I think the Web Platform Installer is a great tool, but I have to question the wisdom of its home page:
If you click on these, you see… nothing. A description would be nice. ("Application Request Routing? What’s that? EC-CUBE?")
But that’s not really the problem. The bigger problem is this: A "spotlighted installers" feature probably sounded [...]
The Rails 3.1 Release Candidate announcement contained news of many new and useful features, plus these regretful words:
has_secure_password: Dead-simple BCrypt-based passwords. Now there’s no excuse not to roll your own authentication scheme.
I will briefly provide an excuse.
"Simple BCrypt-based passwords" is a reasonable feature, but shouldn’t be mistaken for end-to-end authentication, or even a substantial subset [...]
The March 2010 issue of the Communications of the ACM includes a technical paper with an introduction entitled "A First Glance of Cryptography’s Holy Grail" (ACM subscription required). That’s enough to catch my attention. The paper itself, Computing Arbitrary Functions of Encrypted Data, describes a relatively new algorithm for homomorphic encryption.
Although these words may be [...]
In 1984, Ken Thompson, the operating system and programming language pioneer, received the ACM’s Turing Award. In his short, highly-readable Turing Award speech, he describes "the cutest program I ever wrote." He notes that because the C compiler is written in C, it is possible to alter the source code maliciously to produce a malicious [...]
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