Monday, April 6, 2009

Is nothing sacred on the racetrack?

By Himal Kotelawala, The Sunday Times, June 1, 2008

Colombo, Sri Lanka -- Sri Lanka is considering some diplomatic action regarding cases where a horse named ‘Buddhist Monk’ and another named ‘Buddah’ had run in two separate horse races in Yarmouth, England and Tramore, Ireland respectively, last week.
www.racingpost.co.uk. The latter website also carried a summary of ‘Buddhist Monk’s’ performance. It said “ ‘Buddhist Monk’ had a rug for stalls entry but got away well and was soon tracking the leader. He edged left in the closing stages and was only shaken up by his jockey without resorting to the whip and can repay the kindness in a similar contest,”
‘Buddhist Monk’ finished the race in second place on Thursday. Its rider was D O’Donohoe and the horse is owned by Lord Derby. The betting was stated as 10:1, meaning if the horse had won, a prospective bet winner would have made Rs. 10 for a Rs. 1 he bet on it. Meanwhile ‘Buddah’ owned by Joseph A. Shannon and ridden by R.Walsh had come ninth in a field of 14 in a two mile hurdle race on Friday.
When contacted by The Sunday Times, British High Commission media spokesman
http://www.buddhistchannel.tv/index.php?id=43

Sunday, April 5, 2009

Lamport's one-time password algorithm (or, don't talk to complete strangers!)

There's a subtle beauty in simple things that present great value. To paraphrase Albert Einstein, a solution to a problem should be as simple as it can be, but no simpler. Applying a one-time password (OTP) scheme between distributed systems makes it more difficult for a would-be intruder to access and gain unauthorized control of restricted resources such as data, physical devices, or service end points. An OTP scheme is obviously a step up from completely open access, or access limited only by physical network barriers. But a solution based on an OTP challenge also has some advantages over static, infrequently changing passwords, because the window of opportunity to gain access to credentials is much smaller. There's a practical place for either type of authentication, or even both used in concert.

Refer : http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-03-2009/jw-03-lamport-otp.html