Results tagged “internet-explorer”

Pre-orders for Windows 7 went up yesterday. If you expect to upgrade an XP or Vista computer anytime in the next year, pre-order Windows 7 before July 11 to save half off retail. Home Premium (super-duper edition?) is only $50.

Mac and Linux remain my environments of choice for real work, but Windows 7 does look promising. I definitely expect to upgrade my gaming rig at some point, and $50 feels right for a Windows upgrade.

In other news, I'm having too much fun with my iPhone to write about it. More later...

This news is a couple weeks old, but I wanted to mention it anyway. Several years ago I mentioned a flaw in MD5. Seeking a proof of concept, a team of researchers successfully forged a CA certificate that could sign any certificate they desired. The resulting certificate would be implicitly trusted by all major web browsers. The team presented their results at the 25th Chaos Communication Congress last month in Berlin.

I wanted to briefly describe their ingenious technique but gave up after realizing how many prerequisite concepts I'd need to introduce. Read their excellent paper if you're interested in the details. The team used a farm of PlayStation 3 consoles to compute a CA certificate that collided with a carefully crafted certificate issued by RapidSSL.

There's no immediate risk to users. This development is primarily a wakeup call to certificate authorities to stop relying on MD5 immediately. MD5 is broken.

I just ran into a fascinating and insightful discussion about web applications and the future of computing. The article includes lots of good dialog and many links to other related articles. My favorite is an article written by Joel Spolsky earlier this month: How Microsoft Lost the API War. His article touches on such diverse topics as backwards compatibility in the Windows API, the sudden stall in Internet Explorer development a few years back, the .NET framework, Microsoft's "bad bets" in the upcoming Longhorn, and the decline in rich clients. Enjoy!