optical computing
Optical Computing - Today Adi Shamir, the “S” in “RSA”, gave the second of his two presentations this week as an invited expert on campus. He has just announced that he cracked the 802.11b encryption scheme. Today I watched his presentation from tuesday on streaming media; it was about the future of optical cryptography, or croptography. It was quite an inspiring presentation. He showed how one could theoretically crack DES in about a second, using today’s technology and not much expense. He discussed ways to do computations optically using simple lighted transparencies (or existing high-quality photo film) and also using lasers. As an added bonus, he showed us how the new Texas Instruments DLP chips are being used not only for cryptography, but for making bio-chips as well. These DLP chips and their “Digital Micromirrors” are freekin’ unbelievable, I hope TI got some serious patents on that so they can keep sinking money into other developments like it.
I wasn’t sure if I could mention the name of Microsoft’s source control system earlier, but Ray Ozzie has pointed out a public presentation that mentions the name and a bunch of other interesting statistics.
One of the possibilities that most interests me these days is the possibility of having ubiquitous metadata flowing around the web. Aaron Swartz has an interesting program called ArchiverProxy which is complimentary to the AimAtSite tool I have been using lately. Currently both of these only capture an individual’s metadata. One day people like Aaron will get things working such that people can share their metadata with one another without even having to think about it. I found a discussion of the challenges of metadata. I agree wholeheartedly with the last paragraph.
And on a lighter note, the police are apparently not friendly enough with all of the Japanese tourists in town to see Ichiro. In a city where people stand in the rain rather than jaywalk, this jaywalking ticket got thrown out — that will teach the cop to mess with an angry little asian girl!
Today was my haircut. I started going to Gene Juarez at the Redmond Town Center because my wife does, and I needed a barber when my last barber moved to California. It’s kind of funny; apparently this place does tons of business in gift certificates, especially around holidays like Valentine’s day. Something to do with busy Microsoft employees buying last-minute gifts for their significant others. Even the phone number is easy for a softie to remember; Microsoft main switchboard is 882-8080, and Gene Juarez switchboard is 882-9000.