Playing with Technology

Blogging class

Jon Breitenbucher — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 20:37:13 +0000

Talking about creating a blog.

One thing to do is include an image. To do this you go to upload and browse for the image. Once it is uploaded click to use thumbnail and link to image and then drag to post.

Blog session

Jon Breitenbucher — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 14:19:17 +0000

I’m in Professor Holt’s FYS right now. We are talking about how to interact with the blog software. Image uploading is one of the things they need to know how to do.

Digital artifacts

Jon Breitenbucher — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 23:39:45 +0000

Looking for music, sounds, moving images, or texts that you can use in your projects? You need to check the Internet Archive. The Archive has a large collection of images, sounds, music, and texts that can be used in your projects.

Organizing information

Jon Breitenbucher — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 05:55:49 +0000

Dr. Havholm has asked me to give some pointers to his Digital Aesthetics class on managing RSS feeds to keep up with the blogs and stay sane. There are a few things I plan on talking about:

Mozilla Thunderbird
RSSOwl cross-platform RSS reader
Google Reader requires a Google account
Firefox extension Feedview will be in Firefox 2.0
Safari

Digital Aesthetic class

Jon Breitenbucher — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 18:15:23 +0000

Today I showed Peter Havholm’s class how to create a blog on our blog server. I also showed them the basics of posting and maintaining their blogs. It seemed to go pretty well. A number of students already have blogs so I wonder if they should ask Peter to let them use their existing blogs rather than create a new one. We’ll see what happens. There has already been one issue with the title of a blog (which has been changed) and I think it is something to bring up at the next policy meeting (really need a name for this).

Network forensics

Jon Breitenbucher — Sat, 10 Dec 2005 16:15:19 +0000

On Thursay (12/8) I made a guest appearance in Dr. Paul Edmiston’s Forensics class. Prof. Edmiston wanted to demonstrate to his class some of the tools used by the FBI and CIA to catch cyber criminals. To that end I demonstrated the Ethereal packet sniffer to the class. I made clear that what I was doing would be against the College’s acceptable use policy and would get them in serious trouble. We captured some traffic in the chemistry building and tried to capture some e-mails from Prof. Edmiston. Due to network configuration we were unable to capture any of Prof. Edmiston’s e-mails. This was just as well as he really didn’t want to have to change his password.

The take home message was that it is relatively easy to capture internet traffic and identify personal information. It seemed to make a number of the students take note and several asked what they could do to protect themselves. All-in-all it was a great experience for everyone.

What is Open-Source Software?

Jon Breitenbucher — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 02:50:23 +0000

Dr. Hornsten has asked me to talk about open-source software with you today. So let’s get started.

What do we mean by open-source?
Can you name two open-source software programs that you use on a daily basis?
Have you ever thought about what qualifies a program for open-source status?
- Open Source Definition
Does open-source mean free?
- It’s all about the license
  - Can you name some open-source licenses?
    - Some licenses on Wikipedia and OSI.
  - What in the heck is copyleft?
Do you read the EULA? What is an EULA?
Can you patent open-source software?
- Patent Commons.
What is community source?

On a different note. What about mathematical algorithms, can they be patented?

The background. In the early 1970s several researchers were working on a way to send and receive messages electronically in a secure manner. The idea that developed was public key cryptography and was initially developed by Diffie, Hellman, and Merkel, but they couldn’t find an algorithm to make it work. Enter Rivest, Shamir, and Adelman.

The algorithm idea. It is really very simple and everyone should be able to understand the basics of how it works. Find two prime numbers p and q (Can anyone tell me what this means?) and multiply them together and call the answer n. Now find a number less than n and relatively prime (Can someone tell me what this means?) to (p-1)*(q-1) and call this number e. Now break the message into numbers Mi that are less than n and compute Mi^e mod n (What does mod mean?). This is the encrypted message. Through the magic of number theory we know that there is a number d so that (Mi^e)^d mod n will be Mi.

The patent. In 1981, after several key Federal Circuit Court decisions lead to the Freeman/Walter/Abele test for patentability and a US Supreme court decision Diamond v. Diehr, patent #4405829 “Cryptographic communications system and method” was issued for the RSA algorithm. These decisions are still reshaping the face of patent law. It is an interesting exercise to read the decisions and try to understand exactly how one can patent an algorithm. What do you think?