On my way

[ciphergoth]

Right, I'm about to go, and I return Thursday evening. I'll be paying the international charges for all mobile calls while I'm away, so please don't phone or text unless you're one of my flatmates or lovers. Sorry.


That's the easiest packing I've ever done! Just about the first time I've travelled in recent times that I haven't needed to bring either sex toys or my laptop :-) I don't actually have to leave the house for about another half an hour.

It turns out the flight touches down at Brussels Charleroi airport, which I'm guessing is the sort of Luton or Schoenfeld of Brussels. Fortunately it doesn't seem to be too hard to get a train to Leuven from there.

I just can't get Mark Wing-Davey's voice out of my head, going "Belgium, man, belgium!".

I'll be back early Thursday evening, by which time, fingers crossed, the fucking broadband will have returned. It's still blinking disconsolately at me; there's an engineer booked for between 12 and 2 tomorrow. Jon's agreed to let them in. However, even if they fix everything I probably won't be reading any of my email until I return; I've had to hook the cable modem up to a Windows box since that's the only thing the engineers will touch, so I'll need to connect it back up to the Linux box on my return.

A quick look at the list of papers says that IBM will be showing off a new stream cipher. This upsets me since IBM always patent everything to the hilt, and it'll be another avenue of design set on fire and pissed out by the talented people at IBM. I really need to come up with something good before every such avenue goes that way. I haven't bothered to download any of the papers in advance this time; I look forward to reading them in my hotel room tonight...

anyway, hugs to all the usual cute and lovely people, and look forward to seeing and chatting when I get back!

Comments

[ex-meta.livejournal.com]

You have to pay international cellphone charges to receive messages? That's screwed up.

As to IBM patenting stuff... this is true, but when's the last time you saw IBM try to use patents to put a competitor out of business? As far as I can see, it's done as a defensive measure and to gain reasonable licensing revenue, rather than to crush competition and abuse the industry. Maybe I've been to too many indoctrination sessions.

I'd still like software patents not to exist, of course. But given that they do, it's kinda necessary for IBM to patent stuff.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

It's just that in crypto, software patents serve only to kill off a technology. Unless the owners are prepared to give away a worldwide, no-fee license, you can't implement it in free software so you can't put it in standards. If the Internet is to have faster ciphers than Rijndael in CTR mode, researchers will have to stop salting the earth on interesting new avenues of research.

[ex-meta.livejournal.com]

Well, it's pretty much the same in lots of other areas of software. Look at what happened to fractal compression.