Dr. Dobb's Journal December 2000
In a race to beat the public-relations clock, RSA Security released its public-key encryption algorithm to the public domain -- just two weeks before the U.S. patent on the algorithm was due to expire. This means that anyone can create software that incorporates an implementation of the algorithm, which is represented by the equation "c=me mod n." It also means that many security products available only overseas will now be marketed in the U.S. For example, Baltimore Technologies announced that "with the expiration of the controversial patent of the RSA algorithm, Baltimore will now offer its complete range of developer products in the United States, previously prohibited by the patent." For more information, see http://www.rsasecurity.com/.
Steve Wozniak, the inventor of the first Apple computer (the Apple I) and the hugely successful Apple II, is one of this year's seven inductees into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Woz joins a distinguished group in the 28th class of inductees, including Walt Disney, inducted for his invention of the multiplane camera, and William Kroll, who invented titanium and zirconium processing. Other inductees include Reginald Fessenden (wireless radio), Alfred and Helen Murray Free (dip-and-read urinalysis test), and J. Franklin Hyde (fused silica and silicones). For information, see http:// www.invent.org/.
A research team from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Wales have discovered that entangled pairs of light particles, called "photons," can act as a single unit but perform with twice the efficiency. By using a process called "entanglement," existing sources of laser light can be used to produce smaller, faster computer chips than technology allows today.
Currently, manufacturers use optical lithography to sculpt computer chips with transistors measuring between 180 and 220 nanometers. While traditional computers can work with transistors as small as 25 nanometers, manufacturing obstacles come into play due to the light's 248-nanometer wavelength. However, the proposed entanglement technique would allow the use of laser light of 248 nanometers to produce computer chips with dimensions of a fourth of the wavelength (62 nanometers) or smaller, compared to today's limits (124 nanometers). Entangling more than two photons would improve results even further. For more information, see http:// www.jpl.nasa.gov/.
Steve Roberts's computerized recumbent bicycle has rolled to its final parking place in the Computer History Museum Center in Mountain View, California. Roberts described the Big Electronic Human-Energized Machine...Only Too Heavy (BEHEMOTH) in his article entitled "Designing Technomadic Systems," (DDJ, June 1998). The 105-speed BEHEMOTH carried 72-watts worth of solar panels, a repackaged Macintosh portable computer; the innards of a Toshiba T1000 running DOS; a Sun SPARCstation; a helmet-mounted display that tracked the cursor by Roberts's head movements; a cellphone; a ham radio; a color TV transceiver; and six security sensors programmed for intrusion detection.
After almost two decades of wired biking (the original "Winnebiko" hit the road in 1983), Roberts is turning his attention to a pair of "microships" -- 19-foot canoes running Linux and outfitted with solar panels. According to Roberts, one advantage of the canoes is that they do not have to climb hills. For more information, go to http://www.microship.com/ and http:// www.computerhistory.org/.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has selected the winning algorithm to be adopted as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) by the U.S. Department of Commerce, replacing the aging Data Encryption Standard (DES), which has been the standard since 1977. After narrowing the field to five finalists, the winning algorithm is Rijndael (pronounced "Rhine-Doll"), developed by Joan Daemen (Proton World International Inc.) and Vincent Rijmen (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) of Belgium. The Rijndael algorithm is based on a block cipher algorithm described in the article "The Block Cipher Square Algorithm," by Joan Daemen, Lars R. Knudsen, and Vincent Rijmen (DDJ, October 1997). Basically, Rijndael is a fast block cipher that encrypts data in blocks of 128 bits, using a 128-bit key.
All of the candidates in the AES competition were required to support key sizes of 128, 192, and 256 bits. A full technical report on the competition, and other background material are available at http://www.nist.gov/aes/. For more on the Rijndael algorithm, see http://www.esat .kuleuven.ac.be/~rijmen/rijndael/.
Releasing proprietary software to the public domain as open source is a growing trend in the software industry. The latest company to jump on the open-source bandwagon is Silicon Graphics (SGI), which has announced plans to release the source code of its digital media software development kit (dmSDK) for Linux. dmSDK is a digital media development environment, which has traditionally run on SGI's Irix operating system. SGI also released its Open Inventor 3D graphics API to the open-source community. dmSDK on Linux will be supported by the Khronos Special Interest Group as part of the OpenML standard being developed for integrating audio, video, and graphics content across a wide range of platforms. The dmSDK source code is available at http://oss.sgi.com/.
IBM and Microsoft have released the specifications for the Web Services Description Language (WSDL), a combination of IBM's Network Accessible Services Specification Language and Microsoft's Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). WSDL is an XML format for describing network services as a set of endpoints operating on messages containing either document-oriented or procedure-oriented information. WSDL is extensible to allow description of endpoints and their messages regardless of what message formats or network protocols are used to communicate. However, the bindings described in WSDL 1.0 support only SOAP 1.1, HTTP GET/POST, and MIME. The WSDL specification is available at http:// www-4.ibm.com/software/ and http://msdn .microsoft.com/xml/general/wsdl.asp/.