DocBugIntelligence, media technologies, intellectual property, and the occasional politicsMicrosoft builds tool to steal data off computers- April 30, 2008 From the "what could possibly go wrong" department, Microsoft just announced that they've developed a simple one-button tool to break into a computer and suck down an entire hard drive's contents onto a thumb drive: COFEE, a preconfigured, automated tool fits on a USB thumb drive. Prior to COFEE the equivalent work would require a computer forensics expert to enter 150 complex commands manually through a process that could take three to four hours. With COFEE, you simply plug into a running...http://docbug.com/blog/archives/000774.html Calculating the Birthday Paradox- April 18, 2008 For the last couple years I've been working on a program that generates a large number of essentially random ID strings (it's actually a replicated document storage system that uses the hash of a file's content as its ID, but the details don't matter). Since IDs are independently generated there will always be some chance that two different files will just happen to have the same ID assigned — so how long do I need to make my ID string before that probability is small enough that I can...http://docbug.com/blog/archives/000773.html |