Tuesday, February 15, 2005

Nikon D2Hs. Pre-PMA 2005: Nikon has today announced an upgraded version of their high speed shooting D2H professional digital SLR. The new D2Hs features a range of improvements which have come out of the development of the D2X as well as specific improvements to the D2H design. Highlights; 8 frames per second shooting for up to 50 JPEG or 40 RAW images, 12 bit ASIC processing, WT-2 wireless support (802.11b/g, PTP/IP), improved AWB, 3D Matrix Metering II, higher resolution 'flicker free' LCD monitor, modified vertical... [Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)] Still no full-frame sensor. Well, I just recently bought a new F6, so I'm not in the market for a new Nikon body anyway. Maybe in another few years there will be a full-frame camera available. 10:31:49 PM    comment () SHA-1 Broken. SHA-1 has been broken. Not a reduced-round version. Not a simplified version. The real thing. The research team of Xiaoyun Wang, Yiqun Lisa Yin, and Hongbo Yu (mostly from Shandong University in China) have been quietly circulating a paper announcing their results: collisions in the the full SHA-1 in 2**69 hash operations, much less than the brute-force attack of 2**80 operations based on the hash length. collisions in SHA-0 in 2**39 operations. collisions in 58-round SHA-1 in 2**33 operations. This attack builds on previous attacks on SHA-0 and SHA-1, and is a major, major cryptanalytic result. This pretty much puts a bullet into SHA-1 as a hash function for digital signatures (although it doesn't affect applications such as HMAC). The paper isn't generally available yet. At this point I can't tell if the attack is real, but the paper looks good and this is a reputable research team. More details when I have them. [Schneier on Security] It looks like I'll be retiring my PGP keys that use SHA-1 instead of MD-5. 7:13:28 PM    comment () More 'Conservative' Free Speech. Steve and Virginia Pearcy, a couple in Sacremento, placed a large doll of a US soldier on their house and wrote "Bush Lied, I died." Over a quarter of World Net Daily readers believe that the couple should be arrested for treason because this "aids and abets the enemy." While I don't know exactly how representative these WND polls are in terms of the conservative grassroots, they usually get a few thousand responses (they have to be unique, as you sign in... [Antiwar.com Blog] The original article contains this quote from a neighbor, who comes across as slightly less insane than the Busheviks quoted on Antiwar.com: "I'm outraged," neighbor Marque Cohen told the Sacramento Bee. "We have our men and women in uniform that are dying to protect our rights and I think it's a disgrace that somebody would be allowed to hang a U.S. soldier in effigy in front of their house." Less insane, yet clearly lacking any sense of irony. 7:09:28 PM    comment () Some bad news about REALbasic 2005: according to the FAQ, REAL Software is abandoning the Mac OS for the IDE--although it will still compile for Mac, Windows, OS X, and Linux. Looks like I'll be switching to the Windows version, or else sticking with REALbasic 5.5. 6:02:40 PM    comment () California Wants GPS Tracking Device in Every Car. HTS Member writes "California has a new excuse for more taxes. Claiming losses due to fuel-efficient cars, such as Gasoline/Electric Hybrids, California is cooking-up a new system to punish people who aren't using enough gasoline. They want to tax commuters by the mile. How would this be accomplished? By requiring everyone to install a GPS device in their vehicle, and charge them their "taxes" every time they fuel-up. From the article: 'Drivers will get charged for how many miles they use the roads, and it's as simple as that.. [a] team at Oregon State University equipped a test car with a global positioning device to keep track of its mileage. Eventually, every car would need one.'" [Slashdot] Presumably we're not supposed to realize that the government could and would use this to track the exact movements of every car in California. 2:14:43 PM    comment () REALbasic 2005 to ship in next three months [The Macintosh News Network] That's good news. I haven't used REALbasic lately, thanks to a commandmant from my manager, but he's out of the picture now. I look forward to the new version. 10:31:39 AM    comment () Notes and Tips: Apple GUI. How ironic is it when Apple directs buyers of its priciest PowerBooks to control critical settings via cryptic Unix line commands? [MacInTouch] For those of us who remember (and still use) the Mac OS, it's more sad and depressing than ironic. OS X is so bad that cryptic Unix commands are necessary for tasks as simple as emptying the trash! 10:23:57 AM    comment () I Just Couldn't Have a Black Market in My Sector. This morning Rupert Murdoch's Neocon News Network (NNN)interviewed a U.S. Army captain who was wounded in Iraq, recovered, went back, and then wrote a book about his experience. His explanation of why he was wounded by a roadside bomb was... By Thomas DiLorenzo. [LewRockwell.com Blog] I trust the captain will receive an appropriate decoration for his heroic struggle against capitalism. 9:54:05 AM    comment () I just noticed an error in the Symantec announcement about the UPX parser vulnerability. The list of affected products includes our Mac products, which is incorrect. Not only does the vulnerability not affect any of Symantec's Mac products, it is impossible for it to affect them. This fact should be obvious to anyone with the slightest knowledge of the Macintosh after reading the description of the vulnerability. 9:21:20 AM    comment ()

© Copyright 2006 Ken Hagler. Last update: 2/15/2006; 2:04:35 PM.