense sunlight, dropping in the ocean, light charring, and falling completely into two or more pieces, while still remaining perfectly readable afterwards.

4 It will allow me to scribble notes and/or doodles in the margins, with my choice of mechanical pencil or fine Muji fibre-tip pen (black). (Note, typing in the margins with a crappy thumb keyboard is not an acceptable alternative.)

5 It will allow me to riffle through it and thus get a quick, intuitive look at the book’s argumentative or narrative structure.

6 It will allow me to tear off the corner of a page to write down my phone number (or someone else’s).

7 It will display to other people in coffee shops and on public transport the title of what I am reading, so as to advertise my erudition or quirky sense of humour.

8 It will be physically handsome, not drop-dead fugly. (Note to Amazon: for pity’s sake, next time, head-hunt people from Sony or Apple.)

9 Indeed, the books on it will still be designed, by typesetters and graphic artists, so as to feed our aesthetic pleasure.

10 I will still be able to lend or give books to friends, or swap books in and out of the honour library of much-read novels in a Mediterranean seaside bar.

11 I will be able to use the ebook as a reliable flat surface for rolling cigarettes or other leaf-based refreshments, without worrying about debris shorting the motherboard.

12 When I receive the updated edition of the Oxford Companion to Philosophy, I will be able to press the previous edition into service as a stand for the left-hand music speaker on my desk.

13 The ebook will function, morever, as both bug-crusher and discretionary hat. Placed on my face, it will make a soft roof against the sun on the beach.

14 I will still be able to hurl a fatuous tome such as Jeff Gomez’s Print Is Dead across the room without thereby destroying my ability to read any other books.

Posted on by mklang

Trigge Happy Free

Steven Poole’s book Trigger Happy is a pioneering work in the history and aesthetics of computer games. As an experiment (triggered by Amazon Kindle & DRM discussions) Steven is giving away his book for free, with no DRM attached under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license.

Trigger Happy is a book about the aesthetics of videogames — what they share with cinema, the history of painting, or literature; and what makes them different, in terms of form, psychology and semiotics. It was first published in 2000; this is the revised edition with the Afterword written in 2004 2001. (Update: as requested in comments, the 2004 Afterword can now be read here.)

The book will be available online for “a limited period only” and therefore his (and my) advice is to grab it while its hot!

Hopefully we shall also be able to find out more about the results of the experiment. Whether or not it increases or decreases sales, generates interest or has any interesting unexpected consequences. Stay tuned to Steven’s blog.

Posted on by mklang

Vanity Publishing, not only a vanity

Victor Keegan discusses self-publishing in an article on Guardian Online. His main thesis is that “If the invention of the printing press liberated books from the monopoly of the monasteries in the 15th century, then self-publishing is freeing us today from the power of publishers.”

The term vanity publishing is misleading. Today there are several viable options for either bypassing publishers or collaborating with them on completely new terms. These create opportunities for small obscure titles to be printed and sold in addition to creating original and personalised gifts.

Everything depends upon the level of service you desire. Handling everything from content, layout and marketing creates very cheap books but these books may be difficult for general readers to find but will provide a viable and important option for alternative publishing.

Posted on by mklang

Senseless security

Bruce Schneier has an excellent blog, Schneier on Security, where he often lists examples of pointless security but today his list of senseless anti-terror actions was both funny and scary:

The “War on the Unexpected is being fought everywhere.

In Australia:

Bouncers kicked a Melbourne man out of a Cairns pub after paranoid patrons complained that he was reading a book called The Unknown Terrorist.

At the U.S. border with Canada:

A Canadian firetruck responding with lights and sirens to a weekend fire in Rouses Point, New York, was stopped at the U.S. border for about eight minutes, U.S. border officials said Tuesday.[…]

The Canadian firefighters “were asked for IDs,” Trombley said. “I believe they even ran the license plate on the truck to make sure it was legal.”

In the UK:

A man who had gone into a diabetic coma on a bus in Leeds was shot twice with a Taser gun by police who feared he may have been a security threat.

In Maine:

A powdered substance that led to a baggage claim being shut down for nearly six hours at the Portland International Jetport was a mixture of flour and sugar, airport officials said Thursday.

Fear is winning. Refuse to be terrorized, people.

Posted on by mklang

Addicted to dead trees

Once again the demise of the book is being announced as immanent. The main problem is that the book has been around for too long, it contains no lights, soundcards or batteries and therefore must be a thing of the past. With the coming launch of the new ebook reader the Amazon Kindle battle lines have been drawn around the future of the book.

For me it doesn’t matter how fancy schmancy the details are – and Kindle has some impressive details. The dead tree with ink stains still remains my clear favorite. For many reasons, some pure nostalgia, but as Steven Levy writes in Newsweek online: The book

…is a more reliable storage device than a hard disk drive, and it sports a killer user interface. (No instruction manual or “For Dummies” guide needed.) And, it is instant-on and requires no batteries. Many people think it is so perfect an invention that it can’t be improved upon, and react with indignation at any implication to the contrary.

the flexibility and durability of the book is one of it’s most endearing factors. Also thus far most technical solutions have been lacking in some form. Not to mention the fact that the book seldom requires cables and is a very difficult product to break (relatively speaking).

Posted on by mklang