My main reaction to recent events is that theyshow how certificate authorities are one of the real practical weaknessesin SSL. All of the theoretical security in the world can be triviallythrown away by shoddy practices on the part of a single trusted certificateauthority, and we've recently seen not one but two such CAs exposed.

The case of the improperly issued mozilla.com certificate is a clear-cut procedural failure, either failing to vet yourresellers or failing to properly vet a signing request or, for thatmatter

Recently, some backups on our new Solaris x86 fileservers started failing with (GNU) tar reportingerrors about:

Warning: Cannot stat: Value too large for defined data type

More alarmingly, even ls on the Solaris fileserver would reportthis (as an error). Fortunately, I remembered a recent discussion on the ZFS mailing list about this, to the effect that if you are usingNFS, it turns out to be possible to create files with 'impossible'timestamps. Inspection showed that this was indeed the

I have mixed feelings about 'test driven development' (and I can'tclaim I've done much of it, especially not with rigor), but one subtleadvantage of it has come through clearly even in my limited use of it:you actually start using your code's interface before you freeze it.This is important because actually using things remains by far the bestway to refine their design in computer science.

Usually I started out with a general idea of what function calls andmethods and so