Shostack + Friends Blog Archive

 

Colossus, Anon Blogging, and International Blogging

  • In PGP’s CTO Corner, Jon Callas draws attention to the second world war Colossus computer:

    The Colossus Rebuild Project took 10 years and 6,000 hours of effort. The resulting machine is not a replica of a Colossus, but an actual Colossus that uses some of the actual parts. The team finished a Mark II Colossus in time for the 60th anniversary of the completion of the first Mk II Colossus. They even built it in the very place that Colossus #9 was built, on the same concrete pad.

    So how fast is Colossus? Colossus is fast. It decrypts at 5,000 characters per second…If you wanted to program a modern computer to do what Colossus does, you’d need a 2GHz Pentium to match it. Not bad for a machine made out of 2,500 vacuum tubes, eh?

    And the rebuilt machine may be destroyed.

  • Curt Hopkins has Questions for Bloggers in Focus Areas, who need privacy help.
  • Rebecca MacKinnnon points to World Blog Day 2005, and encourages folks to point cross-culturally.

    In one long moment on August 31st, bloggers from all over the world will post a recommendation of 5 new Blogs, Preferably, Blogs different from their own culture, point of view and attitude. On this day, blog surfers will find themselves leaping and discovering new, unknown Blogs, celebrating the discovery of new people and new bloggers.