How the NSA (may have) put a backdoor in RSA’s cryptography: A technical primer
An excellent description of how the Dual_EC_DRBG backdoor works
(tags: surveillance tech dual_ec_drbg nsa rsa security backdoors via:jgc elliptic-curves)
Who Made That Nigerian Scam? – NYTimes.com
The history behind the 419 advance-fee fraud scam.
According to Robert Whitaker, a historian at the University of Texas, an earlier version of the con, known as the Spanish Swindle or the Spanish Prisoner trick, plagued Britain throughout the 19th century.
True facts about Ocean Radiation and the Fukushima Disaster
solid science
(tags: fukushima japan radiation risk ocean disasters sieverts contamination sea fish science)
Packet Flight: Facebook News Feed @8X
good dataviz of a HTTP page load: ‘this is a visualization of a Facebook News Feed load from the perspective of the client, over a 3G wireless connection. Different packet types have different shapes and colors.’ (via John Harrington)
(tags: via:johnharrington visualization facebook dataviz networking tcp 3g)
URGENT: Input needed on EU copyright consultation – Boing Boing
The EC is looking for feedback — but not much, and pretty sharpish.
Go to www.copywrongs.eu and answer the questions which are important to you. You do not have to answer all the questions, only the ones that matter to you. […] The deadline is 5 February 2014. Until then, we should provide the European Commission with as many responses as possible!
Peter Norvig writes a program to play regex golf with arbitrary lists
In response to XKCD 1313. This is excellent. It’s reminiscent of my SpamAssassin SOUGHT-ruleset regexp-discovery algorithm, described in http://taint.org/2007/03/05/134447a.html , albeit without the BLAST step intended to maximise pattern length and minimise false positives
(tags: python regex xkcd blast rule-discovery spamassassin rules regexps regular-expressions algorithms peter-norvig)