Raw Matter

Congratulations to Werner Koch & Co: GnuPG, one of the most widely used pieces of crypto software, has just turned 10. If you like good infotainment, the birthday announcement reviews the last 10 years with facts and also some fun trivia.

Specifically, Wifi. Connecting an ipw2200 to a rt2400 in ad hoc mode turns out to only work with 40 bit WEP or unencrypted, and then only with bit rates that remind me of analog modems (as I write this over an assh connection, the cursor lags several characters. Nominally, the connection is 11Mbps, but as soon as there's a bit of traffic, it drops to 5.5Mbps, and the actual data transferred is always at the 4kBps level. Hmm. Fun, now the WiFi suddenly decided to drop to 2Mbps, and it seems that I actually have 2Mbps, so probably I should hardwire it at this setting.

Of course I didn't expect the rt2400 to magically acquire WPA capabilities, but I'd at least expect the specified stuff to work... This is not bleeding edge hardware, after all, so even the Linux drivers should have had time to mature. (OTOH WEP is b0rken regardless of the bit strength, so I should replace that rt2400 stuff anyway.)

So much for KDE 4 ... after a lengty downgrade and package picking session (Yay! for dependency handling in Debian!) I'm now back to the trusted KDE 3.5.x (mostly x == 8) and will wait until KDE4 hits testing (which would be after lenny, I guess.) KDE 4 sort of worked - but I'd not call this “beta” at this stage, and apparently the KDE people joined the use-as-much-screen-surface-as-possible-for-funky-stuff crowd, leaving less space for actual application content than before. I hope the final versions can at least be configured to be smaller.

I hoped the Live CD would be somewhat more complete than what's currently in experimental, but unfortunately, KDE wouldn't even start for me :-/ (Admittedly, I didn't fool around with it very long, so maybe it might have worked with some magic word.

The Handbook of Applied Cryptography (Menezes, Oorschot, Vanstone; 2001) is now available as a free (as in beer) download. It's from 2001, so it wouldn't include all the latest stuff like MD5 being broken and SHA1 being slowly weakened, also estimates on how long a computer takes to break DES will be seriously outdated, but the fundamentals haven't changed. I haven't had the chance to read it yet, but I guess now's the time to close that gap.