Dr. Dobb's Journal May, 2005
The Secure Hash Algorithm-1 (SHA-1) has been one of the world's most popular hash algorithms ever since it was developed by the U.S. National Security Agency in 1995. Recently, however, Xiaoyun Wang, Yiqun Lisa Yin, and Hongbo Yu, who are researchers at China's Shandong University, claim to have devised a technique by which the algorithm can theoretically be compromised 2000 times more quickly than with a brute-force approach. For details, see "Collision Search Attacks on SHA1" (http://theory.csail.mit.edu/~yiqun/shanote.pdf). SHA-1 is used to create digital signatures by protocols such as the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL).
The ground rules have been laid for this year's International Conference on Functional Programming contest (http://icfpc.plt-scheme.org/). The first problem will be posted June 24th; initial entries are due by June 27. The revised problem will be announced on July 9. The year marks the eighth annual ICFP programming contest. Last year, programmers were challenged to "design an ant colony that will bring the most food particles back to its anthill, while fending off ants of another species. To win the contest, you must submit the neural wiring for the ants in your colony—"a text file containing code for a simple, finite state machine that is run by all of your ants." The programs were then pitted against each other in a tournament to determine the winner. Prizes this year have not been announced, but have traditionally included cash as well as "the satisfaction of hearing the judges proclaim your programming language 'the programming tool of choice for discriminating hackers.'" Haskell took the honors in 2004.
Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn have been named winners of the 2004 A.M. Turing Award, "for pioneering work on the design and implementation of the Internet's basic communications protocols." The Turing award carries a $100,000 prize sponsored by Intel. It was established in 1966, when A.J. Perlis became the first honoree, and has been awarded every year since. Cerf and Kahn worked together at DARPA beginning in 1973. In the course of a project to integrate three independent networks, they developed the concepts of routers, IP addresses, and the TCP protocol, which they published in 1974. Four years later, Cerf and several colleagues split the original TCP protocol into two parts, thus inventing TCP/IP. This year's Turing Award will be formally bestowed at the annual ACM Awards Banquet in San Francisco.
IBM has contributed more than 30 open-source projects to SourceForge.net (http://www.ostg.com/) including the Jikes Java compiler. Other open-source contributions include projects revolving around Apache Derby, Eclipse, Globus, Linux, and PHP. In addition to source code, the contributions include articles, tutorials, forums, blogs, plug-ins, and the IBM Linux Software Evaluation Kit. All in all, IBM has contributed more than 120 collaborative projects to the open-source community. IBM also has teamed up with Zend Technologies to develop integrated software based on PHP using IBM's Cloudscape database.
Not to be outdone, Adobe has launched an open-source web site of its own at http://opensource.adobe.com/. Adobe's open-source web site is the home for the Adobe Source Libraries (ASL) and information about other Adobe open-source projects. ASL provides portable, peer-reviewed C++ source libraries for leveraging and extending both the C++ Standard Library and the Boost Libraries. The first two libraries available, called Adam and Eve, are components for modeling the human interface appearance and behavior in a software application. They are written in C++ and have been released under the MIT License, an OSI-Approved Open Source License.
Microsoft researchers David Heckerman and Nebojsa Jojic have collaborated with HIV researchers to apply machine-learning and data-mining algorithms used in computer science to develop new approaches to creating HIV vaccine models. In particular, the algorithms let Microsoft database software identify patterns within large computer databases. Software based on these algorithms combed through the hundreds of genetic sequences, and tested millions of different possible combinations of epitopes and immune types. Interestingly, Microsoft has used similar algorithms to help differentiate spam from legitimate e-mail.
According to Simon Mallal, professor at the Centre for Clinical Immunology and Biomedical Statistics at Royal Perth Hospital and Murdoch University in Australia, the key to fighting HIV is to find patterns in how it mutates to create versions of the virus that can escape recognition by the carrier's immune system. By uncovering patterns in different patients, the researchers believe they can more accurately predict the HIV epitopes needed to train the immune system to recognize and fight the virus. He added that, regardless of how successful these approaches are, they may help with the design of vaccines for other mutating viruses. For more information, see http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/ features/2005/feb05/02-23HIVResearch.asp.
Yahoo has launched its Yahoo Search Developer Network (http://developer.yahoo .net/), an online resource offering developers access to web-service APIs for Yahoo Search products, along with existing APIs. Yahoo sees YSDN as a place where developers can share code, ideas, and applications that extend the company's search technology. According to Yahoo, each API provides developers with access to 5000 queries per day per API, five times more than the limits placed on users of the Google Web API. (Google offers an API as well.) The site provides SDKs, documentation, FAQs, and the like for developing apps that use Yahoo's search web services.
Columbia University law professor and open-source advocate Eben Moglen has formed the Software Freedom Law Center, to provide legal representation and other law-related services to advance free and open-source software (http://www.softwarefreedom.org/). Among the pro bono services offered by the SFLC are license development and implementation consulting; legal consulting and lawyer training; and legal defense against litigation.