“PKI-me-harder”

The saag list has a thread discussing “SHA-1 to SHA-n transition”, with all the expected bumps, wrinkles, and sad realities. But entertaining and thoughtful. My favorite comment at the moment is one of Peter Gutmann’s:

It looks like we’re nowhere near admitting that we have a
problem yet if the response to the failure of PKI is PKI-me-harder.

It’s a little like the problem of building a boat in your basement, and then seeing you can’t get it out. Is this a design issue, a deployment issue, or have we fundamentally misunderstood the project? (Once you add local zoning and construction regulations, it’s not long before you wish you’d never started this damn boat.)

Serious Interestingness

Barcinski & Jeanjean are an interactive design duo based in Amsterdam. Their main site/portfolio has one of the coolest user interfaces I’ve ever seen. (I really gotta get me some 3-D glasses)

They created a very cool visualization of photos on flickr having high “interestingness“.
It’s interesting, so don’t even look if you are facing any deadlines.
(note: both of these take some time to load, but it’s worth the wait.)

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry is hilarious, even although it’s hard to detect anything like a “joke” per se. And he’s all over this Internet stuff… His enthusiastic explanation of Twitter for the BBC is pretty funny, including the dangers of in-flight tweets, and the occasional lapses into “savage banality”.

He’s like a Python for the Internet age.

He has a great podcast, at least based on my having listened to the first episode. (“Busy man travels and breaks arm, feels both immediately and meta-miserable, describing both the pain and the relative unimportance of it, in a world going to hell in a hand basket”)

What do you call someone who, as he speaks, is having sex with language in his mind? Mr. Fry seems to be flirting with some internal thesaurus-self, making occasional asides to this invisible audience of one. This gives the narrative a lovely, wandering quality that is highly entertaining, particularly if you are someone who has (“struggles with”) a tangent-rich internal dialogue.

Recommended.