Wandering Thoughts archives

Link: Peter Gutmann on PKI

Everything you never wanted to know about PKI but were forced to find out [PDF] by Peter Gutmann is a set of slides about just that: a pile of the warts and issues with PKI in general and the SSL model in specific. If you're interested in the whole field, his home page has links to enough additional papers to keep you reading for some time.

(From Chris Samuel, and that in turn from Russell Coker.)

Link: Threads Cannot be Implemented as a Library

I've already linked to this in passing, but I'm going to rerun it as an explicit link. Threads Cannot be Implemented as a Library by Hans Boehm makes the argument in its title:

We provide specific arguments that a pure library approach, in which the compiler is designed independently of threading issues, cannot guarantee correctness of the resulting code.

There is also a discussion of this paper at Lambda the Ultimate that may be interesting reading. On a quick skim of the LtU discussion thread, this Usenet article jumps out as a useful summary of the entire volatile and multiprocessor programming issue, ending up with the conclusion that using volatile is both unnecessary and harmful in shared-state concurrent programming.

Link: OpenBSD spamd

OpenBSD spamd - greylisting and beyond is a presentation by Bob Beck of the University of Alberta about the OpenBSD's spamd system, how spammers react to it and similar systems, how you can exploit this, and the University of Alberta's experiences with spamd, complete with interesting numbers. I'm sadly jealous, as local feelings insure that I'm not going to get to deploy this sort of technology any time soon.

(Also from Richard Johnson of river.com.)

Link: varnish, a HTTP accelerator

Varnish - the http accelerator [PDF] is the slides for a presentation about a HTTP accelerator for dynamic websites/CMS systems (its website is here). Slide three made me laugh out loud, and I have to say 'what he said'.

(From Richard Johnson of river.com.)

Link: A lovely summary of the XHTML issue

On the WHATWG mailing list, Henri Sivonen put together a marvelous and concise summary of the whole problem with XHTML in today's world, and why XHTML advocates usually irritate me. I'm not going to quote anything; just read the whole thing here.

(From Sam Ruby, who linked to an Ian Hickson WHATWG mailing list message that quoted Henri Sivonen's message.)