Fritsch: RTP has lost its edge

Highwoods CEO Ed Fritsch says what I’ve long said: RTP is a dinosaur.

Ed Fritsch, CEO of Raleigh-based real estate company Highwoods Properties NYSE: HIW, is blunt in his take on Research Triangle Park.He says RTP has lost its edge, and he questions whether there’s time to get it back.Fritsch, speaking to a crowd at Triangle Business Journal’s Power Breakfast at Prestonwood Country Club in Cary on Thursday morning, doesn’t pull any punches.Years ago, “we would show RTP properties and say, ‘this is the heart of the economic engine,’” he says.No more.

via Fritsch: RTP has lost its edge Video – Triangle Business Journal.

The keys to the keydom | bit-player

This is an eye-opening look at the potential danger of SSL and SSH keys not being as unbreakable as once thought. At least, when not implemented correctly. Stuff like this gets me excited again about math.

If X and Y were components of public keys in the RSA cryptosystem, their shared factor would create a huge hole in the security fence. And the problem is particularly insidious in that each of the two keys, when examined in isolation, looks perfectly sound; the weakness only becomes apparent when you have both members of the pair.This potential vulnerability of factoring-based encryption methods has been known for decades, but it seemed there was no reason to worry because coincidentally shared factors are so utterly unlikely. A couple of weeks ago I heard an eye-opening talk by Nadia Heninger, a member of a group that has searched for such unlikely coincidences in the wild. They found 64,000 of them. Reason to worry.

via The keys to the keydom | bit-player.

Google Adsense backfires

Houston, we have a problem

Houston, we have a problem


I’ve been using Google AdSense on my blog for many years now, though I only recently got around to reenabling it after a few years of downtime. When I glanced at the ad showing on my site this morning I had to cringe: it was an anti-Obamacare ad from Americans for Prosperity. That’s right: the Koch brothers had infiltrated my blog.

Initially, I went to the AdSense dashboard and disabled all ads in their “politics” category. That blocks all the political ads from running on my site and as this page is often about politics that won’t do. Fortunately, there’s a way I can block just the ads from assholes like AFP. Thus you shouldn’t see them appearing anymore (and if you do, please let me know ASAP).

On the bright side, I’ve earned about $7 this week. Not too shabby for a start.