My personal joke -- at least I hope it's a joke -- is that he's going to break every NIST hash submission without ever seeing any of them.

More later. (I'm sorry, but I missed the name of his student/co-author for this work.)

EDITED TO ADD (8/19): Okay, he thinks that AES is immune to this attack -- the degree of the algebraic polynomial is too high -- and all the blog ciphers we use have a higher degree. But, in general, anything that can be described with a low-degree polynomial equation is vulnerable: that's pretty much every LFSR scheme.

That's ASCII, not hex: An article on wardriving raises security hackles by repeating some slightly overheated statements about Wi-Fi security. The article opens with a 63-character ASCII WPA passphrase, which is later described as "hex." (ASCII passphrases in WPA can be up to 63 "printable" characters - ASCII 32 to 127 - while a hex version of a 256-bit TKIP or AES password is 64 hexadecimal digits long.) The article tries to conflate Wi-Fi attacks that led to the largest set of breaches in retail credit-card systems and wardriving, a hobbyist activity that's never been looked on very favorably by law enforcement. The sense of ennui of wardriving pioneers is pretty clear; when Wi-Fi is everywhere and generally secured, it's far less interesting. The wardriver in the article convinced the reporter that a maximum-length WPA passphrase stored on a USB drive for automatic use was the best way to go. But, really, 20 characters containing letters and punctuation and no words found in a dictionary along with changing your network's SSID (network name) provides all the security you'll ever need for a home or small business. (If you need more, deploy WPA/WPA2 Personal.)

Green Wi-Fi's Senegal efforts hit snags: The folks at Green Wi-Fi are well motivated, and they're running up against all forms of security theater and bureaucracy both here and in Senegal, where they have an active project. The San Francisco Chronicle notes the group's effort to build solar-powered, self-sustaining Internet access via mesh networked nodes. Getting devices out of the country, clearing customs in Senegal, and hooking up their solar system all hit problems they're working through. As with the One Laptop Per Child program, I see a "build it and they will come" mentality in Green Wi-Fi's mission statement: the notion that providing computing power and Internet access will result in good things, rather than an effort to figure out what good things need to be achieved, and whether computers and the Internet will assist.

the balaclava "could be used to conceal someone's identity or could be used in the course of a criminal act".

Don't they realize that balaclavas are for sale everywhere in the UK? Or that scarves, hoods, handkerchiefs, and dark glasses could also be used to conceal someone's identity?

The game sounds like it could be fun, though:

Each player starts as an empire filled with good intentions and a determination to liberate the world from terrorists and from each other.

Then the reality of world politics kicks and terrorist states emerge.

Andrew said: "The terrorists can win and quite often do and it's global anarchy. It sums up the randomness of geo-politics pretty well."

In their cardboard version of realpolitik George Bush's "Axis of Evil" is reduced to a spinner in the middle of the board, which determines which player is designated a terrorist state.

That person then has to wear a balaclava (included in the box set) with the word "Evil" stitched on to it.

Buy yours here; I first blogged about it in 2006.

I’d like to give everyone the benefit of the doubt here; perhaps Dell was using it in a much narrower sense. Perhaps the term has really only been used more commonly since the time Dell first applied for the trademark back in March 2007 and now. BUT…

- Dell’s definition is quite broad and certainly not Dell-specific. “The design of computer hardware for use in datacenters and mega-scale computing environments for others; customization of computer hardware for use in data centers and mega-scale computing environments for others; design and development of networks for use in data centers and mega-scale computing environments for others.” Strike One.

- And according to the Wall Street Journal’s research, “cloud computing” has been in regular use since 2001. Strike Two.

So now the “case” has been returned to examination and hopefully the PTO will follow up on everyone else’s research on this and decide that yes, cloud computing is one of those broad, ubiquitous terms that should NOT be trademarked by a single company.