artodeto's blog about coding, politics and the world

You are not a Software Engineer. You do not build skyscrapers. You do not build bridges.

You grow gardens.

You are a Software Gardener.

Do you try to plan your gardens in such detail that you know where each leaf will be positioned before you plant a single seed? Do people expect estimates (or are they promises in your organisation?) on exactly how many flowers will have bloomed in one years time? Do you have a bonus tied to that? Things that would be perfectly reasonable to plan for a skyscraper seem a little ridiculous when you are talking about a garden
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Nice to read and true story at the end. You don't like it? What about the fact that a garden is a complex organism with so many forms of living in it?

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Despite Mexico’s reputation for horrendous, Slim-driven telecom service and policy, it’s far from the only country that struggles with providing rural cell phone access. According to the GSM (for Global System for Mobile Communications, the standard technology behind a 2G network) Association, a consortium of commercial mobile providers from all over the world, 1.6 billion people in rural parts of developing countries don’t have access to mobile networks. That’s why Bloom and his collaborators at Rhizomatica say that if you really want to make the benefits of cell phones available to the people who need them most, it’s not enough to democratize the hardware by making the phones themselves super cheap. You have to democratize the infrastructure, the network itself. And that’s a lot harder to do.
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I have no idea how much I have to honor the people around rhizomatica. They are doing things right and making the world better. In germany, we only have problems bring the internet to the people (and with internet, I mean something with higher bandwith) and even this is not an easy task (special thanks to the politics and the nearby telecom monopol). The good part about our internet problem, the hardware is there. To build up a mobile phone network (that is stable and scalls well) is something different.
Super cool that I was able to read that article. Faith in humanity restored, you know :-).

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At this conference, activists Gustav Nipe and Elin Andersson set up a honeypot open wi-fi, and labeled it “Open Guest”. About a hundred of the worst surveillance hawks used the honeypot access point during the conference. The activists were logging all so-called “metadata”: which servers were contacted and how. They present their findings in an op-ed in Swedish.
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They also note that the people who are responsible for the very security of the country happily use open and unencrypted wi-fi to fetch governmental correspondence, and draw some conclusions from that:
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Always "good" to know how well trained the people about a topic or technology are, that are know as "the rule makers" :-(.
Nevertheless, high five for this hack.

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Laut Bernstein ist die übliche Reaktion auf derartige Fehler, den Programmierern die Schuld zu geben. Vertritt man aber die Ansicht von Rivest, ist das falsch: Vielmehr ist die Schuld Bernstein zufolge ein kryptographischer Standard, durch den Programmierern leicht solche Fehler unterlaufen. Für DSA und ECDSA gibt es inzwischen - fast 20 Jahre später - mit RFC 6979 einen Standard, der für das k keinen Zufallswert, sondern einen aus der Nachricht und dem öffentlichen Schlüssel berechneten Wert verwendet. Damit ist gewährleistet, dass bei unterschiedlichen Eingaben sich der k-Wert nie wiederholt. Auch der von Bernstein mitentwickelte Signaturalgorithmus Ed25519 verwendet ein derartiges Konzept zur Vermeidung des Zufallszahlenproblems.
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Quelle

Ich kann die Aussage von Herrn Bernstein voll und ganz unterschreiben, ist mir doch in letzter Zeit selbst bewusst geworden, dass Software mit tausende Optionen jeden überfordert. Der Hinweis auf die Unix Philosophie ist hier durchaus angebracht.
Und ganz ehrlich muss man sich als Informatiker immer eingestehen, und hier zitiere ich meinen Physikprofessor nur all zu gern, "die wahren Künstler, sind und bleiben die Mathematiker, die lösen die Probleme, die wir gefunden haben".