Zaemis

We’re told that it will take powerful quantum computers to break RSA encryption, so for now the world is safe. But I wondered, in an era of increasingly sophisticated models, might AI pose a threat? These systems excel at finding patterns in data that humans miss, and if there were any subtle weaknesses in key generation, I would think AI could detect them. Yes, theory says it’s all but impossible to break RSA because it relies on the computational hardness of factoring large prime numbers. But theory and practice don’t always align, and sometimes the most interesting discoveries come from testing our assumptions. So I set up an experiment to test whether a transformer model could learn to reverse-engineer SSH private keys from their corresponding public keys. Experiment and Results I trained a T5-small transformer model (60 million parameters) on a dataset of 50,000 SSH key pairs, split into 70% training, 15% validation, and 15% test. Given a public key as input, the model was as...

Writing can be a fun and rewarding way to share your knowledge, experience, and opinions with others. Unfortunately, it can also be intimidating or frustrating for some people. When I was managing editor for SitePoint's PHPMaster property, I prepared a guide to help alleviate some of the frustration and self-doubt that new writers (and even experienced writers) might experience. The guide wasn't something commissioned by SitePoint; I wrote it on my own for my authors. And though it's been about eight months since PHPMaster was absorbed into the main SitePoint site and I stepped down as managing editor, people continue to ask me about it. So, I've decided to make the guide publicly available. The New Writers Guide offers advice for finding inspiration, structuring an article's content, growing one's self-confidence, and overcoming other challenges that programming writers may face. Hopefully it'll continue to help people write awesome articles and realiz...

Happy belated International Change-Your-Password Week! Earlier this month, thanks to the generous sponsorship by the great folks at Adobe , people all around the world were changing their passwords and tech blogs were parroting guidelines for choosing a strong password. But let’s be honest – passwords are a hassle. And, as Adobe was so kind to remind us, even the strongest unique password can be an open door if the company storing it isn’t doing so competently. As someone who is a programmer, I’m aware of several technical solutions to our password woes. As someone who suffers from cynical realism, I believe the barrier to adopting these solutions to be red-tape and human nature (ego and laziness). There’s no reason for every website to require their own login credentials when OpenID and OAuth exist. Perhaps we should increase liability for password storers and provide incentives to the crackers who hack them. A smart company would migrate to an SSO-provider to mitigate their responsi...

A few weekends ago I traveled down to Richmond, Virginia, for Urba Semajnfino 2 . It was my first Esperanto gathering, and it was a great opportunity both for a vacation and a chance to use Esperanto as a real language as opposed to just a study hobby. Afterwards, In the midst of the post-vacation blues that followed my return, I found myself thinking about the future of Esperanto, PHP, and Ruby. I've said before that Java is the new COBOL -- a lot of legacy code has been written in Java and still needs to be maintained, but "fresher" languages are increasingly considered when it comes time for new development. We've witnessed the increasing acceptance of PHP in enterprise environments which were predominantly steeped in Java in only a few years ago. And now that PHP is a mature, "grown up" programming language, I admit it's a little less fun to program with as it used to be. PHP is the new Java, and in 10-years time it may be the new new COBOL. A n...

Tradukita de Please God, Give Me Something New! . Koran dankon al Jon Z kaj 黄鸡蛋/Ĉitano pro ilia kontrolado. “Jen... rigardu ĉi tiun <ligilon>. Tamen, vi devas uzi la plej freŝan version de Chrome.” Aĉ! Ĉu ni ne jam spertis tion? 15 jaroj pasis, kaj nun ni reiras rekte al la sama loko, kie ni ekiris… “Plej bone aspekta pere de .” Estas vera domaĝo. Ne miskomprenu min. Jaroj da laboro por normigi HTML, JavaScript, la DOM, CSS, ktp klarigis multajn malklaraĵojn, kaj tio ja estis necesa. Sed striktaj reguloj ankaŭ sufokas kreadon. Ĉar HTML5 kaj ĝiaj amikoj forigis kelkajn el la limigoj, la pendolo svingiĝi antaŭen. Homoj ekkreas denove. Sed, nun kontraŭas Firefox kaj Chrome anstataŭ Internet Explorer kaj Netscape. Tamen, estas sistema problemo preter la “foliumiloj militoj.” Ĉu vi memoras AOL? Facebook nun klopodas esti “La Interreto.” Ĉu vi memoras komputilegojn kaj verd-ekrajnojn? Ni puŝis ĉion al la komputila labortablo, kaj nun puŝas ĉion reen “al La Nubo.” Ĉiuj el la kvara k...

"Here... check out this (link). But you have to use the most recent version of Chrome." Sigh. Haven't we been through this already? 15 years have passed and we're headed right back to the same place we started... "Best viewed in <someone's favorite browser>." It's sad, really. Don't get me wrong. Years of standardization work on HTML, JavaScript, the DOM, CSS, etc. cleaned up a lot of messy lose ends and yes it was indeed necessary, but stringent standardization also stifles creativity. And now that HTML5 and friends have loosened some of the restrictions the pendulum has started to swing back in the opposite direction. People have started to innovate again. This time around it's Firefox vs Chrome instead of Internet Explorer vs Netscape. There's a systemic problem that goes beyond browser wars, however. Remember AOL? This time it's Facebook trying to be “The Internet.” Remember mainframes and terminals? After pushing everyt...

I didn't intend to write another blog entry so close to the conclusion of my Week with Go series, but my experiences earlier today definitely warranted a rant. Installing the SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine for use as a stand-alone interpreter on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS doesn't sound like outlandish goal. After all, CouchDB ships by default as of 9.10 and it requires a JavaScript run-time. Technologies like node.js and v8 are pretty hot right now so there might even be a few alternatives to choose from, right? WRONG! sudo apt-get install spidermonkey-bin E: Couldn't find package spidermonkey-bin There used to be such a package but apparently SpiderMonkey is "unsupported" now and was removed from the Universe repository. Sorry Ubuntu. I'm not feeling the love for Rhino. It doesn't do JIT and runs slower than a one-legged sloth. Besides, I don't feel like installing ca-certificates-java , default-jre-headless , icedtea-6-jre-cacao , java-common , libavahi-...

A coworker stumbled across Gartner's top 10 technologies for 2011 and decided to share it with everyone in the office via email. Overlooking the need for a cluebat , and resisting the urge to similarly spam everyone with The Oatmeal's take on email etiquette , I think Gartner missed the mark on some things. Let's be honest for a moment. Cloud computing has been hyped since '08 when Eucalyptus and Amazon's EC2 Services came out. Social media has been on the radar since since blogs became popular (though admittedly Twitter and Facebook upped the ante). Mobile computing has been slowly making inroads but I think it's still too soon to claim "The PC era is over." All the technologies have been around for years in one form or another; they just happen to be "hot" right now... and by the time someone starts touting them they've probably peaked. In the next 12 months I predict there'll be a lot of potential for things like IPv4/6 netw...

There once was an app called Subversion Who's working was utter perversion; Whether a check in or check out, I'm always in doubt If it's preserving my coding excursion.

My sister's boyfriend showed me a nifty chart which presents the size of by distance from a television before your eyes begin to notice the difference of 1080p resolution. Just out of curiosity, we measured the length of my living room and looked at the chart to see how large of a television I would need. The distance between my couch and television is a bit shy of 20ft... off the chart! The chart goes up to 130 inches, or approximately 11 feet. But an 11 ft diagonal measurement doesn't really mean anything to me other than "big ass TV"*, so I decided to dig out my high school math skills to help me put it into perspective. Assuming a standard 16:9 wide screen display and some liberal number rounding: I would need a television that's almost 6 ft tall, and 10 ft wide if I wanted to see Jay Leno's crow's-feet in high definition! I only have 8 ft ceilings so that gives 2 ft of clearance above it, and the room is 16 ft wide so I'd have 3 ft of clearance ...

Happy New Year! I hope everyone has had a rewarding holiday and will have a prosperous new year! Last year I tentatively designated 2009 as my "Year of Balance." I wanted to make a concerted effort to focus more on what's really important in life. With a busy full-time job, a death in the family, juggling several side-projects, and buying a house this year (2009 was probably my "Year of Expense" in retrospect with the new house and all the joys that come with home ownership)... my head would probably have exploded had I not been making that effort. I'm not sure what my theme for 2010 will be, but I'll still be doing my best live, laugh, and love as much as I can and I hope you will be to!

I've been tagged by Chris Cornutt and Jeff Jones to share some things you probably don't know about me. (It's nice to see chain mails flow through the blogosphere too, eh?) So, here's seven little-known facts about yours truly... My first career choice was to be a diocesan priest, and I briefly attended Seminary after I graduated from high school. My family isn't overly religious, and my parents didn't push me to go; I think I just like to help people and felt drawn to the rich history of the Roman Catholic Church. Life has a funny way of playing out differently than we intend for it, doesn't it? After I left seminary, I attended a state university and majored in elementary education with a concentration in music history and literature. I'm not overly fond of children, though, so I didn't complete the program. I would only need to take two more classes to be a state-certified elementary teacher. I studied French for 5 years in high school...

I've never been one to make New Year's resolutions. If I really want to change something about myself or my life, why what until January 1st to set goals for myself? It doesn't matter to me if it's January 1st, April 15th, July 4th, or December 26th... I just set goals and go for them! Instead, I prefer to choose an over-reaching theme for the year. This suits me better because there's no success or failure benchmarks to meet; it's something I keep in mind to help guide me as I tackle the challenges and opportunities that come my way. 2006 was my "Year of Adventure." 2007 was my "Year of Change." 2008 was my "Year of Success." What will 2009 be? I've chosen to designate 2009 as a "Year of Balance" for myself. Like everyone, there's good things and bad things in my life; putting the balance back into my life again will empower me to better appreciate the good and deal with the bad more productively. So, it was ver...