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8 years ago I gave my first presentation on network security. It's a hard topic, and the worst parts were explaining how cryptography works, and explaining software bugs as the buffer overflow or a race condition. Meanwhile, Wired as made an amazing job explaining the formers with an animation. You don't get the cryptography how to (guess prime numbers theory is really hard to draw) but instead you can have a glance at some moments of really bad software.

Update: NSA's site for CryptoKids.

Due to the lack of time, today's menu is about grilled feeds:

• Microsoft keeps surprising, and is offering Visual Studio and SQL Server. It's free, even for comercial usage, but it's only a Express Edition;
• An excelent how-to implement your own helpdesk company, using UltraVNC and some webservices. Requires heavy geekary;
• Joined the Morfik Pioneers program. A very interesting application that will allow building web applications (AJAX) with a graphical user interface;
• Finnaly, follow-me phoning, or how to implement bluetooth proximity detection with Asterisk.

Three news worth notice:

• The newest player to arrive at the webOS arena is Microsoft. The old giant unveiled is web strategy, launching is Live program: a personalizable website, with a lot of Ajax and a cool concept, Windows Gadgets; a new webmail application, which mimics Outlook in a browser (have to see this working); a new messenger, with VoIP integrated and ability to call for any fixed line in world; and Office Live, which is not an online version of Office, but a set of free, ad supported, productivity business tools;
• Sun announces services to convert Microsoft Office docs to Open Office compatible format. There is nothing special with this announcement, Sun is following the OpenOffice path. The thing is, this is a service to be offer by Sun Grid Utility, which is Sun's vision of the future, "the network is the computer". Or in other words, applications will be web based, all you need on your side is a browser and a web server running in our PC for local access to information, as stated by Jason Kottke;
• Google has filed a patent to serve search results based on user profiles. That means that Google will start to work on all the information they have about us, like what are we searching for, what are the websites we visit most, and what are our social networks. It's a good idea to have Google showing me the links I care most, but this arise a lot of privacy concerns. For a peek on where this could lead us, watch epic.

Tuesday, I read on ArsTechnica about SBC's CEO Edward Withacre interview on BusinessWeek, where he declares, and I quote:

How concerned are you about Internet upstarts like Google (GOOG ), MSN, Vonage, and others?

How do you think they're going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?

The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! (YHOO ) or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!

In 10 years, you will be able to be understood by anyone in the world. Talk to anyone in your preferred language (say English), they will listen to you in whatever language they want to (Spanish? Portuguese?), all this in real time, thanks to this translation goggles. A step back for the Esperanto community, a huge step forward for globalization.