Despite the title of this post, there is no complex interconnection between these various stories. (… or is there?)
First, there was the announcement about the government’s continued increased funding of the CBC (not “continuning to increase”, just “continuing the last increase”) that Tod Maffin blogged about. (As a CBC employee, you can imagine that Tod is particularly interested.) I’m glad the funding continues, and I am just as disappointed as the CBC folk that it wasn’t made permanent. If I were The King Of Canada I would at least quadruple CBC funding, and set up systems designed to insulate the editorial staff as much as possible from political manipulation. I am intensely proud of what the CBC manages to do on the limited budget we give them now, and I have no doubt they could do even more with more resources. I’m particularly excited to see what they do int he podcasting sphere, something that Tod is very involved with.
Secondly, speaking of the podcasting world and public radio, be sure to check out PublicRadioFeeds.com, a directory of podcasts of public radio content that Tod maintains. You know I love to get content to fill my MP3 player for car-listening, and there are lots of good sources on the directory, which is growing pretty quickly.
For something completely different, I want to point quickly to the breaking of SHA-1, which was announced at the same time the RSA Conference was running. I bet there was a lot of buzz among the cryptofolk about that, especially among the people with a little knowledge. There’s no practical attack yet–although it’s not hard to envision a case where a message from a bank (or PayPal) is replace with an altered message that contains a bunch of hidden HTML (the exact HTML required to make the message generate the same hash as the original), but this kind of break signals the time to get out–before the practical attack becomes relatively easy. Fortunately we have SHA-256 or SHA-512 (PDF for those algorithms) to move to, which are actually substantially different algorithims from the SHA-1, not just different bit lengths.
And on yet another completely different note, hop over to Wired to check out this story on some vampire medicine. My comment on a story like this would be something along the lines of “this is a science fiction story waiting to happen”, but I think the “class hierarchy arises over access to fresh blood for medical reasons” territory was already pretty much covered in a Philip Kerr science fiction thriller.
Blood won’t be an issue for Hunter S. Thompson’s remains (how was that for a sequitor, huh? Huh?) since he apparently wants his ashes to be fired out of a cannon. I love that they are actually going to do it. It certainly seems a lot more interesting than my whole “bury my ashes under a blackthorn bush on my property” thing.
Fans of Bloom County may be interested in some bootleg MP3s that have appeared on the web People who aren’t into Breathed definitely won’t care. (For the record I would buy a monster Bloom County collection, just like I plan to buy the monster Calvin and Hobbes collection.)
Finally, while we’re talking about music, I’ll have to add a link to what must surely be Gwenda Bond‘s favourite band
