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Comments on some of the odd stuff which comes into my life. I honestly don't see why people find this interesting, but clearly they do.

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My serious essays In addition to my babbling here, I do write serious essays on serious topics. You can read the current stuff as a blog, or look at some of the more popular essays in an archive.

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Tivo patents network-style protocol for hard drives (11:52)

Tivo has been granted a US Patent, number 7216235, for a password locked disk drive which will send challenges to the host and require that the challenge be XORed with the lock key, and the response then be encrypted and sent back to the drive. And the drive will send other challenges to the host from time to time, to verify the authenticity of the key.

This seems to have some of the characteristics of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange, some of the ssh protocol2 repeated changing of the key (not clear if the data from the drive to the host is encrypted), and generally sounds like over-solving the problem by using a lot of proprietary hardware.

It also seems to have little value over just encrypting the data on the drive in the first place. Perhaps the goal is not to protect anything, but rather to avoid having cheap large disk drives put in Tivo hardware without paying for a larger system.; Note that DVRs will use an external hard drive, but will encrypt the data on it. Sounds like a better solution to me.

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Lab on a chip (06:21)

NASA is developing a "lab on a chip" to test for and identify various types of bacteria which might infect a space ship. The goal in the next few years is to identify over a hundred common bacteria and some fungi. Tests are ongoing, on the ISS and in the arctic.

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