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January CTO Breakfast Report
We talked about the recent SHA-1 hack and the MD5 exploits that are available. Lockcrack (a password cracking program) apparently has a table of pre computed hashes now installed that make cracking many hashes a job of just a few seconds.
There’s a pattern in some technology start-ups where there’s a brilliant technologist who has an idea that many others can’t quite understand. They attract some money and generate a lot of hype on the basis of their brilliance, but eventually fail because they can’t explain what they do.
We got into a discussion of phones and convergence. Richard Miller mentioned GrandCentral.com. They are a “one number for life.” That’s weird since I used to review them when they were a Web services routing company. Not sure if this is the same company repurposing their technology or someone who bought the name. I also mentioned Equals, a similar offering that I wrote about last September.
Of course, you can’t Scott Lemon reported that he’s playing with AskteriskNow and TrixBox. They’re much better to install than plain old Asterisk. AsteriskNow seems very polished, but it will just wipe out whatever box you boot with the install CD in, so beware. Jared Smith, author of the Asterisk book lives in Draper Utah. We need to invite him to the CTO breakfast—I guess I just did.
We had a small discussion of living software and intentional programming. I really like this idea of building systems that build applications rather than building applications themselves. I think the popularity of Rails has something to do with this idea. Rails is just a taste of what’s possible. Lisp macros also play into this idea as well. I’ve been thinking of how we could redesign CS330 (Programming Languages) in terms of domain specific languages and there’s something in this whole living software idea that I’d like to have in the class.
Phil Burns brought up The Truth Machine, a book about a future where everyone has to tell the truth because of a new technology that will let people know you’re lying. Scott mentioned KishKish, a lie-detector plugin for Skype.
Posted by windley on January 25, 2007 10:24 AM
Comment from Jared Smith at January 25, 2007 1:00 PM
I'd love to come to your CTO breakfasts... but I moved from Utah to Virginia in August, so that makes it a little difficult. I'd be happy to come out and speak on Asterisk any time you'd like, if you can convince someone to buy me a plane ticket. :-) (I guess I could also do it over a conference call, but who likes talking on the phone?!?) I've been doing Asterisk training and consulting full-time for a year now, and loving every minute of it!
Also, it appears that the TypeKey thing is broken on your blog, as it keeps giving me an error that says "The sign-in validation failed".
Comment from Tristan Rhodes at January 25, 2007 2:24 PM
I think the application you are describing is Ophcrack.
http://ophcrack.sourceforge.net/
They have a live-cd that will crack many passwords, but the larger the rainbow table the more complex passwords you can crack
Comment from Craig Walker at January 26, 2007 1:08 AM
The GrandCentral you are referring to is a completely new company from the one you reviewed a couple of years ago. We founded the company in late 2005 and acquired the name and URL from the prior company that has been reformed and is now a pretty interesting company called Swivel (www.swivel.com). I'd be happy to give you a briefing on the new GrandCentral...its a little like Tivo for your phone. We'll find you at all your phones through your GrandCentral number, screen your calls, protect you from telemarketers, let you ListenIn on voicemail while it is being left (from any phone and able to jump into the call by hitting *), let you treat different callers differently with custom voicemail greetings and ringback tones, and we let you upload any of your mp3s to replace the ringback tone. And a lot more. Check it out at www.grandcentral.com, we think its the ULTIMATE phone service...but I am biased. - Craig Walker, CEO, GrandCentral
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