For those interested, the Ikarus is a two seater microlight aircraft with a maximum cruise speed of 194kph (120mph). See the Ikarus C42 wikipedia page for more details.

Go into about:config and set browser.cache.disk.enable to FALSE, then right-click and select NEW -> INTEGER and type browser.cache.memory.capacity and set to 100000 (for 100mb).

Now your memory is being used for the cache instead of your hard disk. If you have loads of memory (more the 2GBs) then you could set the cache figure to say 200mb or higher for even better performance.

I was thoroughly impressed with this regex. I’m not going to reiterate what other people have already explained. So instead I will place links to other blogs that explain this very cool regex primality test.

http://montreal.pm.org/tech/neil_kandalgaonkar.shtml

http://www.noulakaz.net/weblog/2007/03/18/a-regular-expression-to-check-for-prime-numbers/

http://zmievski.org/2010/08/the-prime-that-wasnt

Thanks to <a href=”http://rantsofageek.com/”>Theo</a> for sending me a link to this!

I’m a fan of difficult puzzles (ideally if there is a prize) to the point of sleep deprivation. Let me show you the Isis puzzle. It’s titanium, heavy and fits in your hand (but not if you have small hands, then you need two). It’s also nearly impossible to open. I’m not giving away any clues at all, we managed it and I’m looking forward to the next challenge.

I’m also a fan of LEGO and this year I was ecstatic to see I had the new LEGO NXT kit. I got bored of the default builds and chucked together this remote control arm in an evening. I’m hoping to improve it and bolt it onto a telepresence robot such as the Rovio.

The additional sensors such as the RFID sensor also look very interesting. I’ve been interested in cataloging everything in the house with RFID chips and then using multiple sensors to see if we can locate the items in 3d space. That way we would never lose anything :)

The other cool (some may say odd) present was my DNA results from 23andme. I’m not going into detail on the results but it was well worth the $206 and I think everyone should get this done ASAP.

So the internet and ecommerce is now broken?

Don’t panic – there is a fix – it just hasn’t been written yet. TLS 1.1 and TLS 1.2 exist which are not vulnerable to the exploit. However they are not supported by major browsers or web server distributions. I suspect this will rapidly change and support will appear in the next month or so. Also – the exploit is not public and I expect it will be kept a secret for as long as possible.

What to do?

For internet users: Make sure your browser, email client and operating system is bang up-to-date and apply updates immediately as they become available! If your preferred browser is slower than others in getting a fix then temporarily switch to one that does have the fix.

For website owners: If your using SSL at all e.g. ecommerce or email then get onto your hosts once a fix is released and make sure they are going to implement it ASAP. If they are not going to update then move to another host.

For web hosts: Keep your customers informed and hope a fix comes soon!!

I will try to update this post with info on browsers and server software as and when they begin to support TLS 1.1

Bitcasa think they can offer you unlimited storage for $10 per month. They achieve this magic by using deduplication which ensures that data is never deduplicated across any of their servers. So if I upload an mp3 and you upload the same mp3 it only exists once on their disk. Dedupe actually takes it further and breaks every file into chunks and makes sure each chunk is only saved to disk once so if we both have a document where the front two pages are the same – those two pages will only be saved to disk once and so on.

So dedupe is great – but I want to encrypt all my data before it goes onto some untrusted server(s) and so should you. Encrypted data though is rather random and doesn’t benefit at all from dedupe.

So bitcasa are using the following solution:

If you use something called Convergent Encryption – where you generate a key from the file you are encrypting. Then you can encrypt all your data with an individual encryption key for each file. To date this is as much info as they are willing to divulge. However this means you can only dedupe data on a per file basis, so my second example won’t work.

So the only possibility I can think of is that they are breaking files into chunks on the client and encrypting each chunk individually before uploading it to their servers. This will work great but does mean you need to remember an awful lot of encryption keys (millions or possibly billions depending on the chunk size). And this does mean you will need to use Bitcasa’s proprietary client. This means you won’t see any web based access and you won’t see many if any 3rd party applications for a long time.

However that last paragraph is pure speculation at this point :) I’ve signed up for the beta and hope to have more info soon!

The only fix I’ve found was to update to Ubuntu version 11.04.

An unresolvable problem occurred while calculating the upgrade:
Trying to install blacklisted version ‘blcr-dkms_0.8.2-13′

To fix, simply search for the package ‘blcr-dkms_0.8.2-13′ in package manager and mark for upgrade. Click apply and then try the system upgrade once again.

To fix you need to change $allowed sites to be an empty array.

e.g. $ALLOWED_SITES = array();

An example of what you may initially find:

$ALLOWED_SITES = array (
‘flickr.com’,
‘picasa.com’,
‘img.youtube.com’,
‘upload.wikimedia.org’,
‘photobucket.com’,
‘imgur.com’,
‘imageshack.us’,
‘tinypic.com’
);

If you have been affected then you need to clear out the infection on your server:

Search your wordpress directory for the base64_decode function and make sure you don’t have any odd looking long encoded strings anywhere.