Upgraded to flash player 10

I just upgraded my Ubuntu to flash player 10. Using flash 9 was fine, but I had few problems with online movies (i.e. youtube) and with heating of the processor.

The main problem was with the online movies: after few seconds of playback firefox crashed. Now it seems to work; I can't be sure yet because firefox used to crash randomly after few seconds of playback: up to now I watched a couple of movies without any problem.

Another issue related with online movies was that after I played a movie with the flash player, I was not able to play anything with acutal player (i.e. mplayer or totem): they just frezzed without playing any sound or video. Now this problem is solved.

I still have to check if the heating problem has improved or not.

To upgrade, just do

apt-get remove --purge flashplugin-nonfree

download the flash 10 beta from Adobe labs, unzip it and

cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/firefox-3.0.1/plugins

The Apple in the box

Yesterday Apple presented the SDK for iPhone to the public. It is nice that they decide to allow third-party applications on their phone, but few things does not convince me.

First, why should a developer yield the 30% of the price to Apple? This seems to me an abuse of dominant position (dominant w.r.t the developer).

Second, the freeware applications will be given for free, but still the developer has to pay a one-time-fee of 99$, to be able to provide applications through iTunes. This is just ridiculous. Third-party applications are an add-on value for iPhone, not a problem. There should be no fee, especially if the application is freeware or opensource.

Third, it seems that there's no other (legal) way to distribute software that iTunes. This is an old story that started with iPod, but in this case it is completely different. The iPod plays music that you are supposed to buy with iTunes Music Store. iPods are dominant on the market; many people have one and once you have an iPod, you may be tempted to buy a mac also. There is basically no concurrents to iPod. This leads to the conclusion that forcing people to use iTunes would increase the selling of both the music and the macs.
With iPhone it is different. It is not dominant on the market (at least outside the US). Android is very promising and (hopefully) about to come. iPhone does not play music, but runs applications. Applications are radically different from music. There is a much more wide community developing free software that free music, and free software has often proved to be better or more appealing that closed one. If it is not possible to easily develop and distribute applications, there is some problem, from my point of view.

I wonder why Apple has a so closed approach to informatics.

RSA engine

Ok, I finally have a (almost) working example of RSA + Rand engine for OpenSSL.

I only have to implement ciphers ans digests and I will have the whole engine stub I need.

OpenSSL engine

I'm getting crazy experimenting with OpenSSL and its engines.

I find it very difficult to work without any type of documentation. Any progress will be reported here.

Only for the Italians...

Any Italian should sign for this petition online.

Ripe it

A couple of weeks ago I attended to a summer school where one of the teachers was Bart Preneel; he's sooo cool. He gave some classes about how to formally proof crypto algorithms. The classes were interesting, but when I look at his home page I found out a couple of things about him which really impressed me.

He's one of the creator of RIPEMD-160. He says that RIPE-MD should be preferred to SHA-1 because of the way it was developed. In fact it happens that RIPE-MD was developed by a framework of European cryptographers and the whole process was public, while RSA was secretly developed by an American private company.

Well, I have to admit that I completely agree with him, so I propose to use RIPE-MD instead of SHA-1.

Search the reader

Finally it is possible to search text in the feeds of Google Reader. It was one of its major lacks.