Ill at home...

You might see a lot of me on LJ today - I've got this cold that's been going around, and sleeping has been troublesome, so I'm alternately fiddling with the computer from bed and sleeping...

Update: And here's the sort of thing I get up to when I should be doing something useful - shaving four characters off the shortest implementation of RC4 in Perl. (Theirs is 193 chars, mine is 189)

#!/usr/bin/perl -0777
sub Q{$s[($_[0]+=$_[1])%=@s]}sub S{@s[$x,$y]=@s[$y,$x]}@k=map
hex,pop=~/../g;S Q$y,$k[$x%@k]+Q$x,$_>0for@s=0..255;$x=$y=0;print
chr($_^Q S Q$y,Q$x,1)for unpack'C*',<>

The state of crypto products

Just read this story on Slashdot, so in curiosity I downloaded the paper. And I have to echo and extend comments Peter Gutmann made about the state of crypto under Linux: when you hear about a product that uses crypto, open source, Linux based or otherwise, just assume that the crypto is woefully cack-handed rubbish from someone who's read Applied Cryptography if that.

ssh v2 is mostly OK. TLS (SSL v3.1) is mostly OK. GPG is mostly OK. IPSec is mostly OK. I don't know of anything else that people in the field think well of.