Year: 2009
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The Lost Re-View
In anticipation of the final season of Lost which will be broadcast in early 2010 I have decided to watch again the entirety of the five previous seasons so as to reassess what went before with the knowledge gained from later episodes.
However it is likely that things which seem significant in hindsight are so only because the writers took it upon themselves to develop things which were initially meant to be inconsequential into something larger.
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The security of GSM is broken
The encryption system used for GSM mobile phones has been demonstrated to be fundamentally flawed and is crackable. But to be honest what is most surprising is that it has taken until now for the security of the 20-something years old encryption system to be broken.
At the recent Hacking at Random (HAR) conference, held from 13-16 August, Karsten Nohl detailed plans for cracking standard GSM cell phone encryption, known as A5/1, and making the results available for anyone to use. You can see a PDF of his presentation here.
This issue was covered by Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte in the latest episode of the podcast Security Now, transcript here.
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PM’s apology to codebreaker Alan Turing
Prime Minister Gordon Brown has released a statement on the Second World War code-breaker, Alan Turing, recognising the “appalling” way he was treated for being gay. [via]
The statement came in response to a petition posted on the Number 10 website which had received thousands of signatures in recent months.
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Central heterochromia
I just discovered by accident the terminology for the unusual colouration of my eyes.
Central heterochromia is an eye condition in which there are two different colors in the same iris. Central heterochromia is where the central (pupillary) zone of the iris is a different color than the mid-peripheral (ciliary) zone.
Eye color is determined primarily by the concentration and distribution of melanin pigment within the iris tissues, anything affecting those factors may result in a difference of color being observed. Central heterochromia appears to be prevalent in irises containing low amounts of melanin.
Eyes displaying central heterochromia are often referred to as “cat eyes” because of the appearance of a multi-colored iris.
Text taken from the Wikipedia article Heterochromia and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike 3.0 license.
