He used to be smart.

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Japanese people drive so carefully not to get any scratches on their own cars.
But we can get only the cramped small parking spaces.
So, they perform the feat of parking their car leaving a space of a finger between the wall and the car.

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Egyptian doctors said they removed a second head from a 10-month-old girl suffering from one of the rarest birth defects in an operation Saturday.

Abla el-Alfy, a consultant in paediatric intensive care, told Reuters at the hospital in Benha, near Cairo, that Manar Maged was in a serious but improving condition after the procedure to treat her for craniopagus parasiticus — a problem related to that of conjoined twins linked at the skull.

“We are still working on the baby. After surgery … you get unstable blood pressure, you get fever. But she is stabilizing,” Alfy said. “We have some improvement.”

As in the case of a girl who died after similar surgery in the Dominican Republic a year ago, the second twin had developed no body. The head that was removed from Manar had been capable of smiling and blinking but not independent life, doctors said.

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Earlier this week, three Chinese cryptographers showed that SHA-1 is not collision-free. That is, they developed an algorithm for finding collisions faster than brute force.

SHA-1 produces a 160-bit hash. That is, every message hashes down to a 160-bit number. Given that there are an infinite number of messages that hash to each possible value, there are an infinite number of possible collisions. But because the number of possible hashes is so large, the odds of finding one by chance is negligibly small (one in 2⁸⁰, to be exact). If you hashed 2⁸⁰ random messages, you’d find one pair that hashed to the same value. That’s the “brute force” way of finding collisions, and it depends solely on the length of the hash value. “Breaking” the hash function means being able to find collisions faster than that. And that’s what the Chinese did.

They can find collisions in SHA-1 in 2⁶⁹ calculations, about 2,000 times faster than brute force. Right now, that is just on the far edge of feasibility with current technology. Two comparable massive computations illustrate that point.

In 1999, a group of cryptographers built a DES cracker. It was able to perform 2⁵⁶ DES operations in 56 hours. The machine cost $250K to build, although duplicates could be made in the $50K-$75K range. Extrapolating that machine using Moore’s Law, a similar machine built today could perform 2⁶⁰ calculations in 56 hours, and 2⁶⁹ calculations in three and a quarter years. Or, a machine that cost $25M-$38M could do 2⁶⁹ calculations in the same 56 hours.

On the software side, the main comparable is a 2⁶⁴ keysearch done by distributed.net that finished in 2002. One article put it this way: “Over the course of the competition, some 331,252 users participated by allowing their unused processor cycles to be used for key discovery. After 1,757 days (4.81 years), a participant in Japan discovered the winning key.” Moore’s Law means that today the calculation would have taken one quarter the time — or have required one quarter the number of computers — so today a 2⁶⁹ computation would take eight times as long, or require eight times the computers.

The magnitude of these results depends on who you are. If you’re a cryptographer, this is a huge deal. While not revolutionary, these results are substantial advances in the field. The techniques described by the researchers are likely to have other applications, and we’ll be better able to design secure systems as a result. This is how the science of cryptography advances: we learn how to design new algorithms by breaking other algorithms. Additionally, algorithms from the NSA are considered a sort of alien technology: they come from a superior race with no explanations. Any successful cryptanalysis against an NSA algorithm is an interesting data point in the eternal question of how good they really are in there.

For the average Internet user, this news is not a cause for panic. No one is going to be breaking digital signatures or reading encrypted messages anytime soon. The electronic world is no less secure after these announcements than it was before.

But there’s an old saying inside the NSA: “Attacks always get better; they never get worse.” Just as this week’s attack builds on other papers describing attacks against simplified versions of SHA-1, SHA-0, MD4, and MD5, other researchers will build on this result. The attack against SHA-1 will continue to improve, as others read about it and develop faster tricks, optimizations, etc. And Moore’s Law will continue to march forward, making even the existing attack faster and more affordable.

Jon Callas, PGP’s CTO, put it best: “It’s time to walk, but not run, to the fire exits. You don’t see smoke, but the fire alarms have gone off.”

It’s time for us all to migrate away from SHA-1.

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Bugs Bunny and his pals are being updated for the future� way in the future. The WB network will take the famed Looney Tunes characters as models for a new children’s series, “Loonatics,” that will air on Saturday mornings starting this fall. The characters’ descendants �Buzz Bunny and the like� will be superhero action figures for the cartoon set in the year 2772.

The network’s animators have re-imagined Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Wile E. Coyote as sleek new figures for a modern age.

“We all flipped for it,” David Janollari, president of the Kids’ WB, said this week. “We just said, `Wow, what a great way to take the classic Looney Tunes franchise that has been huge with audiences for decades and bring it into the new millennium.’”

Janollari said both boys and girls enjoyed the new action figures in test runs of the show. Their parents may be a little surprised, however.

“I think the legacy is intact,” he said. “If anything, it’s an homage to the legacy instead of a destruction of the legacy.”

If a picture is worth 1000 words, what happens if all thousand of them are profanity?

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World Wind lets you zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth. Leveraging Landsat satellite imagery and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data, World Wind lets you experience Earth terrain in visually rich 3D, just as if you were really there.

Virtually visit any place in the world. Look across the Andes, into the Grand Canyon, over the Alps, or along the African Sahara.

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“The Crackers” is as much a public happening as it is a tasty snack, defying the domino theory. Peanut butter or cheddar cheese. They poured their hearts and souls into the project for over 26 minutes. It required three dozen crackers and spanned over nearly 23 inches along a footbridge in the park at a cost (borne exclusively by the artists) of $2.50. Is it art? You decide. The installation was completed with no permits or bureaucracy, and fed to the ducks after about a half hour. “The Crackers” is entirely for profit.

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An indignant Israeli is suing a pet shop that he says sold him a dying parrot, reports the Ma’ariv newspaper. Itzik Simowitz of the southern city of Beersheba contends the shop cheated him because the Galerita-type cockatoo not only failed to utter a word when he got it home, but was also extremely ill. Mr. Simowitz adds that the shop owner assured him the parrot was not ill but merely needed time to adjust to its new environment.

Now that Viral Advertising is “the hip thing”, everybody is doing it, and as a result the ads suck as least as much as regular advertising.

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Last summer Alan Keyes, the far-right Republican known for his own harsh brand of conservatism and his failed presidential bids in 1996 and 2000, was running a wildly unsuccessful campaign against Barack Obama in Illinois�s U.S. Senate race. Keyes�s only national headlines were made when he told Sirius OutQ�s Michelangelo Signorile that gay men and lesbians were guilty of �selfish hedonism,� extending the epithet to Mary Cheney, the vice president�s daughter.

It now seems like that spasm of homophobia might have triggered a karmic backlash. His daughter, Maya Keyes�who maintains that she loves and supports her father and who worked for his failed Senate run�has come out as a lesbian. Rumors about Maya Keyes�s sexuality have swirled since September; Alan Keyes was even asked by Chicago reporters to comment about it and he gave a nonanswer.

Now, just months after the election, Maya Keyes has agreed to speak to The Washington Post and The Advocate. On Monday, she is set to speak at an Equality Maryland rally. Alan Keyes, a �family values� conservative, has told his daughter that she is no longer welcome in the family�s Illinois residence, Maya says, and that he will not pay for her to attend Brown University.

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Hide those cameras and sketchpads if you’re planning on using them in Central Park this month, and even if you’re not going, think of an alternative phrase to describe those 7500 orange-ish shower curtains. Do Christo and Jeanne-Claude own Central Park? Their publisher at least seems to think so, according to a post in Infoshop News by street artist and dedicated artists’ rights gadfly Robert Laderman.

Christo’s publisher [Kunst-Verlag Schumacher/Edition Fils] claims a vast new degree of copyright and trademark protection. They claim they will prosecute anyone who sells their own original photos of The Gates; who makes and sells a drawing of The Gates or who even uses the words, The Gates, without their permission. They claim to have copyrighted the words, The Gates. They also claim to have an agreement with the media that media sources may only use news photos of the gates for the period the installation is up. That after that the media will only be allowed to use “official” photos of The Gates.

They also claim that all of Central Park is now “private property.” Talk about privatization! Be sure to thank Christo, Bloomscrooge and the CPC [Central Park Conservancy, the private group which now controls New York's parks, or at least the areas enjoyed by communities of money - ed.].

Don’t forget the Maybach.

And let’s have Bud Light open the Oktoberfest, while we’re at it. and if the movie sucks, George Lucas will have to face the Wrath of Cannes.

Buitenlandse media noemen hem al Luud Rubbers