Need To Know 2003-11-28: ">> TRACKING << sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering Since his retirement to an underground volcano hideout in Switzerland, briliant ex-Autodesk founder JOHN WALKER is rarely seen. Sunlight reaches him only when he throws his enemies into the lava pits, and releases small but - in the words of his arch-enemy Rudy Rucker - gnarly advice and utilities. The pre-Atkins geek health regiment of choice, the 'Hacker Diet' was one. The latest is JAVASCRYPT: a set of Javascript programs designed to do the fiddly work of a home-brewed crypto conversation on whatever machine you need it. Code book generation, AES encryption and (weird) textual steganography are all implemented in downloadable, browser-runnable applets. Being in Javascript, the code is slow, but source-viewable and locally run, which gets it double-points for the trad standards of trustworthiness. For those of you who believe in it, Javascrypt's non-standard formats also make it as securely obscure as you can get. Then again, do you really trust a man *known* to be an evil archcriminal mastermind? http://www.fourmilab.ch/javascrypt/ - ah, but that's just what he wants you to think http://www.4w8w.com/bookrucker4.html - the full story of his evil genius http://www.fourmilab.ch/javascrypt/example.html - and he has the cheek to use it as his book key!"
NEWS : "The 40-year-old Mr. Everett was raised in McLean, Va., with his sister Elizabeth, mother Nancy and father Hugh Everett III, a quantum physicist who in 1957 proposed a formal theory of parallel universes known as 'The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.' 'Everett's work has boggled minds inside and outside physics for more than four decades,' reported Scientific American in last month's issue.
Mr. Everett said his brilliant father wasn't communicative at home. When I asked him what the conversation was like around the breakfast table, he replied, 'There wasn't any.'
'Physicists and geniuses don't always make great family men. I lived with him for 18 years and I learned more about him from the Internet.'
Mr. Everett's family was a heartrending source of inspiration for his most notable work, the 1998 album 'Electro-Shock Blues' (DreamWorks), written after his sister committed suicide and h...
Comments