- "Lessons Learned in Implementing and Deploying Crypto Software", by Peter Gutmann, is both entertaining and worrying. Section 3.6 on OpenSSL and random seeding is hilarious, describing the lengths to which users would go to work around a check that the RNG had enough entropy. Even when public-key encryption is being used, users often design their own key-management schemes to go with it. One (geographically distributed) organisation solved the key management problem by using the same private key on all of their systems. This allowed them to deploy public-key encryption throughout the organisation while at the same time eliminating any key management problems, since it was no longer necessary to track a confusing collection of individual keys.
- "Benchmarking mbox versus maildir" compares Maildir, which takes one file per message, with the UW-IMAP server's variant of mbox files and concludes that Maildir is just about as fast, and often faster.
- Here's an attractive slide from Tim Berners-Lee's recent "Semantic Web Status and Direction" talk, given at a Semantic Web conference last week. The wave metaphor is a clever way to show the status of various technologies -- are they research curiosities or widely deployed?