Bye Bye md5 SSL

We've know for a while that md5 was weak. I can't put my finger on it, but I remember at least a couple mathematical weaknesses that reduced its cryptographic "hardness" to crack by orders of magnitude.

Now some researchers are estimating that for about $1500 of cloud computing resources from amazon, this can be done to md5 based SSL certificates. I know SHA-1 has a couple of similar math based weaknesses, so perhaps it is next. For now it reigns supreme!

Where's the SUN?

I must say, I'm having a LOT of fun in Vietnam. Though I mostly work and train just like at home, still its a great experience living in another culture. The people are really nice everywhere, though you can tell there's not too many foreigners around here by the way they always look at me. Still I have only had 1 sunny day in a month here!

I did a little research on climate statistics. Below is the table of averages from Wikipedia's page about San Diego:

Weather averages for San Diego
Month	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec	Year
Average high °F	65.8	66.6	66.4	68.4	69.1	71.6	76.3	77.7	77.2	74.7	70.0	66.0	70.2
Average low °F	48.9	50.7	52.9	55.6	59.2	61.9	65.7	67.3	65.7	61.0	54.0	48.7	55.0
Precipitation inches	2.28	2.04	2.26	0.75	0.20	0.09	0.03	0.09	0.21	0.44	1.07	1.31	10.77
Average high °C	18.8	19.2	19.1	20.2	20.6	22.0	24.6	25.4	25.1	23.7	21.1	18.9	21.2
Average low °C	9.4	10.4	11.6	13.1	15.1	16.6	18.7	19.6	18.7	16.1	12.2	09.3	12.8
Precipitation mm	57.9	51.8	57.4	19.0	05.1	02.3	00.8	02.3	05.3	11.2	27.2	33.2	273.6
Source: Weather.com [3] January 2006

You can note that we AVERAGE about 11 inches of rain per YEAR and almost all of that is in the winter. Now lets look at Vietnam. Of course they have microclimates here as well because these stats DO NOT reflect the rain we get here in Da Nang. I again borrow from Wikipedia on Vietnam.

Climate chart for Vietnam
J	F	M	A	M	J	J	A	S	O	N	D
19   20 12	27   21 13	39   24 18	80   29 21	198   32 22	240   33 25	322   32 26	345   32 25	250   31 24	99   28 23	44   25 19	21   21 16
temperatures in °C precipitation totals in mm

Basically as a country it averages MORE RAIN IN A MONTH THAN WE SEE ALL YEAR. I think I could handle the rain if it was like Hawaii and got sunny in the afternoons, and I guess that's what it's like here in the summer. Clearly it gets HOT here in the summer so I can only imagine its a lot like texas. Oh sunny San Diego! I don't miss you, but I miss your sun.