MD5 security: great blog entry

Sebastien has posted his thoughts on the MD5 vulnerability. Check it out!

Robert Cringely

I always find Robert Cringely engaging on his articles, and his last installment follows this tradition. Some would say its nothing short of insanely great.

Anyways, a couple of thoughts:

• 50,000 or so geeks over at Microsoft spend some portion of their time thinking `How can we defeat/block Linux' and they come up with some pretty crazy ideas. In this installment Robert makes the point about the new USB system, but this is just one angle.

  It is clear from Chris Anderson's last post that it is an ongoing strategy to come up with schemes that will lock Linux out (even if they are highly inadequate for the world where scams are the rule of the day).

  Avalon's feature set is one of these creative things they come up with. I am convinced that they see Avalon as the tool that will replace the Web (the marketing folks will step in and claim that they `augment the user experience').

• The software industry like no other one has a tremendous flexibility to create completely new models and abstractions, roll out prototypes and such.

  Maybe we are reaching a point where we need government regulations on the software industry or in some of its components. An explicit acknowledgment of Linux and open source players as an important player in consumer choice.

  Ah, not only had I suggested that when Slashdot posts a link to the MS lobbying efforts.

Speaking of augmenting the user experience. It is clear that plenty of work can be done today to augment the user experience of the web: GMail and Google Local services is leading the pack in smooth user interfaces. Everyone is raving about the keyboard navigation, the clean look and the good interaction of GMail, while am delighted to see the clever hacks to explore maps without doing page reloads.

And finally there is A9 who also sports a great user interface on the Web.

Firefox reaches one million downloads

Firefox reached one million downloads ahead of schedule. Congratulations to the Mozilla hackers!

Java APIs too academic

Someone else also thinks that Java APIs got too academic: here