06.10.05

The end of MD5.

Posted in Cryptography at 10:32 am by Haris

Bruce Schneier, a security expert, talks about a new set of MD5 collisions generated by two researchers in Bochum. This renders MD5 not safe, i.e. completely useless. A very interesting read indeed.

For those of you who have never heard of MD5 before, a simple explanation is in order. Keep in mind that I am not a cryptography expert, and I am trying to understand these things myself. MD5 is what is known as a hash function. What it does effectively is, given a text, to produce a smaller text, consisting only of 128 characters, called the hash value, which can be computed very fast. The simplest way this can be used is to test if some huge download you just performed went ok. Some distributors offer the MD5 value of

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What I like about TextMate

Posted in Mac OS X at 9:36 am by Haris

TextMate has quickly become my left hand (I am left-handed). I could not possibly live without it right now. Here are some of the reasons:

• First and foremost, it is extremely stylish without sacrificing on performance abilities. This is an editor that was built with both a regular user and the programmer in mind. It has a very simple interface, without many bells and whistles, but do not let that deceive you, we are talking about a very powerful editor, almost paralleling vi and emacs in terms of power. On the other hand, it integrates

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