linux.conf.au 2007 CFP time

linux.conf.au is coming. You can feel it inside. That week-long, sleep-depriving, brain-bursting overflow of excitement and geekyness is coming. And it's less than 6 months away.

Got cool stuff you're working on? Open-Source related? Then you want to submit a proposal to the Call for Papers.

Now.

Why should you bother?

• You will be contributing to the Australian Linux and Open-Source community by inspiring them,
• You might become famous and get recognised by your peers,
• You'll be treated like a rockstar during the conference,
• Employers might offer you a job,
• The pressure of being ready on time will force you to finish that feature for your project that you've been dragging your feet on :-)

Go do it. Submit a paper. You know you want to.

/tech/linux-australia/lca2007 | 31 Aug 2006 | #

LinuxSA September 2006 (extra meeting) - Piratpartiet, file-sharing, privacy/freedom of speech/communication etc

  Hi all,

  Sorry for the last minute notice, but we've organized an extra meeting
  for September (additional to the usual one on the 19th).  This one
  should be interesting enough to justify it though :-)

  NOTE: This is for next Tuesday.

  The usual details:

    When:   7:00pm-9:30pm (doors open 6:45pm) on
            Tuesday, 5th September, 2006
    Where:  Senior Secondary Assessment Board
            of South Australia (SSABSA)
            Boardroom (1st floor)
            60 Greenhill Road
            Wayville SA
    Cost:   FREE
    Who:    Anyone and everyone.
            No pre-registration necessary.

  Presentation:

    Egil Moller (http://www.redhog.org) is a Piratpartiet member from
    Sweden, working as a free software developer currently in Adelaide.

    He'll be giving a presentation on the Piratpartiet and surrounding
    issues, such as file-sharing, privacy/freedom of speech/communication,
    PP's history/policies, patents, and the effect of issues concerning PP
    which will have huge effect on Free Software, Opensource, Copyleft and
    software developers if fully implemented.

  Pizza:

    After the meeting, please join us for pizza at San Giorgios (cnr.
    Frome Street and Rundle Street in the city).

  For more information:

    Email:        organisers@linuxsa.org.au
    Web Page:     http://www.linuxsa.org.au/
    Mailing List: linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au
    IRC:          #linuxsa on irc.freenode.net

/tech/LinuxSA | 31 Aug 2006 | #

SHA-1 partial chosen plaintext attacks successful

So back in February, we found out that SHA-1 was gone - researchers could generate 2 plaintexts that generated the same hash. But at least the plaintexts were gibberish, meaning that while SHA-1 was broken, the break was of limited use.

Now comes a more serious blow - in a similar vein to the previously reported MD5 attacks it's now possible to choose part of the plaintext and still get the same hash. Yikes.

Quoting the article:

         Using the new method, it is possible, for example, to produce two HTML
         documents with a long nonsense part after the closing  tag, which, 
         despite slight differences in the HTML part, thanks to the adapted appendage
         have the same hash value.

Now what if I could add some nasty javascript to a web page and retain the original hash? Validating the web page with a MD5 or SHA-1 hash won't tell you of the maliciousness. Combine that with DNS redirection and you have something a bit scary. Can you say phishing attack?

We need a new hashing function, openly and publicly selected, just like AES. Moving to SHA-256 or SHA-512 are just stop-gap measures.

/tech/code | 28 Aug 2006 | #

Milestone day today

Today is a milestone day for me. Seven years at the one company - I guess it had to happen eventually.

Looking back it's been busy - building everything from Java VMs, to smart-card operating systems, to crypto libraries, to web applications, to web services, to location-based services, to distributed audio processing, through to end-user GUI applications - across Linux, Solaris, and .NET - not to mention also doing customer management, business development, herding cats, cutting code, graphic design, and sysadmin duties. Whew! It's been a whirlwind of constant change. Have to say, I love the diversity!

/life | 23 Aug 2006 | #

Writely comes out of beta

Google's Writely comes out of it's secret beta today. I've been playing for a little while today (ahem, when I should have been doing other things ;) and I reakon they've done a good job. This is what the AJAX-enabled Web2 is supposed to be.

Quick feature review:

• Import Word docs
• Export out of Writely to HTML, RTF, Word, OOo, PDF
• Fully-featured word processor
• Online collaboration
• Publish to HTML, stored on their server
• Blog posting integration
• Revision history

So this post should have been done in Writely, but I'm not willing to hand-over username/passwords to a 3rd party app yet. That bit scares me a little. I'll need to hack some addition security in first.

/tech/misc | 21 Aug 2006 | #

LinuxSA August 2006 - Why the law re. DRM matters: restoring the balance in Australian Copyright Law

  Hi all,

  Time for the LinuxSA August Meeting announcement (it's this
  Tuesday)...

  The usual details:

   When:   7:00pm-9:30pm (doors open 6:45pm) on
           Tuesday, 15th August, 2006
   Where:  Senior Secondary Assessment Board
           of South Australia (SSABSA)
           Boardroom (1st floor)
           60 Greenhill Road
           Wayville SA
   Cost:   FREE
   Who:    Anyone and everyone.
           No pre-registration necessary.

  Presentation:

   Darren Kruse will be giving a presentation on "Why the law re. DRM
   matters: restoring the balance in Australian Copyright Law".

  Pizza:

   After the meeting, please join us for pizza at San Giorgios (cnr.
   Frome Street and Rundle Street in the city).

  For more information:

   Email:        organisers@linuxsa.org.au
   Web Page:     http://www.linuxsa.org.au/
   Mailing List: linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au
   IRC:          #linuxsa on irc.freenode.net

/tech/LinuxSA | 12 Aug 2006 | #