Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Thursday, September 9, 2004

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How to Cheat at Chess: A Security Analysis of the Internet Chess Club: "The Internet Chess Club (ICC) is a popular online chess server with more than 30,000 members worldwide including various celebrities and the best chess players in the world. Although the ICC website assures its users that the security protocol used between client and server provides sufficient security for sensitive information to be transmitted (such as credit card numbers), we show this is not true." [via Slashdot]

A colleague said that internet chess is the first useful application for the net. But now it seems that chess is popular with cheaters also.

Killing unnecessary IT projects -- Comment()
I have been thinking about unnecessary and failing IT projects in enterprises: CRM, document management etc. (See my recent net column in Finnish, Teknopuuhastelu näivettää yrityksiä.)

These thoughts were inspired partly by the recent announcement on Ford killing 'Everest' procurement software system: "[Ford Motor] pulled the plug on a system built around Oracle's 11i E-Business Suite."

Shy Perelman impresses with math breaktrough -- Comment()
Ssp commented the math breakthrough:

That's more like last year's news. Not that people have verified Perelman's work yet, but talk about started a while ago. In fact it seems like he can proven the even stronger 'geometrisation conjecture' which implies the famous Poincaré conjecture. I also like Yahoo's way of converting dollars to pounds. I hope they'll give me a similar rate.
Perelman put the initial piece of work on the web in late 2002 (link). I think there started being rumours in the following spring [...] People were rather positive all the way through. I even saw a printed book introducing Ricci flows (the technique Perelman uses) explicitly referring to the papers recently.
I also saw another report on the topic on a German news site today. I wonder why this is suddenly 'news' again. Who gets to decide that?

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Switch from PC to Mac OS X saved NASA hundreds of hours per year: "Frequent system crashes made long-term tests difficult. When tests were completed, it took scientists several hours to gather the relevant data from each of the applications. [...] Since implementation in fall 2003, the system has proved to be very stable and has saved NASA scientists hundreds of hours per year."