EVOL.reverse

Mathematicians at UCLA have discovered a 13 million-digit prime number, a long-sought milestone that makes them eligible for a $100,000 prize given out by the EFF.

The group found the 46th known Mersenne prime last month on a network of 75 computers running Windows XP. The number was then verified by a different computer system.

What is the importance of finding a new prime number?

Finding new Mersenne primes is not likely to be of any immediate practical value. This search is primarily a recreational pursuit. However, the search for Mersenne primes has proved useful in development of new algorithms, testing computer hardware, and interesting young students in math.

Does this affect RSA cryptography?

The security of the RSA algorithm is founded on the mathematical difficulty of finding two prime factors of a very large number. Essentially, a RSA public key is the product of two randomly selected large prime numbers, and the secret key is the two primes themselves. This algorithm is secure because of the great mathematical difficulty of finding the two prime factors of a large number, and of finding the private key from the public key. This is difficult because the only known method of finding the two prime factors of a large number is to check all the possibilities one by one, which isn’t practical because there are so many prime numbers. This means the discovery of a new prime number doesn’t affect the security of RSA. The promised development of quantum computers over the next several decades that can effectively perform many calculations simultaneously may be able to break the RSA algorithm relatively quickly.

Why does the EFF pay $100,000 for this finding?

The foundation supports individual rights on the Internet and set up the prime number prize to promote cooperative computing using the Web.

Now you can finally spy on what your neighbour is working..

http://www.mikrokopter.com/ucwiki/en/MikroKopter

• Learning: You learn a lot by working on the system and working with some bright developers.
• Fun: It’s rewarding when you can get something done in such a project, it takes skills and organization on your part.
• Travelling: You get to travel to conferences and hackatons to hack and meet with the other developers, that’s nice as well.
• Doing it the right way: Sometimes work doesn’t permit things to be done the right way by one reason or the other. In such projects you have time to study things and really get them done right.
• You get a lot of exposure but is it something you really want?

• I guess you shouldn’t be involved in the development of something unless you are very interested in knowing how it works and you want to hack on it and make it better.
• You shouldn’t be involved in the development of something unless you’re a savy user of the software.

code_swarm, is an interesting experience consisting of a series of videos about the development of open-source software. Using dacing light, rings of color, and snappy music, it shows the history of commits in software projects like Python, Eclipse, etc.

Every now and then, and sometimes more often than not, you are asked to do something at work that you don’t particularly like. Or maybe you don’t feel you should be doing it, or maybe you don’t know how to do it, etc.

What kind of person are you? How do you react to this kind of situation and how is the best way to deal with it? Are you able to workaround your thoughts and emotions and get the work done or do you talk with your boss about it?

Whatever you do, you’re not alone. Thousands of people face the same thing every day.

What would you do if it was your own company and a worker approached you saying he doesn’t really feel motivated enough to carry out a task he was assigned?

Well, at least for one day, smile at the task and do the work as if it was the best thing that could have happened to you. You will see there is nothing this technique will subtract from you. It will only add. And if this doesn’t work forget about me and my technique

Of course I’m saying this for myself only. Take only what you feel like taking. But one thing is for sure, stupid work is periodical.

‘Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing – it didn’t have to do whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with.’ - Richard Feynman

‘Be inspired, enjoy your job, keep learning and never forget to play.’ – gskinner

Why not be great? [..] Many people will have to answer that question by saying, “I spent my time waiting, whining, worrying, and wishing.” Because that’s what seems to be going around these days. Fortunately, though, not everyone will have to confess to having made such a bad choice. - Seth Godin

“We’re building a badass team. Honestly, we’re bringing together the best developers, no question about it.” - dougmccune

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

I was happy to know my team finished 9th in the DA-Op3n CTF contest. It’s not on the top three but there were some nice teams out there

I think the contest was very well organized. We had a status page to check how teams were doing in keeping their services up. We had a script to report vulnerabilities in the services and a public list of advisories reported. Besides this we had graphs in nearly real-time displaying the number of captured flags per service or the current team ranking. Some of the undiscovered holes are now documented.

These graphs are plotted against data present in a database which is fed by the scoring bot, which periodically checks all services and awards points to the teams if their services run or if they cracked another team’s services.

Graph

SciSys acquired last year VCS by paying €16.64 million. Today I got to meet Prof. Dr. Klaus-G. Meng, the company’s single founder, that started VCS in 1981.

He told the initial history of VCS, how he started the company, etc. Basically he knew how to receive a signal from satellites and designed a receiver that was capable of monitoring the signal. Back then this was great technology. The European Space Agency was using paper prints that came out every X number of minutes so going to a system where they had live feedback of the signal on a TV was considered something very useful. His first client was precisely the Agency but soon after Lufthansa and other big companies were interested as well.

The first thing I asked was: wasn’t this easy enough to be done by other companies? Did you had strong competition? He said no because it was a niche market. The bigger companies were interested in bigger markets like medicine, etc.

He ended up doing a tour with us through the office, which was brilliant! The building used to be an abandoned school and maybe that’s why it is so functional inside. There are rooms for 1, 2 or 3 persons instead of an open-space, which reminded me more of a university environment than a software company.

It’s funny to see people using these really old tools (IDEs, compilers, etc.) and not miss anything..

Well, I miss Eclipse with the memory profiler, the debugger, the Ctrl-Click go to function, the Ctrl-space auto-complete, the integrated documentation, etc.